AI and the End of Honest Marketing

> The goal of marketing has always been to create a customer experience that leads to sales. When you think about it, that makes sense; good marketing is an effective way to reach customers who are likely interested in your product or service. What's more, it builds brand loyalty by allowing consumers to experience an emotional connection with your company via high-quality content or products/services that speak directly to their needs as well as their wants and desires."

This is a very very romantic view of marketing. It ignores that marketing is used for deliberately manipulating people's perceptions/politics/culture, creating needs that never existed (for example shaming people into buying "solutions" to things that were never problems), projecting false images of a brand to hide the evils of the people behind it, etc. The idea of marketing producing "high-quality content" is a gross misrepresentation since while there are some amazing works of art created for marketing purposes, most ads are crude and exactly the kind of artless garbage that computers seem very well suited to churning out.

Marketing is manipulation, deception, and control. It corrupts everything that it touches. It seems very strange to see concerns like "Are we just going to be living in some sort of computer simulation where we have no idea whether or not these kinds of things are real? Or worse yet, do we live in a reality where everything we've been told by marketing teams and corporations is actually false" being raised about an industry that was already built on telling lies.

AI is going to replace a lot of people's jobs, but I don't see myself feeling sorry for out of work marketers anytime soon.