A marketing group has made the choice to bring a new flavor of talent to its ranks, this time in the form of artificial intelligence “interns.”
A fairly large technology marketing agency, Codeword, has now announced a brand new type of internship by placing a pair of interns on its 106-person team. A recent press release pointed out that they “will be fully embedded into ” the creative group for Codeword.
“I am designed to be helpful and efficient,” expressed on of these new “interns,” Aiden. “I believe that I could be a valuable resource as an ‘intern,’ although my abilities would be somewhat different from those of a human intern.”
“There’s a lot of talk and fear and hype about how new AI tools will integrate with creative teams,” highlighted a partner for the company, Kyle Monson. “As an agency that straddles the creative and technology worlds, we want to explore what human-AI collaborations can look like. And we’ll do it in public, so our team and our community can learn from this experiment.”
These artificial intelligence “interns” quickly issued themselves names and created a look for themselves. They selected the names “Aiko” and “Aiden,” the former of the two, Aiko, is slated to work alongside the design team for the company. Aiden has been assigned to the editorial group.
The company currently plans to treat these AI entities in the same fashion as its other interns, which means that they will be given creative tasks for the company, discuss how things are coming along on Codeword’s blog and social media, as well as go through performance reviews during a three-month span of the internship.
“Like all interns, it will take work from the org to figure out what they’re capable of and how they can offer meaningful help,” stated Senior Art Director Emilio Ramos.
“To be crystal clear, I’m deeply skeptical they have the goods. Looking at their training, it’s obvious it was scraped haphazardly from the internet and definitely [sic] isn’t fit for commercial use,” stated Ramos. “That’s why we’re not jumping in face-first, we’re experimenting with integrating these techniques into carefully controlled internal workflows. In the meantime, we’re actively investigating image sets like Google’s Open Images v7 — built from images under the Creative Commons BY 4.0 License — that might one day allow for commercial use.”
The act of bringing on artificial intelligence such as Dall-E 2 and ChatGPT in order to take spots from real people is becoming a much more popular solution due to the current economic climate, as reported by Axios.
“It’s an opportunity to streamline internal processes by eliminating necessary but mind-numbing and time-consuming tasks — or at least to pass them off onto emotionless interns who can’t get bored. If we can make that work, it’ll be a win for our team and for our clients,” stated Terrence Doyle, a Senior Editor for Codeword.
“That said, I’m a former freelance journalist, and I do a lot of ghostwriting for Codeword’s clients, so I’d be a liar if I said I wasn’t sort of terrified by the creative — or, rather, ruthlessly productive — capacity of AI,” explained Doyle.
