Decision Marketing: AI is a game changer but why is it all so cringeworthy?
It’s mid-May and LinkedIn has spent the past few weeks is losing its mind. Some of the excitable posters are lauding the new capabilities of image generation, creating everything from hyper-realistic, unclockable photography, to the ability to ‘Studio Ghibli’ themselves; a trend that’s been picked up from everyone from the IDF and the White House, to thoughtless social media trend-hoppers, oblivious or uncaring towards copyright or the use of their own data. Major plagiarism and ethical concerns aside, it’s just sort of… embarrassing.
The online obsession with ‘-ifying’ ourselves isn’t new. When Snapchat launched when I was a teenager, my cohort were obsessed with dog face filters and bunny ears, the ease of the novelty and implicit excuse to post a pouty pic of ourselves too good an opportunity to turn down. The ongoing memes of ‘yassification’ use it too: face tuning people to within an inch of their lives to create an unrecognisable, ridiculous, and at times squidward-style versions of themselves, which is undeniably funny.
But as someone who was a teenager when the social media VR and AR boom, well, boomed, I can’t help but associate it with the cringiness of those years where we were putting anything and everything online. The feeling crept up again a few years ago when that early Dall-E image generator went viral, and everyone was pumping out ridiculous, terrible brain-rot imagery. It was exciting at the time, but looking back at those pictures, do we not all feel a little bit silly?
Brain-rot is, I guess, what makes the advertising industry’s obsession with AI feel especially lame. Pumping out unnecessary content for the sake of it floods the usual advertising echo chamber with work that’s mediocre at best, but we engage with it because a little robot made it.
It’s always obvious when you see the agencies that are champing at the bit to come up with as many innovative and outlandish ways to use the tool to win awards, and show they’re ‘technology first’. Meanwhile LinkedIn doom-posters are furiously warning their connections that their jobs are about to disappear; from designers to copywriters, illustrators to even film-makers, and that we all have to KEEP UP OR BUST.
And, of course, while these scores of ‘marketeers’ scramble to be at the forefront of using AI as a creative tool, we all turn a wilful blind eye to the staggering environmental concerns the tools use. I struggle to believe any of these intelligent, perpetually-online professionals can call ignorance to these concerns when they frequent the news; the fact that one image generation can use the same energy as charging your phone, that training the AI models uses up as much energy as a small country each year, or that the cooling systems use an obscene amount of water that are being tapped from drinking reservoirs.
According to MIT, by next year, “electricity consumption of data centres is expected to approach 1,050 terawatts”, putting it in fifth place on a global list of emissions, between Japan and Russia. Then… don’t even get me started on e-waste.
I’m sure a lot of those losing their minds over the new capabilities of AI like to think they do their bit for the environment, perhaps they cycle to work on their Brompton, or only eat red meat once a week, or even voted for the Green Party. The hypocrisy of unnecessarily using AI models over and over again for online clout, despite the widespread knowledge of its environmental credentials, makes them just look a bit silly.
Look, AI is undeniably a tool advertising (and the whole world) is going to have to adapt to use. I’m not an old man shaking his fist at the boom of new technologies, and of course I understand the far range of uses it offers us in the creative industries. The positive capabilities of AI in the health and medical world is far more interesting than what I look like turned into a muppet.
But while we continue to post AI cartoon versions of ourselves with little regard for personal, legal or environmental impact all over social media, scaremonger with doom-content online about the imminent redundancies of our roles, or just lose our heads over something that feels a bit like those Snapchat dog-filters from my teenage days, it all just feels a bit lame to me.