Questioning the Direction of AI

By Martin Molloy

AI is all the buzz right now. It can write your college paper, generate art, and even generate advertising.

Outside the mundane things it has been doing for year, albeit not always well, (chatbots, customer service) and the paranoid Terminator or M3GAN vibes, one could argue we are using it all wrong.

First, many feel there are serious ethical concerns to consider. A lot of AI generators “creating” content is actually compiling images or knowledge from other sources. One could argue that at best, AI content is light plagiarism, but at worst it is outright theft. One example is the recent AI art craze you’ve been seeing which takes imagery from actual, human-created art (often without permission) and repurposes it. While these sites are free (for now), when they do become monetized, they’re going to take money out of the hands of living artists.

Beyond that, some argue it is a threat to what makes us human…creativity, exploration, and consideration. Why automate those tasks while we trudge through the mundane? That’s why it feels we’re getting it wrong. We should be seeking to automate mundane tasks to save time and energy. Then we should finish them off with a human touch.

That said, anyone who has interacted with an AI or automated process to handle customer service or, in our industry, recruiting knows the lack of human touch can make the process more frustrating and time consuming. Perhaps the focus should be on making the process easier for all instead of automating creative endeavors.

Kurt Vonnegut says it best in a letter he wrote to a class of elementary students―focus more on being creative for creativity’s sake.

W5 is proud of our work featuring real people creating the art of market research that ensures actionable and humanistic insights actually fit our clients’ needs. Let us know if our real brains can help you craft a custom market research solution to your insights needs.

In the meantime, let the machines dig the metaphorical ditches instead of doing things that truly make us human.

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