How I use AI 

I don’t have a unified theory of AI. Just an evolving list of things I do (and don’t) use it for. Mostly it lets me spend a bigger share of my time on the actual work.

DIGITAL ETHNOGRAPHY / BACKING UP FINDINGS

The danger with interviewing six people is that it’s just, like, the opinions of six people, man. But nobody has time to interview a statistically relevant sample.

For Doomsday Preppers, I took thousands of comments from from the subreddits r/preppers and r/twoxpreppers and plugged them into ChatGPT to draw out themes, test theories, and make sure the preppers we spoke to represented the whole. (They did.)

‘TELL ME FIVE TIMES WHEN [X] HAPPENED’

ChatGPT is useful for coming up with lists of cultural moments. E.g., “give me five examples of when Twitch culture broke into the mainstream.” I then need to investigate the moments myself, but it has a much wider cultural memory than any strategist could have.

Though it doesn’t have a deeper cultural memory. Subcultures that lack representation online are likely to lack representation in ChatGPT, so I also need to seek out more representative media depending on what we’re talking about.

POSITIONING RESEARCH

For pre-brief research on Arby’s, I used AI to create graphs positioning Arby’s against its QSR competitors. It needed some finessing, but ChatGPT is a bias/public-opinion-reflection machine, so it’s pretty good at telling you how the internet ranks the price/quality/sentiment of fast food chains and other well-known brands.

VOICE SPOOFING / FPO ADS

I used AI to spoof Jay Shetty’s voice for a Cracker Barrel ad read. I spoofed Nick Offerman’s voice for a Coleman manifesto and a series of ads as if Ron Swanson was endorsing/explaining how to use Coleman products.

Ethical note: The point is to sell the work through and make the case for either 1.) why paying this person to do the ad/VO makes sense or 2.) to make it feel real/embodied by a persona, even if this won’t be a spokesperson-led campaign.

FILLING IN GAPS IN REAL VO

In our Sensory Forecast case study for Fast Company, we had some last-minute changes to the script, but not enough time for Alex to get back in the booth, so I filled in the gaps with voice spoofing, then mixing the clips to match the character of the original VO.

GENERATIVE FILL

I think everyone knows about generative fill, I just wanted a reason to show you this cute baby. (The original photo cuts off just below his feet.)

BREAKING WRITER’S BLOCK / TAKING NOTES

Chat is a useful conversation partner. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a novel idea from it, but sometimes a bad idea in an unexplored territory is good enough to get things back on track. It also works well as a repository for all my thoughts over the course of a project, so I can look back or ask it questions.

TECH SUPPORT / SEO

Chat was incredibly useful at problem solving some issues I had setting up GA4 for a consulting client last summer.

WHAT’S EVOLVING / WHAT I’M LEARNING

Updated 5/16/24

ChatGPT -> Gemini: I might be switching my allegience from OpenAI to Google’s Gemini because it’s easier to fact check and find sources, and the integration with the Google Workspace is hard to beat.

Also interesting to see ad integration in Gemini; could be a fun place to play with campaigns in the future.

AI edkeithly.com: I’m training an AI on my portfolio so you can ask it questions about my work if you’re shy. Mostly it’s an exercise in getting a chatbot to be good at one specific task/brand voice.