Proof of Human in the face of AI

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction

Once upon a time, in a galaxy not at all far away, we were at peak Crypto and Web3.

Our collective memory is short, because we are back in some kind of AI bubble.

That’s not to say it’s a bubble which will burst.

Let’s be clear, the medium-long term impact of AI is going to be awesome in the literal sense. Indeed, its full-scale effects are still largely unimaginable.

Is there an alternative contender for the tech-driven disruption of our generation? It’s hard to see one.

But it’s at least a bubble that will be cut down to size, for now. Rubber still has to hit the road in the short-medium term.

In the Marketing industry there remains too few robust real world examples where the valuations being offered to new AI companies are commensurate with their net new value creation to end customers.

As my last guest, the brilliant Tom Evans from Kraft Heinz put it, AI remains in the “experimental” bucket at best.

At worst, among the industry captains of Marketing, skepticism is growing regarding the second-order effects as AI and Marketing collide and coalesce.

This doubt starts with a concession: the near-certain eventuality that all that non-specialised stuff which gets repeated ad infinitum, which is copy-paste-copy-paste, or which is more admin-like (e.g. moving names of influencers from one list to a Google Sheets master doc) won't have to be done by a human anymore.

This is true across all knowledge work industries, I'd imagine.

This is going to leave more time, space and budget for the minority of investments that deliver the majority of results.

Resource will be freed up to use craft and creativity to win mental availability in buying situations, and sell more product; which is what every Marketer is paid to do.

Happy days!

But, of course, not every brand and business will take that opportunity to lean into the craft. The potential of the future won't be evenly distributed.

Those practicing bad Marketing today will likely use AI to produce more "stuff" that doesn't move the needle. Expect to see some businesses relish the fact they can now put out bad 5 social posts a week instead of 1, without a commensurate COGS increase.

Unfortunately for these Marketers, what will also increase is the frustration of the people they care about.

Customers are already tuning out of mass and unpersonalised communication; there are many proxies for this, but the ongoing decline in email open rates is probably the most straightforward. With AI coming in to play, even more might mean even less.

Advantages will therefore accrue to output that's unique, differentiated, culturally relevant, and cannot be matched at scale by an AI engine.

Marketers, for half a decade or so, have figured out that authenticity matters when you’re trying to win hearts and minds. In this sense, AI (which is definitionally inauthentic in its production) is not well positioned to support their mandate.

This is why "Proof of Human" matters.

Among end customers, some version of the Bladerunner's "Voight-Kampff test" is going to be increasingly prevalent. Premiums will be attached to brands that leave no doubt as to whether work has been created (at least primarily) by humans instead of bots. Why? Because people hate being sold to, but they love to buy.

The winning approach increasingly revolves around the axiomatically-human (e.g. in person events, or “walled gardens” like WhatsApp CRM communities led by a brand evangelist) that guarantee brands don’t feel “sales-y”.

A potential disillusionment with digital presents an enormous problem for brands that are used to swinging a big Meta / Google paid ads sword and hoovering up a lot of new customers and repeat business. It’s wonderful if AI let’s brands rapidly optimise and A/B test a gazillion variants of their paid ads, but what if customers are losing interest in paid ads? (There’s evidence that this has been a long time coming.)

Newton's third law states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. As AI makes it so easy to create lots of fake “stuff”, customers are going to seek out the human signal in the artificial noise, and allocate their dollars accordingly.

The conclusion of this article is simply to say that there’s no silver bullet provided by AI in which everything at least will fall into place for Marketers.

If we see AI as a new form electricity providing a new type of power, it doesn’t mean everyone will use that power well.

If marketers abuse that power, customers will react with equal force. In this scenario, the second-order effects might make it harder to sell more product; in other words, it might be harder for a marketer to do their job.