Market Research Archive - Market & Investment Research

Successful Pricing and Willingness to Pay

29. April 2026Johannes WinterhalterLeave a comment

how to make Customers pay the Price they like to pay

Successful pricing is about over-charging and loosing customers, quite often loosing the complete business in competitive markets. Firms who apply price discrimination based on willingness to pay will successfully make customers happy by offereng product-price combinatons they like and are a good fit for their needs.

Pricing can be easy, and it can be one of the most complicated things in management. We need to know what the customer wants, where his level of acceptance for a price is, if we can move this frame, or if we leave money on the table for undercharging.

Successful pricing implies having a product for everybody the seller wants to have in his client portfolio. Tries to raise revenue by changing prices have to be in a way that customers do not loose trust into the enterprise, they still have to see value in subscribing or buying.

When we think about ordering a service and have some information about offers and a clear picture what we want, we have a Latitude of Acceptance of prices in mind. WTP is Willingness to pay for a service or product, and we may need to re-anchor the frame.

Price confidence is not about believing in your value; it’s about having the data to prove the client’s risk for not buying is greater than your fee.

For thoughtful analyzing and presenting the connections the Assimilation-Contrast-Theory is useful. It uses the level of price acceptance by the customer, and tells the seller where he is.

The Problem: Weak Anchors

Many sellers with problems in having a good pricing structure default to weak, external anchors:

Competitor Prices (External Anchor): Easy to find, but instantly anchors the WTP low, leading to sub-optimal pricing.
Trade Association Guidelines (External Anchor): Provides safety, but ignores the consultant’s unique value and capacity.
What the client paid for similar projects before (Internal Anchor)
The own beliefs about the worth of the product.

These weak anchors by clients result in an unknown Willingness-to-Buy (WTB) and fear of the Pricing Whiplash on the suppliers side – a wild haggling with prices without foundation. This is if an originally called price is too high or too low, and the seller needs to recalibrate his prices without changing the offer fast. This is the fastest way to loose clients trust.

The Cost of Not Buying, Anchoring It and Sharing – We may focus on the Cost-of-not buying. When we have this, we have the strongest argument we can get. The latitude of acceptance for the client is drawn by the clients’share of the cost of not buying. Fortunately identifying the cost of not buying is not rocket science. I do not want to go into details there because it differs between for example lawyers, hairdressers, graphic designers, coaches and real estate agents.y

Lead Magnets are dead or more a Cargo Cult for Consultants?

8. January 2026Johannes WinterhalterLeave a comment

My Artificial Intelligence told me a few months ago: your website about pricing has no Lead Magnet. You need a PDF with a checklist for download, in exchange for an e-mail. IOnce I have the e-mail of the downloader, I can send her or him newsletters and sales mails, until the breakpoint of 8 to 12 contacts is reached. Then the prospect will buy. I myself thought lead magnets are dead, looking at all the bad content from other websites.

The Marketing Myth

Sellers of attention want to make us believe that every seller has to be on top of the attention of many people for an extended time. If not on top, they will buy elsewhere. This permanent attention costs a lot of money, and what is if the targeted group is quite small and the consultant sells not to be in need attention? That is the case for me as a pricing and market reseach consultant.

Lets look into this marketing myth and look there the Cargo Cult analogy is. Cargo Cults emerged after World War II. Islanders on some remote Pacific Islands, who were deeply impressed by goods the US Army left while their presence, tried to attract the “Cargo” again with ritualistic wooden imitations of airport technology. The marketing world is full of marketing analogies to the bamboo antennas and wooden control towers used in Cargo Cults. They are ritualistic imitations of a process that once worked, performed by people who do not understand why it worked.

Here is the breakdown of why modern Lead Magnets are a Cargo Cult, and how to tell the difference between a “ritual” and actual value engineering.

The Anatomy of the Cargo Cult

The term “Cargo Cult” comes from Pacific islanders who, after WWII, built fake airstrips to summon the American planes that brought supplies (“cargo”). They replicated the form (runways, towers, headsets) but lacked the mechanism (global logistics, radio waves, commerce).

In modern marketing, we see the exact same mimicry:

The Bamboo Control Tower: This is the generic Landing Page. It looks like a functional page—it has a headline, a hero image, and a submit button. But it connects to nothing of substance.
The Coconut Headset: This is the “Ultimate Guide to [X]” PDF. It mimics the shape of value (it’s a document, it has 10 pages), but it contains no actual insight, only fluff or ChatGPT-generated common sense.
The Prayer: The belief that if we simply perform the ritual of “putting up a gate,” leads (the Cargo) will naturally arrive and convert into sales.

Why the “Planes” Don’t Land and Lead Magnets are dead.

The original lead magnet strategy (pioneered by direct response marketers decades ago) worked because of a psychological mechanism called The Value Exchange.

The mechanism requires that the value of the information provided is greater than the “cost” of the user giving up their privacy (email address).

Today, the market is flooded with low-quality magnets. The “cost” of giving an email is high (spam risk), and the perceived value of a generic “Top 10 Tips” PDF is near zero. Marketers are building the airstrip, but they have forgotten that the planes only land if there is a reason to land.

The “Ritual” vs. The “Engineering”

You can spot the difference by looking at the intent behind the creation.

The Cargo Cult (Ritual)	The Engineer (Strategy)
“I need a lead magnet.”	“My customer has a specific gap.”
Creates a PDF because “that’s what you do.”	Creates a tool available on request of recommendation. This might solve a problem.
Title: “The Ultimate Guide to…”	Title: “Tool to measure possible vulnerability and improvements …”
Goal: Get the email address.	Goal: Earn trust by demonstrating competence and do the first step for solving the problem.
Result: User downloads, ignores, unsubscribes.	Result: User reads, does the first step, gets a win, respects the author.

When is a Lead Magnet not a Cargo Cult?

A lead magnet is legitimate engineering when it is a Utility.

Instead of a passive document (which users just hoard and never read), effective magnets are often active tools or specific assets that save the user time immediately.

Cult: “Whitepaper on Pricing or Data Security.” (Boring, generic, likely unread).
Utility: “Vulnerability Scanner for your pricing methods.” (Runs once, gives a result, proves expertise).

Summary

If you are creating a lead magnet because you read a blog post saying “you need a funnel,” for harvesting e-mail adresses which can be further hammered by sending generic newsletters, you are in the Cargo Cult. You are waving flags at an empty sky.

If you are creating a lead magnet because you have identified a painful splinter in your customer’s finger and you are offering the exact pair of tweezers to pull it out—that is marketing.

Pricing in the coffee market – how can it fluctuate so much?

3. January 2026Johannes WinterhalterLeave a comment

From 12 €/kg to 22 €/kg on the grocery shelf in less than one year

I have clients requesting why raw coffee is so expensive compared to four years ago, when people were at home and drank coffee all the time. Looking at the grocery shelf I could see the same coffee climbing from 14 € per kilogram to 22 € and then going back to 12 €/Kilogram for a special offer.

To answer my clients, I had to look past the grocery shelf and into the exchanges where prices are determined by the ‘Logistics of Time’—speculative contracts that bet on stories like climate change rather than the stable harvest cycle shown in my graph.

The prices for coffee beans – standard arabica – are quite volatile and not always justified. The prices are determined on exchange and it is possible to buy and sell contracts for future coffee and for difference in prices (CTDs). CTDS are not listed in the number of sold bags. Bags are a standard unit for coffee and about 60 kg. On its way from raw coffee to the grocery shelf the coffee goes through a roastery and looses about 20% of its weight. That tells that a seller needs at least 2-2,5 times the raw coffee price at the shelf to cover roasting, taxes, packaging, transporting and selling costs.

Year	Approx. Price (€/kg)	Forensic Context
2011	€4.25	Peak volatility; high logistics and supply chain friction.
2013	€2.32	Prices reaching a bottom level.
2018	€2.50	Strong supply surplus (the “186-million-bag” pressure).
2021	€3.82	Post-pandemic logistics “Noise” and supply chain shifts.
2024	€4.80+	Current volatility requiring Resilient Pricing to protect margins.
2025	€ 7.55	Stabilizing on high levels, futures are getting slowly cheaper

I have a graph which includes harvested coffee beans and prices:

On the right side there is the price, which reached more than 8 € per Kilogram, and on the left side and in the light blue bars there is the amount harvested in the year, epressed in bags per month. The price for coffee fluctuated much more than the amount of harvested beans.

Would climate change make coffee more expensive or disappear

On January 24th 2024 the Economist, one of the leading journals for political economy wrote:

“But global warming threatens the world’s coffee supply. Temperatures are rising and rainfall patterns shifting across South America, central Africa and South-East Asia, where most of the world’s coffee is grown. By the end of the century between 35% and 75% of the coffee-growing land in Brazil, the world’s biggest producer, could be unusable, according to a recent paper published in Science of the Total Environment by Cássia Gabriele Dias, an agricultural engineer at the Federal University of Itajubá, in Brazil.”

The reports in many other journals and newspapers pointed in the same direction. Coffee drinkers are expected to stay with coffee and paying higher prices for a scarce good, not moving to beer, wine or tea.

How to make money with betting on raising or falling prices

To provide a Fact-Based Foundation for your coffee article, we can Reverse Engineer a classic futures trade. In the coffee market, speculation isn’t about the physical beans in a sack; it’s about the “Logistics of Time.”

Here is a comprehensible example of Short Selling—the strategy used when a speculator believes the price is currently anchored too high and will drop.

About Climate Change: I know that climate change is real. The only thing to discuss is how fast we will notice and what to do to live with it.

The Scenario: The “Climate Change fast” Hallucination

Physical Reality: It is July in Brazil. A rumor of a “Climate Change fast” hits the market.
The Reaction: Prices spike to $2.50/lb because of fear (Noise).
Your Analysis: You look at the weather data and see the “Climate Change fast” didn’t actually hit the main growing regions. You realize the $2.50 price is a “Data Hallucination.”

The Move: Short Selling (Selling what you don’t own)

The Contract: You “sell” 1 contract (37,500 lbs of Arabica) at the current high price of $2.50/lb.
- Total Value: $93,750
The Wait: Two weeks later, the market realizes the “Climate Change fast” was a false alarm. The price drops back to the $2.00/lb equilibrium.
The Cover: You “buy back” the contract at $2.00/lb to close your position.
- Cost to buy back: $75,000
The “Bacon” (Profit): The difference stays in your pocket.
- $18,750 Profit (minus transaction fees).

Most coffee is traded by direct contract, sometimes long-term, between buyer and seller. Many contracts have the exchange price as anchor.

Here is a graph of the coffee traded and the prices for 2024 and 2025:

The Verdict: Speculation is just a bet on which “Story” will come true.

The following graph shows the amount of traded coffee and prices. While prices went up on a regular base, there was much more coffee traded than today – in the first chapter we saw that the real harvest was only about 5% less than in the years before and is expected to grow about 8% compared to 2018.

How prices stayed high after the end of speculation

The graph shows that at the time the coffee prices reached a certain level speculative demand collapsed. It was too dangerous for speculants.

Coffee prices and Amount of traded coffee

How Pushy E-Mail-Marketing Destroys Trust

2. December 2025Johannes WinterhalterLeave a comment

There is a fundamental flaw in common recipes for E-Mail marketing that destroys trust.
Many E-Mail-Marketing services suggest sending a cadence of 8-12 emails until the customer finally buys.
What if the recipient bought the product just before and does not need one more for months or years? Or just does not need the offered product right now or has a good relationship to another supplier?

If an enterprise whose product I’m not interested in sends me 8-12 emails, I mark them as spam and never buy anything from them. They are marked as pushy spammers and have actively destroyed their capital: Trust.

The Misalignment of Funnels

: The reason companies send 8–12 emails is because they are using a Commodity Sales Funnel (high volume/push) for a product that is often not a commodity (their unique service). The assumption is that low frequency equals lack of interest in selling on the sellers side.

For me, as a Strategic Analyst, constant “hammering” is not marketing—it is a destruction of capital.
The cost of that friction is paid by the marketer: I and many others hit unsubscribe or adjust my spam filter. The company spent money to acquire my address and then sent messages that actively drove me away.
They paid a Cost of Friction that was higher than the value of the potential sale. The Expert’s Rule:
You cannot build a high-value relationship with low-value tactics. If your solution is not a commodity for daily use, your sales funnel shouldn’t be either. You must attract, not hammer.

What Your Spreadsheet Can’t Tell You: The Hidden Financial Value of Human Conversation

19. November 2025Johannes WinterhalterLeave a comment

If a customer walks out of your store without buying, looking at the security camera footage won’t tell you why. You can analyze the video (Data) all day, but you will never know if they left because the price was too high, or because the music was too loud.

To find out, you have to run out to the parking lot and ask them.

In the corporate world, we rely heavily on ‘Security Camera’ data—web tracking, AI analysis, and big spreadsheets. These tools are excellent at telling us what happened. But they are terrible at telling us why.

Here is why the most profitable companies still invest in human conversations, and how you can use them to fix your pricing strategy.

AI is a Mirror, Not a Window. AI can only tell you what customers have said in the past. It cannot tell you what they would pay for a new, innovative product. That requires a human “Store Owner” intuition.

The store owner talked to people – he or she never missed the value of human conversation.

How to make qualitative interviews worth the effort

Qualitative Interviews done by a good interviewer who makes the interviewees talk in the right direction gives direct access to the thoughts of our clients and target groups. This includes thoughts which do not exist in a written language.

The Cost of Not Knowing

Compare the 300 € interview cost to the cost of launching a product with the wrong price. “Is it expensive to pay 300 € to find out your customers would have paid 20% more? No. That 300 € just made you 20.000 €.

This additional publicity pays for a part of the survey. The other one is additional sales following an improved strategy.

Stupid interviewers are a no-go

For best quality of interviews the interviewer has to dive into the world of the interviewed person. The interviewer has to direct the interview and add questions if necessary. This requires a lot of experience and knowledge for the interviewer. Hiring a random person without knowledge is the first step to disaster. Less experienced interviewers need the first interviews in a project for training, experienced interviewers do not need that. They can relate to previous experiences

References

This article is based on about 20 years experience with qualitative interviews and the usage of some form of artificial intelligence since 1992.

The Simplest Sales Secret: Why “Eating Your Own Dog Food” Beats Every Sophisticated Strategy.

3. November 2025Johannes WinterhalterLeave a comment

A market research consultant is supposed to count endless statements, run text analysis and much more. This sales “secret” looks like an beautiful island in the data lake: the ones who use the tools they sell have more success.

Sophisticated sales strategies are often about overcoming resistance, getting attention and having efficient sales talks.

Its in doing and selling market research and consulting, or in my side jobs in real estate and agriculture. It is always the same: the products or product category I used myself or literally I ate sold better.

In this article I talk about EYOD in general and its implications, at the end I discuss the implementation in to Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) sales.

Numbers That Support the Eating Your Own Dogfood Strategy

The statistics fall into three categories: Product Quality, Sales Productivity, and Customer Trust.

1. Enhanced Product Quality & Cost Savings (The “Proof” Part)

The primary result of EYOD is a better product, which is a prerequisite for simple sales.

Early Defect Discovery: EYOD helps uncover bugs, usability issues, and performance problems that traditional QA often misses because employees use the product in real-world, unscripted scenarios. This prevents embarrassing sales demos and post-launch failures.
Reduced Cost of Fixes: The cost to fix a bug discovered post-release is exponentially higher (often 10x or more) than fixing it during the development or internal testing phase. EYOD shifts detection left, saving significant time and money.
Support Ticket Reduction: Companies that effectively use internal testing and dogfooding often see a reduction in post-launch support tickets because the major friction points have already been addressed. This frees up support to focus on sales-related questions.

2. Improved Sales Productivity & Confidence

The sales team is a huge beneficiary of EYOD.

Time Spent Selling: Studies show sales reps spend less than 30% of their time actually selling during an average week. The rest is often spent on administrative work, data entry, or research.
- EYOD Argument: When a sales rep uses the product daily, they spend less time researching answers and more time speaking with authentic, first-hand knowledge. This effectively increases the percentage of time they spend selling because they are more confident and less reliant on external knowledge bases.
- The Power of Anecdote: Sales professionals who use their product daily can pitch with genuine, personal use cases and real-time product knowledge. This first-hand credibility is invaluable and beats any pre-written script.
- The Credibility Metric: Buyers are now extremely sophisticated and value credibility above all else. Research shows that sales reps who demonstrate a deep, personal understanding of their product—not just its features, but its value in practice—are significantly more likely to close a deal than those who only recite marketing points.

3. Customer Trust and Loyalty (The “Simple Sales” Part)

Simple sales are about trust. EYOD is the ultimate trust signal.

Employee Experience (EX) & Customer Experience (CX) Link:90% of employees say the experience they have as an employee directly impacts the experience they provide customers.
- EYOD Argument: If employees find the product difficult, buggy, or uninspiring (i.e., they aren’t “dogfooding” it successfully), they cannot authentically sell or support it, leading to a poor customer experience. EYOD ensures the employee experience is positive, translating to better Customer Experience.
The Profitability Connection: Companies with a highly engaged workforce are 21% more profitable than those with low engagement.
- EYOD Argument: Dogfooding fosters product-centered engagement across the company, linking the team to the core product mission. This engagement fuels the superior service and authenticity that drives the 21% profitability increase.

That is a perfect strategic pivot for your consulting message. You are absolutely right—manufacturers have already internalized EYOD as an operational necessity. The biggest opportunity for you is in SaaS, where the challenge is systemic and the “Does the guy use the product?” question is a critical sales filter.

Here is a revised, high-impact section you can add to your article to specifically target the SaaS audience and position your consulting services:

The SaaS Blind Spot: When EYOD Becomes a Strategy

You’ve identified the core problem: while using your own product is an operational given for a farmer or manufacturer, it’s a strategic choice (and failure point) for most SaaS companies.

The SaaS Credibility Gap

For a B2B SaaS buyer, the market is overwhelming, and every vendor promises efficiency. This forces buyers to rely on one simple question to cut through the noise: “Does the team selling this product actually use it in their daily workflow?”

Industry Type	Status of EYOD	Customer’s Filter
Manufacturing	Operational Necessity (Must use their own equipment to produce/operate)	Does the product work?
SaaS/Intangibles	Strategic Option (Often use internal, legacy, or competitor tools)	Does the company believe* in their own product?*

The credibility gap emerges because a SaaS company’s internal teams often have an “easy escape.” If their product (e.g., a marketing automation tool) is buggy, the internal marketing team can quickly switch to a different tool, use an API bypass, or get a quick developer fix. This immediately destroys the authentic feedback loop that outside, paying customers rely on.

My Consulting Value: Enforcing Authentic Friction

My consulting service is not about telling you to use the product; it’s about scientifically structuring the process to ensure they experience the same friction their customers do.

This involves establishing a rigorous, company-wide “Forced Use” framework that answers complex questions:

Which teams must use which features to fully replicate a customer journey?
How is the feedback quantified and categorized to inform strategic pricing and development sprints?
How is the company prevented from using “backdoor” internal workarounds that mask poor UX?

By focusing on the strategic, systemic implementation of EYOD in the SaaS world, I transform simple advice into a sophisticated, necessary business project—the exact challenge you might want to hire mee.

From 1,000s of Views to 0 Sales:

26. October 2025Johannes WinterhalterLeave a comment

My $200 Marketing Mistake and the Lesson That Redefined My Consulting” or “Why ‘High Traffic’ Can Be a Useless Metric: A Case Study on Targeting ‘Doers’ vs. ‘Dreamers’

I use this as a simple example for something much bigger: a year ago, I launched a promoted post for an article I had written. I spent a modest budget on Facebook… The results came in: thousands of views, plenty of clicks. I was thrilled. Then I checked my sales dashboard: Zero. Nothing.

The article was a philosophical piece... It was perfect for attracting an audience I call ‘Dreamers’—people who enjoy thinking about business in the abstract.”

But my service isn’t for Dreamers. It’s for ‘Doers’—founders, entrepreneurs, and managers who need to make a decision now. It is about finding the target group.

I thought publicising a philosophical piece of text will help my brand and so elevate my sales. It did not – there were many people who like my way of thinking, but hardly any of them needed my service. The connection trom the philosophical article to my services in market value, marketing ROI and brand value calculations and research was not present for the readers, or they did not need it.

How This “Failure” Makes Me a Better Consultant

“This experience is why I am so passionate about data-driven validation. Before my clients spend a single euro on ads, it is important to ask the tough, practical questions that separate ‘Dreamers’ from ‘Doers’:

The Message Test: Is my content speaking to the person who thinks about the problem, or the person who pays to solve it?
The Alignment Test: Does my Call to Action (CTA) on this post align perfectly with the service I’m selling?
The Market Test (The ‘Doer’ Question): Have I calculated my Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM)? Do I actually know how many people are in my target niche and what their potential value is?
The Metric Test: Am I measuring the right thing? (Stop tracking ‘Views’ and start tracking ‘Qualified Leads’).”

The market test is not expensive – see my order page. You, the reader, might even do it yourself and decide if you want professional assistance. Most successful campaigns are the result of contributions of multiple persons:

The business owner or Chief Marketing Officer
The consultant helping defining the target group and messaging with the help of AI
The responsive clients who help developing strategy and product by answering questions
The designers who do the final graphic appearance

Lets start it and find the marketing mistake.

Searching the Marketing Mistake — Measuring water depths does not necessarely help with marketing mistakes.

Recommendation Network or Artificial Intelligence in Sales – which one has warmer Leads?

25. September 2025Johannes WinterhalterLeave a comment

We are looking for people and organizations with a web presence or at least a listing in Facebook, Linkedin or some municipial business directories. AI cannot find others.

Recommendation networks – do they have qualified leads?

The power of recommendation marketing lies in its ability to effortlessly drive sales when a product aligns with a broad audience, eliminating the need to vet leads. Personal referrals, customer reviews, and influencer endorsements pave the way for seamless transactions without added complexities.

Ideally the other members of your recommendation network are looking for customers for their network and are warming up leads before. The prospect expects to be contacted when the seller reaches out.

This is an ideal setup. In practice most recommended leads are not warm, sometimes it is required to hire service people with bad quality just to please the guy who gave the recommendation.

However, the flip side emerges when the product caters to a niche market or appeals to a limited segment of potential buyers. In such cases, relying on recommendation marketing with personal endorsements can result in frustration. Vendors like myself may find themselves inundated with unqualified inquiries, while those offering recommendations witness their efforts to connect buyers and sellers go unrewarded, whether in commissions or praise.

AI is more than just talking about AI – Artificial intelligence in sales

How it is supposed to be:
Professionals in this area use AI-powered tools to personalize customer experiences, optimize marketing campaigns, and predict sales trends. They understand how to leverage AI for tasks such as customer segmentation, lead scoring, and content creation. A creative mindset combined with an analytical approach is key to suc
The reality:
Many of the ones selling products claiming to be AI-powered tools do not use AI for their own outreach to prospects. So it stays less personal, the approached clients get annoyed. AI applied correctly helps finding the ones who are open for the products.

AI is really good in finding information about prospects – it can read and digest complete web presences in less than a second. So just use it.

How AI took my side job – Artificial Intelligence Business Plan

2. August 2025Johannes WinterhalterLeave a comment

Until Summer 2024 I offered creating simple business plans for startups. I did that on my website and on Fiverr for about 120 € each. I stopped that for the lack of orders and a lot of weird questions regarding my gig which never ended in a purchase. The prospects were obviously looking for excuses for not ordering my service. Looking at other work about 50% of my personalized offers generate a contract. The gig was meant as entry offer for learning to know each other and sell more services later. I used a template and filled it with data from the client, then I added some treated and interpreted market data to make an earnings prediction. The origin of the data was publicly available sources.

Artificial Intelligince (AI) is really good at working with data and templates from the web. Actually I am using the AI behind Google Gemini. For testing I asked it to write a business plan for a dog grooming business, later I asked it for market data for dog grooming in Germany.

The result was a really nice plan – you can download it here. It was a working example for a plan with estimations done by AI.

For first orientation the plan is really good, and it looks nice. I even think it is possible to apply for a loan at the bank.

I checked the numbers: the market data is quite generic, the assumed sales price is not confirmed by market research, and there are no scenarios. What to expect for free? My former prospects group, who did not want to pay more than 120 € for a business plan, is obviously happy with the very cheap plans delivered by AI.

So Artificial Intelligence took my side job. Maybe it is similar to what they did to map suppliers with their free Google Maps. I use Google Maps frequently and consider it to be technological progress. Google Gemini as one example of an AI chatbot offer requires a subscription for full functionality.

Measuring the qualitiy of artificial intellgence business plan

Artificial Intelligence: danger to humanity, productivity increase or just boring?

16. December 2023Johannes Winterhalter

Artificial Intelligence is based on statistical learning. We all learn with statistics, even if we do not know it. Our brain is good at things we do often, remembers words we frequently use and puts others aside. When we touched an electrical fence we learn it hurts. Animals make a similar experience. Also we look at other humans to learn how they handle situations. This may improve our own lifes. We look at the experience of others, how they do things, and if we think its good we imitate it.

The challenge of Artificial Intelligence is to put learning into a statistical model. With more and more computational power more is possible. Impressive for me is the look at colored 100+ years old silent movies in colors . The machine learned from actual pictures how the old colours were when the original was filmed and put that knowledge in the colorized version. With human painters this process would have taken years of work. Another impressive example of AI is a comparison between the Donald Trump impressions of Alec Baldwin (actor) and Scaredketchup (computer artist working with AI)

What AI and all the models do is to analyze all available text and give the resulting language model the ability to create new text out the old text . This is all based on mathematical and statistical calculations. As a result the new text is really close to existing text found somewhere on publicly available sources. AI can pretend to invent something, just by combining results or something the readers did not find already themselves. Remember: it is not really new, the machine found it somewhere.

A personal view on the benefits of Artificial Intelligence

AI-generated text is good when I have a question and the machine prepares its findings for me. There it can use text I did not know before, and probably I am happy. AI can ease pressure on customer service – the bot can answer many frequent questions without human interaction.

How AI-generated Text creates boredom

The inherent lack of invention by AI may create boredom. Also Artificial Intelligence is actually not well trained to look into human emotions. This may change over time.

Human brains have a capability to recombine things which never put together before. This is called human genius or creativity. Machines cannot do that actually. Computers lack the capability to fast apply the invention on human minds and viewers and so see if it works. Scaredketchup combines his own creativity with AI tools for creating pictures.

For me interesting is to look at how music is created: the musician has some inspirations and tests it before live audience. His mind tells him what the listeners like and what not.