An Imaging Issue

I asked ChatGPT to create an image of a CEO yelling at an Executive Team for creating a drawing of a person with three arms. This is the image ChatGPT created.

Back in 2010 I consulted with a retail brand. The brand brought in a crusty marketing consultant ... a guy in his mid-60s who had seen everything and consequently "knew everything". I presented a slide showing that the brand needed to greatly increase the investment in paid search ... having left Nordstrom three years prior, I knew exactly what a brand generated when it took $36,000,000 in catalog marketing expense and converted it into $18,000,000 in paid search spend yielding a sales increase.

I finished presenting the slide.

The crusty consultant went off, describing how stupid it was to pay for "keywords".

• "Are you telling this room of seasoned professionals that they should stop mailing a 64 page catalog featuring more than 350 products, and instead pay $0.50 four million times for the phrase "functional goretex?" Lunacy, Kevin. Lunacy. 

In the afternoon session, we obtained a document from the digital marketing team, showing the top 100 keywords, the investment in each keyword, and the sales associated with each keyword.

1. "Look at this, Kevin. We invested $10,000 in the term "Softshell", generating $25,000. What do you want them to do, spend another $5,000? What happens if nobody else searches for the term? What happens if they search for the term and they lose money? You don't run a business with analytics and keywords. You generate sales with a catalog, Kevin. You know better. This is the kind of advice you're giving people? 

The crusty consultant was essentially mocking the image that AI generated above. He couldn't see the future.

If you can't see the future via the image at the top of this post, you are the crusty consultant I described from 2010. A fusion of AI, Community, and Video is coming. Unavoidable. Already happening. While I think AI is going to muck up a ton of brands while greatly benefiting others ... while making dumb people look smart ... and getting dumb people fired in the process ... I still am not stupid enough to think this is the future.

And how the heck do we know if AI was / was not in on the joke in the image it created?