There is a scene in the movie Blade Runner where Dekhart, Harrison Ford's character, puts a series of probing questions to the female lead to see if she is a human or an artificial intelligence. When she fails to bristle at the mention of "an entree of boiled dog," she slips up.
I've been thinking a lot about that scene and the questions it raises. Like many of us, I have been using my own Turing tests to see how indistinguishable the intelligence of the chatbot is from our own. The parlour game, played across dinner tables, water coolers and social networks, reached a million users in just five days, setting a record for the fastest adoption of a consumer product in history.
The buzz in my field of marketing has been particularly high, with practitioners expressing an equal measure of wonder and apprehension at the tool's ability to do things previously considered the preserve of seasoned marketers and advertising professionals. A boon for productivity and a threat to entire categories of marketing and advertising jobs.
The release of GPTzero, a technology which is potentially just as relevant to an artificial intelligence future, was greeted with less controversy. GPTzero is a tool that can detect if a text is generated by artificial intelligence. Despite being developed over a single weekend, I have found it to be quite accurate, and I think that the developers of similar apps will get funding for improvements.
There are many reasons why it is important to know the provenance of the words, images and videos that make up our lives. The very heart of what it means to be human is what makes this distinction so important.
Public school ban
Students handing in work generated by artificial intelligence and claiming it as their own is the immediate problem that the app will solve. The risk that New York City's public schools recently banned from their networks and student devices is correct. The move was defended due to the fact that it can pass a plagiarism test with flying colors.
Humans draw on prior research to advance their own ideas. The difference is that the machine doesn't know what it means. It simply puts together copy (or imagery, video or voice) in a style, or a variety of styles, that it has been exposed to in its training.
The increasing prevalence of this type of pastiche should worry anyone in the business of communication. Artificial intelligence-generated posts are starting to show up on social networks. A sort of "Hallmarkisation" of the media is predicted by this project. Even though it continues to use artificial intelligence to improve its search engine results, it still penalizes sites whose content is mostly generated by the technology.
The question of whether compensation is due to the original creators of the intellectual property that is trained on is a thorn in the side of the industry. The creators of artificial intelligence art generators, Stability Artificial Intelligence and Midjourney, have been accused of using copyrighted photographs and artworks without consent to train products that are now monetising permutations of those self- same images.
This doesn't address the question of what happens to the quality of human discourse when an inordinate proportion of what we read and hear is generated
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There's a chance that advanced artificial intelligence will be used to produce frighteningly credible propaganda. A Russian-designed bot claiming to be neutral but primed on the opinion pages of Pravda is one example of a Maga version.
The persuasive power of such tools will only grow as deep fakes are improved. The problem of the "liar's dividend" remains even if critical- thinking people aren't taken in by these shenanigans.
I could imagine a situation where I am in a virtual meeting with someone busy and important, only to find out later that I was actually conversing with heravatar, trained to mimic not only her appearance, voice and gestures, but also her values, belief and
There is something more primordial at play here, something which compelled us to confront the question of what is unique about the product of human ingenuity. Yuval Harari reminds us in his book that it's foolish to think that we can do anything that machines can't. The biologically useless by-product of certain brain processes is consciousness.
This doesn't mean consciousness isn't important. It is only by virtue of consciousness that something can be considered meaningful.
We went back to Blade Runner. After leaving the room, her creator turned to Dekhart and bragged that it took more than a hundred questions to determine that she is a replicant. Dekhart is angry that she doesn't know she's a replicant. It can't not know what it is.
There is a difference between the two. If we are going to feel any sympathy for her or those of her kind, we need to know consciousness. Roy, a replicant, is about to kill Dekhart when he pauses in the movie.
He said that he had seen things people wouldn't believe. Ships are on fire. The expression on Dekhart's face changed from fear to compassion as he continued. The hardened blade runner, a hunter of replicants, came to realize that Roy has not only seen these things but experienced them just as deeply as a human would, and that Roy's death should be mourned rather than celebrated.
It is important that we remember that the words we read, the films we watch and the art we appreciate are the product of sentient human beings who care and understand it. The end product is not different. Any form of brand communication is the same.
This isn't saying that marketers shouldn't use artificial intelligence. As machine learning advances at a rapid pace, it will only be a matter of time before artificial intelligence tools become even more powerful.
I bet that marketers and agencies that use artificial intelligence will replace those that don't. We will have to be transparent and honest about how we use artificial intelligence, and wary of the ethical and brand risks we run should we misuse it. We need to pay attention to these things. It doesn't. BM/DM is a combination of BM andDM.
