Telling Tales of Thinking Machines

History is a graveyard of great products with bad branding. Overhyped, overly complex, or just plain bland—the stories we tell about new technologies can make or break entire industries. At its finest, a compelling story can accelerate a company's upward trajectory; at its worst, it can hinder adoption and dampen public opinion.

Polaroid founder Edwin Land unveiled the world's first instant camera in 1947. At the time, developing photos required darkrooms and days of manual processing, so the idea of taking a photograph and developing it in one quick step was practically magic. But Land did something even more clever that ultimately shaped the product's success. He positioned his invention not as an incremental improvement in photography, but as a true scientific breakthrough. To do so, he invited leading science reporters—not the photography trade press—to tell his story, resulting in widespread positive coverage that launched his research into a scalable commercial product.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT launch couldn’t have been more different from Polaroid’s calculated positioning. Released as a “low key research preview” around Thanksgiving 2022, it quickly went viral and gained a million users in a week. The wildly different launch approaches had one thing in common: a genuinely innovative product that captured the world’s imagination. OpenAI’s recent Super Bowl ad was an interesting full-circle moment. The medium was chosen precisely and the message was clear. AI (and by extension, ChatGPT) was humanity's next big innovation. 

From Polaroid’s instant photography in the late 40s, to OpenAI’s ChatGPT today, the job for tech communicators hasn’t changed: find and communicate magical novelty.

Land aspired to build Polaroid into a business at “the intersection of science and art.” As a tech communications agency, we’re lucky to live at that very intersection. Telling tech stories for 25 years has allowed us to create and communicate our fair share of AI stories, many before it was even officially branded “AI” as it’s known today. AI’s wardrobe changes over the years gave us a front row seat to expert systems, ML, big data, NLP, and much more. Today, the agents are nigh. Tomorrow, maybe your agents will take bits of this blog and add it to your personalized info smoothie.

Data scientist Erik Larsen playfully said, “what we call AI can sometimes be seen as the combination of machine learning and marketing.” Tech journalist Alex Kantrowitz more cynically called this cyclical rebranding the “AI PR Industrial Complex”. When the hype inevitably gets way ahead of reality, people’s claims do the same. As communicators, our job becomes finding the sweet spot where our client's bold vision is tethered to reality and accuracy — without losing the magic. This is especially challenging with the speed of AI progress. Questions like “What is today’s mania missing?” or “What unexpected dots need connecting?” demand new answers on a daily basis. That’s what gets us out of bed in the morning (and sometimes keeps us up at night).

Zooming out, AI progress is really just the latest chapter in our ever-evolving relationship with improving technology. We’re always in a delicate dance of humans shaping machines and machines reshaping what it means to be human. Controlling fire rearchitected our biological ancestors’ lives, primitive rafts made us seafaring and expanded our horizons, the printing press democratized the written word, electricity seized back the night’s darkness, and the internet reshaped our economy and society. Humanity thinks its way to new heights, and then has to grapple with the thinner air.

AI’s immense potential raises big questions. Questions around ensuring bad actors don’t exploit it, encoding fairness in embedded systems, navigating climate challenges as we scale data infrastructure, and rethinking human purpose in a world of thinking machines. Any sufficiently powerful technology is also a geopolitical lightning rod, with significant military implications globally. Exponential change requires us to constantly identify, prioritize, and pursue the unknown. Responsible communication depends on it.

That said, we believe in AI’s promise because we've seen it build upon itself consistently, and because we're eternal optimists. We may well be at David Deutsch’s Beginning of Infinity: on the verge of major unlocks across software, robotics, drug discovery, biomedical engineering, transport, logistics and more that will improve society in incredible ways. OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei have articulated their visions (Altman, Amodei) of this future recently.

I've been telling tech stories for about half a decade. In this brief timeframe, the pace of AI progress has been exhilarating and dizzying. My grandmothers, who are alive and well in India, were born in 1940. The photocopier was cutting-edge tech back then, and the consumer internet was decades away. 

When I step away from the dizziness of the day-to-day announcements, sometimes I wonder about the world my grandkids will live in. What will feel as intuitive and simple as checking your phone? What wondrous inventions will they take for granted? How far will they travel to see loved ones? Will they live on earth? What will a fulfilling life mean to them? I don’t have the answers, but I do have many questions.

Through all the seismic shifts yet to come, there’s one thing we know for sure at LaunchSquad: we’ll be there on the cutting edge, learning, creating, and communicating.

Have an AI story to tell? We'd love to hear it.

#LaunchSquad25

Epilogue: an AI reading list

In case it wasn't clear already, we love this stuff. If you’re looking for ways to be informed about the many different aspects of AI, here are some insightful books:

• The Alignment Problem | Brian Christian – A sweeping and nuanced look at aligning AI with human values, this book offers a great history of the field’s progress while also noting the ethical challenges inherent in making AI systems both highly performant and safe. Required reading for the AI curious.
• The Beginning of Infinity | David Deutsch – Explores the power of knowledge and argues that all scientific progress is fuelled by humanity’s endless search for better explanations. David’s framing of humans as “universal explainers and constructors” is profound. Regularly cited as a favorite book by technologists.
• Brief History of Intelligence | Max Bennett – Traces the evolutionary and neuroscientific origins of intelligence framed around key breakthroughs (steering, reinforcement, simulating, mentalizing, and language). Max argues that understanding the brain’s development is key to creating and coexisting with AI.
• God, Human, Animal, Machine | Meghan O’Gieblyn – What does it mean to be human in the age of AI? A philosophical exploration of how technology, consciousness, and religion intersect, Meghan’s memoir is unique, beautifully written, and deeply thought-provoking.
• Chip War | Chris Miller – A sharp and fast-paced examination of the geopolitical and economic battles over semiconductors that highlights how chips became the most crucial resource of our era. A great read as nations across the globe ramp up their strategic moves around chips and data centers.