Unless you’ve been living completely off-grid —maybe in a cabin somewhere in the Cascades—you’ve likely been hearing about and interacting with artificial intelligence, or AI. Here in the Puget Sound region, from Microsoft’s Redmond campus to Amazon’s towers in South Lake Union, we live in the heart of high-tech AI development. But even in the Silicon Forest of Washington, the initial buzz in coffee shops from Capitol Hill to Tacoma’s Proctor District was laced with fear. Was AI going to render us all irrelevant? Was this new tech the enemy? Then, we realized AI could do a lot of good. Soon after, we discovered it wasn’t perfect, but it could be a fantastic assistant… if we work with it.
A Local Example
I’ll use a personal example. I was recently scrolling through Facebook Marketplace, looking for the perfect jacket for an upcoming show at The Moore Theatre. I found what looked like a great secondhand black leather jacket from a seller over in West Seattle. The listing, which featured photos and a description, was thorough enough, and the price was great, so I made an offer. It was accepted.
However, when I received the item, the tag clearly read “faux leather.” Now, anyone who’s shopped for a rain jacket at REI’s flagship store knows that materials matter immensely. Leather and faux leather are two very different things. It was a stylish jacket, perfect for a drizzly Puget Sound evening, but it wasn’t what I believed I was buying.
Thankfully, I was dealing with an honest seller. When I contacted her, she replied, “Ah, I just used the AI-generated description the site created. Of course I’ll take it back.”
The Human Touch in a Tech-Heavy Town
Oh, AI. You were so close. This is where we, as humans, have to work with AI instead of letting it do all the heavy lifting. Using AI as a tool is great. It can help a small business in Fremont draft marketing copy or help a developer in Bellevue streamline code. But it’s crucial that you edit with a human heart and a deep understanding of the community you’re trying to reach.
AI makes mistakes because it doesn’t know they’re mistakes. It can be as clumsy as a tourist trying to navigate the I-5 and I-90 interchange at rush hour because it isn’t navigating real-time issues in a real-time world. AI lacks the common sense that tells you to grab a raincoat even when the forecast just says “sunbreaks.” Humans bring the message home from the framework AI helps create.
Our Takeaway
As a marketing firm with a heavy dependence on creative energy, we often hear that we must be worried about AI. We aren’t. We see AI as a new neighbor who just moved to town. It’s incredibly smart, but it doesn’t yet know the unspoken rules, like where to get the best teriyaki or why everyone clears out of the city on a sunny Seafair weekend. It needs a friendly guide—a human—to show it the ropes. It’s a collaborative partnership, and it works best when we allow the unique strengths of both AI and humans to complement one another.