Artificial intelligence is either going to wrest control of advertising and marketing back from the grips of the consumer — or it is going to destroy civilization. At least that’s what you
might think after reading the tsunami of discourse on AI since CES 2017.
But, as with most things, if we fail to learn history, we are doomed to repeat it. AI is not the first technology
going to destroy life as we know it. E.B. White called radio “a godlike presence” coming into our lives and homes. TV would turn us into zombies, and the Internet would turn us into
isolationists (well, the jury is still out on that one).
I was struck by a quote I came across recently about how content “shapes and promotes…[and] dominates their sources
of information. [C]ontinued exposure to its messages is likely to reiterate, confirm, and nourish (i.e. cultivate) their values and perspectives.”
While this quote so aptly describes
media consumption over the past election cycle, it was actually written in 1986, in the book “Perspectives on Media Effects." That book describes the essence of cultivation theory, which
asserts that heavy television viewers end up shifting their world view and perceptions based on what they watch on TV. TV begins to inform how they view their own social reality.
With digital
media becoming the medium of choice, surpassing TV in time spent, it is fair to expect cultivation theory to apply to digital media as well. What makes this phenomenon even more powerful in the
digital world is the exponential force of choice.
The main difference between then and now is that the theory was developed in a world where “television provides a relatively restricted
set of choices for a virtually unrestricted variety of interests and publics. Most of its programs are by commercial necessity designed to be watched by nearly everyone in a relatively nonselective
fashion,” according to "Living With Television."
Commercial necessity is very different now, when virtually anyone can create, publish and earn income from their content. This has
created an endless — some argue infinite — number of choices online.
That brings us to the paradox of choice (popularized in Barry Schwartz’s 2004 book of the same name). He
cites research done by Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper which found that when grocery store shoppers were faced with fewer choices of jam, they were actually more likely to purchase a jar than when they
had a wide array of flavors to choose from. Greater choice resulted in shoppers being paralyzed by indecision and making no choice at all.
We are beginning to see this happen in our media
decisions. As the number of available television stations continues to increase (Nielsen reports the average television viewer has 205.9 options), the number of stations viewed, on average is
decreasing, to less than 10% of available channels.
We see a similar pattern in Web site traffic. According to comScore, the top five sites garner almost a third of all page views in a month
,leaving the other 999,999,995+ websites to duke it out for the other 66%.
As choice has exploded, the conventional wisdom has been that this increase in choice put the control in the
hands of consumers. But has choice actually made us more passive media consumers? Rather than seeking out our variety of options and making informed choices, the reality seems to be we revert to the
tried and true and reinforce our existing behaviors, and beliefs. We’re consuming more media than ever but we are consuming more of the same.Instead, the information explosion expanding our
knowledge, it is, to paraphrase, reiterating, confirming, and nourishing our individual values and perspectives.
AI is here and it will not destroy us — just as radio, television and the
Internet never did. Nevertheless, many fear that AI will only exacerbate user passivity by learning what kind of content we like and directing us to similar things.
Still, machine learning
(aka AI) starts with human teaching. We can use the algorithms to feed us content that challenges, questions and feeds our values and perspectives. And when we do, we won’t have to worry about
history repeating itself.