Episode 1: A Gray Start

I have long been thinking about the subject of AI and how to articulate the general opinion and thoughts on it. Today, I'm finally materializing it by creating my own educational series on AI, which I have called "AI: a Black Box or a Blank Canvas?" Through this series, I am eager to explore the full color palette related to the implications of AI in our world of international education marketing.

There are several reasons why I have named this first episode "A Gray Start." While I am not clear yet where this experiment is going to lead us (nor is AI), I am taking it on as a personal challenge to develop a deeper understanding of AI, together with our geNEOus community. I am not aiming to take a stance on the dark or bright side of AI, but rather explore the existing gray areas that lie in front of us and create a kaleidoscope to portray our future.

The future of digital marketing

Yesterday, I received an email from Google introducing Duet AI for Google Workspace and inviting me to join the waitlist to test "new generative AI features in Workspace Labs." After clicking the button, however, I received the following message: "Workspace Labs is not accepting signups in your country at this time." This is because Google is not offering its latest AI service in Europe . Indeed, the European Union (EU) is considering implementing new regulations or laws related to artificial intelligence. This decision could be influenced by various factors such as potential conflict of interests, GDPR compliance and other legal considerations.

This is officially my second failed attempt to interact with Google's AI systems as I try to understand what ChatGPT's number one competitor is truly capable of. Why so? Because Google Bard launched in 180 countries after the Google I/O announcement two weeks ago, but excluded Canada and the EU. From my research, I have come to learn however that the surprising feature about Bard is that it is not directly powered by Google Search. Instead, it utilizes Machine Learning (ML) algorithms optimized with reinforced learning, therefore automatically learning from itself to improve its accuracy.

So, does this mean that Google is cannibalizing its own products? How will Google Ads' business be affected by AI technology? How will ads need to evolve? Will ads be suggested in conversational AI systems like Bard, considering that ChatGPT is not based on ads but monetized through premium subscription models? How will Google's SEO ranking factors be influenced by the vast amount of AI-generated content already flooding the web today? If anyone can write AI-powered "high-quality" content at scale now, will human-generated content rank lower tomorrow?

Furthermore, the high accuracy of multimedia ads powered by sophisticated AI models that have been in place for multiple years, has led people to question how their privacy is preserved. These systems have been training on huge data sets in the back-ends of digital marketing for a while, and are only now being brought to the front-end; all of a sudden gaining unprecedented attention. More so, predictive analytics on human behavior are integral to both models. So, now that AI can also shape our marketing, how should we shape it?

The future of education marketing

One of the most important ways of self-improvement is learning. On this particular topic, humans have been giving feedback to machines at an unprecedented rate compared to how they have given and received feedback to themselves. Therefore, if AI has been learning from us, what feedback will we give it going forward? To what extent will our input affect its behavior, as ML algorithms become more and more powerful every day and more and more humans, from different walks of life, use AI?

Yuval Noah Harari helps us understand an essential component behind the challenge that the exponential growth of AI represents for humankind: language. The very language we use to communicate with these tools may be our best tool to help future generations identify who is human or who is not. However, can AI develop its own language to train itself, pushing humans completely out of control? Can it train us to make a better use of language to communicate with it through an optimized use of conversational prompts (how we ask questions to AI)?

The problem is that we, nor younger generations, have not been educated to handle these artificial reasoning machines. Yet, ChatGPT holds the record for the fastest adoption time in the history of technology, reaching 1 million users in just 5 days . As a result, the average individual is using tools such as ChatGPT or Google Bard in ways that may or may not be counterproductive to their own personal development and the collective interest.

What does this mean for the future of education marketing? The question potentially goes beyond the future of education or the future of marketing, or the combination thereof. We could ask ourselves deeper questions about the implications AI and language are having on the world we will leave to our children. This depends on us, but is society prepared to face this question? There is no time to ponder, as the beast has been unleashed. This technology has the power to transform our civilization, for better or for worse. However, having power also entails having responsibility. The power of love is not the same as the love of power. So what do we do with this technology now? Can we maximize its potential to increase our productivity without jeopardizing the future of humanity? Can we responsibly coexist with machines?

The legacy for future generations

We are still in the early days of mainstream AI, and we have an opportunity to regulate how this new technology will impact our education sector. Now that we are at an inflection point in history, isn't it the right time to rethink the way we operate as a society, on how we educate ourselves around the fundamental questions that will directly impact our future? We are relying more and more on machines and are becoming increasingly dependent on them. Therefore, the need for trustworthy and transparent regulation becomes crucial when unsupervised AI is shaping our future generations' potential.

How will we train AI to distinguish between the greater good and individual satisfaction? How will we build AI models to discern the needs of the elderly VS younger generations? How will we model AI to optimize the management of our planet's resources? How will we improve AI on the nuanced tradeoffs between individual privacy and society's security? How will AI be shaped to serve specific companies; will the digital marketing ecosystem keep being funded by ads? How will societies align with the intentions of tech companies unveiling more and more powerful AI solutions? How will we include AI when writing its own regulations?

What is the best use of our time to answer these questions? How do we adapt? Some may claim that we still have time before reaching AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) , where machines could potentially develop self-awareness and emotions, while embodying the latest break-through in robotics. But rather than focusing on such futurist approach yet, shouldn't humanity's knowledge become our top priority to responsibly ensure a real positive legacy to empower our future generations in an AI-powered world? The time has come to rethink humankind's knowledge transfer. The alignment and joint efforts of public-private partnerships to establish a decisive commitment to regulate AI would be a gift to humanity.

I would like to conclude this first episode by stating that this is a highly complex field, and that we should start learning how to navigate it immediately. AI technologies are advancing at a speed that no human can currently master or fully understand, constantly leaving us with outdated information. In the meantime, shouldn't we however at least discern if a medium like this episode was crafted by a machine or a human?

This entire article, where I provide my insights on how alien intelligence could affect the future of international education marketing, was entirely conceived and curated by myself. As I embark on this gray experiment, an important question has piqued my curiosity: if I had fed this article to an AI bot for editing purposes, how would it then use my perspectives to reconfigure its answers to similar questions by other users? How will others distinguish AI-generated knowledge from human-generated knowledge? Would I have made a positive or negative contribution to human knowledge transfer? We need more time to understand the true impact our actions can have on future generations through AI. In the meantime, I hope that by embarking on the quest to explore AI as a Black Box or a Blank Canvas, I have at least sparked some form of humAIne emotions in you.