I recently gave a presentation on the future of AI in hearing healthcare, and I started the presentation by telling the audience of ~800 people that the presentation was going to be given by my digital clone and that the complete content of the presentation was generated by AI. I then stood to the side of the stage while chatBRENT gave the introduction in the video at the end of this post.
From my perspective, confirmed by talking to people after my talk, there was initial amusement at the thought that chatBRENT was going to give the hour-long presentation, but then discomfort and concern that chatBRENT really was going to give the presentation. I talked to people afterwards about what they thought in that moment, and many said that they were annoyed and unhappy that they were going to listen to an AI talk to them instead of me.
After chatBRENT gave the intro, I stepped in and said that, while adequate, I could have given a much better introduction and, given my decades of experience giving presentations on hearing healthcare to hearing care professionals, I was taking over the rest of the talk. For the rest of the presentation, I explained, chatBRENT would be my assistant that I would occasionally call on to comment when appropriate. Which is exactly how the rest of the presentation went. And I do believe that I could sense not only amusement from the audience on what had just transpired but relief that I was the one who was giving the rest of the presentation, not chatBRENT.
I don’t think the audience’s reaction to all this had anything to do with how much they wanted to hear from me per se, I believe that people have a visceral negative reaction when they know they are being given AI content instead of the ideas and thoughts of a real person. I believe that this is true in business and will prove out to be true in entertainment as well.
Co-founder and Chairman of Netflix Reed Hastings recently said, in a discussion with Reid Hoffman on the podcast Possible, that people want to watch real people in entertainment, they don’t want to watch AI generated entertainment in sports or movies. “I think anything that lives in the emotional realm will be impacted not as much by AI, because we humans react to these things emotionally... So you like to give and get real flowers, not fake flowers. I don't think that's changing just because of AI”. And trust, that safe feeling which is so important in so many interactions, is in that emotional realm where people want real human involvement.
Imagine you are at a bookstore looking at the latest book by Stephen King and there is another book whose cover says it was written by an AI system trained on all of King’s work. Which one are you going to buy? Even better, image that someone gives you a birthday gift of the book by the Stephen King AI instead of the latest one by the man himself, what would you think of that gift?
There is an intangible feeling that comes with knowing that the information that you are receiving—whether business related, news or entertainment—was generated by AI rather than a person. This may change over time, but for now I believe that there is an unstated rejection at some level of AI-generated content.
This raises the business question of under what conditions raw AI-generated content today is accepted without any negative reaction. My instinct, similar to what I saw during my presentation, is that right now people have an adverse reaction to any meaningful AI content being provided unaltered by human thought. What would be a more effective use of AI-generated content in business, I believe, would be to mediate AI content, curating the content rather than passing it on untouched, and incorporating it in your own thoughts rather than having AI be the thought leader.