I recently drove from San Jose to San Francisco in the Bay Area, and saw no less than 10 billboard ads for AI-focused products. Everyone seems to be jumping on the train, plugging AI into their tools with the hope that they’ll be able to ride the new wave with success.
How do we keep from over-saturating the market with AI-this and AI-that? The fatigue is beginning to set it for me, is it for you too? I read this quick article on where that fatigue is coming from and the authenticity needed to fight it, and it’s got me thinking about how we can make sure that authenticity comes through in our own work: AI fatigue is real, and it’s costing brands more than engagement
YESSSS! I experienced this too just last week. I think it could be because of the location, being in the heart of all the tech & the rapid growth. Its sooo heavy in the Bay Area because all the companies are chasing the next cool thang!
Love the article and I think it just emphasizes the idea that AI is a tool to build on human ideas and not the other way around.
One issue is that it’s been rolled out publicly and commercially so quickly. It’s creating memes, custom profile pics, and clogging the social feeds with fake content. It’s also allegedly taking your job. So socially, there’s a lot of resentment.
The bay is crazy for obscure tech advertising. Would love to see the ICP for some of the ads. I’ve definitely seen ads for AI security and compliance, which is pretty niche.
I think we’ve forced laggards and people who don’t really want to engage into this quickly, so it’s forcing a lot of unhappy people. Hard to get people into a posture of supporting a future they do not want.
Digital transformation efforts have had the same fate. Those skeptics and conservatives have to figure out how to deal with the overwhelming amount of exposure.
“one in three workers say they’ve “actively sabotaged” their company’s AI rollout—a number that jumps to 41% of millennial and Gen Z employees.”
He added that WRITER’s research shows that workers often don’t trust where their organizations are headed. “When you’re handed something that isn’t quite what you want, it’s very frustrating, so the sabotage kicks in, because then people are like, ’Okay, I’m going to run my own thing. I’m going to go figure it out myself.’” You definitely don’t want this kind of “shadow IT” in an organization, he added.
He’s tackling some larger issues as well. Human review standards, policies about sensitive or private information, and specifying what they’re specifically looking for from their AI usage.
“Clients don’t hire us to do administrative work. They hire us to spark movements and change their paradigms.” - Love this line, has me thinking of ways to streamline some monotonous processes in our work to focus on the creative pursuits that bring the most value
Technology is there to solve our problems, not become them.
As with every technology evolution before it AI becomes a hype. Doing the technology becomes the solution, because people are asked and measured on if they show up with an AI-project.
But, there are no AI-problems. There are only real problems where AI can be a part of the solution.
From my perspective the hype was worst early this spring. Then the only things clients were asking for were AI or efficiency (or both), but late spring that started changing. .. AI still needs to be part of the answer, but it’s not the question anymore. Which is good.
Although it’s always important to remember: we overestimate change in the short term and underestimate it in the long term. AI is now like the Internet in 1994, and look where it ended up taking us .. (after the crash in 2001 …)
