Fixing AI's Branding Problem + Advice for Anxious Public Speakers

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:15)
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**SPEAKER_1** (0:40)
Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them. That's bull spend, and marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:50)
I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:57)
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**Scott Galloway** (1:16)
Welcome to Office Hours with Prof G. This is the part of the show where we answer your questions about business, big tech, entrepreneurship, and whatever else is on your mind. If you'd like to submit a question for next time, you can send a voice recording to officehourswithprofgmedia.com. Again, that's officehourswithprofgmedia.com, or post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit, and we just might feature it in our next episode. Let's get into it. Our first question comes from Reddit user, Hotsinger4266, who asks, by the way, I've not seen or read these questions, I love your takes on branding and 100% agree on the brand around AI is plummeted for good reason in recent months. Without specifically mentioning a model company, what recommendations would you make to improve the sentiment around AI? Stop asking for bailouts. Say you're going to age gate it. Don't lend your models to character AIs.
Say you're not going to have porn or you're going to age gate porn, maybe cooperate with a great university such as Berkeley, or there's another great university in the Bay Area, University of San Francisco. Get that a little bit of dig at Stanford.
So I would try and, I don't know, get Altman to shut the fuck up. He keeps saying dumb shit.
So I don't know, just try and be good citizens.
I've said that I don't think it's these companies' fault. I think that these companies are doing what they're supposed to be doing. They are doing whatever they can legally to maximize profits or revenue growth and shareholder value, which is all they care about and all they should care about. It's the government's job to regulate them. So I think, so it's not what these companies should do, it's what the government should be doing. In China, 75 percent of the citizens there feel good about AI. In America, it's the opposite, because there's a general sense that they can trust their government there. They put in an age limits, they've put in job protection. So people feel optimistic about AI's upside and aren't worried about the downside. Whereas in the US, we have people including Mr. Wonderful, Kevin O'Leary, who I actually have enjoyed. I've been on a couple of debates with him and I've enjoyed the discourse. He is exactly the wrong person for these data centers. There's a general feel that there's going to be another bailout of these companies who want to hold on to their $800 billion plus valuations despite the fact they're spending against a valuation or spending against a future of demand, which isn't materializing. I would say AI has become this giant bet by the administration and it's gotten so frothy. So far, the indications of AI are, it seems like some people are getting very rich, and all I know is supposedly my electricity bills are going to go up. I think this is more the fault of the government than it is the specific company. Sam Altman has made some stupid tone-deaf statements, but welcome to being a CEO.
But I think it's the externalities of the notion that they haven't positioned it correctly. Because if you think about, I mean, the AI framing is pretty ugly or the accurate framing, and it's the following that these companies are essentially ingesting the entirety of the world's written work.
They are then strip-mining it and selling it back to the people, and they've done this without the consent or compensation of the people whose work they're borrowing or stealing. And then they strip-mine it and sell it back to the people who are about to be laid off because of what AI is doing. That's just not a great narrative. So I think that they should be working with the government to create trust around employment. I think all the catastrophizing they've been doing, this is something they can do, stop catastrophizing and telling, and stop saying this is more powerful than nuclear bombs because if it is, it should be regulated. We wouldn't let Oppenheimer sell bombs into China or into Mexico. Talk about the upside more, and then I just think the senior management here has done a really shitty job. And all of the discussion around the AI job apocalypse from Dario and Sam, so far it's not happening. And also it feels more like a fundraising tactic to justify the token spend, companies looking for efficiencies, which is Latin for layoffs. So some tone deaf statements from the companies, be more concerned proactively about some of the harms. Some of it is unfair. Actually, AI, interesting enough, is a bit of a moderating force. Social media takes people to the polls. What's interesting I find fascinating about AI is it's actually moderating, it creates more centrist. But I think the decline in the brand that is AI is mostly about them getting out over their skis and creating an environment where it feels it's very much a bubble and similar to technology, the future is here, but it's just not evenly distributed. But I think the person who's really fucked up AI, the brand, is the president. By not giving people any sense that it's a fair game, having surrounding all these people at the White House, talks of a bailout, talks of an investment and no regulation. It just feels like here we go again and the government is now a giant bet on AI that's responsible for 93% of GDP growth, 75% of earnings growth. So people think, okay, people are getting rich, but I'm not one of them and my electricity bills are supposedly going to go up. And these individuals don't seem that concerned with the labor force.