$300k to train your own replacement? What a deal!

There I was, checking my email, when lo and behold I got an Indeed job posting that sprained my eye-rolling muscles.

A $300k/year job as the VP of Marketing for an AI platform designed to market restaurants. Loathe though I am to state “read that again” I feel it bears mentioning. 

A VP Marketing role for an AI platform designed to market. 

Tickled with the possibility I could add a scoff to my eye rolls, I clicked the link to read more about this ironic position.

On the second bullet point of the job’s responsibilities, I read the offending line “Drive thought leadership and PR initiatives to raise [company’s] profile in the tech, investor, and restaurant communities.”

Pardon my bluntness, but what the hell is a thought leader? How does one even “drive thought leadership”? 

This is the kind of corporate slaggery (see, I can make shit up too), that makes me long for the zombie apocalypse. My role in said apocalypse will be to kneecap windbags who use designators like “thought leaders” so the rest of us can escape the brain-nibbling hordes. Just so you know where I stand.

If I’m guessing, “drive thought leadership” may roughly translate to “pen LinkedIn posts and hope someone shares it without you asking them to share it” (only thought followers would beg for a like and a share) and “train the AI with your human brain.”

It is my human, paranoid mind that believes this company is looking for a human marketing genius to train an AI on how to market. Breaking it down further, they’re looking for a human to sell everything it knows to an AI that is designed replace other human marketers and, most likely, the human who trained it.

Hence the eyebrow raising salary of $300k a year for a remote VP role. Will you even have that job a full year? Good luck, Chuck.

Secondly, if this AI is as groundbreaking as the corporate fluff words littered throughout the posting suggest… why can’t it market itself? 

I guess we’re still in the phase of AI requiring a human genius to train it to then replace lesser mortals. Comforting.

To be crystal clear, I do not oppose the use of AI. In fact, in full transparency, the first thing I did after rolling my eyes at this job, was to send a few sections of it to my ChatGPT who I have lovingly named “Charolette.” And I asked Charolette, is this job posting ironic as fuck?

Because to me, AI is a useful tool. No doubt. Extremely powerful. So in a way, this blog post is some kind of irony-ception. Using my AI tool to mock someone else needing a human to build up their AI tool to replace humans with AI. 

Exhausting.

But a human is typing every single word here. The way I use ChatGPT is like renting a bulldozer to level a house pad. Rather than using a shovel and a tamper to carry out the same work but in a fraction of the time, saving my back, shoulders and sanity.

In this way, AI helps me organize. It even outlined this very post. I wrote it, I gave it the idea, I told it “these are the points I want to hit” but I took it from there. Charolette didn’t inspire this. I inspired this. To keep with the restaurant theme, I often think of my use of my AI like it’s a bread-maker. I put in the ingredients, I tell it what I want to make, and it carries out the tedious taks as I carry onto the next thing.

That’s because AI, at least right now (big caveat), is a powerful assistant. It can automate output but not originality. Yet. Nor can AI, which has no feelings, no sense of taste in the literal sense of taste buds, predict what people will like. Even honest marketers will tell you they have only educated guesses. The difference is, I can walk into a restaurant and try things out. I can get a real feel for the ambiance (or lack thereof), I can observe the tables around me. 

Now here’s where I get unsettled about this company spending at least $300k a year (if just the first year). Are they hiring someone to market their AI, or to train the AI to market itself? Language like “build frameworks” and “scale content strategies” can often signal: we want your brain to feed our machine.

We may be at the stage of AI development where these companies are hoping humans will reverse-engineer intuition. If they succeed… where does that leave us? 

We cannot stop AI, it’s already here. Technology advances at an exponential rate. My shovel to bulldozer analogy wasn’t a one off. I’m typing my thoughts into a word processor and will then copy and paste it into a blog platform. Rather than, say, etching out each thought into a stone tablet with a chisel. How wonderful that each of our thoughts were formed into sounds that made words with both written and spoken forms. Language. 

We are “Homo sapiens” because we are wise. Our minds, imagination, ability to will certain realities into existence, is what set us apart from other earlier primates. It is one thing to outsource menial tasks, laborious tasks, to our tools (as we have done for millennia), but we are knocking on the door, all of us, of outsourcing our minds as well. 

I’m not prone to doom and gloom, though. There are still areas where AI will faced challenges in surpassing human beings. Or I should say, genius human beings: Timing, context, voice, empathy, vibe. Everything dependent on lived experience in the real world driven by gut checks, emotional responses, and human interactions.

And this is the big problem with a marketing AI tool. Marketing, good marketing at least, is storytelling. You can feed as much data as you want into an Ai, and it can give you patterns. But you still need a human being to understand what story the data is telling you and what story to tell to the people who need to hear it.

I ride horses. All of us who ride horses understand the horse isn’t doing all the work. Much to the chagrin of living room jockeys every four years when the summer Olympics shines on their screens. Given the option, a horse will stand there and eat grass. He is a powerful creature, sure. But his preference is for you to bring him hay, then walk away. No horse will win the three-day event without a rider guiding him. 

That VP role might be quite tempting. Who doesn’t want to make $300k/year with bonuses built in? But I’m not looking to ghostwrite my own extinction. A lot of us aren’t. Machines, our tools, are supposed to make our lives better. Do the things we don’t want to do. 

But telling stories… not one of those things. 

This company posting this job is saying as much, isn’t it? It needs a human being to market it, to tell its story.

I guess they haven’t seen the irony the way I have.