SUPRIYO GUPTA
What is the biggest challenge that is going to be faced by communications in the AI driven world?
There are going to be, in a sense, four forces at play. And the end result of those four forces would be the creation of a completely different information flow and networks and communication channels within which we have to shape communications.
Briefly, those four forces are:
First, large language models, LLMs, transitioning in the next couple of years according to many AI experts, to Artificial General Intelligence or AGI (software with human-like intelligence and the ability to self-teach and with the ability to perform tasks that it is not necessarily trained or developed for). The opinions are divided on how soon this will happen – and the range varies from a couple of years to decades.
Second, the transition in the speeds of processing as a result of quantum computing.
Third, is the entry of robotics, which is not just a question of mechanical jobs getting taken over, but also interfaces with non-human intelligence and even non-human virtual and real actors.
Fourth, is the emergence of synthetic biology coming into play, which would be a combination not of only of synthetic biological products, but also the embedding, for example, of more and more advanced equivalent of neuralinks into human beings and human interactive spaces. That may be a little further away, maybe half a decade or a decade away, but just as neuralink today is enabling motor faculties of people who have disability, it is likely we will see soon knowledge packed human implants which also harnesses the power of AI platforms. Indeed,
If that sounds very sci-fi and, therefore, in the realm of conjecture, the reality is that we are already seeing initial demonstrations that are making animals smarter. Humans with neuralinks may become commonplace in the span of a decade, moving from the current trend of wearable devices that monitor parameters to implanted chips that provide information, give cues to your body and engage with external AI devices.
Now, if a decade sounds like a very long time, reflect on the fact that the whole phenomena of mass adoption of internet is roughly about two-and-a-half decades old and smartphones have been around just about a decade-and-a-half and the adoption of LLM models like chat GPT is less than a couple of years old. So, the speed at which transitions are taking place is very rapid.
It is, therefore, important to start preparing for it now, especially if you are large players with a long-term plan for continued existence.
HOW DOES ALL THIS CHANGE ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION?
You may have done your business and your communication and built your brands in a fashion that has more or less remained unchanged while the vehicles have changed and the models have changed. But the communication and the approach to communication has not really changed from 1970s very dramatically. It is more or less the same approach to brand discipline, it is the same tools and measures that are getting used.
The narratives have changed, the way in which you get the narrative across has changed as well. But the fundamentals of brands, building communication between individual companies or individuals, organizations to their audiences have not really fundamentally changed. Now, that is going to undergo a huge transition and those transitions will have multiple layers.
Let us talk about a few layers today and then we can expand upon it in subsequent conversations. So, the first one which is very, very important to understand is the creation of a synthetic reality, a reality that is manufactured in all its dimensions by a combination of artificial intelligence models, as well as the carriers that become smarter because of the combination of AI with them. And in time, get accelerated much faster.
Now, it is important to understand that AI is not just a question of technology or a tool, it is intelligence. It is an intelligence which some authors like to talk about as alien intelligence. And it is an intelligence that is going to be superior to a human IQ in as little as two years.
So, if you today have a human IQ spread at the top end of 160 and going at best up to around 200, by 2026-27 we might well be looking at an AI IQ of 1600 and in a decade after that, a billion times that. Now, it is not really going to be a question of what we are going to tell the AI to do. We are way past that and we don’t really realize it.
It is not going to be driven by algorithms which have been put in by people. It is not even going to be driven by ethical values that we are trying to incorporate. What is going to happen is that AI with its smarter intelligence will start working to create its own realities and those realities will impact brands.
THE DAWN OF THE ERA OF SYNTHETIC REALITIES
Now, if you really look at it from a communication point of view, from a very, very narrow and a very limited bandwidth of the next four years, you are looking at three challenges that communication has to face.
The first challenge that communication has to face or communication practitioners have to face is that you have to be an expert in creating synthetic realities. The second is that you have the expertise to combat synthetic realities.
And the third is to create devices by which you can separate the synthetic and the real by creating more and more grounded relationships. Now, when we talk about synthetic realities, most of us are already in the web of a certain amount of synthetic realities. The key thing to understand is that when you are talking about synthetic realities, you are not talking about synthetic realities, which are necessarily artificial or have been created external to who you are.
Synthetic realities are often created on the basis of prodding you in a certain direction. Take, for example, the fact that each one of us, if we open our Instagrams and we compare them, we would find that we are, we have very, very different Instagram feeds. The stories that we see, the ones that we interact with, the ones that we are conversant with, they are very, very different.
And yet we might have the same reality. For example, we might be working in the same office, we would probably be having the same office lunch, we would be having similar common areas of conversations in which we can interact with each other, we would be working on the same projects, we would also probably be discussing viewpoints, which are very similar, and that is how we make friends. But when you open your Instagram, you would find that it is at a layer deeper than your social or your professional face.
It is who you are, what you see, what you feel, and therefore each one of us are different. Now, if you really realize what is happening is that Instagram is also feeding you currently on the basis of algorithms of reach, which makes you see more of what you like, or more of what you would probably engage and interact with. In turn, it is making changes in your reality at a much deeper level.
It is making changes in what you think, how you observe information that you have, your motivations, what you think of your career, how do you approach love and so on so forth.
A good example of this synthetic reality and the changes that it might really come is this story, which could well be spun together by someone.
Recently, there was a story about the couple who were leading, you know, trying to put their life together.
One was on a night shift, one was in the morning shift and so they spent very little time together. They were working hard in order to put together a corpus for their future together. So whenever they met, they were not really in the best of their romantic connects, not in the best of their engagement with each other.
And then one day, the man says to the woman that, look, I’m going to be tied up in a project for the next three days because of which I am just going to respond to you on WhatsApp. And then for the next three days, the interactions are limited to WhatsApp. But what the woman notices is that this interaction is far more pleasant, far less stress-free, far more romantic, far more understanding, far more, you know, compatible.
Now, three days later, the man reveals that this is really, this is an interaction that was driven by AI, not by him. He was a part of an experiment. The reaction was that the woman preferred the AI version of this man rather than his real version.
Now, the question is, was AI mimicking the person and the best of the person? The answer is yes. It was not mimicking a universal standard. Otherwise, the woman would have caught on to the fact that this was someone else responding on his behalf.
She was, in a sense, responding to the best of the person.
Now, the question is this, that when we say that we need to create and need to become experts in creating synthetic realities for brands, it is this: We would need to start thinking in terms of how do we deploy AI to project, to engage with our communities from the best of what the brand has, best of what the organization has, best of what the entire organization has.
TRAINING AI TO BE THE AGENT OF THE BRAND
So, teaching your own AI agent in the art of reflecting the best of you, the art of engaging in the best of what you do is probably going to be the first and the major push in communication development in the next five to seven years.
And it is very, very likely that this would happen with a very high degree of automation. It would happen with a combination of recording of speeches, recording of day-to-day activities, conversations happening socially within a particular space and then using it as a learning model.
Now, that also means that you have to have the kind of people who are a part of that training module, who understand and are part of the core of the organization. It also, in a sense, dehumanizes the brand. So, the challenge would be how do you deal with the dehumanized part of the brand? How do you ensure that synthetic does not necessarily mean artificial? Synthetic should replicate.
Today, for instance, when we are talking about synthetic DNA, we are not talking about simply a question of putting in a polymer there. We are talking about DNA that fixes issues, for example, in the case of sickle cell anemia Synthetic DNA can be used to diagnose and treat sickle cell anemia, a genetic disease that affects hemoglobin in red blood cells. Synthetic DNA can be used to correct the defective gene that causes sickle cell anemia and insert it into a patient’s bone marrow. This can be done by removing bone marrow from a patient and genetically correcting it, then transplanting it back into the patient. That is how you move forward in biology.
We will also move forward in communication in exactly the same manner. By creating self-replicating content that is healthier, less prone to error and more ‘dependable’.
The second aspect that’s equally important is how do we learn to combat the synthetic reality that is being created to harm the organization, the brand, and you – the individual. We have seen that already at play in a very large fashion. We tend to think about them as narratives.
We have seen them as narratives. So, if you look at a particular political leader and then you create labels from them. The political machinery starts creating labels and then populates and propagate that in order to create in people’s minds a synthetic or a fake narrative that cannot necessarily be tested by facts, but becomes an impression because it, in a sense, reinforces prejudices or creates a point of view where you do not have an alternative perspective. So, you might look at it and say, here was a very well-driven campaign that created the concept of a Pappu and a Feku.
Both of these concepts, in a sense, also dehumanized the person and this was well before AI. This was a combination of political propaganda delivering immense impact riding on a plethora of channels which distorted reality.
In a sense, being very economical with the information that we are passing on and were getting consumed.
That’s also the reason today, if you see right across the world, the emergence of forces that are pushing narratives that, in their holistic perspective, should not really stand the test of reality. America’s problems are not driven or created by illegal immigrants. If we focus on immigrants as the problem, it usually is because the political system is not able to deal with other real issues.
These are issues that come up during elections. These are issues that do not necessarily change the way in which the economy works or the polity works or society works. Having said that, these are narratives that have dominated and especially in the last decade and a half.
But these are not the only narratives. If you go back, whole civilizational narratives were wiped out when a combination of English and the printing press spread one narrative of White Man’s supremacy through colonialism.
We forgot as a country, as a people, as a civilization what happened before 200 years of the last century. We relearned Indian history from a perspective that was again driven by what was projected as a higher civilizational format when in fact, we had even superior civilizational impact around the world – and, that, we are rediscovering now.
So what will change when AI comes into the play and starts creating synthetic narratives? The thing is this that they will be far more individualized. They will be far more personalized.
It will recognize you as an individual. Your acceptance of the narrative is no more a question of whether you’re part of a mob or a part of a leader that seems to be swaying masses. This is one-to-one: Narratives that are tailored to resonate with your innate belief system.
So the communication that happens is a synthetic reality that engages with your reality. When you are combating it, you will have to find tools at an organization, brand, government level, even in international relations to try and find ways and means by which the synthetic realities do not drown out the actual ones.
The third part of it is that you have to be able to build a bridge between the synthetic reality and the reality which exists on the ground.
People to people relationships become that much more important. Human interaction will become that much important because if you do not do so, the synthetic interactions tend to last more.
The question is this: Will these synthetic realities stay at the level of the large, digital information consumer or will it go all the way to the bottom of the pyramid, right to the “information poor” in rural India?
The answer is yes.
Almost half a dozen years ago, an agriculture university conducted a study to see where farmers get information that they trust. And it turned out that a very large proportion, 80% of them, got their information from WhatsApp and they trusted it because “people like them” were circulating the information. Instagram, Facebook and You Tube are flooded with content from the poorest, the most ‘disconnected’, the most remote – they are creating ‘content’ that ranges from entertainment to politics, from learning modules to sociological portrayals. These ‘creators’ are also consumers of content – and as they are fed more and more ‘synthetic content’, it will shape their world view, their appreciation and relationship with brands and organizations.