There's an interesting angle that I think could have been explored more in this article, which is that companies have their own persona, and that persona is usu

There's an interesting angle that I think could have been explored more in this article, which is that companies have their own persona, and that persona is usually highly managed. People get degrees to learn how to communicate externally as a company. Companies are highly protective of their persona because it's often closely tied to their brand. Most employees are careful about how they speak publicly, especially when they might be speaking for their employer. Famously a lot of Apple employees would always put "my tweets don't represent the positions of my employer" in their Twitter bios. And when employees do screw up, the company has an escape hatch, they can fire the employee and the world moves on. The products that companies put out into the world are part of that persona/brand too. When you turn on your new iPhone the software experience is exactly as Apple designed it. The heavy curation of the App Store is another example: Apple believes that apps on their store reflect their company and values. And people see it the same way, just look at calls to remove certain apps that have objectionable content (e.g. Parlor). This new wave of generative AI products puts a big wrench in that though because no matter how well you crafted your prompts, you have no control over what the models output. Google put the guardrails in Gemini in place because they were worried that the model would output something that would hurt their brand, and in doing so they just created a new problem that hurt their brand. OpenAI largely got away with this in the beginning because GPT was a technology demo, but the moment it became a product it had to have an opinion, because the company itself would be held responsible for what it output. And unlike an employee you can't just fire your AI model when it screws up and move on. This is going to be tricky for companies to navigate.