Most meeting planners have likely discovered the benefits of ChatGPT and other generative-A.I. applications for creating titles and descriptions for event sessions as well as for marketing and other communications aimed at attendees, exhibitors, sponsors, and others.
Further, the recent release of the upgraded version of ChatGPT—dubbed ChatGPT-4O and available for free to the general public—brings an even more robust tool to planners.
However, a new academic paper titled “Human-A.I. Interactions and Societal Pitfalls” finds that if too many people simply accept the first result produced by an A.I. application when they enter a command, the results that A.I. produces over time could become increasingly unoriginal—the opposite of what event planners need in their educational and promotional content.
A recent Wall Street Journal article titled “Why You Need to Tell an A.I. Chatbot It Has to Do Better” summarizes the key points of the academic paper, noting that “the authors used statistical models to show that on a large scale, content created with the help of A.I. will become less unique than what users would have produced without A.I. ...This becomes an even more pressing concern when the A.I.-generated content already spreading across the internet is used to train the next generation of A.I. The researchers point to the possibility of a potential ‘death spiral’ of homogenization, where getting anything but a bland answer becomes increasingly difficult, even if a user tries to coax more out of the chatbot.”
The solution: Users must take the time to ask follow-up questions or alter the command after receiving A.I.’s response to an initial query or command, using adjectives and other descriptive words to have the application generate different results. And sometimes, the simple command to "try again" will produce different results, as the A.I. application wades through its universe of searchable data and builds new connections.
One planner who is especially well versed in getting specific and unique results from A.I. applications is Margaret Launzel-Pennes, CEO of Los Angeles-based events agency Pop Experiential; in fact, she has conducted every element of conference planning, from site selection to marketing to content creation to speaker selection to post-event data analysis, with significant assistance from A.I.
Read about her persistent approach to interacting with A.I. so that she creates unique educational sessions, marketing copy, and other elements of her conferences—an approach that includes feeding website URLs and other data and information that she finds on the internet into her A.I. commands, giving the application as much relevant information as possible to consider as it generates responses she can use.
