I hear folks marvel at the wonders they achieve with AI – the writers, designers, and entry level employees they don’t have to hire, and the staff writers, designers, and entry-level employees they can fire. Need an email? Throw some data sheets at Claude. Need a web site? Pick a template and let ChatGPT run wild.
AI hasn’t ushered in a new chapter in marketing. It has simply accelerated the race to the bottom we were already running—one that mirrors larger societal trends.
Remember when every B2B brand turned blue? At some point in the past decade or so, almost every brand paid homage to that ubiquitous hue. It was magic. It was the “right” color. Everybody had to use it or lose it. The conventional wisdom was unshakeable. To this day we have clients who vet competitors’ brands and say, “make ours look like everyone else’s.”
Simultaneously, the corporate need for efficiency demanded templated processes and procedures. For instance, to attract customers to B2B tech products, you simply choose from a short list of proscribed tactics. This way, companies don’t have to worry about fluffery like “talent,” or “ability.” Any half literate sentient could follow the prescribed steps. Whether these were the most effective marketing methods was neither here nor there. They were the methods that no one could blame you for using. By following the formula, employees could throw up their hands and dodge accountability. “This is how everyone does it!” It was a win-win for companies and their hires. Employees got to mindlessly tick the boxes while companies didn’t have to worry about fluffery like “talent,” or “ability” since any half-literate sentient could follow the steps.
So, we entered a world in which everyone was doing pretty much the same things in pretty much the same ways. This was great for corporations because they became personnel-proof. No more “key men and women.” In the templated workplace, no one could stand out, ensuring no worker wielded actual clout. “Exceptional,” and “distinctive” became epithets, not praise.
Workplace AI is the apotheosis of this trend. You no longer need the warm body. It’s all the same anyway, so let the machine do it. Sure, the output is dull, syntactically labyrinthine, often strangely non-sensical if you stop to give the glib-sounding jargon a moment’s thought, but it’s cheap, and it’s “good enough.”
That prompts the question, “good enough for whom?” Enter tech and AI badly integrated into education. Screens in schools have already partnered with screens in-hand to shorten attention spans, reduce literacy, and promote the ethos of disposability—everything is of equal, minimal significance to the TikTok videos of men getting their testicles smashed.
Now AI can finish the job. A study tracked almost 27,000 Chinese secondary school students over the course of 30 months to determine how AI impacted learning. The students did much better on homework and spent less time on it. “The bad news: The same students saw their closed-book exam scores fall 20% within six months. Entrance exam scores dropped between 18% and 24%, with the greatest declines surfacing after roughly two years of AI use.”1
With AI in hand, they were quicker and seemingly more efficient studiers. AI-free exams showed they had learned significantly less.
Author Catherine Rampell wrote about AI in education:
“Studies show, over and over, that when we engage in AI-assisted learning we give up sooner. One found that after just “10 minutes of AI-assisted problem-solving, people who lost access to the AI performed worse and gave up more frequently than those who never used it.” An MIT study showed that test groups who used ChatGPT had the lowest brain activity and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioural levels”. We undergo not just cognitive offloading, but cognitive surrender: we forget what was possible.”
AI in education is the perfect gateway drug to AI in the workplace: comparatively thoughtless repetition of rote exercises resulting in outcomes we don’t even know are poor because we have nothing against which to compare them, and we’ve lost the discernment to judge them anyway.
With the combination of corporatism, tech utopianism, and AI fanaticism, we are doing an excellent job of making ourselves and our output less interesting. Perhaps we’ll have the good fortune of boring each other to death before AI “destroys humanity” (bwa ha ha ha ha!!!).
Leonce Gaiter – Vice-President, Content & Strategy
