Here are some practical applications of GenAI that have emerged over the past couple of weeks:

1. GenAI for chat products: How can you learn from others’ mistakes and get a chat product right? Watch a recording of our Webinar (or read our summary) that saves you from reinventing the wheel. You can also watch a recording of a Webinar featuring India’s Jagran New Media (blog summary here), which has also built a chat product for search that its users find highly engaging.

2. GenAI investigative journalism tool: A candid piece by reporter Jaemark Tordecilla on how it took him 16 hours to build a truly helpful tool that he expects will save reporters 80% of the time they spend on audit reports, combing through data.

3. GenAI for diversity: The Baltimore Times has created a set of inclusive avatars and voices that allow its audiences to select from multiple diverse “personas” that reflect and represent the audiences they seek to serve.

4. GenAI for video: I have seen mainly rave reviews for OpenAI’s new video tool Sora, which can create extremely realistic, high-quality details. It does raise questions about copyright and training data, though.

5. GenAI for classifying information: Semafor found it was hard to collect hate-crime statistics because they are defined and tracked in different ways by local U.S. police departments. So, Executive Editor Gina Chua plugged a definition of hate crimes into a bot and was surprised by how well it could discover unwritten rules and relationships in articles. Chua suggests this capability could be used for “content moderation or finding violations of a given policy in a sea of complaints.”

6. GenAI for rewriting copy: Reach Plc uses it to repurpose copy from wires, police releases, and elsewhere in its own chain (as do Newsquest and Ippen), as well as image captions. 

7. GenAI for marketing: WPP unveils text and image-creation tools and talks about training models on brands’ tone/voice or target demographics. So far, they have almost 30,000 users and millions of prompts. It is part of a broader trend of using AI in marketing — design agency Code and Theory has joined a creative AI partnership with Oracle, Publicis has fully acquired Publicis Sapient AI Labs, and Omnicom has joined forces with Microsoft. 

8. GenAI for PDFs: Adobe makes a PDF reader chatbot available in Acrobat and Reader in beta. The road map includes integrations with Firefly, the ability to pull information from multiple documents, document types, and sources simultaneously, and features for generating first drafts and editing copy.

9. GenAI for tapping into new audiences: Schibsted gets in younger listeners’ ears with audio reports and finds high completion rates and greater engagement than for text articles. Jagran is building an AI-based app for younger audiences.

10. GenAI as an alternate source of revenue: Reddit is reported to be selling its users’ conversations to Google as training data for US$60 million ahead of an IPO. 

11. GenAI for customer service: A cautionary tale for anyone experimenting with this use case. The bot can make up stuff, and you are on the hook for it.

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