How I Plan To Teach AI … Until I Get Punched In The Mouth

In less than a week I start the spring academic semester. The class I’m teaching is a fairly new one: Marketing Platforms and Systems. It was suggested by a student and fast-tracked into reality last year, which is one of the most unacademic things I’ve ever seen from an academic institution, and I'm totally here for it.

I’ll be honest: The initial go was a bit of a trainwreck, with too much material and too little focus. So like a coach of a perennial second-division team I'm back with more focus and a fresh approach. And a big part of the fresh approach is AI – specifically, how AI is changing the tools marketers use.

There are other classes in the academic galaxy that teach AI, maybe even some that help students use the AI tools that are increasingly baked into customer relationship-management systems, content-creation tools, ecommerce platforms, and communication tools like Slack.

But I know for sure where I go textbooks fear to tread. I’m a little like an angler tying flies “in hand” to match the hatch that’s going on around them, and if you don’t get the analogy that’s fine.

Working without a textbook and without a net, tying my flies to match the hatch, here’s what I plan to teach 39 students about AI starting next week.

AI is a tool, and you use it like all the other tools you have at your disposal.

Does someone coming out of college need to know how to build a data warehouse and construct a Qualtrics survey and remove background noise from a video soundtrack to be successful in their first marketing job? No – but their odds are a lot greater of getting a good job if they can do all those things.

I think it’s great for marketers to specialize … but only after they’ve been exposed to all phases of marketing and the tools involved.

Imagine if marketers were construction workers. The person in charge would never say, “That’s Joe – he’s my Vise-Grip specialist,” or, “That’s Ramona – she does Sawzall.” They wouldn’t say it because it’s stupid in the context of construction. Construction workers need to know how to use all the tools.

Maybe they can get to a point where they’re the Paganini of the jackhammer and are only brought in for the tricky cases. But more than likely a construction worker is going to spend some of their day with a nail gun and some with an impact driver, and they’re going to be happy about it and valued because of it.

AI in all its manifestations is just another tool in the box you need to master, along with your journey-builder and your automated emails and your creative suite. It’s a ripsaw of a tool, like to take your arm off if you’re not careful, but we’ve had to master powerful tools before.

I was having coffee with an old friend who now sells AI-impregnated solutions, and he said, “AI now is like the internet when it first hit. Remember how everyone said back then that the internet was an unfair advantage for people who knew how to use it? That’s how it is for AI now.”

I actually do remember when the internet took off and it was an unfair advantage – especially for those who harnessed it to play in the world’s largest trivia contest.

But I also remember when computers first changed the landscape. I was a student at Wausau West High School, and while I was far from a computer geek (unlike my co-valedictorian, the utterly brilliant Michael Scott) I spent a lot of time in the computer lab building programs in Basic and storing them on paper tape, and playing the most primitive version of Oregon Trail imaginable.

Later I got into journalism, and saw a lot of incredibly talented beat-walkers and typewriter-pounders steamrolled by CRT workstations and computerized typesetting.

Later still I saw the magazines I loved and the people who loved them buried by the internet because the people in charge were flummoxed by how to fit the old stuff into the new ways of consuming information.

Bottom line is I’ve seen a lot of powerful tools make some radical changes in how things are done, and AI is just one more.

And unless you want to get pile-driven into the muck you’d better learn how to work with it.

AI can do some incredible things already.

Ever play a guitar synthesizer? It can create mind-blowing sounds that you’d never thought a guitar could make – and the most awful burples, beeps and glitches, generally in the softest and most sensitive parts of a song.

That’s sort of where AI is now.

Ask DALL-E 2 to generate a graphic of workers using Salesforce, and it’s apt to belch up something like this:

The faces are creepy, the hands are completely un-hand-like, and it has no concept of how to spell.

But ask DALL-E 3 to generate an anime-inspired illustration of marketers wrestling with multiple platforms and it does much better:

Ask ChatGPT to write code, and it does really well.

Ask it to perform a semantic analysis of a website, and after a few tries, you get the data you’re after.

Ask it to generate a word-for-word transcript of a call and a summary, and it gives you pretty much what you asked for.

Ask it to write like me, and it … doesn’t. But for high-volume stuff like social posts it does just fine, after a few nips and tucks.

The point is, AI is already helping me with low-value tasks, just as I'm sure it’s helping graphic designers with some of their low-value tasks.

And truth be told, I'm fine if I never have to write another tweet … X … whatever. I'm fine not having to count how many times the word “heritage” is used on a website. And after writing a master’s thesis built around ethnographies, where every “um” had to be documented, I'm super-fine not having to hand-mash interview transcripts.

AI has its lane, and it’s right down the middle of the fairway (though not always the fairway you intended). I often go tee to rough to other rough to water hazard to over the green to eventually on the green. That’s not to everyone’s taste, and that’s not always the right approach.

AI is great at sticking to the fairway, and I’m good when I get my walking in. So there are ways for each of us to do what we do best.

AI can be a real aid to people who need it.

Remember the Twilight Zone episode where the spooky aliens come down bearing a book titled “To Serve Man,” and it turns out to be a cookbook?

That’s kind of how AI is right now. Some people think it’s a guide to making our lives better, and some think it will eat us whole.

I'm still on the fence with that, but I will say from a 100% boots-on-the-ground perspective: There are a lot of students who are bad writers but great thinkers, and their inability to communicate their thoughts in writing stands a really good chance of keeping them from realizing their potential.

These people could change the world, and if ChatGPT can remove that obstacle between their thoughts and their audience, it’ll be serving mankind the right way – and I don’t mean with a light cream sauce.

It’s going to be an interesting semester. The ground will shift beneath our feet a couple of times in the next 16 weeks, but I can tell you this: It’s a whole lot easier to deal with when you know it’s coming.

(And yes, AI generated all the images in this post.)