Musings.
Rants and Opinions that deserve more than a 140 character response and deeper reflection.
Agency in the Age of AI
While researching my piece about how the customer journey, discovery and search will work, I saw more coverage of the concept of an ‘autonomous agent’. Basically these are bots that act on your behalf to complete a task - a bit like Siri on steroids.
But these agents won’t only act on behalf of consumers, and could become annoying and dangerous very quickly. If you thought spam email was bad, wait until your WhatsApp bombarded with AI sales bots. Or think about a debt recovery bot that is tasked with getting payment.
Some of these agents will be pointless, like having a bot Tweet on your behalf so you don’t have to. Some will needed to be trusted with personal data in order to complete their tasks.
Having an Agent you can ‘provably trust’ to serve you, and only you will be a difficult balancing act.
Some platforms already have a lot of data points on you, like Meta’s Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg is already thinking like this. Meta sees “an opportunity to introduce AI agents to billions of people in ways that will be useful and meaningful,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors on a recent earnings call.
Autonomous agents and Preference Theory is something that I will be spending a lot more time on.
Snowflake Artists
Art should be a struggle. The same people who don’t want to have a ‘curious’ emoji because it hurts their feelings are worried AI will take their job.
Rather than create a new movement, these so called artists are worrying about being replaced by a machine. And if they really think that their work is diminished by a prompt churning out derivative facsimiles of art, then perhaps they are not artists.
The Blues, Hip-Hop and Punk were all reactions to social and cultural conditions as was Neo-expressionism. How can we go from pseudo-unique machine generated ape trading cards being worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to ‘Art is Dead’ in less than 12 months?
Now people are warning that people might use AI to insert themselves into ‘fake’ holiday photos, but the word ‘photoshopped’ has been used as a verb for decades to describe the act of altering reality.
Some photographers may be made redundant. Those who peddle cliched stock images could find their work devalued by generative AI, but like art, the process and the intent is still important.
Maybe I use an AI like Midjourney to recreate a memory of an event that I have no photos of. I have no intent to deceive, I have no intent to pass off the creation as my own work or anyone else’s.
It becomes a little more tricky when the technology is used to create photo-realistic images of an historical event, like the coronation of an English king. Coronation pictures on Twitter raise some interesting questions, and the alarmists are using this as proof of the imminent doom of photo-journalists everywhere, but let’s take a step back.
Why were the images created? To show what AI can do. Were they intended to replace actual photos of the event? Were they intended to convey a false narrative? No - in fact, they seemed to be designed to match reality as closely as possible - the ‘fake’ images include umbrellas and rain, rather than a bright sunny May day.
It’s possible that images like this could be used rewrite history, like making the crowd look bigger at an inauguration, or putting smiles on people’s faces to make them look like they are enjoying a burger from a popular fast-food chain, or using glue instead of cheese to take a photo of a pizza slice for an ad.
Could they legally be used by a trusted media brand?
Deep-fakes will become an issue, however media brands that are trusted - and there are still many - will prevail.
The Doomsday Clock
And speaking of journalists and AI. Maybe we should be pairing AI engineers with journalists or someone with a humanities background. Imagine if these scientists had someone looking over their shoulder, journaling their decisions and the way they consider their actions. It’s been done before with the nuclear industry.
From Late Night Live
Everything Old is New Again
Some publications really do suffer from a lack of collective memory and the constant pressure to remain relevant. Marketing Week published the following article on Linkedin…
A focus on employer branding is a “relatively new trend” for businesses, whether B2B or B2C, SME or direct to consumer. However, it seems B2B businesses are feeling it the most.
As someone who worked at Unilever and was educated about the history of the company, I know that employer branding is not a new thing at all…
In 1888, 100 years after Australia was 'discovered' by white people, the founder of what would become Unilever built Port Sunlight. Port Sunlight was part of a business model he termed “prosperity-sharing”.
Rather than profit sharing, he provided workers with decent and affordable houses, amenities and welfare provisions that made their lives secure and comfortable and enabled them to flourish.