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Business And Society

How Generative AI Is
Changing Creative
Work
by Thomas H. Davenport and Nitin Mittal

November 14, 2022

Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images

Summary. Generative AI models for businesses threaten

to upend the world of content creation, with substantial
impacts on marketing, software, design,... more

Large language and image AI models,

sometimes called generative AI or foundation
models, have created a new set of
opportunities for businesses and professionals
that perform content creation. Some of these
opportunities include:

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1. Automated content generation: Large

language and image AI models can be used to
automatically generate content, such as
articles, blog posts, or social media posts.
This can be a valuable time-saving tool for
businesses and professionals who create
content on a regular basis.

2. Improved content quality: AI-generated

content can be of higher quality than content
created by humans, due to the fact that AI
models are able to learn from a large amount
of data and identify patterns that humans
may not be able to see. This can result in
more accurate and informative content.

3. Increased content variety: AI models can

generate a variety of content types, including
text, images, and video. This can help
businesses and professionals to create more
diverse and interesting content that appeals
to a wider range of people.

4. Personalized content: AI models can

generate personalized content based on the
preferences of individual users. This can help
businesses and professionals to create
content that is more likely to be of interest to
their target audience, and therefore more
likely to be read or shared.

How adept is this technology at mimicking

human efforts at creative work? Well, for an
example, the italicized text above was written
by GPT-3, a “large language model” (LLM)
created by OpenAI, in response to the first
sentence, which we wrote. GPT-3’s text reflects
the strengths and weaknesses of most AI-
generated content. First, it is sensitive to the
prompts fed into it; we tried several alternative
prompts before settling on that sentence.
Second, the system writes reasonably well;
there are no grammatical mistakes, and the
word choice is appropriate. Third, it would
benefit from editing; we would not normally
begin an article like this one with a numbered
list, for example. Finally, it came up with ideas
that we didn’t think of. The last point about
personalized content, for example, is not one
we would have considered.

Overall, it provides a good illustration of the

potential value of these AI models for
businesses. They threaten to upend the world
of content creation, with substantial impacts
on marketing, software, design,
entertainment, and interpersonal
communications. This is not the “artificial
general intelligence” that humans have long
dreamed of and feared, but it may look that
way to casual observers.

What Is Generative AI?

Generative AI can already do a lot. It’s able to
produce text and images, spanning blog posts,
program code, poetry, and artwork (and even
winning competitions, controversially). The
software uses complex machine learning
models to predict the next word based on
previous word sequences, or the next image
based on words describing previous images.
LLMs began at Google Brain in 2017, where
they were initially used for translation of
words while preserving context. Since then,
large language and text-to-image models have
proliferated at leading tech firms including
Google (BERT and LaMDA), Facebook (OPT-
175B, BlenderBot), and OpenAI, a nonprofit in
which Microsoft is the dominant investor
(GPT-3 for text, DALL-E2 for images, and
Whisper for speech). Online communities such
as Midjourney (which helped win the art
competition), and open-source providers like
HuggingFace, have also created generative
models.

These models have largely been confined to

major tech companies because training them
requires massive amounts of data and
computing power. GPT-3, for example, was
initially trained on 45 terabytes of data and
employs 175 billion parameters or coefficients
to make its predictions; a single training run
for GPT-3 cost $12 million. Wu Dao 2.0, a
Chinese model, has 1.75 trillion parameters.
Most companies don’t have the data center
capabilities or cloud computing budgets to
train their own models of this type from
scratch.

But once a generative model is trained, it can

be “fine-tuned” for a particular content
domain with much less data. This has led to
specialized models of BERT — for biomedical
content (BioBERT), legal content (Legal-
BERT), and French text (CamemBERT) — and
GPT-3 for a wide variety of specific purposes.
NVIDIA’s BioNeMo is a framework for
training, building and deploying large
language models at supercomputing scale for
generative chemistry, proteomics, and
DNA/RNA.OpenAI has found that as few as
100 specific examples of domain-specific data
can substantially improve the accuracy and
relevance of GPT-3’s outputs.

To use generative AI effectively, you still need

human involvement at both the beginning and
the end of the process.

To start with, a human must enter a prompt

into a generative model in order to have it
create content. Generally speaking, creative
prompts yield creative outputs. “Prompt
engineer” is likely to become an established
profession, at least until the next generation of
even smarter AI emerges. The field has already
led to an 82-page book of DALL-E 2 image
prompts, and a prompt marketplace in which
for a small fee one can buy other users’
prompts. Most users of these systems will need
to try several different prompts before
achieving the desired outcome.

Then, once a model generates content, it will

need to be evaluated and edited carefully by a
human. Alternative prompt outputs may be
combined into a single document. Image
generation may require substantial
manipulation. Jason Allen, who won the
Colorado “digitally manipulated photography”
contest with help from Midjourney, told a
reporter that he spent more than 80 hours
making more than 900 versions of the art, and
fine-tuned his prompts over and over. He then
improved the outcome with Adobe Photoshop,
increased the image quality and sharpness
with another AI tool, and printed three pieces
on canvas.

Generative AI models are incredibly diverse.

They can take in such content as images,
longer text formats, emails, social media
content, voice recordings, program code, and
structured data. They can output new content,
translations, answers to questions, sentiment
analysis, summaries, and even videos. These
universal content machines have many
potential applications in business, several of
which we describe below.

Marketing Applications
These generative models are potentially
valuable across a number of business
functions, but marketing applications are
perhaps the most common. Jasper, for
example, a marketing-focused version of GPT-
3, can produce blogs, social media posts, web
copy, sales emails, ads, and other types of
customer-facing content. It maintains that it
frequently tests its outputs with A/B testing
and that its content is optimized for search
engine placement. Jasper also fine tunes GPT-
3 models with their customers’ best outputs,
which Jasper’s executives say has led to
substantial improvements. Most of Jasper’s
customers are individuals and small
businesses, but some groups within larger
companies also make use of its capabilities. At
the cloud computing company VMWare, for
example, writers use Jasper as they generate
original content for marketing, from email to
product campaigns to social media copy. Rosa
Lear, director of product-led growth, said that
Jasper helped the company ramp up our
content strategy, and the writers now have
time to do better research, ideation, and
strategy.

Kris Ruby, the owner of public relations and

social media agency Ruby Media Group, is now
using both text and image generation from
generative models. She says that they are
effective at maximizing search engine
optimization (SEO), and in PR, for
personalized pitches to writers. These new
tools, she believes, open up a new frontier in
copyright challenges, and she helps to create
AI policies for her clients. When she uses the
tools, she says, “The AI is 10%, I am 90%”
because there is so much prompting, editing,
and iteration involved. She feels that these
tools make one’s writing better and more
complete for search engine discovery, and that
image generation tools may replace the market
for stock photos and lead to a renaissance of
creative work.

DALL-E 2 and other image generation tools are

already being used for advertising. Heinz, for
example, used an image of a ketchup bottle
with a label similar to Heinz’s to argue that
“This is what ‘ketchup’ looks like to AI.” Of
course, it meant only that the model was
trained on a relatively large number of Heinz
ketchup bottle photos. Nestle used an AI-
enhanced version of a Vermeer painting to
help sell one of its yogurt brands. Stitch Fix,
the clothing company that already uses AI to
recommend specific clothing to customers, is
experimenting with DALL-E 2 to create
visualizations of clothing based on requested
customer preferences for color, fabric, and
style. Mattel is using the technology to
generate images for toy design and marketing.

Code Generation Applications

GPT-3 in particular has also proven to be an
effective, if not perfect, generator of computer
program code. Given a description of a
“snippet” or small program function, GPT-3’s
Codex program — specifically trained for code
generation — can produce code in a variety of
different languages. Microsoft’s Github also
has a version of GPT-3 for code generation
called CoPilot. The newest versions of Codex
can now identify bugs and fix mistakes in its
own code — and even explain what the code
does — at least some of the time. The
expressed goal of Microsoft is not to eliminate
human programmers, but to make tools like
Codex or CoPilot “pair programmers” with
humans to improve their speed and
effectiveness.

The consensus on LLM-based code generation

is that it works well for such snippets, although
the integration of them into a larger program
and the integration of the program into a
particular technical environment still require
human programming capabilities. Deloitte has
experimented extensively with Codex over the
past several months, and has found it to
increase productivity for experienced
developers and to create some programming
capabilities for those with no experience.

In a six-week pilot at Deloitte with 55

developers for 6 weeks, a majority of users
rated the resulting code’s accuracy at 65% or
better, with a majority of the code coming
from Codex. Overall, the Deloitte experiment
found a 20% improvement in code
development speed for relevant projects.
Deloitte has also used Codex to translate code
from one language to another. The firm’s
conclusion was that it would still need
professional developers for the foreseeable
future, but the increased productivity might
necessitate fewer of them. As with other types
of generative AI tools, they found the better
the prompt, the better the output code.

Conversational Applications
LLMs are increasingly being used at the core of
conversational AI or chatbots. They potentially
offer greater levels of understanding of
conversation and context awareness than
current conversational technologies.
Facebook’s BlenderBot, for example, which
was designed for dialogue, can carry on long
conversations with humans while maintaining
context. Google’s BERT is used to understand
search queries, and is also a component of the
company’s DialogFlow chatbot engine.
Google’s LaMBA, another LLM, was also
designed for dialog, and conversations with it
convinced one of the company’s engineers
that it was a sentient being— an impressive
feat, give that it’s simply predicting words
used in conversation based on past
conversations.

None of these LLMs is a perfect

conversationalist. They are trained on past
human content and have a tendency to
replicate any racist, sexist, or biased language
to which they were exposed in training.
Although the companies that created these
systems are working on filtering out hate
speech, they have not yet been fully
successful.

Knowledge Management Applications

One emerging application of LLMs is to
employ them as a means of managing text-
based (or potentially image or video-based)
knowledge within an organization. The labor
intensiveness involved in creating structured
knowledge bases has made large-scale
knowledge management difficult for many
large companies. However, some research has
suggested that LLMs can be effective at
managing an organization’s knowledge when
model training is fine-tuned on a specific body
of text-based knowledge within the
organization. The knowledge within an LLM
could be accessed by questions issued as
prompts.

Some companies are exploring the idea of

LLM-based knowledge management in
conjunction with the leading providers of
commercial LLMs. Morgan Stanley, for
example, is working with OpenAI’s GPT-3 to
fine-tune training on wealth management
content, so that financial advisors can both
search for existing knowledge within the firm
and create tailored content for clients easily. It
seems likely that users of such systems will
need training or assistance in creating
effective prompts, and that the knowledge
outputs of the LLMs might still need editing or
review before being applied. Assuming that
such issues are addressed, however, LLMs
could rekindle the field of knowledge
management and allow it to scale much more
effectively.

Deepfakes and Other Legal/Ethical

Concerns
We have already seen that these generative AI
systems lead rapidly to a number of legal and
ethical issues. “Deepfakes,” or images and
videos that are created by AI and purport to be
realistic but are not, have already arisen in
media, entertainment, and politics.
Heretofore, however, the creation of deepfakes
required a considerable amount of computing
skill. Now, however, almost anyone will be
able to create them. OpenAI has attempted to
control fake images by “watermarking” each
DALL-E 2 image with a distinctive symbol.
More controls are likely to be required in the
future, however — particularly as generative
video creation becomes mainstream.

Generative AI also raises numerous questions

about what constitutes original and
proprietary content. Since the created text and
images are not exactly like any previous
content, the providers of these systems argue
that they belong to their prompt creators. But
they are clearly derivative of the previous text
and images used to train the models. Needless
to say, these technologies will provide
substantial work for intellectual property
attorneys in the coming years.

From these few examples of business

applications, it should be clear that we are now
only scratching the surface of what generative
AI can do for organizations and the people
within them. It may soon be standard practice,
for example, for such systems to craft most or
all of our written or image-based content — to
provide first drafts of emails, letters, articles,
computer programs, reports, blog posts,
presentations, videos, and so forth. No doubt
that the development of such capabilities
would have dramatic and unforeseen
implications for content ownership and
intellectual property protection, but they are
also likely to revolutionize knowledge and
creative work. Assuming that these AI models
continue to progress as they have in the short
time they have existed, we can hardly imagine
all of the opportunities and implications that
they may engender.

Thomas H. Davenport is the President’s

Distinguished Professor of Information
Technology and Management at Babson
College, a visiting scholar at the MIT Initiative
on the Digital Economy, and a senior adviser to
Deloitte’s AI practice. He is a coauthor of All-in
on AI: How Smart Companies Win Big with
Artificial Intelligence (Harvard Business Review
Press, 2023).

NM
Nitin Mittal is a principal at Deloitte
Consulting, the leader of its analytics and
cognitive offering, and a coleader of Deloitte’s
AI strategic growth offering. He is a coauthor of
All-in on AI: How Smart Companies Win Big
with Artificial Intelligence (Harvard Business
Review Press, 2023).

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