There’s a running joke in an episode of Family Guy, from a few years ago, where the otherwise dim-witted father Peter, strikes a contrarian position on The Godfather much to the ire of his household.
“It insists upon itself,” he churlishly repeats to those who trust unconditionally in its status as bona fide classic.
Shows like these, of course, derive their relevance however short-lived, from questioning the sacred cows, however enduring, of the culture.
That which is venerated should supposedly be able to withstand criticism. It’s a hallmark, we have been reminded to a fault, of our democracy. Insisting upon oneself is also a form of marketing, a way of disrupting mass media culture.
We object to pretension in art, as Peter does, out of suspicion. How good is something that needs to sell itself so readily?
But in business it is commonplace. A way to cut against the grain.
He who shouts loudest increasingly gets lost in the noise is no longer an axiom of politics or commerce. Nor does that make it any less true.
The industrialisation of large language models (LLMs) in public relations is a case in point. Its widespread adoption has swept through social media and the world of communications. Insistence is everywhere.
Now businesses, invoking the third person, define themselves through statements of intent, rather than their core function because they have, for our benefit, transcended it. In short, they are supposedly much more than the sum of their parts.
Company X is not just A — it is A, B, C and D. Once you see an example of this, you’ll see it everywhere.
In the digital sphere this is what is now called slop. And it is spreading like contagion.
LLMs use self-supervised machine learning on a vast amount of text, designed for natural language processing tasks.
It amounts to what is called, perhaps egregiously, as language generation. In the last 18 months this trend has prevailed in marketing but increasingly reportage, record-keeping, speechwriting, songwriting and journalism itself.
It’s not just a trait of systemised coercion — it’s the outsourcing of human agency. See how it works?
Everything through the ease of proliferation becomes the same.
“The surest way to predict behaviour is to intervene at its source and shape it,” social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff has observed of how we are herded through surveillance revenues into the behavioural futures market.
Our online footprint is bombarded back at us from the algorithmic void, in between the prompts and advertising cues we generate because we checked the boxes in the T&Cs and created passwords and security codes to make the opaque agreement to extract our data consensual.
Behavioural markets, like any industry, will be subject, at least momentarily, to the rule of law.
As we have seen, particularly in transport, regulation always comes at the price of utility.
That’s a potential problem for ChatGPT which will no longer provide medical, legal or financial advice to individuals due to liability concerns. You only need go back three years to the distorted outputs of the first Gemini model to understand why.
Artificial intelligence is just that and will only abound when it is the primary way we choose to interact with each other.
My four-year-old daughter is a welcome source of contrast. The other day I was showing her Trevor Jones and an orchestra performing his theme from The Last of the Mohicans.
She was roused enough by it to want to watch some other videos of different symphonies recorded live.
Increasingly enthralled by the co-ordination of the many parts that made the sum total, she fixated eventually on the involvement of the conductor, his gestures, at first and then the importance of his role in things, as he juggled distinct sections, and soloists, so that each, far from becoming lost within the whole, became better for its part in the cumulative grand scheme.
I’m certain she coined a phrase.
Not taking her eyes from the exhilarating human endeavour she said of the conductor, “He is the man who convinces.”
Who could argue? But in this case it was towards an authentic, knowable, common good.
