TL;42
We love conversation, and have stuff to say, so this was a fairly long issue. We divided it into three chapters you can flip through while you wait for Midjourney to deliver its upscaled teen crush imaginary wedding photoshoot. In a jiffy.
Time to wrap this up.
Channeling Air-guitaring-god-level pizzazz in 3, 2, 1...
The fun in what?
Okay. We shared our musings on what Generative AI means, and how to align its potential to your own ethos and company culture.
Time to play. Let's talk about how we use AI tools at TakeFortyTwo, what's on our wishlist, and the kind-of-not-there-yet processes of testing and discovery we want to put in place.
Hopefully, these can help you spark your own conversations, or you can jump in the comments and let us know how it's going.
Double-checking stuff
Creative writing remains exclusively in the realm of our team's imperfect and wonderful organic brains.
However, most of our team works in a foreign language on a daily basis. Some of us in more than one! For general communication and operations, ChatGPT, Writer, and similar tools can be useful for checking basic grammar, spelling and style, and planning layout or structure. The ideas are ours. We still use Hemingway and Grammarly for this, too.
Automating non-value tedious tasks
We still write our emails. But summarizing is a pain, and this virtual thingy seems efficient at refreshing our memory to prevent miscommunications. We are using it to suggest Excel formulas, write legal disclaimers and placeholder content (prompt it to build you a custom lorem ipsum based on anything you want, just for kicks) or do basic general research that could have taken ages with the traditional search engine approach. And for fun too. We use it to choose random words for our weekly remote Pictionary team games.
Coding
Though we don't use it as much as we could, it has proven useful to find bugs and suggest workarounds or solutions. We're still scratching the surface on this. Truth is, it's becoming a substitute for StackExchange. Architecturing or designing solutions will stay with Team Human.
Illustrating
This one treads the fine line of the ethical dilemmas we discuss in Part II. We like to experiment, and we don't have the budget, time or talent to paint cryptic 60s sci-fi custom images for our blog. The results are usually far from what we initially envision, but still cool and distinctive enough.
Debating
"Hey, Hal" (we like naming it), "I'm confident I can prove that Rock Lobster is the best song ever written. Please counterargue!". It's useful for finding gaps in your own narrative, or questioning preconceptions. This is particularly useful at 2am when you can't find anyone ready to confront you or bounce ideas off.
Bridging ideas
You know when you have this intuition that there are certain patterns between seemingly separate things, but you don't know enough to find them? Future Ultron does. It can join the dots faster. Find a few edges and ask the bot to find the common ground, and justify the argument.
Running stats
We're looking into using AutoGPT to run data and analytics check-ins on our properties, building custom reports with tailored data period comparisons and automated formatting. Still in the works, we'll share when we get there.
Not brainstorming
If we need software to find us ideas, we better change our line of work. Our brains, our storms.
Not figuring out movies
Yeah, this doesn't work as we expected.
Shut up and take my money
Taking the AI-Train
Internet is dark and full of horrors. We're taking this adoption thing slowly, but fully aware that the technology is here to stay (unless this, or this).
We set aside a budget of hours for our team to play and break things. We have an internal forum where our team members share their findings and discuss pros and cons. We're asking everyone for input to understand the role each of these tools may have in our daily work. It will continue to be a team effort, and a team discussion.
All in all, we're curious, but not hyped. The general feeling is we expected Jarvis but got autocomplete on its first day on the job.
It's a brave new world, nonetheless. (That has such people in it).
Coda: The map is not the territory
“. . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.”
Borges, “On exactitude in science”. 1946.
AI has been around for quite some time. The new thing is we’ve fed the LLMs massive amounts of data (our data, btw), and it worked well beyond expectations.
The end product is an astonishing simulation of, well, you.
But simulations age badly, or end up becoming a parody. Creation requires experience, it comes from life. Its outcome is the interruption of repetition, almost a miracle.
If you have something to say, don’t let it be ruined by AI’s beautiful and pervasively useful imitation of creativity. Try it, test it, use it, sure, but draw your own lines and proceed with caution. Own your thoughts, critiques, mistakes, and discoveries. Celebrate and honor the unique, irreplaceable, persistent relevance of your talent. The competitive edge is quality, not volume. The real prevails.
Read later 💭
- Once the dust settles, we'll see some real changes in eCommerce.
- Creating a thousand automated product descriptions in a minute won't make the economic downturn disappear. The tech industry knows it. Perhaps we shouldn't be so distracted by this.
- Check out Nick Cave's strong argument against writing songs with ChatGPT. A good reminder that intention, experience, the need to transcend and reach others, and the actual existence cannot be mimicked.
- If you're lonely, talk to a PDF.
- If that doesn't help, put Slavoj and Werner in the background. Our favorite AI art experiment so far.
Thank you, next
You didn't ask for it, and we gave you a triple issue. Imagine what we can do if you like, share and comment!
We'll be back in a month to talk all things #storytelling. The power of stories, the wonders of good branding, What Marketing Really Is Or Should Be About, and how it can transform your business.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
💟, 🍵4️⃣2️⃣
Got questions? Suggestions? Opinions? (We love all of those).
Drop us a line at hola@takefortytwo.com, say hi on LinkedIn, and subscribe to get free expert eCommerce insights in your inbox every two weeks.
*We like our TL;DRs in forty two words.
