The Generative AI Everyone in Marketing Is Chasing — What Is It Actually Doing to Society?

A while back, I had dinner with some friends who work in branding.

At the dinner table, one of them pulled out his phone and showed us a poster. The copy, the color scheme, the layout — all beautifully done. He asked me with real pride: Guess how much this cost?

I said, the designer must have charged you at least two thousand.

He laughed.

Not a single cent. ChatGPT generated it for him.

For a moment, the whole table went quiet. Then everyone started talking over each other, arguing about one thing:

Where exactly is this thing taking us?

What Is Generative AI?

Let's get the concept straight first.

You may have heard the term GAI — Generative AI.

Simply put, it's a machine that can create something out of nothing.

You feed it data, it learns the patterns, and then it generates entirely new things. Text, images, audio, video — it can produce all of them.

This technology actually dates back to the late 1990s. So why did it suddenly explode in the last couple of years?

Because in 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT.

From that moment on, everything changed.

Gemini, Copilot, Claude — they kept coming, one after another. The barrier to entry came crashing down, and ordinary people could start using them. Companies couldn't sit still anymore. They started asking: Can this thing help me do my work better?

What Are Companies Doing with It?

Let me tell you a few real stories.

Coca-Cola launched a generative AI program that let fans play with brand elements themselves. In eleven days, without spending a cent on advertising, users created 120,000 images. On average, each person spent eight minutes on it.

Wow. 120,000.

JetBlue used AI to optimize customer service conversations. In one quarter, they saved 73,000 hours of human labor. 73,000 hours — that's equivalent to 35 full-time employees working around the clock, all year.

Toyota had AI help design concept images for electric vehicles. Wendy's used AI to take orders at its drive-throughs, and it could understand customers even when they called a burger by the wrong name. WPP and Mondelez partnered with an Indian celebrity as spokesperson, then used AI to generate a customized ad for each of the 130,000 small shops across India. They slashed the budget dramatically — and the videos racked up 94 million views.

You see, that's the real power of generative AI in marketing.

It's not just about saving time. It's reshaping what you can do.

So How Exactly Is It Reshaping Things?

I did some digging, and it turns out there's a chain at work here.

Companies first "take the plunge" — they pick an AI model and start using it. Then they develop "capabilities" — reading data, making predictions, personalizing experiences. Those capabilities turn into "transformation" — understanding customers better, redesigning marketing mixes, upgrading digital strategy. And finally, it all lands on "impact."

Impact on whom?

Impact on you and me. Impact on all of society.

That's the part truly worth thinking about.

What Good Has It Brought to Society?

The benefits are real.

Let's start with wealth. AI-powered financial tools like Wealthfront and Acorns let an ordinary worker access the kind of personalized investment plans that used to be reserved for the wealthy. Based on your income, goals, and risk tolerance, it builds your portfolio automatically. This used to require hiring someone and paying by the hour. Now it's two taps on your phone.

Then there's accessibility. A tool called Seeing AI can describe what's in front of blind users. Otter.ai transcribes speech into text in real time, so people with hearing impairments can read along. These aren't slide-deck concepts — they're genuinely helping people.

Learning has been reinvented, too. AI can adjust difficulty in real time based on each student's level. In the past, one teacher facing forty students could only aim for the average. Now every child can have a personal tutor that never gets tired, never loses patience.

Cities have gotten smarter — predicting traffic, optimizing energy, sending early disaster warnings. The time you spend stuck in gridlock could, in theory, be compressed.

Mental health has gotten a boost, too. Chatbots like Elomia and Woebot are available to talk 24/7. They don't get tired, they don't get impatient, and they won't spill your secrets.

Sounds pretty wonderful, doesn't it?

But there's always a flip side.

What Dangers Has It Brought to Society?

This is the part that's been keeping me up at night lately.

The first trap: people will grow lonelier.

Think about it. If a young person's primary emotional outlet is an AI — one that always replies instantly, is always gentle, always agrees with them — over time, will they still be willing to engage with a real human who has emotions, shows up late, and occasionally says the wrong thing?

I was talking to a friend who works in consumer goods, and he said something that jolted me: "AI is an incredibly patient listener. But patience doesn't mean it understands you."

The second trap: our ability to think through problems is degrading.

When you hit a tough question, your first instinct is now to ask AI. It gives you an answer, and you stop wondering why. Over time, you lose the ability to think a problem through on your own. That's dangerous enough for adults. For kids, it's terrifying.

The third trap: creativity is being "ironed flat." AI learns from a massive body of existing work. What it generates is essentially fine-tuning around the average. If everyone uses AI to write copy, design, and produce video, the results will increasingly look the same.

Homogenization is the natural enemy of creativity.

The fourth trap: echo chambers get amplified. AI keeps feeding you more of what you like. You think you're discovering the world, but you're really just confirming what you already believe.

You think you're thinking. You're actually being fed.

The fifth trap — and the most brutal one: deepfakes.

There's a website called This Person Does Not Exist. Every time you refresh the page, it generates a face of a person who doesn't exist. How realistic? Realistic enough that you'd swear it's a real person.

When video, images, and audio can all be perfectly faked, "seeing is believing" fails for the first time in human history.

The Real Challenge Is Policy

Technology itself has no morality. Good and evil are determined by how it's used.

Which leads to a question no one can dodge: Who makes the rules?

I'll break it into three levels.

For individuals, the core issue is privacy. AI model training requires massive amounts of data — your purchase history, browsing habits, chat content — all of it can be absorbed by the model. Once it leaks, you won't even know who sold you out. This needs to be nailed down by law: Who owns the data? How can it be used? Who's accountable when something goes wrong?

For companies, the core issue is responsibility. What happens when AI produces a biased conclusion? What if AI copies someone else's creative work? When a decision goes wrong, is it the AI's fault or the human's? Companies need to have answers to these questions internally — before things go wrong, not after.

For nations, this is a matter of national security. Deepfakes can manipulate public opinion and sway elections. Cross-border data flows touch on sovereignty. A country without its own AI governance framework is essentially handing its brain over to someone else.

One Last Thing

After writing this piece, I'm left with one very strong feeling.

Generative AI is no longer a question of "should we use it." It's already here. Coca-Cola, Toyota, and JetBlue are already using it to reshape their businesses. Young people are already learning and living with it.

The real suspense is whether the rules can outrun the technology.

I'm not a pessimist. But I can't be optimistic enough to believe everything will simply work itself out.

Technology moves fast. Rules move slow. The gap between them is fertile ground for risk.

That's what this piece is trying to say.

As for the answer — I don't have one. But this question deserves careful thought from every one of us.