AI on Trial

There are lots of concerns with the development of AI—but do the negatives outweigh the benefits? In this episode, co-hosts Pete Housley and Unbounce Senior Creative Director James Thomson play judge with special guest Aaron Kwittken, Founder and CEO of PRophet. Together, they talk about all things AI ethics. Should agencies disclose that they use AI? Should they be paid based on time and materials or value of work? Can the government regulate AI? Tune in to this episode of Unprompted to learn about how you should - and shouldn’t - navigate the use of AI in the marketing world today.

Meet The Unprompted Crew

Pete Housley is host extraordinaire and CMO at Unbounce. His co-host this episode is Senior Creative Director at Unbounce, James Thomson. This episode also features Founder and CEO of PRophet, Aaron Kwittken. Aaron is a highly acclaimed industry leader, serial entrepreneur and seasoned corporate affairs and integrated communications strategist with more than 30 years in the PR industry. He is also CEO of the Comms Tech Unit for the Stagwell Marketing Cloud, a suite of AI SaaS solutions for PR, social media, and content creators. Aaron founded KWT Global in late 2005 (f/k/a Kwittken), a highly acclaimed global PR and brand strategy consultancy which was acquired by KWT Global and where he currently serves as Chairman. Aaron has received numerous honors and awards for his work and industry leadership from the likes of ICCO, Cannes LIONS, PR Week, The Drum and PRovoke Media, having recently been named a PRovoke 2021 Innovator 25 and to PR Week's 2022 Dashboard 25 for his comms-tech leadership and industry innovation.

Key Quotes

*”When I ran my agency day-to-day, I'd be like, ‘Can I hire someone who can get me 60, 70% of the way there?’ Right now, we're there [with AI.] We're at 60, 70%. And then the human has to come over the top to finish it, to make it better, to give it the values, judgment, and emotion that AI does not have.” - Aaron Kwittken

*”Humans still need to come up with the idea. Creativity rests with us. It's really more so figuring out who else is gonna be interested in that idea or that concept.” - Aaron Kwittken

*”The beauty of it to me is we might hire fewer people on the bottom, but they're going to have much better roles. They're going to stay longer. We're going to be able to upskill them. And instead of having less people, we're going to have people doing higher value things, potentially changing the compensation scheme as well. We agencies should not be paid for time and materials. We should be paid based on the value that we bring.” - Aaron Kwittken

*”ChatGPT is a toy. PRophet is a tool. And I tell folks, ‘If you want to play around with ChatGPT on your own, great. Do not put anything corporate or any work related stuff in ChatGPT, because you don't own that. In the same way that if you use Google Sheets and you don't have an SLA in place, you're giving up all of your information.” - Aaron Kwittken

*”AI is not biased. Humans are biased. And humans build algorithms that then power AI. AI isn’t really AI, it's really human intelligence. So AI is only going to be as biased as the humans who built it. So then you need to have countermeasures and algorithms that then search for and identify biases inside of each platform, which takes time and it takes investment.” - Aaron Kwittken

*”You can't wait on the government. Put it this way: The government has had no control over social media platforms and that's caused all sorts of mayhem, despair, and death in the world. And we can go on and on about how reckless Facebook, Instagram, TikTok have been. The government has had no control over that. What makes us think that the government can control AI? There's no way. We have to do it ourselves.” - Aaron Kwittken

Time Stamps

[1:44] Introducing James Thomson, Se