24 | I ignitemag.ca | Fall 2023 webinar on generative AI who sees tremendous value. “If we’re able to do the mundane things faster, we’re able to get to a valuable result faster and therefore add a higher level of service and add higher, more strategic value to our clients.” Generative AI, according to AI We asked ChatGPT to define generative AI. It initially produced a 320-word response. We then asked it to summarize the info to three lines. The first attempt felt too technical, so we asked it to try again. Here’s what it came up with: Generative AI is a subset of artificial intelligence that creates models capable of generating new data similar to the training data. It includes Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), which can produce images, text, audio and more. Applications include image synthesis, text generation, drug discovery and data augmentation. writing and editing Software maker Cvent recently launched its own AI writing assistant. Patrick Smith, the company’s senior vice-president and chief marketing officer is enthused about the tool’s ability to “help users create compelling, quality content—such as event emails, website copy and session descriptions—in seconds” while ensuring content has consistent branding, tone and voice. Similarly, Santos feels AI writing tools are great for whipping off first drafts of things like speaker bios, “juicy session titles, website copy and social media” content. As event professionals test out tools, she says, “They can now see that they’re going to get a huge amount of time back.” Cardinale also notes tools like ChatGPT are “remarkably good at summarizing,” meaning you can easily chunk your content—to 100, 200, 500 words—as needed. visuals/ photo manipulation Here are just five of the really neat ways generative AI could help event pros: Payam Mousavi, an applied research scientist with the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (AMII), says another natural application for events is a chatbot ‘helpdesk.’ To set up, he says, “Document all of your frequently-asked questions or anything that you would like to address. It doesn’t even have to be formatted, it could just be in a bulleted form. And [the AI tool] would be able to process that and provide answers to whoever asked the question basically instantaneously.” 2 1 3 on-site assistance/ chatbots ai iq Beyond text, generative AI can also dramatically speed up the creation of event visuals. At PCMA’s recent webinar, Santos demonstrated how AI tools—via a few quick prompts— can do things like remove back- grounds from speaker photos. This year, as co-chair of MPI Toronto’s Global Meetings Industry Day, Cardinale enlisted AI for event visuals, but notes that she hired a visual artist to work the app. “You need a creative brain to feed into it to get out what you want visually.”
