Historically, we have watched advertisements, with AI, they now watch us.
Attention Merchants
The attention merchants of the modern economy – Meta (Facebook/Instagram), Alphabet (Google), Microsoft (LinkedIn), Bytedance (TikTok), Apple, and Amazon have built a corporate economy worth over US$11 trillion dollars. This is just under 50% of US GDP.
Globally, people average 6 hours and 58 minutes of screen time per day. Which is over 52 days per year. If you lived to 80, that would be about 9 years of your life staring at a screen. Crazy, huh?
Sure, lots of this time is productive work, being informed, and being entertained. But the reason they want us there on the little screen is mostly to serve us advertising. All this time to entice us to buy things we don’t need, to impress people we don’t know.
If you think advertising has infiltrated the modern mind – then buckle up for things to go next level when we add AI to the equation.
Watched by Loving Machines
What comes will be hyper-personalized – Some will call it utilitarian, others invasive.
Advertising in an AI world won’t just serve up a message to the right target market – it will become one size fits one. The primary weapon in its arsenal will be ‘observing their audience’. But I’m not just talking about decoding the target audience’s age, location, and income, or even tracking their browsing – I’m talking about literally watching them. The key focus will be ‘Emotional Detection’. Read here an ability to commercially leverage our core momentary vulnerabilities. Real-time sentiment targeting.
Our screens will know if you’re sad, happy, angry, disgusted, ashamed, guilty, embarrassed, excited, anxious, jealous, lonely, bored, frustrated, elated, or content… you name it.
It’ll know all of this via multi-modal methods. Not just by what we type and swipe, where we go, what we do, and what we buy…. but also through hearing our tone of voice as we speak to the AI’s, watching micro-gestures in our facial expressions. Every human moment will be on record and analyzed by the world’s best psychoanalyst.
For You Page 2.0
In the future, advertising will often feature you. You’ve had a tough week, you’re feeling sad, the AI observes your emotional state and serves you up an advert of yourself, in a future state of happiness. Which of course will be a consequence of buying whatever it is they happen to be selling. For me, it might be a long-overdue surf trip in some tropical location!
Maybe you’ve been feeling lonely and the AI serves up a message from Kim Kardashian speaking to you by name, with knowledge of what you’re going through. She has a really personal chat with you – an actual live interaction in her exact voice which is like she’s a long-lost friend. After you chat for a few minutes, she invites you to a personalized shopping spree with her. She then literally joins you in a virtual world to spend money on clothing which will feel so real, that you won’t be able to tell the difference, and neither will your dopamine detector.
If you thought the age of the influencer was coming to an end, we are in reality just getting started.
And if you think this won’t happen, that it’s all too much of an intrusion, then just remember what freedoms and privacy we already gave up in the digital era.
With the offer of all-knowing AI at our disposal, to do any task for us, for free… Then a price will be paid, and I can’t help but think it will be like what’s happened in the last two decades…
It’ll just run deeper into our souls.
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Keep Thinking,
Steve