Have you ever seen someone you thought you knew but their facial features weren’t quite right?  Or a place that looks strangely familiar, but something’s amiss? Perhaps you watched a sci-fi film and couldn’t quite understand why the humanoids were so creepy. 

We call this the uncanny.  

The phenomenon of the uncanny arises when something appears to be familiar, but it’s slightly wrong, and in a world of AI (Artificial Intelligence), we’re experiencing this more and more.  

The uncanny spans a range of industries, from novels and cinema to psychological studies, and it has now made its way into the world of marketing.  

In recent years, the rise of artificial intelligence has sparked great controversy, with the moral battles we have all seen played out on our screens becoming an unnerving reality. Platforms such as the infamous ChatGPT shot to fame after people realised their newfound ability to generate pages and pages of text simply by typing in a short prompt. While this platform began as harmless fun for many people, professionals have begun to allow this practice to seep into their work lives and it has caused an uproar.  

Fears surrounding AI

There are many different opinions surrounding AI as an entity, from its dependability to its power to take over the world. Ultimately, however, concerns surrounding artificial intelligence stem from the fear of the unknown, cue the uncanny.  

Due to the comparable newness of AI in our society, it is entirely impossible to know how such a platform will grow and develop. Will AI become a sort of digital servant to make all our lives easier? Or will we become servants to AI masters? These are the questions that have arisen in recent years and while no clear-cut answers seem to be on the horizon fears and conspiracies grow and grow.  

Chat GPT, in particular, is a type of Generative Pre-trained Transformer, meaning it is designed to produce human-like texts based on prompts. While a platform like this can be helpful in quickly generating descriptions or ideas there are many limitations surrounding this platform. 

ChatGPT, like other AI language models, has several limitations. First and foremost, it lacks a true understanding of context and common-sense reasoning. It generates responses based on patterns in the data it was trained on, but it doesn't truly comprehend the information or engage in meaningful conversation. Additionally, it can be sensitive to input phrasing, providing different responses to slight rephrasing of the same question. It may also generate biased or inappropriate content, as it can inadvertently reflect the biases present in its training data. ChatGPT is also prone to verbosity and may overuse certain phrases. It doesn't always ask clarifying questions for ambiguous queries and tends to guess the user's intent, potentially leading to inaccurate or irrelevant responses. Lastly, it lacks real-time information and has a knowledge cutoff date, making it unsuitable for providing up-to-date information. These limitations highlight the need for careful and responsible use of AI models like ChatGPT. 

Did something feel off about that last paragraph?  

It makes sense and it flows but it doesn’t quite match everything else you’ve read so far, right? 

That feeling is uncanny and you’re feeling it because an AI wrote that last paragraph.  

AI in Marketing

Artificial Intelligence Marketing, or AIM, has become a natural development of the rise of AI. Many marketing processes such as writing, brainstorming or even simple research can all be sped up with AI on hand. However, many marketing strategies must tap into the human experience in order to be authentic and convincing, and this is something AI cannot do.  

Companies such as Nike and Coca-Cola are known to have used AI in their marketing strategies however this creative use has always required a team of humans to mastermind the strategy. 

In ASO artificial intelligence does have a place for speeding up processes. Say you want to get a quick summary of a market you know little about or your mind is blank when it comes to tackling a new way of gaining users.  

Keyword research. App description writing. User feedback analysis. These are all daily activities of an ASO consultant which AI could do in a matter of seconds. Yes, taking 10 minutes to have AI generate an app description that just needs to be proofread is clearly more efficient than writing it from scratch—but at what cost? As AI is still relatively new, its introduction in the world of marketing has not been analysed in much depth.  

Now, imagine long term.  

Imagine a world where puns, colloquialisms and idioms have no place in marketing because AI doesn’t understand them.  

Imagine being sat on the tube knowing that all the ads you see come from binary code not a human brain.  

That’s a world in which AI has been overused to the point that humanity and creativity are lost.  

This is also a world in which the uncanny valley has found its way into marketing.  

The Uncanny Valley

A valley. That unexpected drop between two peaks is an image we all know. This sharp drop seen all over nature has been used to explain many idioms surrounding the concept of things getting worse before they get better.   

This ‘Uncanny Valley’ is applicable in many different scenarios and one of its newest applications is AI marketing. 

The valley between artificial intelligence and real human emotion is where many recent media products have fallen.  

In using AI in marketing, we run the risk of letting users fall into the uncanny valley. While marketers may read back an AI-generated description and think it sounds normal, users will notice the human aspect of that communication disappearing, perhaps before the marketer themselves has noticed.  

While the field of marketing is bound to change alongside AI, marketers must be careful not to overuse tools and risk their users falling into the uncanny valley. 

The only hand that can pull users out of the uncanny valley is a human one and so no matter the efficiency of AI marketers must always be on the lookout to keep human emotion at the centre of their strategy.