Understanding The Meganet

How much does AI really understand? How much have we made ourselves its slave through our social media usage? And what does this mean for our marketing efforts?

In this final episode of the second series of Talking About Marketing, we turn our attention to the endeavour of human craft as well as our proclivity for finding the laziest way possible to do things with AI.

David Auerbach is a writer, technologist, and software engineer, whose latest book has shone a light on the way our social media usage has helped the large language models that power Artificial Intelligence to have richer insights into how humans intone and communicate.

As we discuss, the current state of technology and social media is a double-edged sword for marketers.

Meanwhile, back in the "good ol' days", we catch a glimpse of all the background effort applied by Michelangelo to enable him to be the artist we admire. Yes, it's another case of an overnight success who put in thousands of invisible hours to make it all look so easy. There's something in this for all of us!!

And we close out with a tip about getting more views for your YouTube videos and why we don't really need to envy AI robots.

Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes

01:36 Person
This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal.
What Would Michelangeo Do?

In his book, Resilience, Eric Greitens, a Navy SEAL, shares a series of letters he'd written to another Navy SEAL who was hitting rock bottom and struggling to adapt to civilian life.

What separates this book from other books written by Alpha males, is that Eric is very well read and has a knack for weaving ancient writers, poets, and philisophers into his letters.

The book powers forward and is probably best consumed one letter/chapter at time rather than than being binged because it is dense with observations, suggestions, and lessons.

One that piqued Steve's interest was letter 8, where Eric is talking about the importance of honing our habits. One great insight was that the key to success is actually to train at enjoying training because once you enjoy training, the rest is easy.

But by way of example, he shares some thoughts from the master artist, Michelangelo, who had detailed notes on things to practice and consider when painting. The end result being that when it was time to paint, the artist was in his flow state.

All of us could probably do with extra tweaking around our habits, whether that's the habit of blogging, or reflecting on our enterprises, or making sure we're looking after our health so we CAN keep producing the output we desire.

11:03 Principles
This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today.
Meganets

Is there any way of shaking the dark shadows of our addiction to social media? Is AI something to be scared of? And have we helped make the AI monster smarter?

There is a lot we could discuss arising from David B. Auerbach's book, MEGANETS: How Digital Forces Beyond Our Control Commandeer Our Lives and Inner Realities.

Steve decides to centre our discussion around three things of relevance to us as marketers:

• The reason why many marketers and users find social media puzzling (it's because we're all in filter bubbles)
• Why it's impossible for executives to control the junk and lies in social media sites
• The shallow depth of AI "understanding"

David Auerbach is a writer, technologist, and software engineer. He previously worked as a software engineer at Google and Microsoft for many years before turning to writing. He has written on technology, literature, and philosophy for many publications.

One of his opening observations is that people are not constant. When we interact, it is quite chaotic.

Within all that content, there is more poisonous content in social media than ever before in human history. This is because in the past, when we were restricted to interacting with people in our locale, there would rarely be a concentration of people who agreed with our excesses. If we had fringe ideas, it would get blunted by others around us who would challenge it.

However, social media has meant we can connect with likeminded people no matter where they are in the world. This has the result of making dangerous and fringe voices much louder than they would otherwise had been due to Volume, Velocity, and Virality.

For marketers, this is a double-edged sword. On one hand, if we manange to get "in" with our people, we can surf on a really strong current of ready ma