Part Seven of Natural Intelligence - How Artificial Intelligence could spiral downward into real stupidity

Part 7 of 14: Lies, damn lies and shares - Fake News and the rise of influencers

So, we have connected together all of our little worlds of information into one amorphous mass. We have become ultra-connected and always on. We have chosen to broadcast everything that we do to everyone else and then we have allowed (knowingly or not) a load of third parties access to those patterns of usage so that they can establish profiles of what we are and what we do. What is left to leave open to potential abuse you would think?

However, this is where we get into the realm of Marketing 4.0. It seems everything has to have a version number. The premise of marketing 4.0, as I have mentioned before, is to not market directly at you, but instead to market through your peer group. Now this is not a new method of marketing. Friends saying that a restaurant is good, or a food critic in a newspaper saying the same, have been a recommendation route for marketing for eons. However, in the past, these recommendations were ascribable, they were either from people you know or from institutions or public figures that had a reputation or trust to maintain. ?

Albertism: “Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.”

Then this began to evolve. As the internet expanded, then so did sites that aggregated information. So emerged useful apps like trip advisor and lonely planet (others are available of course) that will amalgamate the opinions of many people who are giving what we believe to be personal views from experiencing the product itself. This gave us an insight into what we saw as the “good the bad and the ugly” of something we were seeking to experience, from a viewpoint that was similar to our own.

However, a bit like the validation of self that developed out of social media, this approval of experience became a necessary part of the buying or using experience. Outside of the online versions of critics anonymous, everything that sold, particularly online, required feedback. We then became addicted, not to likes related to us, but likes related to the things we aspire to purchase. Sellers became quite obsessive about garnering these opinions, and they became so important that some unscrupulous parties invented positive feedback to promote a wholesome view of their product that was not actually true. Moreover, therein lies the problem….

Albertism: “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.”

Whist we could see and knew our friends before, we are now in a world where our concept of online “friends” is much looser. In reality we accept “friends” in social media because it increases our numbers more than because they are actually people that we know or genuinely want to interact with. So we constantly let people into our social circle when we really have no reliable means of knowing who they are and whether they are genuine or have an ulterior motive. This makes us very vulnerable to manipulation by people making something look good to extract money or other things from us. How do we know who to trust on the Internet – how do we know things are real? The answer is that we can’t with any certainty, but the worrying thing is that the commonly held thought is that this access we give to people that are trying to con us is a reasonable price to pay for the benefits of access to all the real people that come with these connections. Again, how would we know? Statistically, I wonder how many people on the internet that we converse with are actually real. I did not want to guess the numbers on this so turned to Statistica who estimate that in January 2023, some 4.76 billion people (or 59.4% of the world’s population, use social media. Statistica then goes on to say that Facebook, as the largest social media platform with 2.59 billion users, estimates that 4-5% of its accounts are fake. So even by their estimates, that is between 103-129 million accounts. That is many users that could be liking and friending you then recommending something that they have just bought to entice you to do the same.

Albertism: “In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”

Now, this move to peer influence in purchasing decisions did not go unnoticed by the marketing and advertising professions. Their reaction to this was to create personalities specifically in this space and hence the age of the influencers came into being. Fueled by the “like” mentality, this created a breed of individuals who did enough noticeable things that they accumulated a following. This nay actually have stemmed from other media such as reality shows etc, but once this online following was significant enough then posts that related to products become “celebrity” endorsements. Even more interesting is that this “influencer” status can, in itself become a profession. Going and doing things and then talking about it can generate a self-perpetuating aspirational following, which makes the cult of celebrity even stronger.

In this situation we probably do know who they are and we do know that they are real people, but we have no idea of their real knowledge, what qualifies them to endorse or even if they are endorsing without any genuine use of the endorsed item. Now, I hear you cry, that can happen in good old traditional advertising, where celebrities are wheeled out to endorse a splash on lotion or beauty product “because they are worth it”. But the difference there is that they would be celebrities for another reason, and hence, like our friends, they would have something to lose from a false claim. In the new world the celebrity status from the endorsement itself and the scale can be such that any issue will be lost in the masses of silent people. This world is all about statistics, and statistics and numbers never lie - right?

Let us think about all the things we have discussed so far in this series. The issue here is not the principles themselves (although falsehoods are falsehoods and should not be encouraged) but rather what happens when lies are given a hearing in the ultra-connected scaled world that we have created. A lie can be created, distributed, actions taken on it, and closed down in the blink of an eye. Whereas, in the past, we had time to react and recourse to do so, now this often does not exist. That is based on the assumption that we even spot the lie, or, indeed care?

So in a way we have weaponised opinions and laid ourselves bare to the problems that exist when there is no real way to judge validity and no real accountability associated with bad actors (and I don’t mean a certain beach based lifeguard ensemble in red swimsuits). Anyone see a problem with that?

If you can't yet see the combination of events that over a couple of decades have contrived to put us in a weak position to determine our own course, then you have already been sucked into the problem. I go back to the need to critically think, and to question things, not just for the sake of being obtuse, but because that's the way we learn. When we stop learning we stop being...

Albertism: “Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.”

Coming Next - Part 8 of 14: Herd mentality - How much do we make decisions ourselves or are decisions presented to us on a plate as our own?