Meta's making moves, run for your lives: evil Furbies are here

Plus, Google big shot delivers stark warning...

Author

Charlie Braithwaite
April 07, 2023

A newsletter about AI and Marketing by Tom & Charlie

Share the love. Forward this email over to your favourite marketing pals, or go ahead and sign them up here.

AI Marketing School is sponsored by Jasper, the generative AI platform for marketers. Jasper helps you and your team create content tailored for your brand 10X faster. Sign up here and get 10,000 bonus credits. Always use AI responsibly.

AI Marketing School Newsletter #11

Meta enters the chat (finally)

Meta’s been surprisingly quiet during AI’s recent explosion in interest. Did Zuck drop the ball, betting big on the metaverse without realising AI was the next big thing?

Or has the company just been biding its time?

Both.

That said, Meta has recently made two announcements signalling that it will indeed participate in the AI revolution.

What marketers need to know

Meta has released two tools to help marketers speed up their creative processes.

  1. Segment Anything Model (SAM): Meta released a new AI model that can cut out any object within an image, in a single click.

    Marketers who aren't natural graphic designers know the pain of trying to manually crop an image, whether on Canva, Photoshop, or even Paint.

    But with Meta’s new SAM, you can wave goodbye to pesky, time-consuming cropping. And some people (like Jim Fan, AI scientist at NVIDIA) are hyped.

  1. Ad-creating generative AI: Facebook/Meta is built on ad money. But after Apple released its App Transparency feature in 2021, the company was affected to the tune of $10BN.

    Ouch.

    So, it’s hardly surprising that Meta’s trying to use AI to boost ad revenues. The company is currently testing proprietary generative AI models that can instantly create sentences and graphics.

    The goal? To make it easier for businesses to create ads… Which they can then run on Facebook.

Google’s Mueller gives his verdict on AI content

Google’s official position on AI content is pretty clear. It’s fine so long as you provide genuine value—but don’t use it to game the system.

That said, some are clearly bigger fans of AI than others. And John Mueller (Google Senior Search Analyst / Search Relations team lead) seems to be erring on the side of caution.

What marketers need to know

  • Don’t panic—Google’s official position on AI content and SEO remains the same.

  • However, Mueller raises some valid points.

  • Double check AI-generated content to snuff out the potentially “toxic” 20%.

  • And when using AI to power your SEO, remember: prioritise value over rankings. Try to wow your readers rather than merely rise up SERPs.

Quick Prompt

Here’s a nice n’ easy prompt that generates some pretty impressive results:

“Write an informative and entertaining TED talk in the voice of [author or famous person] about [topic]."

Test it out for yourself and let us know what you think!

This will entertain and terrify you

This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but an all-conquering army of Furbies.

Recommended Reading

TL;DR: While ChatGPT has a “unique ability to go beyond one-by-one corrections by changing surface expressions and sentence structure while maintaining grammatical correctness”, Grammarly’s still king of the castle when it comes to grammar-based editing. For now, anyway.

TL;DR: It’s unclear how intellectual property rules apply to generative AI. If someone produces a cartoon character in Midjourney, who owns the character: the prompter or the company? Or if users build characters influenced by SpongeBob, should the original creators have to grant them permission?

TL;DR: The Masters app has gone all in on AI, adding AI commentary to this year’s Masters video feeds using an IBM Watson-powered language model. We certainly admire the intent—but the results are… interesting.

Thanks so much for reading. With the abundance of content on the internet, your attention means a lot. If you have any suggestions or feedback on how we can improve the newsletter, please shoot us a reply. We'd love to hear from you!

Until next time. Happy marketing.

Tom and Charlie