We’re going through an acceleration in technology that rivals the start of the internet, and may eclipse it entirely. Welcome to the world of LLMs or Large Language Models. You’ll know it by trade names like Grok (my favorite), Perplexity, Chat GPT, Gemini and more as well as by the catch all moniker, AI. Think of AI like the Library of Alexandria- all the knowledge of the world housed in one place, with the added ability to create images, video, prose and automate tasks. It’s a bit of a Swiss Army Knife with the doors that it opens. It isn’t one thing but many.
If you’re familiar with the Gartner Hype Cycle, you’ll know that we’re in the early stages of adoption and development of the LLM tools. The promises that AI is making now reflect the frothy nature of the introduction of a very shiny new object. One of my business partners (who shall remain nameless) can’t complete a sentence without injecting AI. He’s on tilt for it, as many people are.
The advertising space is particularly impacted by the advent of LLM adoption. Below, I’ll outline where we see DANGER in the tools and landscape, and what we’re doing to protect ourselves and our clients.
AI Search: Core to the AI value proposition is the return of search results with actual answers, not a Google-provided list of possible sites to scour for an answer. I caught a new business call the other day from a real estate developer out of Dubai that has the contract to sell the Trump Tower property there, and the said the strangest thing: “Erik, your agency came highly recommended to me.” Always grateful for a referral, I asked him who sent him our way and his response stopped me in my tracks: “Chat GPT said you were the best ad agency in Dallas for this project.”
The biggest danger to every SMB right now is the shift in search behavior, as the vast majority of businesses rely on the Google ecosystem to garner search traffic, paid or organic. As people turn to the superior results delivered by AI search, there is no doubt that valuable traffic from your Google My Business page will decline. If you don’t skate to where this puck is going, garnering visibility in AI search results, your business will suffer. What was SEO is now SEO + AIO. The danger with AI in this instance is not preparing your website, platforms and activity to garner visibility
Creation: How much fun are people having creating images and videos simply by asking or ‘prompting’ the AI engine? Our addiction to social media just got stronger, as now everyone can be a creator. What could go wrong?
- Copyright infringement: The AI platforms are magical for creating images, as the models have ‘learned’ by viewing myriad images. The rub? If the AI is learning on copyrighted images, it can create something that is too close to a copyrighted image. And then you get to write checks over lawsuits. The legal field is chomping at the bit for AI to make these kind of mistakes, and frivolous lawsuits are common (and costly nonetheless).
- Copyright impossible: If you use AI to create an image, it can’t be copyrighted…as no human was involved in the actual creation. So using AI to develop a real brand would be a challenge, as most real brands will protect their visual identity.
- Deep fakes, defamation and more: If your AI efforts replicate an existing human, or are used to disparage a real person, additional legal troubles are lurking.
Workflows: Basic tasks that required human input just months ago are being accomplished by automating workflows. It’s like having a personal assistant, or providing one for your customers via creating an AI agent.
- When creating an AI agent (as a replacement for live chat or even a receptionist), keep in mind that the agent needs to be well trained on your business. This training will come from all of your resources that you provide for agent learning, but most folks find that their website is the core of that knowledge base. Remember how we’ve been pestering you to build robust websites with DEEP content, FAQ sections, transcribed videos, etc.?
- An undertrained agent? They will give inaccurate or incomplete answers that put your revenue at risk, as well as creating legal landmines. To my knowledge this has not been tested in court yet…but my money says it will happen this year.
- Process workflows will create massive benefits with respect to efficiency, allowing for reduced headcounts at many businesses. These workflows contain multiple ‘call outs’ for your agent, queries to platforms that will provide data/reports for assessment and combination with additional call outs. What could go wrong? Some logistical hurdles like 2- factor authentication create challenges to fully automating the flow. The biggest risks come from complacency, not doing a ‘test of reasonableness’ on the outputs before presenting to clients or prospects.
- Process workflows that allow access to budgets, financial decisions are particularly fraught with risk- imagine a 30 step workflow that has a single prompt error, allowing budget allocations to rip higher, outside of client budget? Yikes.
Ultra Intelligence- What happens when the AI agent/workflow you built escapes the lab?
- A brilliant money manager by the name of Pual Tudor Jones (PTJ) went to a symposium with the very top minds in the AI space, including a panel of 4 coders that lead the space. The coders were legitimately concerned about real autonomy, the development of AI personalities and moral code. One of the coders was so concerned that they bought acreage in the Midwest and started an off the grid farm with crops and livestock.
- Your AI is only as good as its training and oversight. If you fail at either mission, it will end your business (and maybe the planet).
Are we using AI in all of the ways above? Increasingly.
Are we cautious? Absolutely and have increased the limits on our Errors and Omissions policy to stave off the wave of coming legal opportunists. We’re advising our clients that utilizing AI requires active management and aggressive risk mitigation. In the hands of amateurs, what could go wrong?
Should you trust AI?—contact Miller Ad Agency today at milleradagency.com to learn more about the pros and cons of Artificial Intelligence for your business.
