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Standing out in an AI-powered world

Published Apr 05, 2023 – By Martin MacConnol

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Our Video Producer Kristian on location

Last week was a seismic week for news, even by the standards of the last few years. We saw Donald Trump tackled by police, Emmanuel Macron joining in protests against his own reforms, and perhaps most shocking of all, the pope wearing an enormous puffer jacket.

Except, of course, none of those things really happened. The images we saw were created by the visual generative AI tool Midjourney. Not long after, amid growing concerns about the implications of anyone being able to create these images, free use of Midjourney was suspended.

Earlier in March, OpenAI released GPT-4, the latest iteration of the language model that powers the wildly popular ChatGPT. GPT-4 is incredibly good at reasoning. So good, in fact, that it can pass most gold standard exams with flying colours. Soon, as OpenAI allows access to plug-ins, ChatGPT will be able to draw from specialised apps, and from the wider web.

All this is to say that AI is moving fast. Fast enough that thousands of experts have put their name to a controversial open letter demanding a six-month pause in AI research.

At Wardour, we’re working hard to stay on top of what’s happening in the world of AI, and how it can be used to turbocharge our creativity.

We know that AI is great at manipulating existing data. As well as saving us time and speeding up our processes, this power is also useful for what you might call “style transfer” work – think “create x in the style of y”. The output it can produce is impressive (and improving all the time) but there are concerns – the looming legal battles over the data these models are trained on and who owns it, for one.

What AI doesn’t have, however, is our experience in finding the right people to speak to, using our empathy and intuition to interview them, and creating something genuinely new.

We’ve been thinking of this emerging divide in terms of primary and secondary content. Primary content is new, unique, and based on real-world interactions – it needs humans. Secondary content is like secondary research in academia: it’s drawn from what already exists.

Amid all this innovation, clients are still looking for ways to stand out. We see a people-first, primary content-led approach as the key to achieving that – powered and underpinned by the magic of AI.

To learn more about how Wardour can help with your next campaign, pop us an email at hello@wardour.co.uk – we’d love to have a chat with you.

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