It’s already well established that AI could take away lots of software and artist jobs, but it seems that copywriters aren’t safe either.
Zoho has created a billboard only using ChatGPT. A Zoho executive asked ChatGPT to come up with a billboard ad in just four words. ChatGPT came up with a message, and it now sits proudly on a billboard in the US.
“I asked ChatGPT to suggest a good billboard message for Zoho. I gave it a budget for 4 words,” said Raju Vegesna, who works at Zoho’s Austin office. “It aptly said ‘Simplify work. Amplify success’. This message is now live on a billboard in Dallas,” Venesena continued, while sharing an image of the billboard next to a Texas freeway.
Now companies typically spend large sums of money to come up with ad copies. Agencies conduct multiple rounds of meetings to understand client requirements, brainstorm, and finally come up with such pithy bits of text. But ChatGPT apparently understood what Zoho did as a company, and was instantly — and for free — able to come up with an appropriate billboard message which was good enough to be used in real life.
Use-cases like these can put ad agencies — and thousands of copywriters and ad executives — out of business. Ad agencies can charge a bomb to come up with such simple bits of ad copy, and for good reason: some taglines, like Nike’s “Just Do It”, and MasterCard’s “There are some things money can’t buy, for everything else, there’s MasterCard” become iconic, and can come to define their brands. But if ChatGPT is already coming up with taglines that companies are able to use in their advertising, it can likely create much more complex ads going forward as well.
And it’s not just ad agencies that might be warily watching the progress of AI. IBM has already announced that it will replace 7,800 jobs with AI in the coming years, and has stopped hiring for these roles. Education company Chegg’s stock fell 38% after it said that it was seeing slower customer growth because students were directly going to ChatGPT for answers. And with instances of ChatGPT being used in the wild by mainstream companies now popping up, it would appear that no job is really safe from the incoming AI disruption.