Marketer, Meet Your AI Replacement

A recent survey of marketers found that over half of them are currently using generate AI, yet few of them realize that it’s going to put them out of work.

The research, sponsored by Salesforce, revealed that marketers estimated AI would save them over five hours per work week, which adds up to at least a month every year.

Since there were 1,029 respondents to the survey, the savings they cited add up 85 full-time employees, or nearly one in ten of them.

Their primary concern? “Accuracy & Quality.” Two-thirds of them say that their employers aren’t providing enough quality data or AI training for them to fully exploit the technology that will render them unemployed.

Of course, this research is part of a propaganda campaign from Salesforce, which has been selling a sales and marketing automation platform for many years (and quite successfully). Its announcement of the survey findings is filled with blather from its executives touting the transformative potential of AI and, without naming its offering, the importance of its offering. 

As for the details of the marketers’ use of AI, they’re pretty much applying it to producing the content for which they’re paid to produce. They call it “busy work,” oddly, and then go on to say that they think AI will someday soon “transform the way they analyze data, personalize messaging content, and build marketing campaigns,” among other benefits.

This will allow them to “focus on more strategic work,” whatever that means. There’s a reference that many of them think AI lacks “human creativity and contextual knowledge” and will require human oversight, so maybe they think that they’ll get new managerial jobs to watch robots do their old ones.

But that’s just wishful thinking doing the talking.

We don’t know who these marketers are, and any survey is limited to getting answers to the questions it asks. It’s intriguing that most of them are eager to give AI a greater share of their workloads.

But this isn’t research, it’s sales promotion. And if the marketers who responded to the survey are as clueless as they appear, they probably deserve to get replaced by robots.

AI As Frankenstein’s Monster

Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt has joined Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Geoff Hinton, and a host of other lesser-known experts in sounding the alarm on ‘existential risk’ from AI.

They follow in the footsteps of Victor Frankenstein, the artificial life pioneer who was shocked when he saw the ugliness of his creation over 200 years ago: 

“Now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.”

Like his counterparts today, Frankenstein had set out to do something cool, something intellectually challenging. He was in love with the potential for discovery and his own capacity for doing it:

“None but those who have experienced them can conceive of the enticements of science…but in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder.”

Once he realized that he could create AI, he had a very brief crisis of confidence: 

“I doubted at first whether I should attempt the creation of a being like myself, or one of simpler organization; but my imagination was too much exalted by my first success to permit me to doubt of my ability to give life to an animal as complex and wonderful as man…I doubted not that I should ultimately succeed.”

Convinced he was a genius, he decided to unleash his creation on the world in a Victorian-era open source experiment:

“I prepared myself for a multitude of reverses; my operations might be incessantly baffled, and at last my work be imperfect, yet when I considered the improvement which every day takes place in science and mechanics…” 

The parallels between Mary Shelley’s fictional AI inventor and the real ones today are shocking and illustrative.

All of them suffer from hubris and each believes that they are somehow smarter or luckier than everyone else. Or maybe just special, generally speaking.

They try and fail to fix the problems they create with more tech. Frankenstein tries to mollify his creation by building a second creature as its bride but then backs off because he doesn’t want to create a race of super AI. Relying on today’s AI to somehow police itself is equally doomed.

As that approach fails, all of them default to regulation, whether via angry villagers armed with torches or Congressional hearings.

And, throughout it all, they somehow believe that they’re blameless, and that any negative or catastrophic effects of their creations are not their responsibility.

This is because they mistakenly believe that intentions can be ethical even if the outcomes aren’t. While there’s serious philosophical debate over this question, most AI innovators equate ignorance with innocence. 

“Not caring” or “not understanding” is not the same as being “not responsible.”

As I’ve said before, if they’d created COVID and unleashed it on the world, they’d all be in jail.

But since AI can be used for entertainment and companies can fire human workers and use it to answer customer queries, among other profit-making endeavors, any bad outcomes are bugs, not features.

At the end of Shelley’s novel, it’s Frankenstein’s creation that’s overcome with sorrow, not its creator. The human being gets rescued and his AI banishes itself from human society and is never seen or heard from again.

I don’t think today’s AI will be so magnanimous.