Yesterday at around 1:00 PM EST, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude were down. Of course, the jokes and memes came fairly quickly. From people stating that “there were no posts” because Chat GPT was not around to people joking about how now we will see who is copy-pasting their content, one thing is for sure: AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) being down was NEWS and—probably—the first time it has happened to that scale.
All jokes aside, having AI and LLMs down is not a big deal right now—while the uses of AI are expanding, we are not as dependant on that technology YET. Of course, the outage raised some questions about our increasing reliance on AI and the reliability of these models.
As AI continues integrating into everyday life and its uses in education, business, healthcare, and entertainment, understanding the potential impact of such disruptions becomes essential.
Technology Outages in Modern Society
Remember how back on March 5th there was a HUGE Meta outage? While it only lasted a couple of hours for many small businesses it felt like forever. Outages are bound to happen and are part of life and technology development: no technology is perfect—after all, technology is human-made.
From lost content to missed opportunities: each time something stops working—Meta platforms in the case of the March 5th outage—society as we know it breaks apart for some time. AI technologies, particularly LLMs, have become integral to many daily tasks as they help lots of people to generate content and do research—some others might even be using AI for their customer service and personal needs—the capabilities of AI are vast and continually expanding which little by little makes us a bit more dependant to AI.
Are We Becoming Too Dependant?
I will be the first one to say maybe, but not really. If you are a Millennial, you probably remember the origins of social media and how older generations would, at the time, complain about how “we were becoming addicted” to our phones. The same thing might happen with AI eventually as its use becomes more widespread, but it won’t happen overnight.
There has been a consistent rise in the number of users interacting with AI models daily, including people using AI for many things, including customer support, content generation, personal assistants, and educational tools. The increased usage is causing AI to diversify and for people to find more ways to use AI to make their lives easier, increase their productivity, enhance capability, and facilitate accessibility.
And, of course, Marketing is not an exception.
AI in Marketing
Content creation, creative work, and marketing are some of the sectors that have taken more advantage of AI. As per a survey conducted by Hubspot, 64% of marketing professionals said they use AI tools in some form in their jobs but, the purpose and level of integration can vary widely. Just 21% of marketers said it’s extensively integrated into their daily workflows.
The integration of AI has significantly impacted all areas of Marketing by automating repetitive tasks, enhancing productivity, and freeing up time for more strategic aspects of content creation—AI does not eliminate the need for the human factor but can make the human factor more efficient.
Certain tasks can now be automated to degrees we only dreamed of before and the job of marketers has become easier.
The Future of AI Reliability
As AI’s role grows, ensuring the reliability and robustness of these systems becomes crucial—of course we should understand that no technology is perfect and, chances are, outages might still occur—regardless, companies developing these technologies must prioritize the implementation of systems that can switch to backup resources during an outage.
AI developers are aiming to become part of the everyday life of the world’s population—just like social media did—communication will be important, and keeping users informed about issues and expected resolution times along with enhancing the security measures to prevent potential causes of outages will not only help them achieve that goal but, will ensure they remain an alternative for their userbase.
As AI continues to evolve and integrate into more aspects of life, ensuring their stability and preparing for potential disruptions will be vital. The future will likely see even deeper integration of AI, making discussions about reliability, ethics, and dependency more important than ever.
