Marketing AI

I’ve been thinking a lot about why I, and others who have been involved with AI for a long time, are often the ones questioning whether AI is really appropriate or useful for a given activity. On panels and in discussions, we can sometimes seem like the sceptics, while others are chomping at the bit to go out and solve the world’s problems with AI. It’s feeling like a strange world at times, and I’ve been wondering how we got here.

My colleague Lawrie Phipps shared this with me this morning:

Lower Artificial Intelligence Literacy Predicts Greater AI Receptivity

If you don’t have access, a preprint is easy to find. It’s in a marketing journal, and it’s basically saying that if you want to sell AI products, you should target people with low AI literacy (I paraphrase a bit there!)

It goes through a number of experiments that show that if you have a low understanding of AI, you are much more receptive to it as a solution. The argument is that this is the reverse of perceived wisdom, where you might think AI solutions should be targeted at those who understand the technology.

Here’s a quote from the abstract:

“This lower literacy–greater receptivity link is not explained by differences in perceptions of AI’s capability, ethicality, or feared impact on humanity. Instead, this link occurs because people with lower AI literacy are more likely to perceive AI as magical and experience feelings of awe in the face of AI’s execution of tasks that seem to require uniquely human attributes.”

I’m not sure what the solution is. An even bigger push on AI literacy? But we can’t expect everyone to be experts. Perhaps simply being aware of this effect might help balance the conversation and keep it more grounded in reality.