Almost Timely News: 🗞️ AI Creates Jobs In the Content Supply Chain (2024-07-07) :: View in Browser
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What’s On My Mind: AI Creates Jobs In the Content Supply Chain
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been making a lot of music with the Suno app, combined with the language capabilities of Google Gemini. In last week’s issue, we covered the process of building a priming representation to create a country song about McDonald’s fries which is now available on most major music streaming services.
Sidebar on Copyright
Machine-generated content in most places is not copyrightable (your prompts are), but a lot of folks misunderstand what that means. Now, I’m not a lawyer and I cannot give legal advice; seek out a qualified attorney for legal advice specific to your situation. That said, copyright is about exclusivity and your right to profit from your content. Content that has no copyright can be used by anyone; if you print a t-shirt with the Mona Lisa on it (which is public domain), you absolutely can sell that shirt. What you cannot do is compel someone else to stop selling the exact same shirt, because you have no copyright over the Mona Lisa. So in this example, I’m putting my machine-generated songs up on music services. I’m absolutely allowed to make revenue from them, but I can’t stop anyone else from making a copy of the song and putting it up on their account. That’s what copyright means, broadly.
Back to the Story
This week, let’s talk about what AI content generation means for the future of work and the future of content marketing. As you almost certainly know from your own experiences with generative AI, what comes out of the machines is increasingly good but still needs polish.
A year ago what you got out of generative AI was like a lump of half-shaped clay. You had to work it a lot to get it into the shape of a vase. Today, you get vase-shaped clay out of the machines that requires much less work to get it the way you want to look, but in most cases, you still have a little bit of polishing to do. Tomorrow’s models will probably produce nice vases in raw clay that still need to be fired; I don’t foresee any near-term future where AI content goes straigh to market, untouched.
AI’s Imperfections Create Opportunities
As I listen to the song candidates coming out of a tool like Suno, they’re leagues better than they were even six months ago, but they’re still not perfect. They still require work. For example:
- Suno still has auditory hallucinations in about half of the songs I create. These are things like weirdly repeated loops, lyrics that get mangled, or a song that ends and then it thinks it has to keep going. Many of these can be fixed in an audio editor.
-
Suno’s music comes out unmastered. That means that it comes out sounding very much like computer-generated audio; the different instruments are all kind of blandly mixed together. This can be corrected with audio mastering, but that’s not something the AI knows to do yet.
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Suno’s tracks are largely not editable. I’d love at some point for it to produce the vocals track, the drum track, etc. all split apart so that they can be individually edited. If you want to do that now, that’s a ton of extra work with a tool like Spleeter to disassemble the song, and then sew it back together in a tool like Adobe Audition after making whatever changes needed.
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Suno doesn’t do any of the other parts of music distribution, like creating coherent cover art, naming your song, loading it up to a distribution service, and then promoting it.
If you do these things, you can take AI’s okay outputs and improve them to pretty okay. They are still not as good as what genuine human musicians can create – for now. As models improve, expect that to change somewhat. Just as ChatGPT made incoherent dreck at its debut, its outputs now are substantially better out of the box, and the same is true for most AI models that are under development.
The Rise of the AI Cover Band?
But there is still a need for humans. In the audio example, there’s a critical gap. Machines will in time develop better outputs, yes, outputs that will require less editing and less mastering, etc. It’s inevitable that, with as much music as people are cranking out with these tools, one of these AI generated songs will eventually be a hit.
What happens when audiences want to hear that live?
Right now, your options are to have a computer play the audio track in public. That’s hardly satisfying. Concerts are a communal event, as much about gathering like-minded people for a shared experience as it is the music itself.
A human cover band could easily take any of these machine-made tracks and perform them live, bands like the Marcel Fisser Band or Hindley Street Country Club that excel at taking existing music and covering it really well. And those folks may well have a cottage industry down the road of taking AI-created hits and performing them live. What’s more, because AI-generated music has no copyright, the bands could do so without the mess of royalties and performing rights.
That’s a distribution challenge with AI content, one that AI isn’t going to solve. As my friend and partner Katie Robbert says frequently, new technology won’t solve old problems, and the desire for a communal music listening experience is an ancient problem.
There is a role for humans even when AI is doing much of the heavy lifting, all along the content supply chain.
AI and the Content Supply Chain
What is the content supply chain? It’s the production of content from ideation to delivery:
- Plan the content.
- Make the content.
- Distribute the content.
- Market the content.
- Sell the content.
- Measure the content.
AI makes some parts far more efficient, and in turn that makes wildly different levels of supply and demand throughout the supply chain. AI can make the content to some degree – the song, the book, the image, the video – but the best creations demand high quality ideas and high quality data. One of the things I say in my keynotes is that your ability to succeed in the age of AI is determined by whoever has the most, best data and whoever has the most, best ideas.
So there’s a high demand for high quality data and high quality ideas at scale. Again, going back to the music example, last week’s song was driven by an annoyance I had about how quickly McDonald’s fries cool down. It made a fun song. Is it going to be a hit? Almost certainly not. It wasn’t a high quality idea, though it was a fun one. But there absolutely is a demand for high quality song ideas.
That’s upstream from the production process, in the planning stage of the content supply chain.
AI obviously is the engine of production in these examples, tackling the first part of stage 2, making the content. But after the machines create the content, then what? That’s where the downstream part of the content supply chain has to deal with the impact of AI.
For example, suppose we now have a glut of AI-generated music. All that music still has to be edited, mastered, and then distributed, marketed, monetized, and measured. The machines can’t do those tasks in a single workflow; you can get some efficiencies here and there, but by and large it’s still a manual, human process. And that means you need people to do those tasks.
When you’ve got a new album from an artist, that’s 10-15 songs that need management and production, and that might occur over the span of a year. Billie Eilish, Beyonce, and Taylor Swift release albums relatively infrequently. When AI is in the mix, you might have a new album a day. Suddenly, you need a lot more people doing the downstream tasks.
The Logjams of AI
This is the key point about AI’s impact on knowledge work. Some parts of any knowledge work process will be handed off to machines in part or in whole, but rarely will the entire process be handed to a machine because it’s so heterogenous and distributed across multiple systems and disciplines. And that means you’ll have logjams at various points in the process, logjams that humans will need to resolve.
For example, my general workflow for making a song goes like this:
- Come up with the idea.
- Write out the idea in plain text.
- Use Google Gemini to turn the text into lyrics.
- Use Google Gemini to draft the sound design prompt.
- Use Suno to make the song candidates.
- Choose a song candidate – usually I make 5-10 of them and choose the best.
- Master the song with Python’s Matchering library.
- Edit the song in Adobe Audition to clean up Suno’s hallucinations and get it production ready.
- Create the cover art with ChatGPT’s image creation module.
- Load the song in Amuse and distribute it.
And that just covers the first 3 steps of the content supply chain. We haven’t even touched on marketing, monetization, or measurement.
When we talk about the future of work, this is what we’re talking about. We’re not only talking about new jobs that don’t exist, we’re also talking about the jobs of today that will be changed. Some will diminish. Others will be busier than ever. An AI music hit factory will still need people, processes, and platforms to do the six stages of the content supply chain, and AI can only help so much.
For example, in the workflow above, I could probably automate steps 3 and 4. Step 6 can’t be automated. It’s so subjective that it must remain human. Step 7 is mostly automated. Steps 8-9 are manual. Step 10 is manual now but perhaps one day there will be a platform with a robust API.
You can see that even in this hobbyist example, there are a lot of parts of the content supply chain that AI just can’t help with.
When I look at my own whimsical use of AI to make pretty good music, AI is filling in a strategic gap in the content supply chain – namely, my complete lack of musical talent. I can provide the rest of the supply chain, the ideation, the distribution and marketing. And every content creator out there worried that AI is going to make them obsolete is understandably worried, but as we’ve seen from these hobbyist examples, there’s still so much AI can’t do. Their expert skills in the creation part will lend them an edge in creation that I don’t have. My friend and producer Ruby King often points out when we review tracks where AI just missed the boat, in ways that I don’t know because I don’t have music composition expertise.
A Familiar Disruption
There are strong historical parallels; this sort of disruption has happened many times before. The rise of the printing press created books at a much greater scale than ever before, fundamentally changing how society worked and making knowledge more accessible. The rise of the mass manufactured automobile in the USA created a massive change across the landscape; restaurants, hotels, and roadside tourist attractions all sprung up to take advantage of the new audience and the new demand.
Today, we still see echoes of that disruption even in modern culture. A Michelin-starred chef, one of the highest culinary accolades, stems from the Michelin Guide, a restaurant guidebook put out by the Michelin tire company to stimulate driving demand in Europe back in 1900.
There is no way to accurately predict what work will look like, what content will look like, what society will look like as AI becomes ascendant in the creation of content as part of the overall content supply chain.
What we do know and can rely on are the same basic motivators that won’t change. Companies want to save money, save time, and make money. Consumers want things to be better, faster, and cheaper. If our AI efforts are aligned to these timeless motivations, then using it will deliver meaningful impact.
And looking ahead, as we saw with the automobile creating all sorts of side industries, I wholly expect AI to do the same, from cover bands performing AI hits to music producers cleaning up AI music to developmental editors fixing AI novels to artists cleaning up AI art. AI will dramatically amplify production, which means the rest of the content supply chain will need more people than ever to keep up.
As always, shameless plug, if you want help with scaling your generative AI systems and processes in your supply chain, this is literally what my company does, so if getting started with this use of generative AI is of interest, hit me up.
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ICYMI: In Case You Missed it
Besides the recently updated Generative AI for Marketers course I’m relentlessly flogging, this week we talked through using generative AI for non-business use cases and what we can learn from it.
- In-Ear Insights: Generative AI for Non-Business Use Cases
- Almost Timely News: 🗞️ How to Build a Generative AI Priming Representation (2024-07-07)
- You Ask, I Answer: Can Sales Create Hot Leads with Generative AI?
- Mind Readings: Reliably Wrong Data Is Okay
- You Ask, I Answer: Safe Artificial General Intelligence?
- You Ask, I Answer: Disclosure of Code by Programmers and AI?
- Mind Readings: Authenticity, AI, and Showing Your Work
Skill Up With Classes
These are just a few of the classes I have available over at the Trust Insights website that you can take.
Premium
- 🦾 Generative AI for Marketers
- 👉 Google Analytics 4 for Marketers
- 👉 Google Search Console for Marketers (🚨 just updated with AI SEO stuff! 🚨)
Free
- 👉 New! Generative AI for Sales
- 👉 New! Generative AI for Food and Beverage
- 👉 New! Generative AI for Architecture, Engineering, and Construction
- 👉 New! Generative AI for Professional Associations
- Generative AI for Agencies
- Powering Up Your LinkedIn Profile (For Job Hunters) 2023 Edition
- Predictive Analytics and Generative AI for Travel, Tourism, and Hospitality, 2024 Edition
- Building the Data-Driven, AI-Powered Customer Journey for Retail and Ecommerce, 2024 Edition
- The Marketing Singularity: How Generative AI Means the End of Marketing As We Knew It
- Measurement Strategies for Agencies
- Empower Your Marketing With Private Social Media Communities
- Exploratory Data Analysis: The Missing Ingredient for AI
- Proving Social Media ROI
- Paradise by the Analytics Dashboard Light: How to Create Impactful Dashboards and Reports
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If you work at a company or organization that wants to do bulk licensing, let me know!
Get Back to Work
Folks who post jobs in the free Analytics for Marketers Slack community may have those jobs shared here, too. If you’re looking for work, check out these recent open positions, and check out the Slack group for the comprehensive list.
- Director Lifecycle Marketing at Mia Aesthetics
- Director Of Global B2b Marketing at Keeper Security, Inc.
- Director Of Marketing And Field Applications at Grundium
- Director Of Marketing at Jobot
- Director Of Marketing at RevRise Media
- Director, Creator (Influencer) Marketing at adQuadrant
- Director, Product Marketing at Kaplan
- Head Of Digital Marketing at WOW Vegas
- Head Of Performance Marketing And Creative Development at Limitless Capital
- Marketing Director at Avie.ai
- Marketing Finance Director (Remote) at Brex
- Media Planning Director at RevCats
- Partner Marketing Director – Usa at Indigo Slate
- Product Marketing Director, Data Science/Ai/Ml at Domino Data Lab
- Senior Director Of Product, Consumer Growth at Headspace
- Vice President, Integrated Marketing at Ruder Finn
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How to Stay in Touch
Let’s make sure we’re connected in the places it suits you best. Here’s where you can find different content:
- My blog – daily videos, blog posts, and podcast episodes
- My YouTube channel – daily videos, conference talks, and all things video
- My company, Trust Insights – marketing analytics help
- My podcast, Marketing over Coffee – weekly episodes of what’s worth noting in marketing
- My second podcast, In-Ear Insights – the Trust Insights weekly podcast focused on data and analytics
- On Threads – random personal stuff and chaos
- On LinkedIn – daily videos and news
- On Instagram – personal photos and travels
- My free Slack discussion forum, Analytics for Marketers – open conversations about marketing and analytics
Listen to my theme song as a new single:
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Events I’ll Be At
Here are the public events where I’m speaking and attending. Say hi if you’re at an event also:
- MAICON, Cleveland, September 2024
- MarketingProfs B2B Forum, Boston, November 2024
There are also private events that aren’t open to the public.
If you’re an event organizer, let me help your event shine. Visit my speaking page for more details.
Can’t be at an event? Stop by my private Slack group instead, Analytics for Marketers.
Songs I’ve Made With AI
These are all made with AI. Each link will take you to a landing page where you can choose the major streaming music service of your choice. Enjoy!
- The Human Hand, a pop song I made for Ann Handley out of one of her newsletters
- Joys of the Universe, a pop song made from a fan fiction piece written by a friend
- Fries That Fade Away, a country song about McDonald’s fries getting cold too quickly
- A Garota Das Havaianas, a Brasilian Portuguese bossa nova song about a woman in love, made for a friend
- Blue Sky Sunday, a country song about Father’s Day when the father isn’t around, made for a friend
- Toxic Love, a pop song about the video game Apex Legends
- Queen of Lies, a rock song made for a friend who was betrayed by another friend
- Władczyni kłamstw, Queen of Lies but in Polish
- Break Free, a hard rock inspired song about AI
- Hjem Igen, a pop song about a friend, her wife, and their baby
- Весняний Київ, Springtime in Kyiv, a Ukrainian pop song made for a friend
Required Disclosures
Events with links have purchased sponsorships in this newsletter and as a result, I receive direct financial compensation for promoting them.
Advertisements in this newsletter have paid to be promoted, and as a result, I receive direct financial compensation for promoting them.
My company, Trust Insights, maintains business partnerships with companies including, but not limited to, IBM, Cisco Systems, Amazon, Talkwalker, MarketingProfs, MarketMuse, Agorapulse, Hubspot, Informa, Demandbase, The Marketing AI Institute, and others. While links shared from partners are not explicit endorsements, nor do they directly financially benefit Trust Insights, a commercial relationship exists for which Trust Insights may receive indirect financial benefit, and thus I may receive indirect financial benefit from them as well.
Thank You
Thanks for subscribing and reading this far. I appreciate it. As always, thank you for your support, your attention, and your kindness.
See you next week,
Christopher S. Penn
You might also enjoy:
- Almost Timely News, January 7, 2024: Should You Buy a Custom GPT?
- Mind Readings: Most Analytics Data is Wasted
- You Ask, I Answer: Reliability of LLMs vs Other Software?
- Mind Readings: Generative AI and Addition vs Substitution of Jobs
- Almost Timely News, January 14, 2024: The Future of Generative AI is Open
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Christopher S. Penn is one of the world’s leading experts on AI in marketing. Christopher Penn has over a decade of AI experience in classical AI, regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI. Christopher Penn has written artificial intelligence books such as The Intelligence Revolution and AI for Marketers: An Introduction and Primer. Christopher Penn is an AI keynote speaker around the world.
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