Alien viruses, humanity and hive minds >

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Vince Gilligan’s new series PLURIBUS is about an alien virus that transforms humanity into a ‘hive mind’. Not only people share one consciousness, they share each other’s memories.

In our world, being hive-minded like bees or ants describes people sharing the exact same ideas, following the crowd without forming their own opinion.

Us humans are quite good at having an opinion, but will one day AI create such a hive phenomenon? Universal information, sharing past activities and thinking, speed of processing, accessibility….all create a world where thinking won’t be universally replicated but could become streamlined into a narrower funnel.

"Blue-box thinking not Blue-sky thinking".

Great strategic and creative thinking relies on divergent , fresh thinking. With a hive mind comes homogenised marketing. So could AI be value-destructive, not value-building?

The story in PLURIBUS is admittedly dystopian, yet in the real world we see threats and dangers we all need to guard against;

1. Procrastination

The belief that AI will change everything, and make strategic and creative brilliance easier, and quicker. So ‘let’s wait before we commit any budget, it’ll be cheaper next year’ becomes real. And, goes the thinking, ‘won’t agencies just be using AI to get there – so why don’t we do it ourselves?’

There are shades of “Waiting for Godot’ here. One day, he will arrive, surely.

2. Category Mistake

AI can produce reams of digital ads quickly, post them, test them, boost the best, kill the worst. All good if your brand and business need 100’s of digital ads running constantly , under the banner of ‘Business as Usual’, not ‘Brand-Building’. The danger to agencies and brands is – a team under pressure could imagine this process would work well enough to handle their Brand work.

3. Commoditised Intelligence

Market and Brand analysis is readily available, and has become much better in the last year. However every brand needs ‘Difference’ to be valued and defendable, so this market intelligence has to be treated as a primary tool from which some interesting ideas can be generated, not as an answer in itself.

However the speed and intelligence of AI reports might fool one into thinking they have the answer, when all it has provided is some common learning.

"Synthetic intelligence will always need human imagination to realise value".

We call ourselves ‘The Brand Reset Company’ because we see our main role as being to define, codify and then promote the brands in our care, with a deliberate focus on finding the central human insight that can underpin what we call ‘The Brand Idea’ . And in doing so be super-vigilant in coming up with a brand platform and creative work that a universal intelligence could not have produced. Let’s make sure we have some madness in the mix. Let’s make sure we interrupt thinking, not just repeat thinking. Let’s trigger curiosity.

This vigilance is needed; AI does not yet have a natural sense of humour , and AI’s quality judgements converge on consensus taste. Exactly the problem brands need to avoid.

Some might say this view is Luddite.

How can you ignore the progress of AI with all its benefits?

The short answer is – we don’t . We have a head of AI who makes sure we use AI to its full useful extent - market understanding, strategic development and creative exploration, without trampling on the need for original thought.

For our recent work for St James’s Place, the wealth manager, we used AI to review the market and the brand strategies of close competitors. When combined with our own qualitative research , we realised most brands build awareness via their presence but fail to really touch a nerve or elicit a strong emotional response. Which in a market dealing with the quality of life and peace of mind of financially-involved people is a glaring gap. Watch this space.

All this might read strongly as just agency self-interest talking. However it’s worth noting that the financial markets have recently been rethinking AI.

The big concern felt by many – well-voiced by Robert Armstrong in the Financial Times – is that AI businesses have low barriers to entry. Their technology does not generate sufficiently differentiated or defensible intellectual property. As he suggests, ‘Frontier AI models will converge to near interchangeability, switching costs will be low and network effects will be minimal’. As a result, perhaps, ‘Intelligence will become a commodity, almost like electricity’.

Market-makers are taking this threat seriously. Looking over their shoulders at low-cost Chinese competitors releasing competitive products.

Here’s the pay-off. As a result of this rethink , Robert suggests, the markets are now recognising that pre-digital forms of competitive advantage are becoming more valuable. Manufacturing Know-how, Distribution Networks, and Brands.

"So let’s use AI but not forget the best brands have a difference worth defining, codifying and promoting. In a way that only slightly weird brand-obsessed humans can do."

And fight against any hint of ‘commoditised intelligence’

For us, true long-term value lies in the Brand, and that’s why we put so much emphasis on Brand Reset with a human heart. All collected in our three-stage programme that couldn’t be more simple to describe; Think, Create, Do.

Written by Founder & Planning Partner, Steve Hastings,