May 21, 2025

Live at HumAIn: 'It's the garden of Eden with no weeds.' How AI is driving a second coming for chatbots

29 minutes

Welcome to an audio-led edition of Unmade. Today’s Unmade podcast was recorded at last month’s AI conference HumAIn, with a panel of practitioners exploring the evolving role of AI chatbots in media and marketing, highlighting the wide spectrum from chatbots as utility, and chatbots as personality.

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From sludge to snark: the divide between form and function in AI chatbots

Cat McGinn, curator of HumAIn, writes:

With generative AI finally giving brands the opportunity to roll out chatbots that work, we tackled the topic at HumAIn.

The discussion features Foxtel’s head of marketing operations and strategic programs Aaron Mitchie, Bastion’s AI consultant Shaun Davies, columnist and strategist at Agency C, Parnell Palme McGuinness, and creative director Emma Barbato.

McGuinness and Davies discussed the development of “Yell At Parnell”, a chatbot trained on McGuinness’s published columns, and designed to replicate her editorial tone and views. The aim was to extend engagement beyond the limitations of comment sections and to experiment with scaling an opinion columnist’s voice.

Davies noted that prompt engineering required over 4,000 words to capture not only factual grounding but also the columnist’s personality, including humour, tone, and political perspectives.

“There is a desperate desire to engage, and this is another opportunity for people to engage. I think that they would also like that opportunity to be supported by the media outlets they're engaging with; I think that it would reverse in some degree the decline in users,” said McGuinness, pointing to closed comments as a missed opportunity for newsrooms.

Creative director Emma Barbato took it further, introducing Bruce Ryder, Australia’s first fictional AI celebrity, a 1970s larrikin launched as a synthetic brand ambassador (see video below). Audiences bought into Bruce rather than the product: “The intrigue was the storytelling, and him as the product,” she said. Barbato highlighted the creative opportunities available to brands when working with immersive, character-led AI tools, particularly in environments unconstrained by conventional briefs.

In contrast, Foxtel’s Aaron Mitchie outlined a strictly functional approach. His team is rolling out a bot to eliminate internal admin, trained on corporate policies. “We’re purposely trying to be boring,” he said. “The idea is eventually everyone's going to get back a day in their week back from admin.”

The panel also raised questions around the ethics of disclosure with users, synthetic identities, emotional attachment to bots, and the future role of anthropomorphised AI in consumer engagement.

Barbato ended the panel with a rallying cry for the creative industries, saying,

“For the first time in my time in the creative arts, we have no hierarchy of anyone being better. We have zero gatekeepers, and it has attracted a brand new creative. And that's what I'm the most excited about: the community that is coming together. I don't know how long we've got. But right now, it’s a garden of Eden with no weeds.”