Liar's poker

No matter how good your public relations team, they can't fix a lie.

Andrew Carrier

May 26, 2024

Read on to learn why:

① Big Tech can’t afford to be anything but transparent right now.

② The worst thing you can do after being caught lying is bluff.

③ Political pressure and vested interests are delaying BNPL legislation.

④ Wall Street is putting AI to work.

⑤ Business leaders still willing to deliver speeches are a rare breed.

⑥ Londoners are cleverer than most.

⑦ AI-powered search will change the way we use the internet.

What's new

OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman was caught lying this week. Again. Gizmodo has a good summary of Altman’s latest PR debacle.

Sam Altman. Source: Gizmodo, 22 May 2024

In short:

“This month, OpenAI claimed ChatGPT’s voice, Sky, never intended to resemble Scarlett Johansson from Her, causing the award-winning actress to issue a damning public statement and threaten legal action. The voice in question is now taken down. Also this month, two big names in the AI community who led a safety team within OpenAI quit. One of the executives, Jan Leike, said on his way out that OpenAI’s ‘safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products.’ It’s becoming harder and harder to take OpenAI at face value.”
“Firstly, the claim that Sky doesn’t sound like Johansson is literally unbelievable. Gizmodo wrote an article claiming it sounded like the movie Her right after the launch of GPT-4 Omni, as did many other publications. OpenAI executives seemed to jokingly hint at the likeness around the launch. Altman tweeted the word ‘her’ on that day. We all could see what OpenAI was going for.”
“Secondly, Johansson claims Altman approached her twice about voicing ChatGPT’s audio assistant. OpenAI says Sky was a different actor altogether, but the claim strikes many as disingenuous.”

Why it matters

You might think there’s nothing surprising about the CEO of a company that makes lying software, who has already been fired once for lying, lying again. You might be right. But I think this story matters because there are lessons to be drawn from what OpenAI’s board has called Altman’s “inconsistent candour.”

① The first lesson we talked about in the context of Apple a couple of weeks ago: in the age of AI, there is very real fear building up around Big Tech. Technology marketers are now grappling with a challenge financial services marketers have had for decades: overcoming mistrust amongst their audience. And there’s no surer way to break trust than to lie.

② The second is how not to behave when you get caught out - whether it be lying or innocently misrepresenting something. Once the truth comes to light, you have to own it. But, upon being confronted with suggestions that OpenAI had copied Johansson’s voice without permission, Altman flat out denied it. He tried to bluff his way out. This, despite having referenced Johansson’s movie Her, despite having approached her twice for the rights to use her voice. A lie is bad enough but being unable or unwilling to take responsibility for it is irredeemable.

The irony is that, had Altman put his cards on the table, this could have worked out very differently, because hidden somewhere in all the horseshit was a pony: by bringing the company to the attention of a much wider - non AI-savvy - audience, Johansson’s law suit could have ended up being good marketing for OpenAI. If only Altman had admitted his mistake.

What to do about it

Take action

You don’t need me to tell you not to lie. Your mother taught you that years ago.

If there’s action to be taken this week, it’s merely to remember that when things go wrong - it doesn’t have to be as extreme as being caught lying, it could be bad press, customer complaints, nefarious rumours - the best course of action is never to shy away from it, never to bury your head in the sand and hope it goes away, but to get ahead of it.

If you need an example of how to do it, I’ll point you to my friend Ben Clymer and his classy handling this week of a negative article in the Wall Street Journal about the online media business he’s built from the ground up.

Did he cross his fingers and hope the piece wasn’t widely read? Quite the opposite, he took to LinkedIn to share the article with his network - while standing up for his team, thanking them for their hard work, and reminding everyone of the company’s considerable successes and bright future. That’s how leaders handle a problem: they own it.

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Top stories

The other articles that are worthy of your time.

FINANCE

Why buy-now pay-later firms are still waiting for regulation three years on

③ Political pressure and vested interests are delaying BNPL legislation.

“Last summer, the UK government pressed pause on its plans to regulate buy-now pay-later products. Now, insiders say there has been radio silence on when the industry might expect the new rules that will shape its future – with the issue thrown only deeper into turmoil by Rishi Sunak’s move to call a general election on 4 July.”
“Insiders say tension mainly resulted from concerns over whether parts of existing rules that were drawn up half a century ago are fit to regulate online BNPL products. […] Regulators and policymakers have raised concerns over a lack of transparency and affordability checks that could lead to vulnerable consumers unknowingly falling into debt.”
“Analysts have warned that the spectre of regulation poses a major threat to some firms that are already struggling with cost pressures. One BNPL executive tells City A.M. that amid higher interest rates, funding pressure and intense competition, some smaller firms are relying on late repayment fees for a major chunk of their revenue – a model he says ‘would never work in a regulated form’.”

TECHNOLOGY

JPMorgan to give AI training to all new hires

④ Wall Street is putting AI to work.

“JPMorgan is to give AI training to all new employees, as the bank seeks to cement its reputation as an AI powerhouse. […]Company president Daniel Pinto said at the bank’t investor daythat the technology will have a ‘very, very’ big impact on the bank’s 60,000 developers and 80,000 operations and call-center employees.”
“In his April letter to shareholders, JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon likened the arrival of AI to the development of the printing press and the steam engine. ‘In the future, we envision GenAI helping us reimagine entire business workflows,’ wrote Dimon, adding that the technology ‘has the potential to augment virtually every job’.”
“The Wall Street giant now has more than 2,000 AI and machine learning experts and data scientists, helping it to bring in over 400 use cases for the technology in areas such as marketing, fraud and risk. Just this month, the bank announced that it was using OpenAI’s GPT-4 model for a range of thematic investment baskets, identifying keywords associated with a theme before putting them into a natural language processing model that scans news articles to identify companies involved in the area.”

MEDIA & MARKETING

Who’d want to give a commencement speech anymore?

⑤ Business leaders still willing to deliver speeches are a rare breed.

“Speakers have long seen graduation ceremonies as offering something increasingly rare: a stage where a large group of people gather to hear speakers impart wisdom, advice or whatever else they want to talk about. The appeal of being a commencement speaker, however, seems to be waning. Just three Fortune 50 chief executives appear to be commencement speakers this year, as colleges have faced campus protests over the war in Gaza, student arrests and wealthy alumni threatening to break ties with their alma maters over antisemitism.”
“Some executives prefer chats to speeches. The chief executive of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, accepted an honorary Ph.D. at Georgia Tech this year, but did not give a commencement speech. Instead, at a special ceremony in January, he delivered a five-minute speech, left the stage to remove his graduation robes, and returned for a ‘fireside chat’.”
“Will the commencement address as we know it survive? One potential outcome is that the address just becomes boring, as speakers focus on avoiding controversy.”

WILDCARD

Londoners the cleverest people in the world: Latest Oxford Economics study

⑥ Londoners are cleverer than most.

“London’s human capital is second to nowhere in the world, helping the UK’s capital climb to the second spot on Oxford Economics’ latest Global Cities Index. Oxford Economics measured the 1,000 largest cities in the world on five categories: Economics, Human Capital, Quality of Life, Environment, and Governance.”
“Although London lost out to New York in the overall score, the UK’s capital came top on the human capital score, beating Tokyo and Riyadh in second and third place.”
“The consultancy noted this was largely due to the number of universities in London, which helped it achieve one of the highest rates of educational attainment in the world.”

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