More ROI from AI or Humans?

Illustration generated with AI assistance using ChatGPT and DALL·E by OpenAI. Concept and article text by Vipin Labroo

The whole rationale behind deploying AI to the extent that it threatens to decimate whole professions is premised on the fact that it leads to much enhanced productivity, reduced costs and unprecedented profits. In other words, much more ROI or return on investment than would accrue if humans were employed to carry out the same tasks. But is it really the case that the ROI from using AI in place of humans is always higher? Let us take a look and try to assess if it is indeed like that.

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For all the hype and hoopla surrounding the rising adoption of AI across industries, the fact of the matter is that the ROI delivered by it is way below expectations. According to research carried out by Scaled Agile’s partner, Return on AI Institute; while 90% of organisations find that they derive some value from AI, only a minority are seeing significant economic impact. Even so, almost 60% of them have started slowing or reducing hiring, banking on future AI productivity gains. At the same time, only 2% of them have linked those decisions to actual results. This points to businesses perceiving more value from AI than actually realising it.

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AI Comes at a Cost

Transitioning to AI comes at a cost. Much of it is in the form of the consumption of natural resources like water and rare minerals, as well as damage to the environment on account of the large amount of electricity  required to be produced to make it functional. At the same time, there is a parallel loss of valuable human expertise that would have grown and matured over the years if not replaced by AI. Completely slamming the door on the face of human ingenuity and its ability to create wonders, and instead depending on AI, which hones its skills by studying past human achievements, may not be the bright idea that many think that it is.

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Comparing humans and AI is like comparing apples with oranges

AI has the ability to train on very large amounts of data. However when compared with how vast humanity is, this is a very small part of it. Given that about 80% of online content is available in only 10 languages out of 7000 spoken worldwide there is not much credibility in the claim of AI’s infallibility. This is on account of the fact that a language is more than a simple means of communication. It carries within itself the values, culture and way of life of a people. 

Training AI on a sanitised and restricted data set means that it is picking up the perspectives and biases of only a section of the world’s population.

​This will in no way enable AI to understand and appreciate the whole scale of the values, cultural landscapes and knowledge embodied in the human race that is 8 billion in number. AI may be supremely useful in the right circumstances, but that does not make it as intelligent as the human race.

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ROI on AI requires human support

In a scenario where AI use doesn’t begin to deliver ROI for 2 to 4 years, is it better to invest in human resources and develop and grow them over the years? In any case, organisations that do manage to show high ROI on their AI investment are the ones that have realised that a human centric business model works best in an environment where AI expertise is encouraged. The key learning over here is that AI performs best when it empowers people by transforming how they perform work. The focus here is on aiding the human work force to perform better and not on finding ways and means to replace people with technology on account of illogical FOMO felt by business houses around the world, driven by unfounded hype.

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Money Makes the Mare Go

Feeding the AI behemoth with astronomical investment in the hope of future super profits is not tenable, and more and more companies are realising it. Until the time AI comprehensively proves its worth as a viable business proposition for organisations across scale and geography, it makes way more sense for one to trust  and invest in people. That will get them more ROI in the near term, and who knows the long-term future as well. AI has as much chance of making people leave the workforce as the internet has had since its launch years ago. While AI will doubtless make its worth felt more and more, it will only do so with the help of people. There is no other way.

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Who cares about quality and authenticity when fluff is what everybody wants?

 

Illustration generated using OpenAI’s DALL·E via ChatGPT. Concept and prompt by the author.

In an era in which a real estate baron cum reality TV host known for outrageous comments and an absolute absence of scruples is elected the president of the most powerful country in the world and allowed to treat  nations across the globe as a doormat what is the incentive for people to put a premium on quality and authenticity? The advent of the internet age, which was supposed to usher in an age of egalitarianism where everyone was supposed to get a fair chance at achieving success backed only by talent and hard work, has actually enabled mediocrity, nepotism, fakery and plain nonsense to thrive at the cost of what is right, fair, true and genuine. A monstrosity called the algorithm has ensured that venal and corrupt individuals and greedy and rapacious organisations are able to direct people to serve their vested interests without  the latter even realising it.

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People no longer care to read or engage in deep conversations with anyone. Social media has had a decided role in uneducating people. Nobody cares to read a well-written newspaper editorial anymore. In fact, newspapers are closing down right, left and centre. Leading television channels are an arena for deafening slanging matches where not a single coherent argument is made or a convincing conclusion reached. The online media space has its own dedicated niches where people push their agendas safe in their respective echo chambers.

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Education has become a farce, with real estate builders and people with criminal antecedents opening schools, engineering colleges, medical colleges and universities at will, ripping off hundreds of thousands of gullible students and parents. The entrance tests to the educational institutions of repute are often compromised on account of repeated incidents of test-paper leaks. Mountains and forests are merrily destroyed in the name of development, never mind the poisoned rivers and air that are left in their wake.

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Tyrannical world leaders wage economic and real war to wreck a well-established and perfectly functioning world order, replacing it with global anarchy that could lead to economic collapse and anarchy in nations across the global south. Where have the statesmen and stateswomen of the world gone? Why are we allowing morons, goons and uncouth leaders to assume the mantle of leadership, when many of them really need psychiatric care?

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Of course, everybody talks like they crave authenticity. There is all this talk about following your passion and living mindfully. People are asked to share the stories of failure, hardship and redemption. But scratch the surface, and it is all fluff. People are pretentious and deceitful and not who they show themselves to be. Who would have thought that Bill Cosby, the avuncular comedian everyone doted on, would be such a monster? People like Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew, as well as the many worthies named in Epstein Files, holding positions of immense authority, have been shown to have a fleet of clay. Whom can the people look up to for inspiration anymore?

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We may be living in the post-truth world, whatever that might mean, and it's possible that people have always been like this, with the lid coming off what was always the way of the world. However, isn’t there a definite feeling that something is off? Like everybody, the whole human race is more diminished than it used to be in the past.

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Man landed on the Moon in 1969, and it was truly a remarkable feat-the culmination of the rise of humans from the forests and caves of their distant past to truly celestial glory. Come 2026 and they send humans to the Moon only to circle it and not touch down. What did anyone feel about that event? Not even deja vu, it came, and it went.

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We don’t put writers, philosophers and scientists on a pedestal. Instead, we worship social media stars with millions of followers whose claim to fame might be crazy and outlandish antics and the ability to shock decent people on account of their facility with expletives. We have passed the stage of expecting there to be a rebound to a world where honest, hard working, decent and competent people would inevitably make it to the top. They cannot. The system is loaded against them. We have reached critical mass in terms of irretrievably being drawn into a morass of mediocrity, dishonesty, gaslighting, conspicuous consumption, and a false sense of entitlement. Far from nursing a damaged moral compass back to health, the world has thrown it away.

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Will AI replace ghostwriters?

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

 With AI decimating jobs and professions across the board, does ghostwriting have any chance of standing up to the juggernaut? For GenAI technology with its multifarious capabilities, ghostwriting is probably low-hanging fruit when it comes to replacing human beings. That may really be bad news for the thriving ghostwriting industry currently valued at $1.42 billion and projected to reach $2,23 billion by 2030. But are things really that way for ghostwriters, and is it really the end of the road for them? The facts seem to suggest otherwise. Far from damaging the prospects for ghostwriters, digital technology has seen a sharp growth in demand for their services as more and more individuals, organisations, and businesses are communicating more and more with their audiences.

​From businesses seeking to engage and win over their customers and clients with content that speaks to the latter’s needs to thought and opinion leaders seeking to build up their brand image, ghostwriting is seeing a steady increase in demand.  From would- be authors seeking to self-publish to creators and influencers- a whole range of people and organisations would gladly pay for the services rendered by a ghost writer. Prince Harry’s much talked about best sellerSpare was, for instance, ghost written by JR Mochringer, apparently for a $1 million fee.

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The Entry of AI

While there is an undeniable boom in the growth of the ghostwriting industry, is there impending  doom on the horizon in the shape of AI writing tools, making it possible for anyone to churn out any form of written content, almost at will? The thing about using GenAI to write for you is that the quality of output entirely depends on the quality of input. If somebody outsourced writing work to a ghostwriter in the past  because they didn’t possess the required writing skills, then how could they now be expected to provide the ideal brief or set of prompts required to obtain high-quality content? A ghostwriter, on the other hand, is a living flesh-and-bone human being who can have a conversation with his client and draw out what it is that he or she wants to convey through a piece of writing.

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AI-generated content often lacks soul because it is essentially regurgitated, lacking emotional depth and genuine insight. It, therefore, comes across as flat and mechanical, akin to how Schwarzenegger speaks in a mechanical drawl in the Terminator series of movies. Would someone wanting to author a memoir collaborate with AI to bring the story of their life with all its human pain, suffering, angst, joys, victories and achievements or with a fellow empathetic human being, who is also an exquisite wordsmith?

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Humans Respond to Genuine Connection

What AI does often borders on plagiarism, because it does not think originally and simply discerns patterns from large amounts of written content created by others and hammers out some form of text that is neat, well organised, but completely lacking in soul. Human beings forge bonds on a primaeval and instinctive level. There is, perhaps, more chance of someone connecting with a dog or cat than with content created by a machine. When Brutus stabs Caesar in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the latter utters the immortal line, “Et tu Brute, then fall Casesa,” encapsulating a human being’s pain and anguish at the betrayal of someone very close to oneself. In this, you have an example of words touching you deeply. Would AI be able to showcase genuine human pain and pathos with so much heartfelt honesty?

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AI Can Be Unreliable

Unsupervised and unvetted AI-generated content often contains major errors and factual inaccuracies. It can’t always be relied upon to conform to the most ethical practices in terms of complying with copyright issues, as originality is not its strong suit. With so much riding on the content created on behalf of large organisations and institutions, it is best to work with a human professional of high repute, who will deliver exactly what is required.

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Backlash Against AI Content

There is already a  massive backlash against AI writing, with prospective clients explicitly stating their preference for human created content. In fact, many of them use tools to detect the use of AI. Consulting major Deloitte had to recently agree to refund the Australian government a portion of a $440000 consultancy fee after acknowledging that a report delivered by it which contained AI generated content had many serious errors in it.  A horror novel titled Shy Girl by US author Mia Ballard, which was scheduled for publication in the US in the month of April got cancelled on account of concerns that AI had been used to write it.

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Conclusion

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Nobody is denying the fact that AI is a great tool for writers to use and improve their craft. It can help them carry out research, bounce off ideas, help in editing and organising text, gathering information and fact checking. Using it as a wholesale content creator, though, is not a great idea and may lead to grief. As a matter of fact, there is as much chance of ghostwriting being replaced by AI as there is of commercial airlines sacking human pilots and moving en masse to pilotless aircraft. It is just not tenable.

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Did Macaulay unknowingly do us a favour by giving us English?

This image was generated using AI (ChatGPT, OpenAI) based on original content by the author.

Macaulay is a much reviled figure in India and with much justification for his decision to replace traditional Indian education with an English medium education that was Western in its ethos and orientation. His intention may have been to give rise to a class of Indians who were in his words “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, opinions, morals and intellect,”but what it achieved was giving the Indian people the opportunity to understand their oppressors better and ultimately oust them.

Merely teaching the highly intelligent Indians who had a long tradition of assimilating myriad cultural and linguistic influences into their fabric, in English was hardly going to subjugate their minds to the glory of the European races. However, the introduction of the language as a medium of instruction at a time when the star of Europe was on the ascendant, and the continent was leading the world in scientific discoveries acted as a catalyst for Indians to catch up with the West and reclaim their place in the world. It also helped them reevaluate and reconnect with their own past, thanks to the pioneering work of many Western Indologists like Max Mueller.

Besides, it allowed people in different parts of the vast Indian land mass who spoke different languages to receive education in a common language and thereby let them understand each other better. Till today a vast number of Indians from South India talk to their Northern compatriots in English. So the language in that sense helped foster national unity across the nation, from across the North, South, East and West of the country. As a matter fact English has become more than an official language used for education, office work, parliamentary debates and dissemination of news. Not only was the Indian constitution first written in it, the language is spoken across millions of bi-lingual homes in India. As a matter of fact India is home to its own Indian English with its unique peculiarities and eccentricities and is globally recognised as such.

It is not surprising that many of the leading lights of the Indian freedom movement like Dadabhai Naoroji, Gopal Krishan Gokhale, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, BR Ambedkar and many others received an English education, either in India or abroad in England. These were wise and erudite men who were aware of their own glorious heritage and proud of it, but welcomed whatever they could learn from Europe and the West. Far from fawning upon their colonial rulers and blindly following their diktats, they stood up to them and questioned their right to colonize and oppress the lands of others, which ultimately led to the freedom of the country.

The fact that millions of Indians continue to receive their education in English has helped them excel at home in India and countries across the world, rising to the highest possible positions in academics, business, politics and a range of other fields or disciplines. At the same time, the Indian languages have seen a revival and greater use in public life, allowing people to discover the richness of their own culture and civilisation that predates that of the West by millennia. 

Thomas Macaulay may have been a bigoted and ignorant colonialist who held that “a single shelf of a European library was worth the entire native literature of India and Arabia, “ but in insisting that Indians be taught in English, he not only opened a chink in the British armour by letting us know our enemies well enough to oust them, but he also helped India use the knowledge of the language to achieve an unassailable position on the world stage. Besides, Indians made the language their own using it in the way they felt it suited them best. Today, some of the most decorated and awarded writers in the English language are either Indian or of Indian origin. Macaulay would have never imagined in his wildest dreams that one day an English speaking Indian would become the Prime Minister of the UK. So much for unintended consequences.

Why do we desperately need sustainable marketing?

Illustration created with AI using OpenAI tools

 Past marketing endeavours that catered to the philosophy of consuming like one’s life depended on it has brought the world to a stage where ecological degradation caused by unchecked consumerism threatens the very survival of our planet. With our planet’s finite resources fast depleting and finishing before our very eyes, no longer is the high volume consumption template tenable. There is realization that infinite growth with finite resources is a fundamentally flawed concept, doomed to lead us to our destruction.

Business owners and marketers are now aware that producing and marketing without accounting for their impact on the natural resources available to us is something that can’t continue. It can no longer be business as usual, and one has to look at production and marketing with the lens of durability and recycling.

What exactly is Sustainable Marketing?

Sustainable marketing is not about promoting products and services that are deemed sustainable. At its core, it’s about accountability- the physical impact on the environment that any marketing activity entails and the necessity of providing truthful and accurate information about the products and services sought to be promoted.

Economic viability of the sustainable marketing process has to be ensured so that not only do businesses achieve stable long-term growth, but are also able to do so without diminishing the available resources. It is important that sustainable marketing break away from the imagery associated with marketing in the past. Unlike in the past, where the focus was on the product and extolling its features and attributes mattered the most, these days the focus has to shift to showing how a product or service has a stake in the environment, helps make society more equitable, while showing the path to long term sustainable growth.

Benefits of Sustainable Marketing

Sustainable marketing is not a fad that a business needs to indulge in to demonstrate its commitment to environmental causes.  On the contrary, it helps businesses accrue many real benefits. Let us look at what these are-

Helps cut costs

Sustainable marketing ensures that a company uses resources in a rational manner by reducing wastage and putting more efficient processes in place. All of this helps reduce costs and, thereby, save money.

Earning the trust and loyalty of customers

Awareness about climate change and the role of unsustainable business practices on the part of companies has made consumers, especially among the younger generations, prefer buying products from businesses known to be sensitive to such issues. Using sustainable marketing practices can help businesses earn brownie points with today’s customers and earn their loyalty.

Differentiate oneself from the competition

A company that uses sustainable marketing to help sell its products is able to present itself as the better alternative to the competition. Companies that are known to back environmentally friendly practices are able to project a wholesome brand image for their products, allowing themselves to differentiate and distinguish themselves from the competition.

Adopting Sustainable Marketing

Adopting sustainable marketing is the way for all businesses if they are serious about their businesses aligning with the way that the world is heading in this world that seeks to bring itself back from the brink of environmental disaster.

Environmental sustainability should be at the core of the marketing campaign

Your marketing campaign should convey the actual sustainability initiatives undertaken by your business, ranging from how you design and produce the products to the way you deliver them. Making claims that are not backed by what you have not actually implemented is to be scrupulously avoided.

Digital media is the way to go

The digital revolution is a great enabler of sustainable marketing, as one can leverage digital media channels for one’s marketing efforts. You don’t need to travel for events when these can be conducted virtually. However, where ever it is necessary to conduct these physically you can use recyclable and environment friendly materials.

Environment-friendly products and packaging

Talk about the sustainability attributes in the product or service you are offering. It may be a good idea to showcase the fact that the product in question is made from recyclable materials and that your packaging causes minimal damage to the environment. Let environment friendliness be the dominant messaging associated with your product or service.

Spending on sustainable causes

Putting your money where your mouth is is a great example of sustainable marketing. Donating a portion of your business’s profits to a sustainable cause demonstrates a strong commitment to the concept of working towards the greater good of the environment.

Marketing and sales have always had a bad press, and often for justifiable reasons. The fight against climate catastrophe is the ideal time to flip the script and make sustainable marketing a potent ally. That will work out well for everyone, consumers, business people and above all, the environment.