Trust in the Age of AI

8/20/24 update: I wrote this article earlier this year as I was still hoping to salvage the marketing career I've had since 2006. It became apparent soon after this article, that there wasn't anything worth salvaging. The promise of A.I. showed such stark realities about how businesses devalue creative work. But what I speak about here is still important and a warning about the shadow side of the "Age of Aquarius".

While our fascination and hope for the future have long fostered an almost worshipful relationship with technology companies, that collective faith has started to wane. I haven’t seen this much negativity expressed toward the tech industry since I started my career in the early 2000s – and certainly not from within the tech industry itself.

Even though creativity has almost always fed into a business’s sales cycle, it’s typically the most devalued and easily targeted for efficiency cuts. In the age of content marketing and media streaming, It’s not the least bit surprising that AI was aimed at the creative industry first. But it stoked much more ire when tech companies started targeting developers for job cuts and AI was touted as a developer “replacement”. Other sectors and jobs are at risk too, of course, but tech has so far garnered the most attention.

As Baldur Bjarnason points out in his article about the state of web development:

• The stock market loves job cuts
• Activist investors see it as an opportunity to lower developer compensation
• Management believes they can replace most of those employees with LLM-based automation

The Veil is Lifted

We have esteemed productivity at the cost of our human spirit for way too long. Touting productivity as a source of good becomes less convincing as we see more evidence to the contrary. How does a society prosper when most members lose in the equation? As the tech industry races to eke out even more productivity with AI, we must address fundamental questions about how this technology is meant to serve our society as a whole. Why would we invest so much capital in a technology that takes so much more than it gives? 

It’s like we’ve finally opened our eyes to the dystopian future lying ahead. We’ve especially started to wonder about the people we’ve entrusted to lead the way. Are the people who have consumed large amounts of our public data to train its machines trustworthy? The very same people allowing a narrative to spread that, while painting a much rosier picture of generative AI’s current capabilities, has cost real people their livelihoods?

Averting Crisis

From a much broader perspective, I think more and more people are asking: “Are those who prioritize profit over people the ones we should trust to lead us into a future controlled by the technology they develop?” It’s not whether AI has the potential to change our lives for the better. It’s whether the people leading the charge will build the systems that focus on that goal. What tech leaders have shown us so far is that their only loyalty is toward building shareholder value. 

Edelman’s global technology chair Justin Westcott recently told Axios, “Those who prioritize responsible AI, who transparently partner with communities and governments, and who put control back into the hands of the users, will not only lead the industry but will rebuild the bridge of trust that technology has, somewhere along the way, lost,” Westcott said.

There seems to be an opportunity for a different type of leader to take a stand, but this can’t be driven solely by companies. We’re here because we’ve given far too much onus to companies, hoping they’d make the right decisions. As Alan Kaye writes: 

“… how much effort should be expended to keep patching the problems vs actually addressing them with better more secure, more trusted, and *more system* approaches. (Putting typical businesses in charge of these tradeoffs has been an unmitigated disaster — but we can see that savvy and wisdom in government is not up to the task either — still, something like government will be required.).”

From a marketing perspective, making more concerted efforts to build trust with your buyer and your buyer’s community is becoming more and more important. As the chaos of spam content increases, people will seek out the experts that they trust. People will be forced to create more walled gardens to protect their data and time. 

Counterintuitively, brands that make it harder for their audience to subscribe to their content may be likelier to succeed than ones who aggressively push subscriptions – as long as brands invest in the types of content their buyer finds valuable. Even when it’s not monetarily driven, there exists an energetic exchange between each interaction. Once imbalanced, value is lost from either side. This may not become noticeable until we reach certain limits like we are currently facing. Brands need to start valuing the retention of their existing relationships. 

Brands have a unique opportunity to show leadership by standing up for people over profits, investing in their local communities, and paving the way for responsible data use and collection. More and more people are fleeing the traditional ecosystems in favor of less sophisticated technology platforms. Ones where they can share freely without oppressive algorithms, AI scraping, or data mining. The brands that prioritize earning the trust of their customers will be the ones who will be actively sought out.