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Have you considered using AI to help with something that you’re not experienced at, confident doing yourself, or don’t have the time to do?

Perhaps pitch writing, a press release, a communications plan or marketing strategy, an annual report or some analysis or research.

I can understand why people are tempted to outsource a job that would ordinarily take them a lot of time and effort and require experience or expertise that they don’t have. After all, that’s part of the service I offer! You get to benefit from my 24 years of experience in this job… but you need to pay me for my time… and using AI is free. So why not use it?

I call bullshit

Because you need to be able to trust the output and AI lies and it hallucinates! After asking for research or information on any topic, if you follow that up with a simple “is this true” – it’s almost always not.

AI models misinterpret context, they rely on biased or insufficient training data and they make incorrect or illogical assumptions. But it’s not always a mistake – research into alignment faking in large language models has shown that AI also strategically lies to us. Whether it’s intentional or accidental – the trouble is that the LLM delivers the information confidently and competently so the average person trusts it.

Enshittification

Another trouble with AI is… the output isn’t skilled or creative – it’s slush. It’s a copy of a copy of a copy and it is leading to the enshittification of everything we consume.

It’s frustrating that years of guiding my clients through the curation and creation of content, time and money invested in SEO strategies or communications that successfully convert to call to actions and now… we’re in the age of enshittification. All of the social media platforms are saturated with AI content. Pinterest is currently unusable and it used to be the third largest search engine after google and YouTube. When the user experience is bad, you lose your customers.

Considered outsourcing your customer service to a chatbot? I can promise you will regret doing this. Your connection to your customers and their ability to build trust with your business and your brand is priceless.

Websites, emails, social media captions, adverts, articles – I can spot the uncanny valley caused by a lack of human touch a mile away and I am so frustrated about the collective lowering of standards and the normalisation of AI output.

Shit On A Stick

Got an idea for a new business? Need someone to talk to about it or how to go about it? Who do you turn to?
Here’s a little case study for those of you who have thought about using AI rather than booking a consultation with someone like me…

Shit for brains

The widespread and enforced adoption of AI is a huge problem for our society on many levels, but one of the most worrying is that whilst it might start with casual daily use, when you regularly outsource your thinking functions, it leads to cognitive decline. So we as people get dumber and more reliant on using it.

Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to change through learning and practice (which strengthen neural connections over time). The more a human practices doing something, the stronger these brain connections become. Currently people are using AI tools to aid them as they study and teachers are using AI to develop curriculums which means people are currently not learning from qualified people in an effective way. Think of highly skilled and essential jobs like nursing or engineering. We need the people doing these jobs now and in the future to have had the opportunity to make mistakes, learn from them and to truly absorb everything they will need to do their job. it’s bad enough that we google our symptoms, we don’t want our doctors googling our symptoms too!

In summation

When something is free, please consider what the cost of it really is.

Technology is never introduced to make life easier for everyday people so they get to do less work. It’s introduced to replace having to pay skilled people so that companies can profit.

AI isn’t being introduced into a benevolent society – it’s an increasingly fascist, capitalist society which benefits from making its citizens helpless and uneducated.

Curriculum control, historical revisionism and censorship – all things which are happening through the enforced introduction of having to source information from AI instead of a trustworthy option. All part of the fascism handbook.

It’s probably a stretch to suggest that hiring me to write your press releases or website copy is fighting fascism, but i’m not not saying that…

Artificial Intelligence, or AI is a fascinating and powerful tool. There are virtually endless applications – chatbots, automated emails, and scheduling tools have revolutionised the small businesses that utilise them for marketing and the demand for this technology has created businesses that further innovate. Giant nerdsquee for AI.

Many things about AI, however, concern me (and they did even before I read Click Here to Kill Everybody by Bruce Schneier 5 years ago) so when I have conversations with clients about how AI could help them – it becomes clear that the risks of individual and collective adoption of these technologies are not widely known. So buckle in.

Throughout human history, we have continued to perpetuate a cycle of innovation leading to irreversible impacts on society. The earliest example of this was only a few hundred years ago and we have continued to make life more complicated and dangerous ever since.

The industrial revolution was supposed to reduce human labour, replacing it with machine labour. (Not for the benefit of the labourers who might then be able to live a life of leisure and peace, to allow their bosses to circumvent fair labour laws and continue to profit) The Luddites who opposed the introduction of technology in the textile industry for example feared that skilled craftspeople would be made redundant and understandably revolted. Because unfortunately, people who profit from technology don’t like to listen to scientists and philosophers. Or historians… they’re such party poopers.

Fast forward 212 years from the industrial revolution and we now have AI software scraping the internet or other data banks to generate images and text. AI has been used to write and illustrate books, compose music, produce poems, research, reports, articles, speeches, legislation…

There is no Global AI Governance to prevent or regulate this technology. There isn’t a machine we can smash (we’re not even allowed to peacefully protest any more!) and Pandora’s box has definitely already been opened.

Artists were not invited to consent for their work to be used or reproduced when art is synthesised by AI. The copy generated by tools like Chat GPT, Google Bard etc is derivative and filled with misinformation and bias. Given that humans seemingly cannot determine the difference between journalism and propaganda, evidence from deepfakes – you must concede that without regulation, AI is as dangerous as the internet is. The internet began in 1991 and we still haven’t created an adequate system to ensure the safety of its users. Whilst the various governing bodies around the world are theorising how governance could be approached, AI is becoming more widely adopted than people are aware of and is already having a negative impact.

The AI algorithms of social media that were created to help humans connect more led to global polarisation and extremism within about 5 years of being widely adopted. We still haven’t cracked online safety for social media or advertising. Our data is being mined by them all. We are the product, not the consumers.

Bias is a major issue when it comes to AI algorithms. AI is not neutral – it was created and coded and debugged by humans and humans have biases. Therefore AI learns the same classism, racism, ageism, sexism, ableism and other biases that humans do… and perpetuates them.

AI is used by education, healthcare, financial and government institutions to create models and automate processes. It creates inequality because it mirrors and exacerbates existing issues such as the gender pay gap or property redlining. Because these systems exist, AI upholds them. In the USA, AI already has the power to deny you a medical prodedure, insurance coverage, benefits, a mortgage, a university place, employment and even impacts the legal appeals process.

But wait, you were just thinking about using AI for your small business.

So yes, AI can create you a powerful logo. But it doesn’t know that you don’t want your logo to look like a swastika. Yes, AI can create artwork for your business. But it doesn’t care about intellectual property, leaving you vulnerable to legal issues. Yes, AI can write marketing copy for you. But it doesn’t have the 27 years of human expertise in doing so that I do in making that copy effective, accessible and relevant to your audience.

No matter how sophisticated a process you create, you cannot synthesise human artistry and expertise. For art to exist, a human has translated something they felt internally into something that exists externally – a song, a sculpture, a painting, a poem, a photograph… It will never truly pass the Turing test. Nor should it.

Earlier in the year I was honoured to be invited onto the Working Hours Podcast in Leeds with the LOVELY and very talented Simon Treen of Western Studios.

It’s incredibly rare that I talk about myself and what I do, I spend most of my waking hours elevating good people like you that are doing such wonderful things.

But if you’d like a behind-the-scenes look at why I do what I do and what it means to me, check it out:

Simon is always looking for new guests, so those of you in Leeds please contact him if you would like to offer up your voice.