Watch for the Cons of Digital Marketing With AI & Take a Lesson from Rod Serling’s Uncle Simon

Watch for the Cons of Digital Marketing with AI & Take a Lesson from Rod Serling’s Uncle Simon

Use of AI in Digital Marketing

In the 21st century, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) is growing to replace people who perform repetitive tasks. As this change occurs, communications specialists must consider the ethics of using artificial intelligence in the digital marketing space as a civic and professional duty. Like any tool, whether it is good or bad depends on how you use it.

In many ways, AI helps streamline systematic processes, like building media lists and scheduling pitches, but anyone who works with journalists can tell you – it’s all about the human touch. And it’s about judgment – that which can’t be replaced by AI – knowing when to pitch, whom to pitch, how to pitch, what to pitch, and so on. That’s good old-fashioned humans at work. However, it sure would help to have AI do some repetitive tasks to save hours of time.

Ethics of AI in Digital Marketing

It is important to explore ethical considerations before acting in business or any pursuit in life. The question of whether or not you should do something is the concern of ethics. In digital marketing and communications, technology must not get too far ahead of human understanding or control of it because there are always unintended consequences.

Should AI evolve unchecked? If so, can you live with the unintended consequences?

On the surface, it would seem to be an age-old concern: society evolves, people get nervous because something important and significant changes their lives, and they question it. In time, they learn to embrace the new when they learn it’s safe, as human evolution and techne are primal needs and instincts. The problem arises when humans embrace techne too soon.

Technology is evolving at a faster rate than humans, who must evolve along with it. However, in many ways, humans seem fairly devolved so primitive biases and tendencies find their way into the technology people develop and use. Ethics controls for that. Some companies have ethics and some don’t. Be aware of this as you consider using AI.

Rod Serling addresses the strife between humans and AI in many episodes of his critically acclaimed television series, The Twilight Zone. An analysis of one relevant episode follows after considering the cons to lay the framework.

Cons of AI in Digital Marketing

The use of AI in every sector and industry is nothing new at this point in human development. The business sector has used AI since the rise of “big data” in the 90s and 00s, which is the age of data collection at a rate too high for people to process. With this comes new concerns, like the invasion of privacy and informed consent, and psychological issues related to addiction and self-image. AI promotes bias, groupthink, and stereotypes, to name a few of its shortcomings. People can’t process information and emotions at the rate they receive them.

AI software is programmed with algorithms designed by humans. All humans have biases, according to social scientists. Therefore, the human or small group of humans programming the technology ingrain their biases into the system.

For example, an AI application for job recruitment called GROW put a glass ceiling on candidates through its software – not on purpose, but due to latent biases from the designer and clients as they misapplied it.

The problem with GROW is that it uses an algorithm to learn about a user’s personality and performance on tasks and tests that are deemed important to employers, without having the research to back up employer use of these traits.

Over time, GROW used the references and connections of people using the platform to recruit the peers of candidates who used the system and were screened as good prospects. By doing this and focusing on a small population of college students, GROW cultivated and rewarded certain character traits in people and penalized other, undesirable personality traits.

A lot of major companies use GROW and continue to use it to this day. Many misuse GROW in their screening process while others use it to screen in candidates – a positive. It’s not all negative, thankfully, and AI can have its uses, but these are some of the cons – stereotyping and discrimination.

As you embrace AI’s use in your media or marketing business, you must ask a few fundamental questions about the ethics of AI in digital marketing, such as:

  • Is it right or wrong to use AI in digital marketing? In what ways do you plan to use it?
  • What are the long-term consequences of certain AI technologies in the digital marketing space and what will be your digital footprint?
  • Is the AI you’re using helping or harming society according to your definition of the greater good?

What’s the answer to these questions? Who knows!

The challenge with ethics is that it’s entirely personal. At Tigereye, systematizing the very thing that we, as a society, worked to undo is unsettling, and that is ending discrimination in the workplace. Misuse of AI risks reversing decades of progress. However, using AI to streamline systematic tasks seems promising.

If you use AI, be careful. Your private client and personal information can get hacked if you’re not cautious, or the AI itself can get jacked and used to prank or gaslight you. Be careful if using any AI features that overwrite a human’s ability to stop the AI from any task through a “kill switch” of sorts.

Case in Point: Uncle Simon

Opening Narration

Dramatis personae: Mr. Simon Polk, a gentleman who has lived out his life in a gleeful rage; and the young lady who’s just beat the hasty retreat is Mr. Polk’s niece, Barbara.  She has lived her life as if during each ensuing hour she had a dentist appointment. There is yet a third member of the company soon to be seen. He now resides in the laboratory and he is the kind of character to be found only in the Twilight Zone.

Barbara confronts Simon the Robot

“Robby the Robot” in The Twilight Zone
Image: IMBD

In an episode of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone television series called Uncle Simon, Simon Polk is an ailing, sadistic scientist who derives great pleasure from causing other people’s emotional pain. His niece, Barbara, has been taking care of him for 25 long and painful years as his only heir. She stays because she wants his inheritance.

Simon invented a robot that he hides in his laboratory and keeps secret from Barbara. When Simon slips and falls after an altercation between the two, Simon dies and his niece inherits his estate under the condition that she watch after his science projects, with one in particular mentioned as needing “special care.”

Barbara finally learns what’s in the lab – a robot Simon named after himself that he designed to learn from its environment – AI. The robot had latently picked up on Simon’s negative behaviors and those behaviors become gradually expressed in the robot until it acts and talks exactly like Simon, insults and all. If only Barbara had the kill switch, but the AI was programmed to take over. She even knocked the robot down to kill it, but it just hobbled around, insulting her.

Robby the Robot and Barbara

Constance Ford and Robby the Robot in The Twilight Zone
Image: IMBD

Similar to how the robot uses latent code it stores from Simon, the scientist, people program their own biases into AI algorithms that cause the AI to learn those biases and perpetuate them as it collects more data. Most don’t do it on purpose, though, as Simon has done. In GROW, the employers introduced bias when they added “client-defined characteristics” in search of “ideal” candidates, and it was likely unintentional. However, don’t let your insatiable desire to grow and expand your business’s capacity through AI cost you in the adverse effects it may bring long-term – case in point, Uncle Simon.

Closing Narration

Dramatis personae, a metal man who’ll go by the name of Simon, whose life as well as his body has been stamped out for him; and the woman who tends to him, the lady Barbara, who’s discovered belatedly that all bad things don’t come to an end, and that once a bed is made, it’s quite necessary that you sleep in it. Tonight’s uncomfortable little exercise in avarice and automatons, from the Twilight Zone.

Copyright© 2025 Tigereye™ – All Rights Reserved.

To “Serve” Man?

To “Serve” Man?

We Come in Peace?

Today, quite by accident, we rewatched an episode of the Twilight Zone called To Serve Man. We’ve been rewatching the series with our children in order to teach them well, and we’ve been viewing the episodes in order. Today, this episode was up. We make a point of rewatching the show every few years to keep its themes fresh in our mind, lest we forget its important lessons. So it was quite the coincidence indeed, given that Thanksgiving is in just a few days and the episode centers around colonization and the evolution of humans, or de-evolution more appropriately. This theme comes up time again in The Twilight Zone and in Rod Serling’s other work, like Planet of the Apes. There are some powerful lessons to be learned there, if you care to listen.

In short, To Serve Man is about colonists who are similar to Christopher Columbus traveling to The New World. In this case, aliens from another sphere travel to a new world, which is Planet Earth. The episode is a classic, known as one of the greatest episodes in television history due to its incredible plot twist and equally powerful message.

Almost everyone on Planet Earth has seen it. If you recall watching it for the first time, you’ll remember feeling your heart drop when you realize that the book, To Serve Man, which was delivered to the humans of earth by aliens called Kanamits, is not what it appears to be at all. In fact, the book ends up being a cookbook with recipes on how to serve man as a dish and not as a public servant since “To Serve Man” can be interpreted in a number of ways.

The Kanamits land on earth with the book in hand and leave it behind after meeting with world leaders to share news of how they come in peace. The earthlings find it and are perplexed by it. The title and text are written in the Kanamit’s language, so cryptologists work to decipher the title, To Serve Man. The humans think the aliens have arrived to help them as public servants just as they said they would, but a few people remain skeptical.

Over time, the Kanamits gain the earthlings’ trust. They offer the humans state-of-the-art technology. They promise to heal the world with their techne and create a regular Garden of Eden on earth. As it turns out, they are lying to the the humans but the people of earth are unaware until it’s too late and their literal goose is cooked. You see, “To Serve Man” can also be taken quite literally, as in serving man as a dish to eat. The Kanamits successfully trick the humans into visiting their home planet where they are well fed and then served as a meal. It’s a brilliant play on words that tricks the humans into their utter demise.

The story is a familiar one unfortunately, much like the history of colonists who came to the Americas with new technology and an empty promise to help the native peoples with it. Indeed, the colonists poisoned the native people during the harvest celebration known as “Thanksgiving.” Talk about kismet in terms of timing. That happens to us a lot.

When the Kanamits first land on earth, the humans are initially skeptical of them and they charge the US military with the task of deciphering the text to determine whether they are friend or foe. Humans from around the world work through the United Nations to understand these alien creatures and they use their own technology to analyze the Kanamits. The humans even give a lie detector test to the Kanamit’s leader, who passes with flying colors.

Never do the humans imagine that they might be anthropomorphizing the Kanamits. No, they don’t question it. Over time, the humans come to trust Kanamits and even agree to visit their planet. In exchange, the Kanamits bring more of their kind to Planet Earth, but the humans never return. Instead, they are imprisoned on the Kanamit’s home planet after being duped to travel there.

Michael Chambers, lead cryptologist and protagonist, is tricked into traveling to the Kanamit’s alien planet before he learns about their true intentions. Chambers is warned by his assistant that the aliens are actually lethal when she deciphers the text and learns the real meaning of “To Serve Man.” Chambers realizes that evolution never changes – whether human or alien – as he worriedly waits to be served as a meal in a prison cell on the alien’s home planet.

No matter how technologically advanced a race may be – whether human or alien – base desires remain. Greed remains. Deceit remains. There will always be the drive to trick, hunt, and conquer in the desperate quest for survival – if one has no morals.

We couldn’t have rewatched this episode at a better time. Coincidences like this always happen to us with the Twilight Zone. Make of that what you will. We’ve decided to write about it in the hope that the message isn’t lost on the world.

Below is a case in point. We last blogged about To Serve Man on March 30, 2021 and it originally aired on March 2, 1962. At the time, we felt it was kismet, too. We just happened to be rewatching this episode then. What a coincidence. Perhaps something is in the ether, some sort of universal truth on which we’re picking up.

That blog post follows, with slight revisions. It’s an analysis of the episode on a much deeper level, as if it couldn’t get any deeper.

Original Post

The Beginning

🎶 [Cue spooky music] 🎶

You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of the imagination. Next stop, The Twilight Zone! 💫

Opening Narration

Respectfully submitted for your perusal – a Kanamit
Height: a little over nine feet.
Weight: in the neighborhood of three hundred and fifty pounds.
Origin: unknown.
Motives?
Therein hangs the tale, for in just a moment, we’re going to ask you to shake hands, figuratively, with a Christopher Columbus from another galaxy and another time. This is the Twilight Zone. 💫

Plot Summary & Analysis

At a United Nations news conference, the Secretary General announces the landing of aliens on earth. An alien known as a “Kanamit” communicates by telepathy to the delegates and journalists. The alien ambassador says its kind will provide humanitarian aid through technology to all peoples of the world if only the people of earth would TRUST them. They promise to end famine and war. They say they will help the earthlings with endless, inexpensive atomic power to meet the world’s needs. They promise a regular Garden of Eden.

The Kanamit, who may also be known as a Candidate (if you listen to the subliminal message very carefully, you’ll hear the resemblance in words), leaves a book called To Serve Man (in Kanamit) behind as it silently exits the press conference without further telepathic comment. Yes, the Kanamits communicate with their minds and do not speak words.

The US assigns a cryptographer to decipher the title. Surely, if earthlings can determine the alien creature’s motives, then they can learn whether to trust them and return to the land of milk and honey only dreamed of in fantasies and Bible stories.

The reluctant and suspicious US team cracks the title of the mysterious book, “To Serve Man.” It seems positive to them, as they ponder the Candidate’s intentions. They believe the Kanamits to some degree now, some more so than others. Over time, they learn to embrace the Kanamits. They set their reservation aside. The leader of the Kanamits even submits to a polygraph test at the request of UN delegates, so trust in the Kanamits is cemented.

The aliens end world hunger and warfare. They provide an abundance of energy. It’s too good to be true. It is important to the Kanamits that the innocent earthlings be willing participants in their own conquest. Eventually, the Kanamits succeed in establishing embassies in EVERY CITY ON EARTH and the humans willingly let them do it.

Now that the basic needs of earth are met, the humans are ready for an adventure. The Kanamits subsequently begin to caravan the willing and curious earthlings by spacecraft to their home planet for a “vacation” in what they claim to be their own Garden of Eden, a land of milk and honey.

Just as the lead cryptologist is boarding their spaceship for a visit, his assistant lets him know that SHE (an important plot point) deciphered the remaining text!

The code breaker then explains the mysterious book’s meaning to her lost comrade as the alien spaceship scoops him away to his fate on the Kanamit’s home planet just before he can break free. He is trapped. They got him. By then, it’s too late as he’s forced into the spaceship against his will. While living in prison on the alien planet, the cryptologist resists cooperating with the Kanamits.

The Kanamit who duped him mocks the imprisoned American while attempting to fatten its prey, and he refuses to eat in protest. His rage is palpable – his despair relatable – and in time he breaks down. The imprisoned cryptologist finally ends his long-term fast in despair and enters a state of hopelessness. At long last, our fallen hero succumbs to his fate and eats his own kind as a broken man, out of surrender. What will be … will be? You see, the Kanamits fed the humans each other to eat. What a metaphor.

As the episode concludes, the cryptologist breaks what is known as the 4th Wall in performance. It’s the invisible, imaginary barrier that separates actors from the audience. It’s a wall rarely broken and when it is the effect is powerful if used correctly. And the protagonist, Michael Chambers, asks the audience:

How about you? You still on Earth, or on the ship with me? Really doesn’t make very much difference, because sooner or later, we’ll all of us be on the menu… all of us.

Closing Narration

The recollections of one Michael Chambers, with appropriate flashbacks and soliloquy. Or, more simply stated, the evolution of man. The cycle of going from dust to dessert. The metamorphosis from being the ruler of a planet to an ingredient in someone’s soup. It’s tonight’s bill of fare from the Twilight Zone. 💫

Conclusion

Mr. Serling begs the viewer to consider the fall of man, from perfection to powerlessness. He demonstrates the cycle of life and the evolution of man – from ashes to ashes, funk to funky. We know Major Tom’s a junkie alright. Just look at the Kanamits. The earthlings receive no real service from the Kanamits, or Candidates as you’ll recall, much like elected candidates and politicians on Planet Earth who cannibalize the public. “Kanamit” and “cannibal” sound similar as well, and that is likely no accident either. The allegory is powerful.

Patty, the assistant to Mr. Chambers – a woman – seems to be the real hero of this tale, but she ran out of time to save the world with her Knowledge. She cracked the code, but no one would listen to her until it was too late. She always had doubt in her mind about the Kanamits, but she was dismissed. Patty eventually played along and even scheduled a trip to visit the alien planet, but she persisted in her quest to crack the code nevertheless. She trusted her intuition but no one trusted her. They trusted the Kanamits instead.

In the Old Testament, Eve’s desire for Knowledge supposedly causes the Fall of Man from his Garden of Eden fantasy. In this story, the female’s insatiable quest for Knowledge would actually save the day and thereby vindicates all Women.  Patty would have been the heroine of this tale if only her instincts had been trusted by Man. However, the tragic cycle of history repeats because a woman speaks but is not heard. Her reservations are ignored and her instincts brushed off. If only the cryptologist had listened to his assistant sooner, they could have saved the world together. Instead, Patty served man. She loyally served her boss and didn’t push him too hard. She deferred her intuition to him. In so doing, the two served no one at all. Instead, they led people to slaughter.

Perhaps women could learn an important lesson from this, too. Serving “Man” helps no one when Man’s motives are impure and they almost always are. Men have been ruling the world for centuries and the net gain to humanity is almost nil.

Trust your instincts above all else and keep your morals about you. The desperate quest for life doesn’t have to come a the expense of someone else’s.

Copyright© 2025 Tigereye™ – All Rights Reserved.