Is your marketing made up? — Kelford Labs Daily
Or is it made for you?
Did you hear the story about the music app that had to build a brand new feature because of ChatGPT hallucinations?
They noticed that more and more users were starting to upload a type of tablature that the app didn’t actually support.
Why?
Well, when they went over to ChatGPT themselves, they saw that it was telling users that their app supported this notation.
And so many people had experienced this hallucination (another way of saying ‘confidently wrong advice’) that they decided to actually build the feature.
Now, there are two ways to look at this story:
1) A plucky music app uses data to provide a feature their customers wanted.
2) ChatGPT is so wrong, so often, and so thoroughly that a business had to change its product to conform to its inaccurate world model.
Two things can be true at the same time.
I share this story because people are getting advice from ChatGPT. They’re asking it questions about how to run their marketing, how to run their lives.
In fact, people are relying on it so much that even some of its investors are becoming deluded and paranoid because they’ve chosen to believe that it knows things.
Meanwhile, it can’t even accurately output the real, extant features of a music app without making stuff up.
Because it doesn’t really know anything, it just looks like it does.
The tokens that come out of an LLM can be thought of as holograms: the appearance of something without the substance. It’s like water that won’t get you wet. And also won’t cool you off, or refresh or hydrate you.
It looks like it will, but if you rely on it, you’ll find yourself suffering.
I say all this because your marketing needs to be unique, creative, and tailor-made to fit you for it to work. It needs to be more than the appearance of marketing, it needs to demonstrate real value.
It needs to demonstrate real thinking and real effort.
But if we don’t expend any effort creating our marketing, it’s not really marketing. It’s more like a hologram.
It looks like it works, but it doesn’t.
Because what comes out of an LLM is neither unique, creative, nor made for you.
It’s hollow, like a hologram.
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