How do we sell the public on the wonders of AI? You might foolishly think that we need to inform them of its incredible advantages or something. Ha!
The paper “Lower Artificial Intelligence Literacy Predicts Greater AI Receptivity” finds the opposite — you want to target “lower AI literacy.” [Sage Journals, paywalled; PsyArXiv, full preprint]
You need suckers who think AI is effectively magic:
… people with lower AI literacy perceive AI to be more magical, and thus experience greater feelings of awe when thinking about AI completing tasks, which explain their greater receptivity towards using AI-based products and services.
AI marketing is 100% about whether the sucker is sufficiently wowed by an impressive demo. They need to see it as “magical.” They need “feelings of awe” at the AI sufficiently imitating a human.
The authors, three marketing professors, note that the “experience of awe” was what previously worked, to the extent it worked at all, to promote virtual reality and virtual assistants.
We can see how magical AI promotion works in practice with the recent UK AI action plan, which is entirely constructed on assuming LLMs are magic.
Your first task: fake a personality. Give the sucker something they can anthropomorphise. What the AI-illiterate want more than anything is their plastic pal who’s fun to be with.
Whatever you do, don’t fall into the trap of explaining AI:
Additionally, efforts to demystify AI may inadvertently reduce its appeal.
