We're Asking the Wrong Question About AI

I was recently having a conversation with a friend who strongly believes that AI is the way of the future. To hear him tell it, a freight train of industry disruption is just around the corner and anyone who is not ready to adapt will be unceremoniously run over. I tried to argue back with some platitudes about how AI was lacking the “human” dimension and couldn’t truly supplant human design, but as I was speaking I realized that I didn’t really believe what I was saying.

After all, TikTok-style algorithms have long since proved their supremacy at predicting the type of content viewers want to watch. It’s plain to anyone who’s paid any attention to the evolution of the social media landscape in the last decade that algorithms are far better at feeding you videos and keeping your eyes glued to the screen than you ever were at picking and choosing which YouTube videos to watch from an array of globally trending videos circa. 2013. It’s fruitless to argue that AI can’t be better than a human at picking what a human will want to see because it’s effectively already been doing it for years.

“Learn it and use it” seems to be the rallying cry of marketing professionals across the internet. Get on board or get runover.

I’ll gladly admit that I think there’s some truth to this. I don’t want to be misunderstood as someone who is “anti-AI,” but I do think that a healthy skepticism is warranted for any new technology let alone one that is both highly disruptive to practically every industry and also fraught with ethical and social implications.

I’ve already spoken at length about the generative dimension of AI, so I hope that this is a helpful primer on its predictive dimension.

So now that we’ve established that AI is better at predicting what a human wants to watch, our work here is done, right?

Wrong.

In my view, the question facing designers, advertisers, and marketers in particular, should not be “what does a human want to see", but “what does a human need to see.”

We might want to watch hours and hours of cat videos or doom scroll through the day’s worst stories on social media so that’s what the algorithms will show us (to the great financial gain of the video poster), but there are any number of things that would be of far greater value to us.

Of course, this is not to say that the the media creator is fully responsible for the media consumption habits of their audience, but I do believe that they have an obligation to consider the purpose of what they’re creating.

This is something that I think machines are going to have a much tougher time with, because it cuts to the core of the human elements that (as of yet!) artificial intelligence is not capable of. Namely: ethical reasoning, common sense, and emotional intelligence.

As much as people may worry about the day when we are ruled by robots, the AI technology of today still operates based on inputs and objectives provided for it by human operators.

Hopefully, this can provide us with some degree of comfort that we are still pretty far removed from being replaced by AI, and also with some professional direction to focus more on the foundational, big picture principles of “why.” Why are we showing our audience this video? Why do we want them to see this ad? Why is it worth their time to see what we are providing for them?

These are the questions that artists and marketers have always had to contend with. But I suspect that to some degree, the element of automation has increased the “throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks” instinct and diminished the extent to which we question whether the media we create is going to be beneficial to our viewer.

Undoubtedly, AI is a part of the future of marketing, but is it THE future? I do not think that it is.

Takeaway: Our usage of AI to produce media does not negate our responsibility to consider the needs of the consumer. Humans should shift their focus from “what can AI do,” to “why should it be done.”

My name is Brent and I like to talk about ideas and the way that we share them. Thank you so much for reading!

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