AI versus Marshy #5: stop press - AI is popular, accurate sourcing with Archer, + remote worker impact

Hey there - welcome to another edition of AI versus Marshy.

In today’s spicy soliloquy:

🤦🏽 Media connects drop in ChatGPT usage with drop in interest in AI

🏹 Tool of the week: Archer AI - referencing on steroids

👩🏽‍💻 The impact of generative AI on remote creative workers

And I haven’t got anything project-y to share this week but I did enjoy sharing about my current morning routine on LinkedIn (featuring my boys 👶🏻👶🏻).

We’ve got this 💪

-Marshy

Correlation and causation and ChatGPT and news telling it wrong

Stop press - faith is SHOOK

A recent article from Washington Post pointed to a 10% drop in website visitors on ChatGPT in June. They used this to equate a drop in interest in intelligence chatbots and image generators.

There’s a few things wrong with drawing that bow:

• ChatGPT is one of many tools flooding the market now. It’s also one of several products by OpenAI and is powered by GPT-4 (along with a huge amount of applications)
• A drop in web traffic to one site is a poor proxy at best, below is a Google Trends search for “AI tools for marketing” over the last 18 months. The chart is moving up and to the right no?
• Both Microsoft Bing and Google Bard have provided other gateways into similar tech - meaning interest is still there, it’s just being deployed elsewhere

Don’t believe everything you read. I do agree that it’s hard to filter fact from fiction and this problem (particularly with the way news and stories travel online) is only going to become bigger.

Tool of the week: Archer AI - taking care of the problem at the source

My friend Dave King co-founded a product called Archer AI. It’s an app that helps you synthesise, summarise, and draw conclusions from data. One of the reasons this is useful is because generative AI can make stuff up.

This a forgivable trade-off when you’re looking for a quick and dirty guacamole recipe, but much higher stakes when researching, working in any professional environment, or dealing with sensitive information.

Dave has been following AI’s trajectory for longer than I have and it’s exciting to see him jumping in with an app that adds strong utility against all the noise.

It knows what I’m talkin’ bout

In my testing, I’ve got the tool to:

• Draw insights from a literature review for a medical research charity. With the goal of helping the charity acquire more donors and communicate their cause better
• Summarise what the main beats are in my book on marketing​
• Draft and help craft a guide for health professionals in the rehabilitation space

For the last one, I was able to identify questions that would prompt compelling content, and then get Archer to answer them by reviewing existing medical journal articles.

I have no way of understanding the accuracy of its claims due to my own inexperience in the area, but it did enable me to produce and craft a draft version - with all claims referenced and ready to be proofread by someone who is in the space.

Think it’s a nifty idea? Well Google does - they’re in beta mode for a notebook app that lets you query and use AI against your own data as well with NotebookLM.

Job impacts of generative AI felt in low income nations

It’s a great read and worth it for the side-by-side comparisons

Like a lot of things in our hyper-capitalist world, it’s usually the low-income countries that suffer harder, or first. Rest of World completed a deep dive into how generative AI is affecting remote creative workers and the stories are mixed.

The story features side-by-sides with copywriters, illustrators, virtual assistants, and graphic designers. The workers produce a piece of work on their own, and then with the assistance of AI tools.

It’s clear that it helps using AI, the underlying concern is will it impact their jobs? Yes and no. The enhanced work is clearly a plus, but will the technology continue to become better to make things harder as the technology improves?

The far-reaching impacts of this technology are going to continue accelerating and it’s frustrating that those most reliant on manual work seem to be some of the earliest affected.

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What do you think? Do you use a remote workforce and noticed anything interesting?

I’d love to hear about it.

Thanks! -Marshy

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