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Love the machine

Companies load AI with emotions to evoke sympathy, reduce complexity and gain an audience. Learn how AlphaGo, Salesforce and Kuka do it.

Written by Matthias Rohner

Business | Technology

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August 15, 2020

For a long time, a wider audience knew about AI mainly through cultural recitation, such as books or movies. The dystopian science-fiction theme of ‘robots kill everyone’ is just the most fun variation of it. Such narratives shaped how AI is perceived by the Western public. More recently, concerns around job losses and a future shaped by cold and potentially biased algorithms are adding up to the vague fears. Companies address this skepticism by changing the narrative of AI. They create an emotional sugarcoating that drives a positive perception.

Companies load AI with emotions to achieve three things:

  1. Evoke sympathy
  2. Reduce complexity
  3. Gain audience

Let’s look At AlphaGo, Salesforce and KUKA as three examples how this might work.

AlphaGo: Evoke sympathy

AlphaGo is a computer program developed by DeepMind Technologies. It uses “neural networks . . . of state of-the-art Monte Carlo tree search programs” to play Go, a 2’500 year old Asian board game. To proof the capability of the program, DeepMind organized a best-of-seven series of AlphaGo playing against Lee Sedol, a South Korean Go world-champion and mastermind of the game. The epic battle of man against machine got a huge media coverage. Millions around the globe suffered with Lee Sedol in his struggle to beat a faceless, cold competitor – against which he finally lost.

Interestingly, through the hole event, DeepMind created astonishment and sympathy rather than fear about the capabilities of their AI application. The documentary “Alpha Go. The Movie” is a masterpiece in such storytelling. It does not focus on the AI-mechanics of the program, but puts the humans in the center: The team of enthusiasts creating the program over years, and Lee Sedol struggling with it, but growing personally on this challenge. In this narrative, AlphaGo is a proof of the unique human capability to create something bigger than ourselves. Or said differently: The story about AI turns into a story about humans. This twist allows DeepMind to touch us emotionally, rather than leaving us with a canny feeling of a machine beating a human genius. In the end, the machine is human made, so we’re all brilliant. This goes even further to the point where the machine is described with human-like qualities. During game two, AlphaGo performed „move 37“ – a move only 1 in 10’000 humans would have made (a number reported by AlphaGo itself). Rather than qualifying it as a side-product of a algorithms gone crazy, people commenting the event saw in it a demonstration of creativity and the “mysterious talents of modern artificial intelligence“ (Geordie Wood in Wired.com). By putting the humans in the center, the story about AlphaGo evokes sympathy and astonishment, rather than fear of another area men lost against machine.

DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and Lee in 2016. Google Deepmind. Credits to Business Insider.

Salesforce Einstein: Reduce complexity

In September 2016, the CRM-giant Salesforce launched “Einstein”, claiming that “artificial intelligence is now embedded in the Salesforce Platform, making Salesforce the world’s smartest CRM”. Einstein is a platform concept. Since the launch 2016, Salesforce has added more and more “Einstein”-features in all areas of their platform: Einstein Next best Action, Einstein Prediction Builder, Einstein Bots, and so on. Behind all “Einstein”-features are AI-concepts such as machine learning, natural language processing or computer vision. While the concept is intriguing, the wide range of features and their underlying mechanisms make them potentially confusing and hard to understand. Salesforce has overcome this by giving Einstein a face.

In the opening Keynote of the Salesforce tech-conference Dreamforce 2016, Marc Benioff & Parker Harris introduced Einstein not only as AI-concept. They introduced Einstein also as the Einstein-figure: A cute, Einstein-look-like cartoon that perfectly fits into Salesforce’s unique Corporate Identity. Since then, Salesforce has constantly cultivated the narrative that “Einstein helps you”, and that life gets better “thanks to Einstein”. This went up to the point where the Einstein-figure appears within the Salesforce User interface. As the story goes, everything labeled as “Einstein” is clever, precious help thanks to this little nice, helpful fellow with the white hair. This reduces the complexity of an AI-platform down to the Einstein-cartoon: Wherever it appears, something clever and helpful must be happening. Einstein as likable cartoon is far more understandable than machine learning. Salesforce doesn’t explain the complexity of their AI-platform, they rather reduce it to an emotionally loaded figure as a brand in itself.

Salesforce Einstein – reduce AI complexity to a white cartoon figure. Credits to Salesforce.

KUKA robotics: Gain the audience

KUKA is a German-based manufacturer of industrial robots and solutions for factory automation. It got some media interest when Chinese owned Midea corporation took over KUKA in 2016, causing fear of technology drain from Germany to China. KUKA also became known as one of the robots supplier for Tesla factories.

In 2014, KUKA released a notable video of German table tennis world champion Timo Boll playing against a KUKA robot. While it was quickly discovered as fake and created some skeptical reaction from robot fans, it set the stage for a new way communication around robots – with more than 12 Million views on YouTube. The approach was taken further, for example in the “Robots vs Music” video with Nigel Stanford, earning more than 17 Million views. Still a highly polished videos, the robots move more realistically, and form an amazing scenery of music creation. Next to such professional videos, KUKA also took an ironic turn and collaborated with Simone Giertz, a “robotics enthusiast” with 2.3 Million subscribers on YouTube. KUKA provided her with an industrial robot arm, and let her play with it – which she turns into “2000 ugly holiday cards”-video. This series of KUKA videos shows a new way to communicate about robot capabilities. They range from being a bit over the top, to really cool, to fun – reaching far beyond 30 Million viewers. It’s a way of communication also cultivated by Boston Dynamics and their videos on Spot and Atlas. Although their footage is more looking like a quick cast done by an engineer with his smartphone, both KUKA and Boston Dynamics use a new communication approach. They gain a wider audience and raise attention by showing their products in an emotional, unexpected way – leaving their audience with the desire to see and explore more.

Scene from “Robots vs Music”. Credits to this behind-the-scene story to Shahir Daud.

Now what?

In the end, it comes down to communication. It’s along standing Marketing concept not to communicate features, but benefits. And more, not to communicate features, but wrap them up into stories and emotions. Emotions stick, and change perception. In the field of AI, where terminology is hyped and confusing, and skepticism about cold, faceless machines is real, sugarcoating AI with emotions turns the story. Where do you have an AI feature in a product you market and sell? Turn it into an emotional story to evoke sympathy, reduce complexity, and gain an audience.

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