A few years ago I was listening to BBC 6 music, my radio station of choice, and they premiered the worlds first AI music composition; that is a piece of music written entirely by AI. The verdict? It was absolutely awful (in my humble opinion). It was hard to put my finger on what was so bad about it, it was subtle, but it just didn’t work… Fast forward a few years and already AI has come on leaps and bounds and the tunes are entirely more listenable and it’s harder to tell the difference between compositions made by people or AI.
It got me thinking about how AI and machine learning could impact our day-to-day work within engagement and experience. I remember back in 1990 as a psychology undergrad, learning about these amazing new technologies, AI and neural networks. At the time it seemed like the stuff of sci-fi, but now the future is here and these new technologies are making a very real impact on our lives at work. So if AI can write a good tune, could it also write a great story, or strategic narrative?
A quick Google search reveals that we are not quite there yet (maybe an opportunity for a pivot for People Lab!?), but there’s a whole body of evidence building around the opportunities for AI to write content and stories. It might surprise you to learn that, for example, around a third of the content published by Bloomberg uses some kind of automated technology. AI is becoming fairly common in the world of journalism. Just imagine working in internal comms and having an AI assistant to wade through the latest financials and turn it into a well written, engaging, easy to understand piece of copy, and minus any typos – sounds like music to my ears! In fact let’s go one step further – all of the above but tweaked into a range of different versions slightly for different audience personas, developed based on AI reviewing the big data we have available on our employee base. Now I am getting really excited!
Many of the commentators talk about experts co-creating with AI, rather than AI doing the journalists out of a job, but I guess time will tell. So writing a great piece of copy, or an article, is one thing, but crafting an entire story is something else.
In 2016 a movie called Sunspring was premieredat the SCI-FI film festival in London. What’s interesting about this movie is that the screenplay was written by AI. Much like the musical composition example above though, the feedback was that it just wasn’t quite right…..yet. One of the reviews summed it up with a comment that it was ‘amusing but strange’. Where AI couldhelp though, is in ‘supercharging’ the story, again the focus is on co-creation.
Researchers at MIT have found that AI is capable of identifying common ‘emotional arcs’ in stories. An emotional arc is critical for engagement, so being able to understand what gives a story an emotional arc and how to use them is clearly an advantage in crafting a great story. What the researchers found is that it is possible to use AI to help make stories more compelling and engaging by tapping into this insight.
Whilst these studies have focused primarily on film and videos, it is easy to see that there is real potential to use these advances to create compelling strategic narratives to engage employees. This technology could help organisations to tell stories that could well be Oscar worthy, at the very least, stores that will engage and make an emotional connection with their people. I, for one, am looking forward to seeing just how this particular story unfolds…
What are your views on AI? Can man an machine truly work together to cater for employees needs? We’d love to hear your views – or maybe you’re already using AI for people practices – get in touch or leave your comments below.
@Emma
