The developers of artificial intelligence warn against their own product. What sounds paradoxical may actually pay off. It doesn't matter which risk is real.
In a few weeks, Donald Trump's policies will be voted on in the midterm elections in the USA. A superlative IPO from the AI giant Anthropic is expected afterwards. Rival OpenAI, on the other hand, has just postponed its IPO, citing the heated debate about the security risks of artificial intelligence (AI). But isn't the ability to wipe out all of humanity the perfect selling point to investors?
It is currently being decided which provider of AI models will win the race. Brand experts see the security warnings as cut-throat competition. How big the risks of the technology actually are remains to be seen. One thing, however, seems certain: While hundreds of companies are founded at the beginning of the development of new products, in the end only one or two remain.
“We are currently experiencing something that we know from the search engine: Google pushed out the other providers until Googling became a verb,” says brand expert Oliver Errichiello ntv.de. “The AI companies are now in a comparable battle over habit, and whoever is the first to appear to us as having no alternative will probably win,” predicts the consultant and professor of brand sociology at Mittweida University.
The tech giants are not harming themselves by warning about themselves, but are doing everything right in terms of branding, as brand expert and consultant Jon Christoph Berndt explains in an interview with ntv.de. The AI expert Jacob Coxon, who triggered the current security debate, emphasized that “this is not a marketing gimmick”. But whether intentional or not, it is ideal advertising. The "real message is that this product is powerful enough to change the world," says Errichiello.
This becomes “the most sophisticated form of the performance promise”. Despite their ambivalent image - "sinister and indispensable at the same time" - the value of these brands lies in the fact that "we can hardly think of an alternative to them."
Fairy tales in the “perverse” fight for attention?
According to Berndt, the appeal of AI models lies in the uncanny. Horror scenarios inspired people: "We've always been on the edge, we want to be afraid at the regulars' table and then secretly be happy that we're doing so well - but for the others it's supposed to be quite dangerous." In any case, attention can only be achieved with negative news.
According to the brand expert, it doesn't matter whether the predictions that AI could, for example, wipe out a billion people are serious. Because in the rapid pace of today's society, people are no longer interested in this later. “Then another digital pig will be driven through the village.”
The population and investors alike need a new fantasy, “new hot shit,” says Berndt. In his opinion, small investors should be cautious. Suspicious stock market bets indicate insider trading under US President Trump - theoretically also conceivable before the AI giant goes public. According to insiders and institutional investors, private share buyers might then only be left with "what our grandmas got 30 years ago when they thought they also needed Telekom shares." After their record high, these lost 90 percent of their value.
In the "war for attention that has become perverse", only those who are strong as a brand and exaggerate their message like the Brothers Grimm, i.e. storytellers, once did, get it. On the other hand, behind the safety warnings, including the call for regulation and slowing down the pace of development, there could also be a strategy to eliminate competition from China, for example, as critics warn. In Berndt's eyes, however, what is more important is who would ultimately regulate this.
Trump has so far rejected supervision and wants to leave it to the developers themselves. If he changes his mind one day, Berndt expects regulators to pursue not only Trump's interests, but also the interests of Elon Musk and the controversial investor and tech billionaire Peter Thiel.
“You shouldn’t expect the warnings to slow down developments,” says Errichiello. “We know from atomic research that everything possible is being done.” The AI companies have achieved “something truly revolutionary”: becoming big within a few years, while even digital brands like Amazon or Airbnb still needed around ten years. "What's at stake now is the political and social sovereignty of interpretation, i.e. the question of who defines the limits of what is possible and who speaks about them."
