🦸‍♀️ AI HEROES

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Why today’s creative professionals will be tomorrow’s AI heroes

NO FEAR

Look around. Creative professionals are feeling threatened. 11,000 Hollywood writers are striking over studios’ purported plans to use AI to generate screenplays. In marketing, agencies have frozen creative hiring.

But what if our new generative AI landscape ends up favoring creative thinkers more than we all realize?

PHILOSOPHER TO PROMPT ENGINEER

Regular readers know that this newsletter believes that generative AI will end up creating more revenue streams for humans than what they take away. We also believe that the coming ubiquity of AI content will end up increasing the value of the human written word, not decreasing it.

AI is also going to increase the market value of a humanities education, too.

Teodora Danilovic studied philosophy at King's College London. She chose her degree because, as she puts it, “I was passionate about critical thinking and analytic questioning.”

Guess what? Her background (personal, as well as academic) has made her an ideal AI prompt engineer.

BID EASIER

After graduating, Teodora joined a company that sells a specific language model to companies who need to fill out lengthy project bid and tender requests.

As a prompt engineer, Teodora needs to make sure that the nuanced, detailed AI language prompts that her company hides behind their software’s simple, user friendly “Create Bid” buttons generate “accurate and consistent results.”

While she —and others— tend to associate this sort of generative AI prompt engineering with a computer science background, there’s “actually an important linguistic element” to prompt engineering.

As Teodora put is, “that made it a perfect job for me.”

Stay with me, as I break down why human-first thinkers (like philosophers and communication professionals) are actually ridiculously well placed to capitalize on our coming AI era.

FROM CD TO CHATGPT

I’ve worked with AI tools for years now. But. It took ChatGPT’s innovative, human-esque chatbot UI to really make me realize how good of a training ground my background as an advertising creative director was for prompting.

Let me explain.

In my big agency days, I observed that the grumpiest creative directors were always the ones who were terrible at sharing/articulating what they wanted from their teams.

In advertising, a full and complete brief, along with references, and the ways in which your direction could —but not should— come to life, are the keys to being positively surprised and delighted by creative work from your teams.

Also, if what you’re presented with doesn’t quite hit the mark, clear, directive feedback is key to making things right.

I always found it shocking how many creative directors didn’t quite get that.

EYE ROLL

Earlier this year, I shared an anecdote about the uber successful music producer Rick Rubin, who was widely mocked online for the way he described his job in a TV interview:

People enjoyed the Rubin memes, but guess what? Rick Rubin has personally earned hundreds of millions of dollars by helping create some of our most recognizable hits —so don’t laugh too hard.

There’s also a lesson here for you.

Like Rick Rubin, YOU also know what you like and what you don't like, and YOU can be decisive about that, too.

And it doesn’t matter if you work in the creative fields or not.

As most people recognize, articulating things well is a business superpower, not just a creative one —and it pays off whether you’re pitching investors, selling products/services to potential clients, or managing people.

But communication is an often poorly wielded tool, if it’s wielded at all.

OK, WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH CHATGPT?

With generative AI, the clearer you are at describing what you want, the better the output.

As the philosopher/prompt engineer Theodora put it, “many of the problems people encounter when using generative tools are due to the user assuming the models automatically understand intuitive social, contextual, and intentional cues.”

Ah, understanding “social, contextual, and intentional cues.”

You mean, all the things that Hollywood screenwriters and advertising creatives are good at?

OUR TAKE

Writers and creative thinkers are poised to become the world’s best AI prompt engineers.

We believe that, and we’re proving it out every day.

See, Fate v Future’s expertise goes beyond what you’re reading. We work hard to create the best newsletter on the Internet, but we’re also a network of senior marketing experts handling the trickiest tasks for brands large and small.

I’ll be direct: Some of the freelance creative professionals in our network are properly freaked out about the future. They’ve observed the holding pattern among agencies first hand, as everyone assesses how human talent and AI tools can and will best integrate.

They shouldn’t be nervous.

We talk to clients daily about the systems they can/should be using to take advantage of the AI tools that are out there, when it comes to their marketing.

And since I started writing about that here, we are seeing an intense amount interest from you, our readers, in learning more about how Fate v Future is helping our client brands turn the AI tide in their favor.

So, we want to share. If you have a brand or a side hustle, and want to learn how we’re ensuring our clients’ thrive in this new landscape, simply reply to this email with “ai”.

Pro tip: We’ll answer any questions you have gratis, and share more about our methods and output. Should you want to proceed with a project, as a reader of this newsletter, you’ll get an insider rate on this service.

We believe today’s creative professionals will be tomorrow’s AI heroes. Simply reply with “ai” to learn how.

More:

You don't need a computer-science background to be an AI-prompt engineer. One woman became one after graduating with a philosophy degree »»

The coming chatbot wars: Google’s DeepMind possesses a data gold mine that neither OpenAI nor Twitter has access to. YouTube »»

More: Scared tech workers are scrambling to reinvent themselves as AI experts. They have good reason to: people with AI skills get paid 27% more than typical tech workers »»

Written by Jon Kallus. Any feedback? Simply reply. Like this? Share it!