Automation has become an indispensable aspect of content marketing, specifically when it comes to email and sales funnels. This has been a lucrative boon for writers who looked ahead and became comfortable with the technology.

What’s amazing is how inexpensive this powerful automation technology has become. It’s the same phenomenon that makes the affordable phone in your pocket more powerful than the computers that once sent men to the moon.

When we first started working with marketing automation at Copyblogger, the base price was $5,000 a month and went up from there. Now I run sophisticated email sequences at Unemployable (one of my other sites) with a ConvertKit account that’s incredibly affordable.

Automation, like machine learning, is a subset of artificial intelligence. And we’ve been hearing for years how AI is about to disrupt society and put people out of work.

We’ve been hearing that for so long that it almost seemed overblown -- some elaborate vaporware that’s nothing but hype. If you’ve felt that way, I’m afraid AI has officially arrived.

In Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, drunken war veteran Mike Campbell is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” he answers. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

That’s where we’re at with AI. The gradual happened for a long time, but now the changes are happening suddenly, and accelerating.

For example, in the short period of time since I started writing this email series and the point that you’re now reading it, I had to extensively revise this section. That was due to the release of GPT-3 from the OpenAI project.

If you haven’t heard about it, GPT-3 is a mega machine learning model that can write its own op-eds, poems, articles, and even working code. This AI is still an early-stage attempt, but it strikes right at the heart of the poet -- language.

GPT-3 is a language model powered by a neural network. Language models predict the likelihood of a sentence existing in the world, and with 175 billion parameters, GPT-3 is the largest language model ever created.

Here’s what Dale Markowitz, an Applied AI Engineer at Google, had to say:

But here’s the really magical part. As a result of its humongous size, GPT-3 can do what no other model can do (well): perform specific tasks without any special tuning. You can ask GPT-3 to be a translator, a programmer, a poet, or a famous author, and it can do it with its user (you) providing fewer than 10 training examples. Damn.

In other words, this AI specifically creates content. And while it’s nowhere near perfect, it gives any aloof “poet” a reason for pause. Stringing words together is not enough for a human to have a defensible career any longer.

You may have seen the news recently about a college kid who created a fake blog that was completely generated by the GPT-3 AI. No big deal, right?

After all, software has been “spinning” up crap content on spammy websites for years.

But then one of these AI generated posts reached the top spot on Hacker News. And then people actually subscribed!

GPT-3 was going to happen last year no matter what. But what you should really think about when it comes to AI is the effect of COVID-19.

Because the pandemic became the perfect catalyst for implementation of AI, automation, and robotics by companies that had been putting it off. The acceleration accelerates.

The most powerful firms in the world -- Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft -- are all algorithmically driven. And they are taking market share away from other businesses at an alarming rate. Plus, you’ve got an array of startups using AI to disrupt entire industries.

But the biggest mainstream change is coming because “normal” companies are taking this disruption to “business as usual” to also implement these technologies. And you can bet that they’re going to eliminate human jobs in the process.

On the flip side, you’re about to be using artificial intelligence and machine learning in the tools you use everyday. That’s because just like the massive price drop in technology such as marketing automation, artificial intelligence itself is becoming “off the shelf” for developers.

In addition to Open AI’s partnership with Microsoft’s Azure, platforms such as Amazon SageMaker, H20, DataRobot, and Google Cloud Platform (to name a few) aim to provide smaller organizations with productized access to machine learning.

Combine this with the companies leading the “no code” movement that allows new apps to be created without traditional programming, and it’s not hard to imagine “plug and play” AI right around the corner. In fact, GPT-3 demonstrates that it will be AI that does the coding!

Artificial intelligence is here. And it’s those with so-called “soft skills” like creativity, empathy, and communication that will continue to thrive.

In other words, the “poet” who learns to strategically work with artificial intelligence and automation becomes a killer. But why is that, exactly?

What will this technology allow you to do that you can’t do alone? For that, let’s return to chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov.

As a “kind” environment of repeated patterns, chess is 99% tactics -- short combinations of moves that players use to get an immediate advantage on the board. And no human can beat a computer at tactics.

So Kasparov, after losing to Deep Blue, began to wonder what would happen if computer tactical prowess were combined with human big-picture, strategic thinking. As a result, Kasparov organized a chess tournament the next year where each human player was paired with a machine.

Human creativity was even more paramount under these conditions, not less,” according to Kasparov, because his “advantage in calculating tactics had been nullified by the machine."

The result? A player that Kasparov had trounced a month earlier played the master to a 3-3 draw. The primary benefit of the Grandmaster’s years of experience with specialized tactical training was outsourced to the computer, and the contest became about strategy.

In other words, tactics are for technology. But you must pair humans with the tech to add in creativity, empathy, communication, and strategic execution.

The killer and the poet. It’s still how you get rich -- now more than ever.

More on becoming a "killer" tomorrow.

Keep going-

Brian Clark
Founder - Copyblogger