Is it fair to compare generative AI tools?

The conversation about generative AI has changed a lot since January of last year, when Spark Event Management founder Anh Nguyen, CMP, and #EventProfsBreakShit co-founder Shawn Cheng organized a meeting between AI workers at Convening Leaders The confrontation is about the challenges associated with the event and the human job without it.

Since then, as more event professionals have become familiar with AI tools, the discussion “has moved away from whether AI is a useful tool for planners,” Sheng told us. convene“the question of how to use it better and which tools would help them the most.”

To test this, Nguyen and Cheng held a second competition at edUcon in June, “AI Duel: Finding the Best AI Tool to Replace ChatGPT,” which once again gave both participating teams the same challenge of 45 minutes of meeting. This time, the team from Singapore-based event tech company Gevme (Vice President of Design Jonathan Easton and Head of Revenue Growth Keerat Singh) could only use the enterprise version of Spark AI. Gevme is a Singaporean event technology company that uses PCMA to develop Spark AI. The second team consists of two masterminds, Nyguen and Tess Vismale, founders and CEOs of CMP, DES, iSocialExecution, and Vinnu DeShetty, founder and CEO of Event Tech Hub, who can use in addition to Spark AI any artificial intelligence tool. Cheng said the audience serves as judges and the evaluation process is loose rather than strict.

It was a close game. Here are the challenges the teams faced over the three rounds and their results:

first round

The team was asked to create three attendee personas—representing event strategists, business event vendors, and students—as well as strategies to convince everyone to register for the upcoming conference. Cheng said that the planners spent more time pre-producing prompts for ChatGPT than the Spark AI team and were therefore considered the winners by the audience, although in his opinion the results could be described as a tie. “Spark AI came up with a very good, very detailed plan, but it just felt a little cold,” he said, while the planner’s results were “more human-centered.”

second round

Each team received a copy of the meeting minutes and were asked to repurpose the content. The curation team transformed the content into a series of blog and social media posts; the Spark AI team produced six online courses. The courses were impressive, Cheng said, but the audience let the planners win because they felt their content was better suited to end-user needs.

third round

The teams were given registration data from past conferences and asked to use it to develop strategies for improving future attendee registration. In this round, Spark AI was the clear winner, Cheng said. Cheng said Spark AI is designed to generate such detailed strategic plans in just a few steps, while planners write prompts for multiple tools to get results. Cheng said that in retrospect, the design of the competition was flawed. “If I added planners to the team using Spark AI, I wonder if the results would be different,” he said. For him, the biggest takeaway is that the quality of the results often depends on who is using the product (in this case, planners or technology developers), and the depth of their knowledge and experience with the audience’s needs.

As AI tools continue to evolve, “I think a lot of planners are like me,” Cheng said. “We’re confident in using AI — and we’re not worried about it replacing our capabilities.”

on the web

For information on how to access free and paid Spark tools and online AI education, visit pcma.org/spark.

Zheng Shangwen

Artificial Intelligence and Diversity?

As the two-year anniversary of the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT approaches in November 2022, event pro and technology expert Shawn Cheng believes event pros will enter phase two, he tells us convene. The first is to be utterly amazed at the ability of generative AI to leverage large amounts of information to create content almost instantly. But he noted that some of the excitement around content creation has been dampened because research shows it reduces creativity at the team level by reducing diversity of ideas.

The second phase, Cheng said, “is delving deeper into AI as an analytical and consulting strategy tool. I think we should actually be more cautious and learn from the experience of creativity. Because we also don’t expect that in six months, we’ll be doing it again The conversation that took place was that all these analytics reports sounded the same.”

Gevme’s Jonathan Easton says there is a “real risk of reducing diversity of thought” when using AI convene“And it may still happen to some extent. But that can be offset by us humans adding as much of our own personal and unique perspectives and experiences as possible when triggering generative AI to create something. So. “The fear that AI will make us all think alike is real, but it underestimates the inherent diversity of human thought and experience and our ability to adapt and innovate.”

Number of artificial intelligence users

According to the Artificial Intelligence Proficiency Report released by Section, an online business school in New York, only 7% of knowledge workers in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada use artificial intelligence on a daily basis – a group that Section refers to as the “artificial intelligence class.” ”. Within this group, the majority reported saving more than 10% per week, with one-third of daily users reporting more than 30% time savings per week. Nearly all students in the AI ​​course (99%) Only the paid version of LLM (Large Language Model) is used, and most use it to support three or more types of work, such as saving time on repetitive tasks, creating as a researcher, and thought partner.

The largest group of users (57%) are new to AI, who use AI tools a few times a month “but have yet to unlock any real productivity gains,” the report said. A quarter of users are AI experimenters, who use AI once a week and report a slight increase in productivity, while the smallest group (11%) are AI skeptics, who almost never use AI.

Barbara Palmer Is the deputy editor held.