A.I. Hype: Culture & Consequences
The AI sector may have overplayed its hand with hype. Culture is not amused. This could hurt the AI sector more than help it. And humanity.
If one is to believe the hype, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is embedding itself into every aspect of our modern lives, from cars and phones to toothbrushes, ovens and refrigerators and every single industry is being upended. Our world will never be the same. Except none of this is true and people are increasingly disbelieving the hype.
For the companies building and rolling out various AI tools, from the tech giants to all the myriad of startups, the hype they’ve created may be having a bit of a cultural moment, but not the one they’d hoped for.
There are some superb applications of AI tools in medicine, environmental management and the development of new materials and more. Generative AI can become a valuable sidekick for humans and will likely end up creating more jobs than are lost, as have all revolutionary technologies. But the overhype today risks damaging all the good that has been done with AI for years.
During the “.com boom” of the ate 90’s to 2001, I cofounded and exited two tech startups. It was heady days indeed. I spent a fair bit of time in Silicon Valley, New York and Toronto. Y Combinator and incubators didn’t exist. Neither did social media like today. This was also when the model for generating hype around technologies came to be defined and over the past twenty or so years, refined. It works. It’s a lot of fun.
At that time, when I had a sumptuous seven figure marketing communications budget, my largest spend wasn’t on advertising, it was on public relations agencies. One in New York (we were listed on the NASDAQ) and one in Silicon Valley. What the tech industry learned really fast was that media coverage drove product sales far more than advertising. But then, programmatic advertising wasn’t really around either. But earned media still delivers the best results.
The tech industry also knows well that Artificial Intelligence has long been a sociocultural fascination and that society sees it both as an existential threat and a potential boon for our species. It is prime material for stories and stories are how we shape our own and society’s realities. The arrival of Generative AI through Large Language Models (LLMs) was a potent fuel for aan already smouldering fire. And things got lit.
The tech giants and those wily and clever denizens of Silicon Valley live in their own sort of bubble. It’s quite an amazing one where innovations burst in a staccato rhythm into the world. Unending, exhilarating and frightening at the same time.
Actual cultural change from any revolutionary technology takes a long time. In the distant past, over centuries and millennia. Today, in decades. The ultimate arbiter of how a technology is adopted at scale in societies is and always has been, culture.
And right now, culture is increasingly less enthusiastic about Artificial Intelligence in its many forms, especially Generative AI (GAI). For GAI can be slipped in quietly, or loudly, if you’re a tech giant rivalling another for market dominance and shareholder lust.
Some recent research shows that consumers in the USA are increasingly mistrustful of AI companies, especially as they perceive AI to have greater autonomy. A Capemini study indicates that 62% of consumers will trust an AI company they perceive to be more ethical. Another study by Getty Images of 30,000 people across multiple countries shows consumers don’t trust companies that use AI visuals in their marketing materials. Yet another study by Axios (a media company) found that consumer mistrust in AI companies as a whole has gone from 61% five years ago to 53% today.
Digital technologies have arguably become incredibly, indelibly and intrinsically embedded in our daily lives than any technology before in human history. And the innovations are happening at a blistering pace. Culture is having a hard time keeping up. Another sign of this was Apple’s sociocultural mega blunder with the launch video of the new iPad. So much so, in a very rare move indeed, Apple apologised within a couple of days.
What we may well be seeing is that the perfectly designed, well oiled hype machine of the technology industry may have overplayed its hand. At least in the short term. People feel that AI is being forced upon them. When societies feel a technology, form of governing or systems are being forced on them, they either sop buying (in a capitalist society), run away or have revolutions.
This is a cultural moment for AI. Not very often does a sociocultural system turn against a technology so very quickly. There are always those who oppose revolutionary technologies. It happened with the printing press, telegraph, telephone and railroads. It is happening with social media, but that took well over a decade. Not under two years like AI has.
The biggest challenge for AI companies today is to understand how culture works when it dislikes something. It is not government regulators they should fear, but rather the invisible hand of society. No matter how much a company spends on lobbying, when enough voters threaten to oust a political or a party, the citizens win. At least in a democracy. These are the roiling waters the AI companies and tech giants must now navigate. They are tricky waters.