Several years ago a more or less sentient machine that could write sensible texts and crank out pictures that could — even remotely — pass for something artists create seemed a far-fetched fantasy worthy of Jules Verne and his counterparts. In 2024, AI systems are considered a universal tool that can elevate your game and change the trajectory of your business. But can you operate on AI only, delegating the creative tasks to the machine instead of humans?
We’ll try to answer that question.
What Is Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence, which we commonly refer to as AI technologies or simply AI, is a branch of computer science. Scientists in this field primarily focus on one task: they are trying to make machines capable of doing things that normally require human involvement: learning, problem-solving, perception, and understanding of natural languages, to name a few.
Human intelligence, however, is the term that describes cognitive abilities pertaining to human beings: we think and learn, we adapt, and interact with the surroundings and the world around us. Unlike us, machines can process vast amounts of data significantly faster than we humans do, but they lack creativity and emotional intelligence.
The Map of Artificial Intelligence by Dr. Milan Milanovic. Originally published on Linkedin
Human Intelligence vs. AI Intelligence
You might have expected to see a list of tasks where people outperform machines and vice versa, but it would be a waste of time and creativity: the world of marketing strategies is growing day by day, and no one knows what trend will randomly pop up. We will enumerate the differences between AI and human intelligence to determine their strengths and limitations.
The rest is up to you. Use this information to refine your tactics and find the winning combination.
Decision-Making Process
Humans are subjective. What's worse, people's perceptions and decisions can be swayed and influenced by factors beyond logic: emotions, beliefs, and social context. They will decide which option is best, assessing the situation based on their understanding of what is acceptable.
AI, however, isn't bothered by social norms and regulations: machines rely on collected data and information they glean. At the same time, AI systems cannot match human abilities to consider non-data-driven factors and challenge facts.
Learning
All humans reading this article can effortlessly name a few components of human learning: observation, experience, and education. Humans explore their surroundings, draw conclusions, and adapt to them, simultaneously grasping abstract concepts represented in literature, music, or other forms of visual or non-visual art (or not art at all.) Basically, humans can learn new ideas from a small number of samples, determine patterns to generalize them, and extrapolate further. Having been shown one or two images of Moo Deng — a pygmy hippopotamus that's become quite popular these days — people will be able to identify the animal in other pictures with high accuracy.
One-shot learning described in the example above won't apply to machines. AI technologies are bound to stick to a completely different pattern: they require copious examples to achieve comparable levels of learning. On average, AI systems may need millions and billions of samples and data to learn at a level beyond that of a human of average intelligence. As you can guess, AI is completely oblivious to abstract notions; it is restricted to the data it is trained on.
Creativity
The human mind is a unique tool that can generate fresh concepts through innovative thinking and creativity: the artworks in your favorite fandom on the Internet is the proof you are looking for. Or, if you are a serious person who wastes no time on such stuff, music and literature are very much alike and are the product of human imagination, which is often deemed to be a fundamental ability. In fact, it is sometimes referred to as the pivotal quality that defines humans.
We live in an unstable world with challenges people of the past never knew how to address. Climate catastrophes and international conflicts still happen, and we tend to feel the urge to resort to imaginative problem-solving and cultivate our creativity.
In contrast, AI does not create anything: it recites and accumulates pieces of information it has been trained on, and some systems are capable enough to recite in synthesized forms, creating mashups of the examples from which they learned. In short, AI can come up with novel approaches based on existing trends but lacks inherent innovation and originality. It's safe to say that imagination is the field where humans are still superior to machines.
Emotions
Emotional intelligence allows humans to form relationships. We assess emotions, understand them, and respond correspondingly, showing empathy or any other emotion expected at any given moment.
AI can't react accordingly: these systems cannot express or comprehend emotions, so they fail to relate to emotional experiences. As usual, they imitate human feelings to pass for a polite, more or less sentient being. Moreover, this lack of emotional intelligence might be the reason why people prefer human-created art to AI-created art.
Craiyon’s take at “human emotions”. (Rather terrifying.)
Multisensory Aspects
Humans may not have the most acute senses, but their senses work. Using touch, smell, taste, sight, and hearing, we receive and integrate information and make decisions based on it. These senses help us form a better understanding of the situation, adapt to the world around us, and assess our surroundings. Subsequently, we respond to these perceptions with complex reactions.
AI systems, no matter how smart, fail to compare to humans, even though some AI tools can receive inputs from multiple types of sources. It only mimics human cognitive abilities, requiring active human interaction to analyze feedback and context that AI cannot interpret.
Understanding Context
We often joke about common sense: we say some people lack it and make decisions on the fly, not thinking too much. From the scientific point of view, however, this is an inherent quality that helps people understand context and make decisions based on various situations. We have already mentioned that AI technologies rely on the information they learn, so let us add another fact: AI systems are not aware of the context, and they cannot make connections between background knowledge and current facts. By the way, if you introduce AI to an unfamiliar situation, they will be caught off guard and will not approach it with wit or creativity.
Impact on the Future Jobs
It’s hard to argue with the statement that AI exerts an impact on our lives, and the professional landscape is already changing, opening new horizons and altering the nature of our tasks. In this paragraph, we will try to make predictions and analyze the potential influence of AI.
MagicStudio’s prompt... Don’t enter “AI impact on the future jobs”, I assume.
New Opportunities
AI is being implemented in various industries, and our well-being may as well depend on the "partnership". The rapid onslaught of artificial intelligence has resulted in the emergence of new areas of development and study: digital engineering is illustrative enough. While manual labor may not completely disappear and remain in the past, there are possibilities that new opportunities and careers will replace the major part of it.
Automation
Affiliate marketers or not, you may be aware of the phenomenon of automation when a machine does all the tedious calculations while you sip on your refreshing cocktail. In fact, this is the most noticeable effect of AI: repetitive tasks, manually performed in the past, are now performed digitally, and sometimes human involvement is not required for successful completion.
Creative Growth
You might find it hard to believe, but consider this: what will you do if all the analyses and repetitive tasks are performed by someone -- or something -- more capable? You needn't waste your time anymore, as such mundane tasks can be delegated to AI. That's where you can focus on the more creative approach, delivering new and original solutions.
The Future of AI and Human Intelligence
We have dedicated the entire article to the differences between artificial intelligence and human intelligence, but we seem to have forgotten one important aspect: the connection between both phenomena. Whether we want it or not, AI and humans are bound to coexist in one cyberspace, thus they will influence each other. Essentially, AI is not aiming to replace human beings; such technologies only complement human intelligence and, speaking metaphorically, are filling the gaps.
Artificial intelligence has been designed to augment human intelligence in various tasks: it can automate data analysis, simplify the process of identification of behavioral patterns, and come up with an unexpected solution to the problem you have been racking your brains over for the last few weeks. Humans, fallible creatures, have other fortes; they should focus on higher-level activities that require critical thinking, creativity, social skills, and emotional intelligence.
Conclusion
Artificial intelligence and human intelligence are two overlapping fiefdoms destined to coexist, and this is the right moment to take the bull by its horns and turn the situation to your advantage. Now that you know that AI systems are a perfect fit for predictive maintenance, fraud detection, personalized recommendations, and other tasks that require rapid analysis and implementation of algorithms and statistical models. Humans, however, are still superior in terms of emotional intelligence: they know when and where to express sympathy, how to relate to other people's problems, and how to strike a deal using an imaginative approach. As a result, the best strategy for any affiliate marketer is to combine these two approaches and conquer the market in no time.
