Today will be the last edition of Artificially Intelligent for the year. So we thought we'd conclude 2024 by asking what the biggest political technology development was over the last 12 months. And while the answer may take many forks in the road, every path converges on a single destination—AI has transformed political advocacy from end to end. This quick read summarizes the most important changes.
What Makes AI Different
We've written aboutwhy AI feels different than other technology changes. What fascinates us most is how nearly every other technology in history was initially available only to the very few, and took decades or even longer to see mass adoption. But today, AI is available to anyone with an internet connection, even on a smart phone without Wi-Fi.
Primarily because of open source frameworks for AI and cloud computing, the most powerful large language models in the world are now accessible by billions of people. And this wave of adoption started only in about the fall of 2022.
This technological tsunami has unleashed a torrent of new applications in countless industries, and has radically changed political advocacy in dozens of ways already, with more changes developing every day. In fact, as the moniker of this newsletter suggests, we started this weekly read in large part to chronicle these changes. There are too many to list them all here, but here's three of the most important to sit with for the new year.
Ad Production
We've written about the numerous ways that AI transforms ad production, including exponentially lower costs with higher quality and faster turnaround times than ever. But it's not just the explicitly new AI tools that enable ad production. AI is a powerful assistant in every step of the production process.
Here's a novel example from this year: we asked AI to help us identify a candidate's most inspirational speeches, which we then used to produce this ad that pieced several of them together—a process that would have taken us days to complete before, if we had even been able to find them at all.
AI did it in just a few seconds.
Ad Targeting
AI enables ad targeting in numerous ways that help us reach policymakers, influencers, and voters with new degrees of precision. We live in a media ecosystem that is now more fragmented than ever. And even the smartest army of people can't make the thousands of split second decisions required to procure ads precisely to our targets at the most efficient prices. AI makes this possible in ways that were inconceivable even a few years ago.
How You Communicate With Policymakers, Clients, Bosses, and Anyone Else
Maybe this is the biggest AI development of them all. Humans by nature are visual creatures. The oldest cave paintings predate writing by about 35,000 years. Research shows that the human brain processes visual information60,000 times faster than text. As we all know, a picture is worth a thousand words.
Yet since the invention of writing, text has been the nearly universal way that information is transferred for one simple reason—we're not all artists. And even for those of us who are, pictures are time-consuming to create. So almost to a person, we choose 1,000 words over one picture the vast majority of the time. But despite this choice, text remains a low-powered substitute for visual communication.
And now suddenly, because of AI image generation tools, we can all swap thousands of words for a few images in just a few seconds.
The implications of image generation go far beyond the ads we create. What happens when we can suddenly communicate with images instead of words? What does this mean for client communications? Lobbying? Employee communications? Communications with our kids and spouse?
We'll pick it up here in 2025 to find out.
Three Ways To Operationalize This Email
🔱 Consider if you changed your ad targeting and production tools this year to maximize the latest in AI.
🔱 Think about your business obstacles in any area, and research the latest AI tools designed to tackle these issues.
🔱 Start using the latest AI tools to punch up your writing, make your communications more visual, or bring novel solutions to client needs.
🔱 If you're enjoying this content, please consider forwarding this email to a colleague or friend. If you'd rather not forward it because you think the content makes you seem smarter compared to that annoying co-worker . . . fine, but you must like at least one colleague you could forward it to. You do, don't you?
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🔱 If you'd like to learn more about how to deploy the lates in AI in your work, please contact us today.
