AI Can Make Tech CEOs’ Lives Easier — But What About Everyone Else?
A Pattern of Tone-Deaf AI Evangelism
Dazzle AI CEO Marissa Mayer recently became the latest tech leader to face backlash over seemingly out-of-touch comments praising AI’s usefulness. In Mayer’s case, that meant asking an AI tool to help with a school-assigned description of her daughter. For OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, it has meant suggesting parents create personalized podcasts for their kids’ drive to school and declaring that he could not imagine parenting without ChatGPT. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has even suggested it will become increasingly acceptable to meet social and romantic needs through AI.
Are AI Execs Too Disconnected to Build for Normal People?
The pattern led TechCrunch’s Amanda Silberling to ask whether AI executives are simply too out of touch to build products for ordinary people — a question that matters all the more as Anthropic prepares to go public and Wall Street begins losing its appetite for heavy AI spending.
On the latest episode of the Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I spoke with Amanda about why industry leaders can sometimes seem so tone-deaf. Kirsten wondered whether this is more of a marketing problem or a product problem.
Amanda’s answer: “A little bit of both.” She also argued that the tech industry is increasingly pushing a future “where basic human interaction gets more and more optimized out of actually occurring,” adding, “And call me old school, but I think that humans being able to talk to each other is probably a net positive for society.”
Below is a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
The Financial Incentive to Overpromise
Anthony Ha: There’s a lot of societal skepticism about AI — this feeling that the people running these companies don’t have our best interests at heart, that they’re out of touch. So you’d think, “Maybe don’t make statements like that,” because of course people are going to see them very skeptically.
I think [CEOs] are trying to walk a delicate balance. On the one hand, there’s a tremendous financial incentive to make the case that you should use this technology in every aspect of your life. But when you make that case, it often [doesn’t paint] a very appealing picture. In some cases, it’s downright dystopian.
Kirsten Korosec: Anthony, if they took your advice, we’d have nothing to talk about on this show.
But I will say this: there’s this whole idea of ChatGPT and other AI tools making your life easier when it comes to personal relationships. In many of these cases, it just seems to overcomplicate what would be, like, observing your child. That might be hard for some people — the people building these products — and it doesn’t necessarily relate to everyone else out there in the world. It can seem so incredibly disconnected when you see these quotes.
To me, it always comes back to: who are they speaking to? Are there people out there who can relate? Maybe there are.
Amanda Silberling: Other use cases we’ve seen people mention are, l...
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