Can a robot feel love? It’s a great question and the puzzle of sentience is one that scientists have marveled over for years. Though we’re not ready to assign feelings to our smart machines, they’re ready to help us express our feelings with the help of generative AI.
Natural Emotion Expression
AI is something consumers are getting comfortable with as part of everyday life and, as generative AI is trained with data covering a multitude of topics, it’s naturally come across a fair share of romance-related content. Here are a few examples of how generative AI could be used to assist consumers (or your customers) with “matters of the heart:”
- Gift recommendations: make recommendations for Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, or Birthday gifts based on the specifications given.
- Card personalization: automatically generate personalized cards or notes with a few provided details about the recipient.
- Event planning: make recommendations for a romantic evening or activities based on the user’s location and interests.
- Sentiment analysis: Struggling to decipher a cryptic text? Analyze that DM or social media post to identify sentiment (e.g. positive, negative, neutral). This could also be useful for companies looking to gauge the response campaigns or a particular piece of content.
If you’re still not convinced the algorithms behind some of those popular generative AI tools are capable of conveying feelings, we have some proof for you. Read on to see how document AI can help put feelings into words and pictures!
The Perfect Love Note, Written by AI
We challenged ChatGPT and our copywriter to create a generic card that expresses romantic feelings, with the goal of seeing which people would buy to gift to someone special. First ChatGPT wrote a generic card, we used Valentine’s Day as a keyword to indicate we wanted a card with romantic expression. Our copywriter then followed the format and style of the card ChatGPT created to create a second card.
Our goal was to see if there was a preference of people choosing AI generated cards or ones written by humans. The following questions were asked to ascertain why each person picked their specific choice.
- Do you think AI wrote this?
- Tell us why you choose that answer!
- Which card would you buy?
- Tell us why you choose that answer!
The experiment was conducted on our Instagram stories, where our followers had 24 hours to identify which card was written by AI, pick which of the cards they would prefer to buy, and explain their thoughts on each decision.
Card 1 – written by ChatGPT
Front of card: Roses are red, violets are blue, I’m so lucky to have a Valentine like you.
Inside of card: You make every day brighter and better just by being in it. Thank you for being my Valentine and for all the love and joy you bring into my life. I love you more than words can say.
Card 2 – written by our copywriter
Front of card: Roses are red, violets are blue, do you know how much I love you?
Inside of card: Having you in my life brings me nothing but joy and happiness. You make every day brighter just by being in it. Thank you for being the best Valentine. I love you more than I can ever put into words.
The results showed 73 of 89 surveyed thought Card 1 was written by ChatGPT. They said it sounded like the type of generic card they could buy at Walmart which helped them decide it was AI generated. 16 of 51 thought Card 2 was written by our copywriter. In making their decision, many were tricked at the “roses are red” portion of the card and thought our copywriter would come up with something more original, heartfelt, and use fancier words.
For choosing which card to gift to someone special, 27 chose Card 1. Responses indicated they found the message in the first card to be lovely and felt like a human would say it. The second card received 21 votes. Those who voted for it felt it had more affection and emotion to it when compared to the first card.
One surveyed person told us while they preferred Card 2, ultimately the artwork on the card would be a deciding factor for them when making a purchase.
McAfee conducted an experiment similar to ours and had ChatGPT create a love poem. They asked respondents to share which was more romantic a poem by AI or a poem by E.E. Cummings. ChatGPT won with 67% of those surveyed saying the AI generated love poem had more romance. McAfee also polled 5,100 individuals about their romantic plans for Valentine’s Day and learned that 42% of U.S. men plan to use AI to write a Valentine’s note this year.
An AI Picture is Worth a 1,000 Words
A second experiment was conducted on Instagram stories with images. We followed the same structure as our first experiment, our followers were asked the same questions and had 24 hours to answer them. Our goal was to see if people’s preferences would be the same for generated images as it is for generated cards.
For this experiment, we used DALL-E and our senior brand designer. We had our senior brand designer create the first image and asked DALL-E to create an image with the same elements in it. The requested elements were:
- Strawberries
- Lipstick on chocolate cake
Artwork 1 – Senior Brand Designer
