At the exchange4media English 40 Under 40 Journalism Conference held in New Delhi on August 13, Shubhranshu Singh, CMO, Tata Motors, author and columnist, provided a fascinating deep dive into Media and Culture in the Age of AI.
Noting that he wasn’t a journalist or politician or ‘anything interesting like that’, Singh began his address by speaking about how his work experiences had informed his journey into the media landscape. “For more than 26 years I have been in direct customer-facing marketing roles. But this presentation has nothing to do with my formal role. As a good marketer, you need to also be constantly a student of the change that impacts the consumer's lives. I think the point has been made earlier that if you are in doubt, follow the consumer. That is usually the north star in any navigation that happens in marketing.”
He noted therefore his presentation is less to do with what's happening in journalism and in the media narrative but more about recognizing the world that we live in. “But before I get there, this is how mankind evolved for about 250,000 years after we became homo sapiens. We were living as a species on the plains of Africa and human life expectancy was miserably short but within the first five to seven years after you became cognizant, everything that happened was finite. Only the sequencing changed. Today I saw a giraffe, then a rhino, then a hippo, then a poisonous weed, tomorrow poisonous weed first, then a hippo, then a chimpanzee and so on. Mankind by evolutionary logic is not wired to encounter change.”
Singh pointed out that over 200,000 years, risk-taking and curiosity have been in terms of evolutionary progression, culled out of the species. “But in the last 200 years, in the last 100 years in the manufacturing world and in the last say 50 years in the domain of accessible technology, change has become bigger than ever in the past. If you are unable to grapple with change or if change has set about but you don't recognize it; it is not your fault. It is a limitation of our species. But you must embrace that change because without change, you will not be able to survive. This is another truth about how mankind is equipped.”
He said we are not multifocal entities and as a species, we are used to being unifocal. “But in the world of accessible internet, in the world of the smartphone, in the world of the algorithmic filter and in the world of artificial general intelligence, we are living in a multifocal world. In science fiction, they show you a room with blue lights where there is a collection of computers and people are sitting commanding the earth. But that's not the way in which the algorithmic world exists. It is so diffused that everybody's data is interacting with everybody else's data. There is no one room. If there was one room, trust me, we would be able to control the world better.”
“But there are many rooms, many algorithms from your electric iron to your refrigerator door to the doorbell that rings with a MyGate application to your Facebook feed to your Spotify day list. Every bit of data about you is talking to every other bit of data and you must therefore learn to live in a multifocal world. Now, AI has become the most perpetual topic I have encountered in the last 18 months.”
Singh noted that people ask about AI like they used to inquire about popular songs, film stars or politics in the past. “But I want to let you know that artificial intelligence is not new. Artificial intelligence has been around practically for our entire lifetime. Because of narrow artificial intelligence, when you type on Microsoft Word and it prompts you for the next word, when you leave your refrigerator door open and it beeps, all of the, when a lift says 10 people have entered: those are all instances of machine learning and artificial intelligence. What is new is artificial general intelligence in the wide sense, in the conversational ability sense. And that is what is giving us goosebumps.”
This was, he said, because human beings, as a species, have placed extraordinary importance on fluency, on ability to speak well. And in fact it is not a characteristic of intelligence, it is just a learned skill. But we think somebody who is having a conversation, then that is wonderful, that is illuminating.
Singh observed that the concept of general intelligence happened almost 20-30 years ago, but it was not commercialized till November 2022 when Chad GPT 2.0 came about. “And then everybody was like, wow, this thing is fabulous. It will change our life. And in the marketing profession, in the journalistic profession, as I keep joking, people are first of all obituary experts. Now print is dead. Now TV is dead. Now life will never be the same. There will be no jobs. Everybody rushes to announce the birth of something new. And before that phenomenon is a toddler, everybody else who is walking the earth is dead and gone.”
Singh went on to talk about the explosion of computing power and capabilities over the last half century pointing out that any phone on the planet today, even the cheapest dumb phone, has more computing power than the entire planet had in July 1969, when man first landed on the moon. And an ordinary washing machine or an electric iron, multi-switch electric iron will have more computing power than NASA had when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon.
“And between 2014 and 2024, 3 billion smartphones have lit up on the planet. We have gone from 1 billion to 4 billion smartphones. 3 billion means 300 crore. If 300 crore times the multiple of what the planet had in 1969 or 70 has come about, how can marketing and media and our everyday lives be the same?”
Singh then went on to expound, in great detail, about the rise of AI and machine learning and how the interplay of algorithms impacted every facet of our lives today.
He also pointed out that last year, for the first time in the world's history, advertising reached $1 trillion. And of that $700 of advertising was purely digital. “If you keep aside TikTok, a couple of other Chinese players, Twitter, which is now X, Snap, aside at $100 billion or thereabouts, $600 billion was divided between largely the Meta ecosystem (which is WhatsApp, Insta, Facebook), and the Google ecosystem, which is primarily Google search, Google programmatic advertising, Google Maps, and so on and so forth. Of this, $250 billion was just Google programmatic advertising. When you type, where can I get coffee in Khan market? And you get a list of links. Those links are not indexed to search by merit. They are indexed to who is paying for that real estate. And $250 billion is a lot of money. So I'm giving you a lot of gyan here, but they're earning $250 billion. So clearly they are winning.”
“So, the popularity, the buzzworthiness, what is significant, what is important, the magic of advertising through digital means is the framing of your attention. You are not only seeing what they have framed for you, you are not seeing what is outside of the frame.”
