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

February 2, 2023July 31, 2025 / Tigereye / Leave a comment

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 21^st 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.

“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.

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.

Tiger Tip: Don’t Polarize – The Definition of Polarization, How It Is Used in Media Relations, and Why It Is Bad for Your Business

July 1, 2022 / Tigereye / Leave a comment

Gaslighting

We recently discussed the subject of gaslighting in depth here and wanted to further explore another example of it in the first of what will be many Tiger Tips. You’ll learn about what polarization is, how people use it in media relations, and why it’s bad for your business.

Tiger Tip No. 1: Don’t Do It!

There are various theoretical frameworks upon which public relations professionals may draw as tactics to use in their business. Like other fields, it’s up to the professional to choose the right approach. Sometimes, the approach people use is one of personal preference or business strategy. Other times, the nature of the business dictates their choice or it’s the ethics of the individual.

For example, people who work in the nonprofit sector often choose models of inclusion and unity while people who work in modern politics choose the tactic of polarization to engage with their audience in the public relations sphere. It’s a form of gaslighting.

The purpose of gaslighting and polarization are to gain control over unsuspecting people to convince them of thoughts, feelings, and actions related to your objective. Polarization gives power and control to the operator that uses it and removes the independent decision-making of the recipient. By reducing decisions to one out of two choices, people can be easily pigeonholed and profiled for predictions about their current and future behavior.

What Is Polarization?

Polarization is an aspect of collective behavior theory in social science. It is defined as the activity of forcing people to take sides on an issue and eliminating the middle ground. It’s the process of splitting society into two groups that are at opposite ends of a spectrum, or pole. People are said to be at one polar end or the other of any given issue.

Polarization is a tactic used as a means of gaining control over individuals or groups of people. Its use has increased over the past two decades, especially in the political sphere. Before it was widely used, the approach of unity was more popular. That tactic helps people identify with each other and with issues they share in common by focusing on their commonalities, the fact that people are more alike than different, and how we all share the same civic duty to society when considering critical issues.

People were making great strides in progress until that came to an abrupt halt as polarization’s use became rampant. Now, everyone is very individualistic and separate. Unity is hard to find.

A society that is divided, or polarized, has a low chance of success. Nevertheless, it’s a common go-to for many in politics and the media. Some public relations processionals make use of it on a daily basis to promote their clients to the general public.

How Do People Use Polarization in Media Relations?

Polarization in media relations takes the form of brainwashing, indoctrination, propaganda, and villainizing, to name a few approaches, or tactics. People are told what to think in order to fit in, which creates a gang culture, or mafia rule. In order to be part of the gang, or club, you have to think a certain way no matter how inaccurate it is – remember, gaslighting also deceives the victim about reality. In other words, victims are deceived about the truth. Polarization works through manipulation as a means of control over people by forcing them to choose between two feigned options.

Brainwashing

Brainwashing alters, or controls, the human brain by making use of certain psychological techniques to deceive the victim about reality and convince them of an alternate one. By reducing a person’s ability to think critically or independently, brainwashing allows for the introduction of alternate and unwanted thoughts or ideas that are reflected in attitudes, beliefs, and value systems.

The Manson Family is a prime example of brainwashing in criminal cult behavior, sparing the details of their crimes here. Suffice it to say that Charles Manson led a cult and brainwashed its members into thinking about their victims in a negative way so they would be convinced to murder innocent people. This is an extreme example of brainwashing, but it drives the point home.

A modern example would be the concept of Cancel Culture. Groups of people on the Internet – sometimes real and sometimes trolls – become convinced by a group leader, or influencer, of a certain reality about a person or business. This belief, which is not necessarily based on fact, motivates the group to remove the person from their lives and professional relationships in an aggressive way. Worse, the mob invades their personal lives and negatively impacts their work, home, and relationships in an effort to “cancel,” or erase the person from society. It’s sinister stuff.

Be wary if you find brain washing in public relations as a tactic to polarize you into taking a stance or action out of only two, narrow choices. Usually, there is nuance to every issue and social media is perception. People also make mistakes and learn. Whatever the reason, group think is limited and dangerous. Be wary if anyone takes offense to your line of questioning to see complexity; they are likely using polarization as a tactic against you. It’s disingenuous. They are trying to control you.

Indoctrination

Indoctrination is the process of manipulating and deceiving people with certain attitudes, cognitive strategies, ideas, or professional methodologies to retain long-term control over them. It’s a systemic form of manipulation and gaslighting.

Indoctrination is seen as negative because it removes free will and choice from individuals. Indoctrination imposes ideas and beliefs on people for control. It impacts their ability to make informed decisions, reflect on ideas, choose actions, and establish values. Indoctrination removes decision-making and eliminates choice by inserting the beliefs and values of one person into the cognitive thoughts and values of another person. Similarly, people are shown how to feel about certain topics and persons to polarize them. It’s an “Us” vs. “Them” model.

The example of Charles Manson further illustrates the tactic of indoctrination. He chose his disciples carefully for the qualities he felt would make it easy to deceive them. He then indoctrinated, or taught and trained them, in his extremist cult’s practices and religion. He established a set of cultural norms and values that his followers all held, without getting into the specifics for ethical reasons. The indoctrinated members of his cult held a set of beliefs and behaviors they used to commit their crimes. He removed their ability to make decisions because they followed the path he laid out for them.

Indoctrination is often associated with dogmatic religions and the military, as just a few examples. They use it to keep control over the large bodies of people who are members of their group. There is a polar end of a spectrum that people who use indoctrination fall on (Our Team and Their Team), leaving only two sides to any one issue. Some public relations professionals may indoctrinate the public to their client’s point of view through repeated use of polarized media. This leaves out everyone else in between the two sides of the pole.

Propaganda

Propaganda is used to influence, or persuade, an audience to further an agenda. The agenda is usually not objective, or a different tactic would be used. People who avail themselves of propaganda cherry-pick facts in an effort to portray a narrative. Propaganda establishes a set of beliefs and values in the person subjected to it. Often, propaganda makes use of heavy emotional rhetoric and imagery to invoke strong feelings in a person and persuade them to think and act in certain ways out of fear.

You may have heard about military propaganda ads used by countries at war that motivate citizens to join the army and fight the “Other” side. This is a form of polarization. There’s the good guys and the bad guys, which leads to dehumanization.

In the media, you see propaganda widely used in political ads. There are even personal attacks that contain damaging untruths in these ads. The goal is to persuade the public that the other person is a villain, which is one polar end of the Hero and Villain spectrum.

Vilification

Vilification makes foes out of people. To elaborate, if you vilify a group of people, you identify them as the enemy. They are at one end of the pole and you are at the other end. They are bad and you are good. They are the Villain and you are the Hero. You portray them as evil and wrong; you are right and good, whether true or not.

For example, people with mental illness may be vilified as “less than able” to make their own decisions in a concept known as ableism, which is a form of prejudice against people with disabilities. It is based on the belief that the person controlling someone else is somehow better than them, which is not true. The person with mental illness is vilified if people instill fear and condemnation in others about that person. Britney Spears was vilified by the media and is still trying to repair the damage done to her professional and personal reputation.

Another form of vilifying takes place in political ads. One side shows their opponent as a villain and depicts them as the evil doer to gain your vote, or control your decision-making. There are only two sides, or poles – good vs. evil. The villain isn’t you. It’s always the the other person. In reality, life is a bit more complex than that.

Alternatives to Polarization

Instead, try a different approach. Perform a market analysis to identify gaps and needs that your business is meeting. Share customer satisfaction stories and personal testimonials with the public as part of your PR strategy. Provide information to the public as content marketing and inspire them to support your business or cause as you use the media to deliver your message. Leave your audience with a good feeling in all of your public relations.

Tell your personal story, lay out how your product or service is meeting that need, and set the stage for growth to demonstrate the possibilities. This creates a sense of forward movement people want to be a part of – it keeps things moving and people like that. Then, lead your audience to your call to action as they’re in the right frame of mind. This approach works. It’s the person’s choice, and you’re not controlling them.

If you instill a sense of inspiration and hope in your business and the future, you set the tone for collaboration instead of polarization and fighting. There is no “Us” against “Them.” There is only “We” in the spirit of partnership. People have a choice about whether or not they partner with you, but you’ve made it really hard for them not to do so.

Remember, all human decisions are based on feeling. Create the right feeling for your business as it relates to the public through media, no matter what line of work you’re in or what you do. That leads people to your product and/or service, converts them into customers who refer their family and friends, and engages them for retention in many years to come.

Why is Polarization Bad for Your Business?

Suffice it to say that business ethics is a hot topic among professionals. Individuals must also hold a personal set of ethics to guide their actions in life. Public relations is no different. People have to ask themselves who they want to be and what sort of businesses models they want to support as employees or entrepreneurs.

Unity and inclusion models lead to positive business outcomes and better societies over polarization models. Polarization leads to strife and eternal conflict. If you give people education and the freedom to make their own decisions, they are happier and find their role in life and business. If you share truth with the public and allow for divergent points of view, then you achieve democracy in business and life instead of a virtual civil war and a competitive business model.

Whether within yourself, your business, or society as a whole, Darwinism leads people to fight with each other under a polarization model. Inclusion models don’t polarize people into taking a side while deceiving the other side, which leads to a winner-take-all approach. Inclusion models are win-win.

There are many strengths-based community engagement and business models you can use to promote your business instead of gaslighting and polarization. Do a bit of research and choose the model that feels right to you as a professional and person. Interview prospective public relations professionals if you choose to work with one. Ask them about their approach – their strategies and tactics to media engagement. You will find someone who is a good match for your business. Just let your conscience be your guide. If you manage your own PR, please don’t polarize or gaslight people. There’s always a better way.

Gaslighting: What It Is, What Are the Signs & What You Can Do To Stop It

April 1, 2022 / Tigereye / Leave a comment

Gaslighting: What It Is, What Are the Signs & What You Can Do To Stop ItWhat is Gaslighting?

Gaslighting is no joking matter. We felt it imperative to post this public service announcement about gaslighting on April 1, which is traditionally April Fool’s Day. We’re posting this now because gaslighting is a pattern of behavior intended to fool the person that the perpetrator wants to deceive and control, and it can happen person-to-person or systemically. Yes, people can be gas lit by entire networks of bad actors, whether they are conscious of it or not.

Those who are mostly unaware of their sinister actions would be explained by a type of “Eichmann Effect,” as it’s called in the field of social science, that we will discuss at a later date. To quote Eichmann, “I was merely a cog in the machinery that carried out the directives and the orders of the German Reich.”

Indeed, gaslighting is a tool that is used by people with sinister intentions to disempower and control unsuspecting people and sometimes the perpetrator is unaware of their part in a corrupt system. Most often, people who commit gaslighting know exactly what they are doing.

Think of Britney Spears and how she was treated by the cruel media at the time she was placed in a conservatorship – they beat her up about everything! It was a sick culture. Not everyone in the media treated her poorly mind you, but the majority did. They are the ones who search for stories that exploit people and remain on the attack to this day.

At the time she entered her conservatorship, it felt as though they were driving her mad on purpose for a juicier story, to speak colloquially – and after she had babies! We couldn’t help but wonder how they could ethically harass someone likely suffering from postpartum depression just because she was famous.

Anyone can be a victim of gaslighting. We see it all the time. It’s the source of many songs of inspiration, chasing what is a ragged tiger. To stop gaslighting, knowing what it is and what the signs are make up half the battle; the other half is saving yourself from it.

Gaslighting is a pattern of manipulation intended to make victims trust the perpetrator while questioning their own reality. It is a form of mental and emotional abuse that takes advantage of a person’s natural inclination toward trust and attachment. After the perpetrator instills a deep sense of trust in their victims, they begin the effort to trick and deceive the person of what they know with their own mind, through their own five senses.

Yes, gaslighting is used to gain power and control over people by placing them in a weaker position than the perpetrator. The victim gets lost in a sea of altered reality that in no way reflects the truth of their existence because the perpetrator has absolute and total authority over their surroundings and perceptions. Victims eventually question their sanity as it becomes increasingly more difficult to separate fact from fiction in their worlds.

For example, in the classic film Gaslight from which the term “gaslighting” was derived, a bad actor tricks his wife into thinking she is mad. He convinces her that she stole jewelry by hiding it in her purse. He tells her friends that she is insane. He also alters the gas lights in their house while convincing his wife that they are exactly the same; he makes his wife believe that her observations are all in her head, which causes her to question her own sanity. She doesn’t even believe herself anymore.

The good news is that through awareness, you can break the cycle of gaslighting and remove yourself from the situation. Once you know that there is such a thing as gaslighting and that many people are victims of it daily, you can normalize its existence and see past your circumstances. That way, you can remove yourself from the situation as quickly as possible.

Oftentimes, the gas lighter is in a tremendous position of power and control over your surroundings, so you may need some professional help to remove yourself from the person and situation, especially if that person is a close friend or someone with whom you live. You may even be mired in legal battles to free yourself. But the good news is that you can set yourself free from gaslighting when you know the signs and get help.

If the entire system is against you, document your experiences and seek legal counsel. In short, there are many things you can do to save and protect yourself. For example, we knew a woman who was the victim of domestic violence by her husband, who was a police officer, and he brought the entire force against her. No one would believe her. He convinced them she was a liar. That’s a difficult situation in which to be, especially when there are children involved.

What Are the Signs of Gaslighting?

Two plus two no longer equals four in the mind of the person deceived by gaslighting. In reality, it still does of course but they can no longer believe it. Over time, gaslighting causes a person to question what they hear, see, and feel. The perpetrator afflicting the gaslighting convinces their victims of many false narratives over time after taking actions specifically to deceive the person. They may change something slightly in the environment. Maybe you left a note on your desk and it’s gone now or it’s been moved. You may notice the pattern. The perpetrator may tell you it’s not true, ad infinitum. You begin to question what you know. They may repeat things like:

“It’s all in your head.”

“You’re nuts! That never happened!”

“No one believes you!”

“You can trust me. We’ve known each other forever!”

“Why would I do that?”

“You’re too sensitive!”

“Lighten up!”

“This has been happening a lot. Are you ok?”

Many abusers use gaslighting to control their victims. This is what R. Kelly did while blackmailing them at the same time. He set up his victims and recorded everything. He committed his crimes on a large scale at the systematic level.

The gaslighting itself can happen on a small or large scale. It may be used just to mess with you every now and then at the workplace or home, or it may be used to defraud you of your hard-earned money. It is common to see gaslighting in social situations and regular human affairs. It’s part of the games people play in every day life, which are not ok.

There are many techniques that perpetrators use to gaslight their victims to retain complete and total control over them. Usually, they’re hiding something, like a lifestyle they want to keep secret from their partner or friend. Other times, they wish to conceal the motives of their puppet master, as it were. By keeping you confused and lost, they veil their true intentions.

A few approaches gas lighters use are:

Instilling a sense of trust in the person coupled with guilt
- I love you but you owe me (implicit)
Love bombing
- I love you to the moon and back! (too much and too soon)
Giving with one hand and taking with the other
- I give you so much, why would I take from you?
Pathological lying
- I promise you on my late father’s grave this is true (I would never lie)!
Distorting reality
- That’s not what happened. I can prove it! (disbelief/lying/interrogating)
Withholding information and hiding facts
- That never happened! (omission)
Trivializing circumstances and minimizing
- It’s not a big deal! (when in reality it is according to most people)

There are a host of other techniques gas lighters use to deceive their victims and convince them of a reality that isn’t true to hide their intentions. They exploit your trust in them and your natural instinct to attach to people. Women are often targets because we can sometimes (or oftentimes) defer our own sense of what is right to others through conditioning, but anyone can be a victim. It’s a trap and it’s not your fault.

What Can You Do to Stop Gaslighting?

Once you discover that you are the victim of gaslighting, you can seek help, talk to professionals, and join a support group. There are many other people like you who are victims. You are not alone. There are people who can help remove you from your circumstances, too.

Recovery from gaslighting requires a lot of time and support. You will likely need help to gain back trust. You may have trauma to work through to form a healthy attachment with someone again. If you think this might be you, we suggest you talk to a professional and seek help. It can be difficult to pull yourself from the mire, but with the assistance of others, you can live a perfectly normal life and one with healthy trust and attachment once more.

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