Introduction

Businesses are widely known to use various marketing strategies to influence consumers to purchase things. Marketing manipulation is nothing new；businesses study all that they can about potential consumers and strategize how to market products to them. Today, Artificial intelligence(AI)using algorithms to analyze giant quantities of data(or“big data”)has been integrated not only into various aspects of our lives, but also into aspects of business and advertising. Whether you believe AI is a tool that can advance humanity or that AI will be its downfall, it cannot be denied that AI is revolutionary and transcends traditional marketing techniques. The question is thus raised：how do we go from people like Don Draper in Mad Men to AI with regard to understanding and handling consumers? In this book, we examine how brands may use this intelligence to influence our choices, for better or for worse.

The rise of AI can be attributed to the fast pace of our modern times, where traditional myths are collapsing in the Western world. Historically, the power of influence has been derived from institutions of mythic authority such as rulers, politicians, governments, religions and unions. Since the 1990s, the power of these traditional institutions has been crumbling in the Western world. However, when one myth falls, another rises to take its place. Today, brands and companies are replacing our traditional myths. Much like the Caesars of Rome, the heroes of Greek myths, the Khans in medieval Asia or the kings of France and England, brands must have power and represent a myth in order to influence citizens and consumers. However, contrary to their mythical predecessors, companies and brands are neither elected officials nor are they religious prophets. Companies and brands have strength, but not in any traditional sense of authority because they do not have the legitimacy of mythic status. AI will help companies like GAFA and BATX and brands to become such myths.

How can you trust brands the way you do gods or myths when they are selling you a product? The tool employed today for manipulating people is a discrete and smart way of private data collection everywhere on the street, in the of fice, in the subway or even at the beach. Having and making use of personal data means knowing you more than average consumers know themselves. Synthesizing personal information, companies could design the perfect targeted ad and product, influencing consumers to buy more.

According to a report by International Data Corporation(IDC), the revenue of business-related big data skyrocketed from＄122 billion in 2015 to＄189 billion in 2019. For the years 2018 to 2022, the IDC report estimates a compound annual growth rate of 13.2%, which amounts to a revenue of＄274 billion by 2020. In essence, as data is increasingly established as a source of energy, the more data you acquire, the more you can feed your AI programs, the more you can analyze consumers, and the more you can influence their purchasing behavior with targeted advertising.

Google Photo leverages AI to relieve its customers of a tedious task：it automatically labels photos as they are uploaded based on people, location, date, and more, which makes it easy for users to search and find the perfect image. Instead of creating albums, selecting photos ourselves, Google does it for us. It changes our lives as consumers and alters our habits. Moreover, we ourselves collect data from the real world through our photos, our videos, the places we go, etc.

Even Facebook labels profile and cover photos with the user's name and description of the photo's background using its Rosetta , a specific AI tool used on Facebook and Instagram(a brand owned by Facebook). It can read photographed text in menus and street signs, as well as words appearing on clothing and product labels. For example, in the screenshot below, taken from Instagram, we can see how Instagram analyzes every detail contained in our pictures. This screenshot was taken while my Instagram page was loading, before any pictures appeared. For one of the cover pictures, we can read that the picture may contain people sitting indoors and outdoors. Rosetta can reveal that the picture may contain people, smiling, standing up, in the outdoors. With such information, Instagram or Facebook can accumulate greater knowledge of every person. Thus, knowing that in this case a person is smiling in her profile picture and that she is standing outside and that in her cover picture is an outdoor scene of mountains and nature, Facebook's artificial intelligence will understand that this person identifies herself with the outdoors and thus will be able to make a personalized advertisement.

Some users say that they have been micro-targeted with ads for things they spoke about in passing but have not actually searched for online. One couple did an experiment and talked about cat food near their phone(they do not have a cat)to see if the phone was listening to them. A few days later, the couple started getting cat food advertisements. However, big AI brands denied using cellphone microphones to collect information for ads.

In July 2019, VRT NWS, a Belgian news channel, revealed that Google Assistant, the system used for Google Home and Nest Hub, had eavesdropped on many private conversations. Google deals with independent contractors who are experts in the field of voice recognition, and an employee of one of these contractors had provided confidential recordings supporting this claim to VRT NWS. Previously, Google had announced that it uses the collected data in order to improve its Ai-powered voice recognition system and to minimize possible errors in the algorithm. However, the leaked voice recordings included private conversations between identified couples in their bedrooms and included personal and business discussions. This example shows how GAFA can record and analyze your private life through your cellphone, your business decisions, and even your sexual proclivities.

In 2018, Google installed an interactive, talkative lion sculpture in Trafalgar Square, London. The lion asked passersby to give it a word. Upon receiving a word, the lion recited a poem. The buzz that the talking lion created was a huge success. Why did Google do that? How did Google come up with this idea? Did Google do this as an advertisement? Did Google use facial recognition to identify the people who live around or visit Trafalgar Square? Or was this simply a ploy to collect more and more data about consumers in order to design products and advertising more closely tailored to the consumer? The data collected from the sensors on the lion can take many forms and can be correlated to other information：it can be the number of people photographed in Trafalgar Square by a Google car or how many passersby downloaded a Google application in front of the lion, combined and compared with the profile pictures users put on their Gmail accounts. Google can create targeted campaigns because they know where you are and when, and where you are going to be. These strategies are better than the ones it would be able to create using traditional models of communication such as television, radio, billboards, or the press.

Companies that have built their strength on data, by chance or by choice, are now the most valuable companies in the world.

Google made＄116 billion from advertisements targeted to cons umers in 2018.

Marketing techniques to persuade you to buy a product through instruments of deep data collection of personal information, like the Trafalgar Square lion, are discreet and innovative. However, companies have always manipulated consumers path of purchase decision. With the development of technologies and the multiplication of marketing actions involving the acquisition of a giant collection of data, brands use AI to create paths and patterns from past information. AI software then analyzes consumer data in order to form a larger understanding of human behavior. Soon, AI companies will be able to perfectly predict consumer needs and sell you what they want. These predictions are done using a stealth influencing process. While companies and brands have been neither democratically nor theologically elected, but rather chosen for their offer of products and services, they acquire power by moving towards secretive marketing, on the peripheries of invisible propaganda, as described in Tchakhotine's work.

Serge Tchakhotine, who fought against Nazi communications in the 1930s, wanted people to know about the dangers of propaganda and advertising in light of manipulation mechanisms. He rested his theory on the processes and reflexes studied by Pavlov, as well as on a ranking of human inner drives derived from Maslow's pyramid(aggressiveness, material satisfaction, parental affection, etc. ). Typically, the success of propaganda and marketing relies on their ability to associate their subjects with one of the four major human drives(aggressiveness, material satisfaction, sexuality, and love)while keeping the propaganda and marketing unnoticed. The behavior of the individual submitting to these drives unconsciously reproduces what has been dictated to the individual. Tchakhotine underlines the importance of the use of symbols, logos, and marketing for studying different campaigns of political, industrial, or religious propaganda. By understanding human behavior and its deep pulsions such as fear or sex, these systems of control(like secretive marketing)are ef fectively executed under the radar. Making use of these same systems, supercomputers may come to be used against consumers, with potentially catastrophic results. Consider fraud detection：You may not know this, but when you get a phone call from your bank or insurance company asking you if you made a specific purchase, it is because the AI of the insurance company has detected an anomaly in your purchase path, by use of efficient machine learning that has collected a lot of information from your previous transactions. In the future, by operating on your fears, it will be easy for the person on the phone to convince you to buy a new insurance product that is specifically for fraud protection, all with the best intentions in the world.

Humans have two choices when confronted with the approaching new forms of manipulation：

1. They could accept the influence unconsciously, as just another rumble in the background noise of daily life, or

2. In a way similar to how humans have accepted religion, they could consent to big-name companies and brands directing their lives because they will embrace them as the new mythic figures knowing exactly what they want to buy. Recent studies have shown that an unconscious relationship exists between consumers, the brands they love, and the brand creators. This type of relationship, as we will later examine, makes it easier for brands to shape consumers.

The main purpose of this book is to lay bare the current persuasion and possible manipulation of consumers and the domination of marketing by AI through a concise study of five key elements：

(1)the evolution of choice elimination in consumption trends since the beginning of the twentieth century and how companies manage AI in this process；

(2)the formidable boom of AI in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution；

(3)how brands and companies can be focused on hidden marketing and silent data collection with less intrusive tools, giving rise to

(4)the possibility for brands to become the new myths, nations or gods dictating our purchasing choices and, finally, how to escape this process through

(5)being free, being somebody, and making money.

Throughout the book, we will seek to characterize the formation of AI：Is it a progressive step in our ongoing industrial revolution or is it a new step for manipulating consumers? But before all of these issues are addressed, let's delve into the concept of AI, what it is, how it works, and its correlation with the protection of our consumer privacy. 6CXWhFlBkKctj6chhIDOP+Ku7Q6itN/vMb0HVNh3z9oIrROy++KwyzYRYxs22tjv