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Fear of job losses resulting from the deployment of artificial intelligence technology is common in some industries set to be disrupted in the coming years. In the entertainment industry, for instance, there’s been a growing anxiety among workers about the impact generative artificial intelligence tools could have on crafts ranging from acting to set building to animation.
But that fear isn’t spreading through the campaign industry — and a recent report is shedding light on a reason why: rather than replace workers, AI is actually creating new workflows that humans are managing. That was one conclusion drawn from research that startup incubator Higher Ground Labs did recently through its Progressive AI Lab.
Josh Berezin, a co-founder at Oregon-based Grow Progress and one of the research partners, said during a presentation Oct. 3 that the participants found not just “incremental gains in efficiency, but also completely different workflows.”
“Whole new AI enabled workflows emerged” during the experiment, which was designed to see if “AI-assisted” political content could perform as well as human-created content. As part of the experiment, four firms were given a creative brief and a budget of $7,500 to provide a video to persuade viewers to vote for VP Kamala Harris for president and $1,000 to create an image. Each agency then tracked its billable items — hours spent, hourly rates, cost of tools and the AI tools used.
“Creating all this content with two hours of work and doing pre-testing is a completely different workflow from what we saw in the other lanes” where AI wasn’t used or used with a mix of human editing, said Berezin, whose company’s platform hosted the content. “Those two modes of using AI tools are another thing that we’re really curious to learn more about.”
Ultimately, the AI-generated content with final human review was the most persuasive, according to the published study, followed by “mostly AI content” with AI plus human editing.
Leah Bae, a VP at Higher Ground Labs, said during the presentation on Thursday that the findings bode well for future human employment in the campaign industry. “Human expertise and creativity remains paramount,” Bae said.
Moreover, she added that AI tools are, in fact, safe for political content creators — and could continue to get better.
“We really do expect to see progressively better outcomes,” she said. “This is a really big opportunity for our movement to get more training. … Without the proper skills, even the most advanced tools can’t reach their potential.”