Some random thoughts I have when developing an AI tool for marketing folks.

Marketers are making themselves redundant, and marketing will one day become irrelevant if we rely heavily on AI to create content. But it’s not in the way you may think. It’s not a sudden drop-and-die but AI would surrender the very core of Marketing in two steps.?

At first, one would be amazed by how AI can twist and turn a piece of original content to suit various emotional settings. We want the same message to sound more altruistic, no problem. We want the same content to be framed in a more individualistic way, no issue. AI can now deliver all of that, quickly and accurately. This effectiveness is a catalyst for boosting our reliance on and perhaps addiction to AI in marketing content creation. Thus, AI weakens, if not kills, our creativity in a similar manner that Google Maps makes our navigation skills obsolete. That’s the stage one in the two-step process.

Let’s remember that all of those emotionally invoking contents created by AI only works if the consumers of the content are Human. Only Homo Sapiens is swayed by emotions. Machine is not.

Then, picture this: AI consumes content created by AI. That day is getting closer as consumers use AI to “automate” their decision-making. Then, the cycles of producing and consuming marketing content will look like a “hamster wheel” where the “spins” are the products of crazily fast and seem to be endless AI-to-AI feedback loops. Less and less human elements are required there. However, we can indeed prompt or feed enough information to our “AI assistant” so that it can be an “avatar” of us and automatically seek products that reflect our personal values. For instance, we can prompt an AI model to look for products that reflect our beliefs in environmental responsibilities, and surely, it’s eager to please us. No damage has been done here, yet. However, the core issue starts to emerge.?

After enough iterations, the way emotions work in those AI-powered decision-making cycles becomes codified and mechanically stable. Emotions, as captured by those AIs at both ends of the marketing content “production lines”, become predictable, and this seriously departs further and further from the inherent nature of our emotions–contextual and unstable. Can one name just one emotion of theirs that is 100% the same in the 1,440 seconds of a day? We can feel altruistic on a sunny day but perhaps more egoistic on a stormy night. Then emotions are no longer emotions in that mechanical AI-AI “pseudo-emotion exchange hamster wheel”, no matter how technologically sophisticated the “wheel” is.?

Marketing, at the very core, is the art of exploring and understanding human emotions and, therefore, influencing our decision-making by “flicking” some of those emotion switches. Without emotions, marketing is death, completing the final stage of the two-step drill.

Am I too pessimistic? Perhaps. Am I against AI? No. I believe AI is the Steam Engine 2.0, enabling us to have many super capabilities that only existed in science fiction 20 years ago. We can free up our valuable time by letting that new engine automate (a lot) repetitive tasks so that we can do more things that fulfil the humanity within us, and being creative is one of those. AI can be very functional, but we must anticipate and manage the risks it would bring appropriately.

However, for those who would expect me to provide solutions to address the adverse impacts of overly relying on AI, especially in the marketing context, I am sorry to disappoint you. I don’t know the answers yet. I need to observe and reflect more on this exciting trend of AI, and hopefully, I can come back soon with some reasonable suggestions.

However, we may not have to wait that long. I can rely on my network here to help with some of their thoughts on the issues. I look forward to having your shares. Thank you!