Starting the year of Grill The Marketer events with an absolute belter of a topic, Artificial Intelligence.
It's everywhere, but nowhere more prominently than in marketing circles. It's 78.2% of my LinkedIn newsfeed, and you know a trend is hot when the Lambro Bros who were spruiking Crypto and Facebook Ads courses are now AI experts.
Clayton and I were super excited to bring the young Charlie Westerman up to the hot plate to answer your AI questions as a seasoned AI user and subject matter expert.
Charlie handled the heat with a calm poise and thoughtfully shared his experience with the room, full of lively questions.
Some things I thought were important to point out:
ChatGPT is a Language Learning Model (LLM) it's designed to spit words back at you. It isn't thinking and interpreting the results it finds. You, the human, need to do that.
Tools like ChaptGPT pull from existing information available on the internet.
Artificial Intelligence is a tool to help us streamline our mundane tasks, not to replace us as humans who are creative, analytical and emotional. Some people will be better and or quicker at adapting to the use of this tool, and that is probably more pertinent that AI's inherent "good" or "bad"-ness. What I mean is that the use of AI is neither ethical or unethical, it's the way it's being used - which often comes down to intent or the user.
Personr
What Charlie's business does is uses AI to help verify is documents have been manipulated, and is on the cutting edge of what's been called RegTech.
I beleive the biggest issue to face the marketing industry (and indeed society as a whole) will be cybersecurity, and the laws in place need to be updated to exist emerging tech where required to keep people safe from being scammed or exploited.
The Backstory
Charlie told us the story of the inspiration behind this business venture - having his identity stolen, and the process of unravelling the mess left behind which means he can't get a loan for a car or buy a house.
With the news of massive data breaches from Optus, Medibank and Latitude in recent times, there's going to be a lot more innovative tools built of the back of protecting information.
So?
Let's bring it back to marketing, and show how what we do as marketers (even on a small scale) contributes to this problem.
Have a think about the last time you purged users from your CRM? If someone hacked your account - would it just be current customer data breached?
Did you get your clients to email you their databases? Do you store them on your computer or in the cloud?
Each and every person on your database is a human, you could have thousands or people's information sitting around ready to be stolen.
How as an industry are we going to address this and make sure our love for data collection and application is balanced with the protections of the person that data ultimately belongs to?
Fascinating.
See? We always bring you the hottest topics and guests!
Next up will be our sister event, Toast the Marketer featuring Dave Monk, and you can register here. He's into podcasting and Web 3, and all things future! This event is free to attend.
Our next Grill The Marketer event will be in June where we bring you the DG from DGPR, the one and only David Gardiner. Get your tickets for that one before they sell out and ask DG all the PR questions you have built up, plus Clayton and I will be there as always assisting you with Digital Marketing and Social Media Marketing Strategy.