Musings II - AI Bias
Rants and Opinions that deserve more than a 140 character response and deeper reflection.
New Pilote Podcast - AI Will Take Our Jobs
After a bit of a break, the Pilote Podcast is back with an extended 2 part episode.
We are jumping on the AI punditry bandwagon and pondering what the real impact of AI might be.
The podcast covers various topics related to AI, including the upsides, downsides, and potential scary implications of having an AI copy of your own voice, how ChatGPT works, its limitations and worst implementation…
Plus Midjourney’s improvement, the underwhelming architecture of Buckingham Palace and the White House, AI taking jobs, generative AI content, the importance of domain experience, and the possibility of gaming studios replacing writers and other roles with AI.
The Problem with ‘Problem’ Marketing
Marketing people say the weirdest things. I recently came across this statement:
Marketing’s actual job is to accelerate someone’s decision from:
1) Problem Unaware, 2) To Solution Aware, 3) To Product Aware, 4) To Most Aware
The context was that marketing is more than just advertising. Something that I wholeheartedly agree with. But I have a problem with ‘Problem Marketing’.
I think that it comes from a couple of places. The first is the way that pitches are made to VCs. There is a problem. Product A fixes that problem. It’s a very ‘engineering’ led view of the world.
The problem with defining everything as a problem that needs to be fixed is that it frames the conversation in a negative way. It’s also quite arrogant - in the case above, it assumes that the customers don’t know they have a ‘problem’ and the marketer can make everything better.
If you have to educate a customer that they have a problem they don’t know about, then maybe you don’t have a business. It’s why Web3 never took off with the mass-market.
There are hundreds of products and services that exist to satisfy customers wants, rather than their needs. What is the problem that a luxury handbag is solving? Or cut flowers, or a sailboat?
Awareness is absolutely the beginning of the marketing funnel. And awareness is going to be changed by the use of generative AI. But it’s brand awareness that marketers should be focussed on, not problem awareness.
Bias in AI
Most people who have used AI realise that there is a LOT of bias. ChatGPT and Midjourney and other generative AI are so biased that they need to be prompted to generate something other than a stereotype.
The very nature of large language models, which are designed to return ‘the most common’ answer mean that prejudices like racism and sexism are baked in already.
Something as innocuous as Australian slang shows how ‘a joke’ perpetuates stereotypes. Asked to write a pitch in the voice of a confident Australian entrepreneur and the model brings back slang from the 30s and 40s…. And the bias in Midjourney is even worse.
This is what Midjourney imagines ‘a confident Australian entrepreneur’ looks like.
What’s wrong with this picture?
They are all male. They are all white. They are all wearing pocket squares, which is bizarre!
Next time you ask ChatGPT something, or use Midjourney to create an image, check for bias.
Linkedin and the Old School Tie
And speaking of bias. Why does Linkedin keep telling me how many people at a certain company went to my university? I barely keep in touch with people who were in my classes 25 years ago, let alone have anything in common with the hundreds of thousands of people who have completed degrees there since.
Is the assumption that because someone went to the same school there is a kind of inbuilt favouritism? That the old school tie is still a thing?