05 Dec Brand, AI and why I call it ‘cosplay code’
I’m a bit late to this particular party, but it’s taken me a while to work through how I feel about AI. And it’s a mixed bag. I can’t ignore the Jenga tower of inherent bias, serious flaws, and the very shaky financial shell game the whole thing is built on—where it seems the makers of GPU processors and stock traders are the only ones making money.
So, for those reasons and more, I’m an AI atheist. I’m anti using people’s words, ideas and work without consent. I’m anti forcing opt OUT on everyone. And anti jumping in head first, ignoring big red warning signs that maybe it’s not a good place for us to swim!
And for now, my data and thinking aren’t free fodder for AI’s rapacious compute appetite. And more, AI just smacks of cosplay. It’s code playing at admin. Playing at writing. Playing at customer service. It even plays at code! And the fakery is hiding in plain sight. It’s called artificial intelligence. Which predictably makes it a poor pretender of whatever role it is playing.
Which makes me wonder how people are aligning their choices about AI to what matters most. Because it is still a choice (unless you forget to change your settings).
In particular, how does it help you add and store value in your brand? Remembering, that happens when the promises you make are anchored in your purpose and values, then kept in people’s experience.
Are you using it like software to help make a task more effective and deliver better results? Or are you wholesale replacing roles? The latter worries me most. Despite words like ‘agent’ and assigning names to AI bots, it is code. Not human. And therefore has no humanity. It can’t learn and adjust in real time. Or show empathy for others.
In certain circumstances, AI can do specific tasks. So using it to replace entry-level coders, analysts, marketers or customer service people might seem like a valid choice. But then who will be around to take on management and senior roles in the future? Absent on-the-ground experience, know-how degrades and the quality of whatever is delivered along with it.
Cue value eroding from the brand. Poke the internet, and you’ll easily find stories about AI screw ups. The customer service bot that can’t help with anything but the most basic question. Bot code with more bugs than a summer picnic. Bot-generated marketing that over-hypes. Generic bot writing riddled with jargon.
I’m often asked how I use AI in my writing. Setting aside the huge assumption, my answer is a curt, ‘I don’t.’ At all. Confused, others try and sell me on how much faster and more I could write by using it to draft my work.
Sure. I could feed my 600+ articles into the large language model platform d’jour and get content mimicking my style of writing. But quantity and speed are not why I write.
I write to think out loud and more deeply about brand and people’s unheroic work. No AI can do that for me or even help me do it better. Because all the side tracks, brain farts and dead ends I’d miss are an integral part of the process.
Which is what I fear people are losing. The ability to usefully find their way through messy, lumpy and inconvenient information and what they learn along the way. Because even the process has value.
Still, there are bright spots.
In her must-read book, The Empire of AI, Karen Hao ends with the hopeful story of an indigenous community in New Zealand using AI to give new life to the Maori language*. While large language model platforms generally accelerate and homogenise language, here access expanded. Crucially the work rested on consent from the community to only ever use it for projects that would not exploit, harm or infringe on indigenous rights.
AI is also potentially better at reading XRays than humans. But before throwing out radiologists with the film, perhaps give patients a choice. Tick this box if you want AI to examine your results. Make it opt-in and consent-driven.
Looking at the current landscape feels a bit like the parable about a Chinese farmer which ends “Good news, bad news, who can tell?”
If you’re using or considering AI keep in mind that everything carries a cost, and it’s not always money. Promises, reputation, the quality of products and services, intellectual property, people’s experience. The list of things you potentially trade when you unleash AI is not trivial.
So before you dive in, or even dip your toe into AI, perhaps stop before you can’t make it back to shore, and consider what are you trading.
Thanks for reading.
*page 411 Epilogue, Empire of AI, by Karen Hao