Selling Generative AI

A Debate About A.I. Plays Out on the Subway Walls. from the New York Times

Generative AI may be one of the most transformative technologies we’ve seen arise in our lifetime, but its integration into our lives and cultural practices has been unwelcome to many people, and for good reason. The AI industry has relentlessly pushed chatbots into education by making them freely available to every student, even though they know this breaks assessment practices. Signals people use to identify meaning are breaking outside of education. AI-generated slop is present in virtually every workplace, social media feed, and increasingly in interpersonal communication.

Companies have taken a powerful technology that people don’t have prior experience with and released it with the same spammy furor of a Candy Crush clone. It is no wonder we’ve seen the wholesale rejection of AI by some, while others uncritically embrace it to do increasingly human-like tasks.

Perhaps most alarming is the pivot we’ve seen play out this year from companies signaling to workers that the expectation isn’t to learn how to use AI to augment human skills, shifting instead to adopt AI agents that automate many junior roles. Once a task or role is automated, it rarely returns.

Breaking Down the AI Marketing Blitz

One of the easiest entry points to start a conversation about AI is viewing one of the recent commercials or campaigns and analyzing how AI is being sold. There are many! Watching a few is enough to get a sense of how saturated the landscape has become. It will also hopefully give rise to some thoughtful questions about what is being sold, who the audience is, and why it matters. For the second year in a row, the annual Coca-Cola holiday commercial is entirely AI-generated, but that’s just a sample of what’s out there.

What’s shocking about the recent trend of AI-generated commercials, like the Coke ad, is just how inefficient they supposedly are. The Coca-Cola commercial may have saved human labor by only requiring five specialists to prompt AI to generate it, but those five people ended up generating a staggering 70,000 AI video clips to create a single commercial. Therein lies the rub—a company replaced human labor with a machine in the name of efficiency and labor savings, only to find that doing so meant it was forced to use a process that was anything but efficient. And many of these images of animals are simply creepy.

The Coke holiday commercial isn’t going over well with audiences. Neither is the latest campaign by the AI wearable Friend. I wrote about the wearable AI technology last year and how deeply upsetting the concept of treating a device like a human companion is for mental health, privacy, and surveillance.

The company behind Friend recently purchased physical ad space throughout the New York City subway system, and New Yorkers promptly responded by defacing these ads with permanent markers. The campaign and rapid rejection of its message are a microcosm of the greater societal reaction to countless developers selling a technology that many people feel is being thrust upon them.

The Rise of Anti-AI Marketing

Savvy companies are keen to signal their own values related to how consumers view AI within their products or marketing. Some of these, like Heineken, are using the backlash against Friend to take a jab at AI with marketing slogans like “social networking since 1873.”

Don’t let the playful tongue-in-cheek tactics fool you. Heineken is just like any major company and has invested heavily in AI.

But Heineken isn’t alone. Companies, like Dove and Polaroid, are likewise rejecting using AI in their marketing. One interesting example is Aerie’s recent pledge not to use AI in their ads. This in keeping with Aerie’s real bodies and no retouching corporate values, but like the Heineken example, there’s no clarity about the company’s AI stance outside of marketing its product. Appearing to be real and authentic is a marketing tactic for many companies. It is what gives their brand value recognition, and consumers reward them by paying a premium. Regardless of the reasoning behind the marketing choices, it is clear that much of the current moment in corporate marketing revolves around a new question: what do we say to consumers about our company’s stance on AI?

One of the more blatant examples of inauthentic marketing comes from the recent Mac commercials. Apple is behind in it own AI development, so their marketing decision was to lean away from selling AI and embrace human creativity. Not a bad strategy when you don’t have a functional AI product! Their new ad for the Mac focuses on human decisions, creative choices, and above all, makes no mention of the word AI. But like the Heineken example, that doesn’t mean that Apple is leaning away from AI. Far from it. In fact, Apple just inked a billion-dollar deal with Google to integrate Gemini into Siri. Apple is selling an ideal to gain marketshare, while rapidly trying to catch up with all the other industry giants and integrate AI throughout their products.

The Big Picture

Oftentimes, we talk of AI hype, and in many ways, the marketing campaigns have become the story of AI . Many of the companies included here aren’t really grappling with values. Rather, they’re looking to position themselves for greater market share by leaning into AI or appearing to reject AI and paying millions of dollars to signal this to consumers. Heineken gets to seem principled while using AI. Apple appears human-centered while integrating Gemini. Friend gets defaced on the subway, and that elevates the niche product to outsized proportions, proof that consumers care.

The irony is that the New Yorkers taking Sharpies to those ads understood something that much of the marketing world is still figuring out. The rejection was about the audacity of selling something no one asked for! People want the agency to make their own choices about their use of technology, and with it, how the future is shaped. When companies thrust products onto consumers with aggressive certainty, announcing that the future has arrived, that agency breaks down rapidly.

Invite Students to Slow Down and Analyze What’s Being Sold

We should all consider ways to help students understand that when a company tries to sell authenticity or human creativity as part of their corporate values, these human-centric approaches can be little more than marketing tactics. Teachers of writing have been assigning rhetorical analyses of advertisements for decades, but anyone can do it and benefit from the practice outside of higher education or the discipline of writing. It also need not be formal. For some, it might serve as a simple mechanism to help make sense of how our world is changing.

Below are a half dozen examples of AI being marketed through traditional commercials. Take some time in the classroom, watch a few with your students, and invite them to think critically about the ads. Doing so can be a powerful introduction to demystifying the techniques companies use to sell AI and help students develop their critical AI literacy skills.

Normal people used the subway walls of New York to start a conversation, resisting AI. Now it is time for the rest of us to continue asking questions about the messaging, what is being sold, and why consumers should be wary of it.