FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
AI Take 2 🎬
Check out the Press Release from Wirepine's Public Relations department:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
New Digital Marketing Agency Launches in Sonoma County
SONOMA COUNTY, CA — Wirepine, a new digital marketing agency, is set to launch this week in Sonoma County. The agency is dedicated to helping small businesses and non-profits create and optimize their online presence.
Wirepine offers a comprehensive range of services including website and brand design, marketing, cybersecurity, and ecommerce. The agency’s mission is to empower small businesses and non-profits by providing them with the tools and strategies they need to thrive in the digital age.
Wirepine understands the unique challenges faced by small businesses and non-profits when it comes to digital marketing. The agency’s tailored approach ensures that each client receives a customized strategy that aligns with their mission and business objectives.
For more information about Wirepine and its services, please visit www.wirepine.com, email Andrew@wirepine.com or call 707-387-1992.
It's true - Wirepine exits stealth mode this week becoming a real boy including customer testimonials and a whole page about me complete with AI Andrew headshot and Hype. www.wirepine.com
But I don't have a PR department. Is the press release real? You betcha - I wrote the prompt, made a few edits and published it. All mine. Early in my career I did a few stints in PR - one in a fancy dancy ad agency in Century City overlooking a Beverly Hills golf course - think 90's West Coast Don Draper/Mad Men vibe. The other one was at a boutique hotel in downtown LA called Checkers. Both cranked out the Press Releases. At Checkers it was usually about what the chef got up to with the shipment of Blackberry's from Oregon. Stuff that'd be a social media post today. No Chat-GPT, but we did have typewriters so yeah, giddyup it’s a new ballgame. While today's media doesn't lend itself to press releases about Blackberry Cobbler, big companies do still leverage them and there's sure enough content out there that Chat-GPT did a bangup job on mine.
I used GPT-4 for the Wirepine Press Release and the only edits needed were adding my name and Wirepine's. For comparison I used the same prompt with GPT-3.5. It reads like an 10th grader wrote it while eating a plate of pizza rolls and chugging Mountain Dew. Wooden, choppy, random hyperbole.
5 months. That's the amount of time between the release of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. Remember GPT-4 passed the Bar exam in the 90th percentile. GPT-3.5 failed in the 10th percentile! That's some crazy progress. So that's what's up in the rest of this weeks article - generative AI's rapid progression and where will it all end up? I have a few more real examples so let’s get to it.
‘Benevolent AI Marshmallow Man’ is our mascot for this week’s adventure:
I Text
To close off on Text there is a suite of new apps/services coming to market that leverage chat AI models like Chat-GPT but trained on your companies’ information/data and branding. Jasper AI is one that I made the mistake of clicking on and now lurks in my feed constantly. Shouldn't have eaten the cookies! There are a lot, search for AI Copywriter tools. They'll keep getting better and soon they'll do full blown campaigns including social media so keep an eye out.
II Images
For my new headshot I used Lensa. They were one of the first AI Avatar apps. Check the difference between Lensa's first-generation images versus the second generation (Avatars 2.0) that came out earlier this month. Again about 6 months between releases. I did a mashup mocking the old ones here. You can see the one I choose for Wirepepine and the v2 mashup here. Image generation engines like DALL-E and Midjourney which do the work behind the scenes for these apps are getting better fast. Just look at how adorable Benevolent AI Marshmallow Man is!
Creative design tools are gobbling AI up like skittles. Adobe made a blitzkrieg of AI announcements at their annual conference Adobe MAX. Press release ;) One more example - Canva, my favorite design tool of the moment - launched Magic Studio: the power of AI, all in one place
III Video
A new trick is text-to-video and the slightly less impressive image-to-video. I played around with Pika and Moonvalley both in beta now and they are pretty impressive. I mean we're talking video. The social web's evolution from text to video took 10 years:
Twitter - Text - launched in 2006
Instagram - Images - launched in 2010
TikTok - Videos - launched in 2016 1
10 years to go from text to video in Web2 and here we have AI generated video in 1 year. Another thing to noodle - text-to-video wouldn’t be possible without the last 7+ years of videos that feed the models.
Here's Pika's take at animating Benevolent Marshmallow Man:
I like the moving hands and blowing bubbles even though Benevolent Marshmallow Man doesn’t have a mouth.
Here’s a Moonvalley video from just my text prompt:
Terrifying right? Not only does Marshmallow Man have a mouth he’s got teeth 😬 Just wait 6 months. I made a few of these videos with the same prompt, and each is more terrifying that the last. I’ll post the others on Instagram.
IV What’s next?
In my first article on this space AI Hot Take I cited a piece from Marc Andreessen as evidence for optimism about AI. Marc penned another article this week and it's completely unhinged. Marc's venture fund - as well as many other VCs - are pouring a ton of 💰💰💰into this space so yeah - it'll be interesting to watch for sure.
We've cleared the initial mainstream media hype cycle and now you will see a steady stream of new products/services and they will get better in quality and performance fast. Startups will fail or be gobbled up/aggregated into bigger companies. There's an abundance of graph’s for the early phase of a tech cycle (think normal curve) but we’ve had enough pictures and videos for one article - I bet you can see it if you close your eyes. I’ll tell you one thing - we’ve cleared the Chasm like Evel Knievel and are racing up the adoption curve vroom vrooom vrooooom!
The trick is going to be leveraging emerging new AI services to run your business better and give you a competitive advantage. Take my simple PR example. If I can generate a press release in 5 mins sans PR department, what can you do more/better/faster with the help of AI?
RIP Vine 🪦😭 6 second Vine videos were amazing and as someone equally amazing told me “you have to be actually smart to make people laugh with 6 seconds.” I’ll never understand how Vine lost this market - they beat TikTok by 3 years (launched in 2013) and shot up to 200 million users in no time. Foreshadowing of evil Twitter killing off goodness by acquisition?