AI Feels Like Social Media Did a Decade Ago

The parallels, to me, are uncanny. 

AI dominates the news now. It's front and center of any trend reports. Everyone has a thought piece on it. 

It'll be disruptive. AI will transform some industries in ways that we didn't see coming. 

Then there will be other areas where AI's disruptiveness will be overhyped. 

It feels so much like the conversations around social media during my first couple of years out of school—a lot of hype. A lot of specialists are coming out of the woodwork. Something you knew you should get comfortable with but may not know where to start. 

Being a more tenured professional, I now have a bigger empathy gland for how my more seasoned colleagues a decade ago must have felt when social hit the scene. 

So what parallels am I seeing between AI and the early days of social media?

There's a significant player.

"Social media" was a comprehensive term. It could have meant message boards, Reddit threads, tweets, etc. But when people talked about social media in the early days, they were talking about Facebook. To a large swath of people in the early days, being a social media expert, in their mind, truly meant being a Facebook expert. 

AI has a similar phenomenon right now. You could be talking about a multitude of platforms and tools. But when you say you're an expert at AI, most people probably immediately think of ChatGPT. 

When Facebook opened up its API, almost every app or website had some Facebook integration. This could have been via implementing a simple Facebook login or even creating an app to customize someone's digital experience based on their Facebook data. Most clients at Engauge (a digital agency I worked at when I first moved to Atlanta) seemed to have some Facebook integration into our projects. 

We're seeing the same thing now that OpenAI has opened up its API. Several apps are baking generative AI into their platforms - powered mainly by OpenAI's newly opened API. It's one major player being baked into much of the internet's ecosystem. 

Let's hope that OpenAI has a better moral compass than Facebook. 

Specialists Coming Out of the Woodwork

Being "good at AI" will become something akin to "being good at social media" used to be. Companies will view an AI expert as someone adept at typing in prompts to a generative AI platform like Chat GPT and getting quality responses that are either very creative or improve efficiencies. 

Organizations will have entire roles dedicated to people who are very good at inputting queries. Tom Fishburne illustrated that in a recent cartoon. 

There will be career paths that emerge from being skilled at AI prompts. Job titles will appear that we haven't seen before. Specialists in this area can stand out in a critical space quickly. 

I was able to move up quicker in my career because of social media knowledge. It helped me get my first job and opened up new opportunities I might never have had before. 

While I'm not a social specialist at this point in my career, I used that initial niche knowledge to get my foot in the door for other career opportunities. Today's AI "prompt engineers" could likely see a similar path for themselves.

Down the road, we'll see AI being baked more natively into companies' operations and relying less on specialists. It'll just be expected for most employees in a few years to have foundational knowledge on how to navigate these tools - or not have jobs. 

There Is a Wide Range of Users

AI has been around for a bit. What's different now (and what differentiates this from the crypto hype last year) is the vast array of users. 

Even where I work, a wide variety of folks use ChatGPT daily. Some use it to help refine or quickly spit out code for email templates. Others are using it to word their internal emails better. It's more than just the early adopters using AI-powered tools. Even some of the more tech-resistant colleagues find value in their way rather quickly, so much to the point where our firm is piloting its own ChatGPT-like internal solution using OpenAI's API. 

In the same way, social media hit an inflection point on adoption when our parents got their own Facebook accounts; we are hitting a similar adoption curve with AI. It's moving beyond a fad because it feels accessible to a broader range of people - not just those of us in our little marketing/tech bubble. 

You Need to Learn Now - But Don't Panic

I've been in marketing for nearly 15 years at this point. One of my favorite parts of marketing is that it's constantly evolving and changing, and you must learn something new every day.

One of my least favorite parts of marketing is that it's constantly evolving, always changing, and you have to learn something new every day. 

I'm tired some days. 

But AI is coming. Is it coming for your job? The threat may be overblown in some instances. But not having that knowledge in using AI probably wouldn't be wise either. Those who figure out a way to make new tech of any kind make them better at what they do instead of fighting it like it's a threat will do just fine. As Tom Fishburne wrote: 

"In the long run, it's less about the title du jour than digital upskilling. AI prompt engineering is just one more area in an endless curriculum of digital upskilling we all have to pay attention to.

As I heard recently, it's not so much the risk of AI coming for your job as the risk of someone who knows how to use AI coming for your job."

Also, ramping up on AI isn't an emergency. Now is a great time to play around with it, get familiar with it, and try to have fun. Learning in a lower-stakes situation makes understanding better down the road. While his approach is slightly different than mine, here's Jason Fried's approach to AI. 

"Play around, kick the tires, poke and prod. Get a feel for what this new sauce tastes like. Have fun, it's not a test.

So wait on it. Pop the pressure. Don't feel like you're falling behind. And don't drop everything to dig in. Start curious, stay curious, know what it's capable of, and, when the necessity strikes, figure it out. Until then, ignore the demands and focus on doing what you're already good at."

My most success on social back in the early days came when I was experimenting and playing around. That will prove true for me in AI as well. 

What do you think? Are the parallels between the early days of social and AI today similar?