6 minute read
An Exploration of Artificial Intelligence in Content Strategy, Joel Eaton, Brand and Media Strategy, M.A
Joel Eaton Brand & Media Strategy, M.A.
Dr. Melanie Richards, Faculty Advisor
Written by Hannah Warren
AKnoxville native, Joel originally came to ETSU for his undergraduate degree in psychology after meeting with the late Dr. Chris Dula to discuss future prospects with this major. At the beginning of his sophomore year, however, Joel began considering a degree that emphasized writing or media instead. After meeting with Dr. Susan Waters of the ETSU Department of Media and Communication, Joel changed his major from psychology to Media and Communication (with a concentration in Advertising and Public Relations). Eager to learn more from the expertise of the faculty, he decided to stay at ETSU for his master’s degree. In the graduate program he began learning how businesses utilize content such as social media posts, blogs, and videos, etc., to create an online presence and build their brand. Outside of school, Joel enjoys writing songs, playing ultimate frisbee, and occasionally cooking. One day he stumbled across a music video of a song written with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). As a songwriter himself, this sparked his curiosity, and he asked himself how AI might impact other creative processes and professions, ultimately leading him to his thesis topic on investigating the potential impact of artificial intelligence on content strategy.
When people hear the term artificial intelligence their minds tend to wander off to sci fi fantasy worlds filled with advanced technologies, robots that are indistinguishable from humans and factories built to replace human workers that try to take over the world. Realistically, this is far from the level of artificial intelligence that is actually utilized today by programmers, researchers, and even individuals in their own homes. One of the earliest examples of AI emerged in the 1990’s in the form of a computer from IBM called Deep Blue. This computer was the first to beat a world chess champion. Since then the field has developed and branched into various types of AI, including natural language processing, machine learning, and deep learning. This has allowed for the creation of voice assistants, predictive texting, artificial neural networks, and in some cases, has even been able to replace jobs traditionally performed by humans. Some fear that this capability will spill into creative industries and replace human copywriters, the ones responsible for creating advertising media.
As a writer and content creator himself, Joel has a solid understanding of the complexity involved in the creative process. Joel decided he wanted to find out how capable existing types of artificial intelligence are of replicating the creative
process, and if they pose risks to human copywriting jobs now or in the near future. He began searching online for scholarly articles and opinion posts from experts in both fields. As he searched, he created an excel database with as many articles as he could find related to advertising and AI, with special emphasis on articles about the history of AI, ultimately ending with a collection of 78 articles. In the database he recorded the search terms he used to find each of those articles, and sorted them into four categories, which included general, technology, blogs, and marketing. Once he had collected all this information, he needed a way to eliminate the least relevant information. He ultimately went through each article by hand to select only articles that were about AI and content creation, and AI and ideation, narrowing the number from 78 to 16.
Joel found that while there are numerous tasks and processes AI is capable of performing very well, there are many things even our most complex forms of AI are not currently (nor in the near future) capable of doing. For example, the song that sparked his interest in this topic, Daddy’s Car, was created by Sony’s CSL research lab using an AI program called Flow Machine. However, this software did not do the majority of the work in creating the song, it only created the score for the
music by using the average of all beats per minute ranges from every song created by the Beatles, while the lyrics were created by French composer Benoît Carré. Most forms of AI today are used for research in biomedical science fields and physics to work with large datasets, but not as a substitute for human creativity. AI seems to be critically lacking in a specific area, one that copywriters rely heavily on, and that is ideation. When Joel examined the writing abilities of AI, he found that AI is not readily able to synthesize a specific idea from a broad concept, but it can aid copywriters in this part of the creative process.
The more he researched, the more he found ways that AI can serve as an aid to copywriters rather than replace them. While copywriters may decide on an audience they want to reach, and AI can help generate text to say what the
Left, Joel Eaton, Right, Dr. Melanie Richards
copywriters want to say, AI is not able to independently carry out the entire process with a high degree of accuracy. AI has also been beneficial in generating concepts for ad campaigns (this process is called ideation); however, AI is not yet helpful in all the ways it could be with ideation. With the rise of social media platforms, businesses need content that can be scaled for a variety of platforms, which can be a tedious and time-consuming process. When you consider the time needed to make their content scalable, the creator has spent almost as much time modifying their product as they did to make it. Joel’s research suggests that if copywriters can adapt to new AI technology the way they have adapted to the expanding social networking system, they will ultimately be able to increase their creative output. Unlike humans, AI does not need eight hours of sleep, take coffee breaks, or have sick days. A copywriter could tell their program how to edit and scale their content, press run, and get back to creating other content. This concept is already beginning to surface with programs such as Adobe Sensei, which already employs AI for image editing, media buying, and other applications.
Joel hopes his research will help people understand that while there are tasks that are not limited only to human ability, we are far from seeing AI replacing the inherent creative capacity of the human mind. He credits Dr. Melanie Richards, his thesis advisor, for her guidance in helping him navigate this new landscape of graduate-level academic research for his first major research project. After graduation he hopes to secure a position with an advertising agency as a copywriter or content strategist.
