Work is well underway to help brands exploit the results of your next chatbot query or project.
Today’s Financial Times reports that companies such as Profound and Brandtech already offer services that allow companies to see if, how, and how often their brands are mentioned by ChatGPT, Claude, and other generative AI services.
Even better, they use some correlating tool to see what sites might be sourced in forming those answers.
What better way to influence the ultimate influencers?
Now, gaming a new medium with marketing crap isn’t news; it’s a tradition of our age that that links paid social media influencers and SEO. Nothing we’ve seen or found online has been entirely free of someone or something trying to make a buck presenting it, whether overtly or working in the background.
That tradition goes way back, too. The first TV commercial aired on the first day they were allowed by the FCC in 1941. In 1704, the first newspaper ad in America ran on the first day of the first continuously published newspaper. Once Gutenberg invented a way to mass-produce books, it wasn’t soon before the first ad appeared to hawk them.
I’m surprised it took the AI brand influencers this long to get in on the game.
But, I think the real news is that it should give us pause to consider the fact that there’s nothing necessarily authoritative or unbiased about what generative AIs tell us in the first place.
In response to a query, generative AI collects whatever data its coders have provided to it and then crunches and synthesizes it into versions that, again, its coders have decided will be most acceptable to whomever asked for it.
Generative AI isn’t a “truth filter” as much as an “everything vacuum” that using deft coding can give us some version of “here’s what people are saying” (or, if you’re using it to write a work report or homework assignment, “here’s what you should say.”).
How did it arrive at that answer? What’s included or excluded from its calculations?
Don’t ask, because you can’t understand the tech, and why does it matter? What you’re getting is going to be as close to accurate as statistically possible, and the conversational interface is designed to make it less likely that we’ll question it.
And it’s working.
The Financial Times story reports that consumers already rely on AI-written results for two-fifths of their online searches, and most of those folks don’t look any further. Just wait until AIs get more situationally aware and therefrom more proactive in providing guidance to us in our lives.
We’re being conditioned to accept it as the de facto interface, intermediator, and manager of our experience of the world.
Throwing in some marketing spin is no big deal for a deal that’s already been spun.
