Artificial Intelligence: Now It's Personal

As the result of a podcast by consultant Mark Scheafer, The New Marketing Career, I'm inspired to deep-dive into the subject of Artificial Intelligence.

You might consider doing so, too.

AI is marketing's next big thing.

Experts insist AI won't make every marketing professional obsolete—not soon, anyway.

But my brief look into AI has already persuaded me otherwise.

London startup Phrasee, for example, is harnessing AI "to write better email marketing language than humans."

If accurate, that's bad news for copywriters.

Phrasee uses algorithms to generate "human-sounding, machine-optimized email marketing language that gets you more opens, clicks and conversions," the company's website claims.

Phrasee's software outperforms human copywriters because it evaluates "hundreds of emotions, sentiments and phrases" before recommending a line.

Human copywriters, if they could wade through hundreds of emotions, sentiments and phrases without soon falling asleep, couldn't assess them—unless they were wizards at Bayesian statistics (the algorithms' secret sauce). 

I don't know any who are.

If Phrasee's algorithms indeed outperform the human copywriters—and I have no reason to doubt they do—it's due to a computer's capacity to scrutinize vast piles of data.

There's at least some consolation in that for an obsolete copywriter. 

Scrutinize stems from the Latin scrutor, meaning "to search through trash."

I'd rather practice old-fashioned wordsmithery and leave the trash-sorting to the computers.