AI for Character Creation and Storytelling in Marketing

Introduction

AI has become popular in many industries, including marketing and branding, as technology continues to advance and change how people live and work. The creation of content is one area where AI has had significant effects, giving marketers novel ways to tell their brand's story. AI is rapidly becoming a cutting-edge solution for brands trying to connect with their target audience. It establishes a strong online presence with its ability to handle massive amounts of data and generate high-quality content in a matter of seconds. It was formerly thought that describing stories was insufficient. Since humans are naturally curious creatures, we set out to learn more about them. Narratologists agree that an article must tell a story, exist in a world, be situated in time, include intelligent agents, and have some sort of causal chain of events in order to be recognised as a narrative. Theories of narratology, or the study of narratives, define and break down narratives according to their different states of action, events, and elements (Magala, 2008). Additionally, narratives typically aim to impart value to their audience. Artificial intelligence (AI) characters are intelligent digital creatures with human-like interaction capabilities. Research on narratives has changed significantly with the development of artificial intelligence (AI). Not only are there new narrative forms worth examining, such as more instances of interactive and branching stories, but there is also an entire field of research focused on enhancing AI's storytelling abilities. While research on educating AI to tell better stories is fascinating and challenging on many levels, discussion and research in fields such as psychology, literary fiction, and even social media suggest that humans are better at telling stories and that even after all these years, humans still have a lot to learn and get better at telling narratives. Therefore, AI might serve us better if it nurtures our intrinsic storytelling tendencies rather than acting as a storyteller alone (Kasunic & Kaufman, 2018). The benefits of engaging in and reading tales can be limited or eliminated by the representation, bias, and authenticity problems that haunt our stories. Additionally, our social systems tend to elevate some stories while devaluing others. AI storytellers will inherit and exacerbate these problematic traits if we're not careful. The integration of data analytics and story-telling has become a powerful force in the dynamic field of marketing. In past decades, raw data, statistics, and numbers played a major role in marketing analytics. But the savvy marketer of today understands the incomparable power of an effectively composed story. Realising that over the last three years, venture capital investments in the field of generative AI have surpassed $1.7 billion, it is clear that the industry is on track for significant transformation. Unlike typical machine learning, generative AI can create stories that are specific to each user based on their past actions, preferences, and behaviours. ChatGPT and other early generative models were designed to support creative work. However, it's projected that more than 30% of generative AI models will be identified by 2025 (Agarwal et al., 2020). It is inadequate for marketing analytics to rely only on raw data in this era. For successful marketing initiatives, data needs to be turned into comprehensive, useful information. An essential tool in this transition is storytelling, which is a tactic that engages the target audience emotionally and shares insights. Marketers can make sure that their messages have an effect that gets retained in the minds of their target audience and provokes a deep emotional connection by using story-based content. Essentially, storytelling in marketing has become both an art and a science since the development of generative AI. Approximately 640 million different kinds of branded content are shared daily, but only 87% of this content receives any meaningful interaction. Since 2015, up to 90% of the top 100 brands have seen a decline in market share, and 62% have seen a decline in revenue. In order to adapt efficiently, businesses need to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) and human intelligence (HUI) to create more engaging narratives with improved targeting and creative execution (Spanos, 2021).