Social media managers, marketers and advertisers, this piece is for you.
If you’ve landed here, anxious and nervous about your future as a social media manager in the age of ChatGPT and AI, we want you to google AI FAIlures on Google or head to this directory of AI-related errors that have caused billion-dollar losses to the companies who used AI blindly.
From Tessa, a chatbot who replaced dozens of human employees to respond to people’s mental health queries and reassurance, but eventually ended up giving harmful dieting advice to people seeking help for eating disorders..
To Amazon’s AI discriminating agAInst women in its recruitment process..
Or Tesla’s accidents because its AI misjudged the route or traffic..
Maybe you’ve heard about how a professor fAIled his entire class because ChatGPT told him that the papers were written through AI, even though they weren’t.
Looking at such incidents, it is clear that the rushed move to an ‘only AI’ strategy has cost companies and will continue to do so.
As any social media manager might know, even well-thought-out campAIgns can sometimes go over poorly.
Cue a Twitter storm and a PR nightmare!
Does that mean AI is not helpful to content creation?
Absolutely not!
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a buzzword in the tech industry for quite some time now.
Its applications are vast and varied, and it has been making significant strides in many fields, including social media marketing.
The advent of AI tools for social media has led to a surge in discussions about the possibility of AI replacing social media managers.
However, looking at the examples above, we firmly believe that while AI can enhance the capabilities of social media managers, it will not replace them.
Let’s zero in on the exact reasons.
AI Always Has Answers (Even When It Doesn’t)
Generative AI HAS to respond to a query – so even when it doesn’t have an answer, it will find one, making up answers that sound convincing.
This issue has been seen in Google’s Bard, Open AI’s CHAT GPT and other tools.
This highlights the absolute necessity of fact-checking every piece of content that has been created with AI.
We recommend you fact-check your research data FIRST, feed that as part of your brief to any AI tools you want to use to create content, AND do a final fact-check before releasing ANY AI-generated content.
AI functions on Limited Data Sets
Another significant problem lies with the datasets these tools are trAIned on.
Until recently, Chat GPT was unable to access live links and would base its answers on knowledge up till 2020 only.
Even now, the rate of information, news, and events grow too rapidly for any tool to keep up and its data set to become outdated.
So when AI doesn’t have an answer, because it doesn’t have the correct data to process, it will generate ‘stories’ and mislead the querent.
AI Models Have Been Repeatedly Proven to Be Biased
Implicit bias has been a recurring problem with machine learning for decades.
Take for example, when Hewlett-Packard’s cameras had difficulty identifying the faces of Black people but had no issue with lighter-skinned users, because the software’s trAIning and testing were not as diverse as they should have been!
Even Amazon’s recruitment system, which wanted to streamline and speed up its hiring process, found that it routinely discriminated agAInst women’s resumes because they did not have active/powerful words like “executed” and “captured,” which were predominantly found in male candidates’ resumes.
What does this mean for you, as a social media manager in 2023?
When you fact check, check for any bias in your content before sending it for production.
The Role of AI in Social Media Marketing
AI has introduced a new level of automation and data analysis that was previously unimaginable.
Its tools for social media can analyze vast amounts of data, identify patterns, and provide insights that can help marketers make informed decisions.
For instance, Facebook’s ad management system uses AI to provide recommendations based on machine learning.
AI also AIds in social listening, a crucial aspect of social media marketing.
Tools like Radarr use AI to monitor conversations and trends on social media platforms, saving marketers a significant amount of time.
Moreover, AI can automate tasks such as lead generation and customer service via chatbots to handle customer queries and requests, reducing the need for manual intervention – but not negating it entirely.
There will always be complAInts and issues that need human intervention or even human empathy, as the example of the chatbot called Tessa showed when it messed up and misled people with eating disorders.
A lot of hate and dislike agAInst chatbots is because people just don’t like how they sound. And while Chat GPT and NLP advances to sound more like it, it’s just not there yet.
Despite these advancements, AI is not a magic wand or a fix-all solution. It is a tool that can streamline processes, but it cannot replace the human touch that is essential for effective marketing.
Social media is about connecting with people, understanding their emotions, and building relationships. These are inherently human attributes that cannot be replicated by AI.
A community can’t be run via a machine – and that is the point of social media.
The Future of Social Media Management with AI
The future of social media management is not about AI replacing humans, but about AI enabling humans to do their jobs better.
And the key to using it effectively goes beyond just having ‘the right prompt’.
Use AI to free up time that takes up hours of manual work, to brAInstorm and come up with new ideas and strategies faster.
By automating such repetitive tasks, a social media manager will have more time to create connections between events to drum up new and fun takes to experiment with, w.r.t brand voice.
AI can also be a valuable tool for content creation.
Use it to come up with ideas for hooks for reels, crafting compelling captions, for content pillars for your niche – the possibilities are endless.
Aaaas long as you (say it with us) fact check all of it!
As we move forward, the role of social media managers will evolve, and you will need to learn to leverage AI to enhance their capabilities.
Don’t be scared of it- learn to use it well and it can become a time-saving asset to your marketing team!
Want to see how leading brands are using AI for social media marketing?
Radarr uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help brands proactively listen, monitor, analyze and respond to conversations happening across social media. This helps them understand their audience better and create campaigns that strike a chord!
