Ozempic has become a brand with global notoriety in the blink of an eye. A sort of ying to the yang of junk food and its brands like Coca Cola or KFC. The Danish pharma Novo Nordisk, which developed Ozempic, has become the largest market capitalization in Europe, far ahead of the star of the 2010s, the luxury group LVMH. Eli Lilly, which markets competing drugs, has become the tenth largest market capitalization in the world. In the fall of 2024, its value exceeds 800 billion dollars, no longer far from the giants who are riding the wave of artificial intelligence like Google, Microsoft and Nvidia, while waiting for the producer of ChatGPT, OpenAI.
Nobody knows if investors have put on too rosy glasses to read the future of these two families of technologies. But at the end of our Prescription Weight Loss Exploration into the scientific and entrepreneurial prowess that produced Ozempic and its similar products, it seems to me that the similarities between these two seemingly very different technologies go far beyond the stock market firmament. The similarities, but also the risks, in particular those to which these technologies could lead our societies in the future if we are not careful.
Discussion with an AI fan
I recently participated in a round table on generative AI as part of the business day organized in the heart of industrial Geneva in Plan-les-Ouates. David Granite holds the position of “creative technologist” at Dorier Group, a subsidiary of the multinational events company MCI. It develops stunning immersive experiences with a lot of AI. He is both an expert and a fan.
David Granite has no doubt that artificial intelligence will establish itself in creation. He is probably right and gives me as proof a small book that he produced for Geneva schools in no time at all with the help of AI producing texts and drawings. It is well made and I agree that these schools would probably not have had the means to produce such a book quickly and cheaply, without AI.
However, as I write this, I can’t help but wonder what impact these AIs will have on those who write, draw or make films, whether professional or amateur. David Granite’s answer is one that I have heard for several years: you will not be replaced by an AI but by someone who knows how to use an AI.
Towards standardized creativity
That seems a bit short to me. Firstly because if these generative AIs do a lot of amazing things, the most striking, the one which was even their gateway via art, is that they invest in what has long remained a private preserve. of the human being: creativity. Given the speed at which they are progressing, can we really believe that they will not succeed in dispossessing us of this creativity intimately linked to our human identity?
British researchers asked themselves the same question. In a study published this summer by Science Advanced, they tested the use of generative AI by editors, not to replace them but to suggest ideas. A frequently cited “positive” use case for AI. While they note that this human-machine brainstorming results in an increase in individual creativity, particularly for the least productive editors, they also record a decrease in collective creativity. The stories are starting to sound similar.
Unfavorable context for humans
The designers of the Franco-Japanese studio Aoki asked this same question of the effect of AI on creativity at ChatGPT4 in July 2023. Basically, this AI highlights the loss of the desire to create, creation in a closed circuit , standardization, excessive production, devaluation of art… and even the risk of cognitive regression, especially for children.
We can reassure ourselves by saying that these generative AIs do not really create content or new work, but generate them from data. Certainly, but these digital contents are also deployed in a competitive economic context more favorable to AI than to humans.
Despite all their faults, social networks like YouTube, Tik Tok or Instagram, as well as platforms like Substack for text or Spotify for music, have allowed the dissemination of everyone’s creativity. This resulted in a gigantic competition for attention.
But what will the most talented influencers, not to mention artists, be able to do tomorrow when faced with a torrent of AI-generated creations, capable of delivering a video, a chorus or even a love letter, tailor-made and perfectly adapted to the mood of the moment, analyzed down to the heartbeat thanks to a connected watch on the wrist of the person for whom this creation is intended?
Un air de Black Mirror
It is at this “Black Mirror” moment in our analysis that AI and Ozempic intersect, beyond the stock market similarities mentioned above.
These medications represent undeniable progress in treating the chronic disease of obesity and its physiological or psychological consequences in a society that stigmatizes it. But their potential impact is much greater, because they directly touch on another aspect of the human experience. Not creativity, this time, but our appetite and beyond, via the reward system of our brain, to our taste, our sensations of pleasure, in short to our emotions. What will be the cognitive and social impact of such desire modulators?
The truth is that we don’t know. For the moment, the pharmaceutical companies developing these revolutionary drugs insist, rightly, that they must be reserved for a population that truly needs them, for medical reasons. To which the rare health insurers who already reimburse these therapies add draconian conditions (also justified) of supervision by specialists and time limits. In any case, there are a billion obese people in the world and not yet the industrial production capable of providing them all with Ozempic, as we saw in this episode of my investigation.
Behind the veil of hypocrisy
But there is also a certain hypocrisy around the spectacular effects of these molecules on weight loss. If Ozempic and its competitors have become such a phenomenon today, it is because their so-called “off-label” use, in other words for people who only take it for aesthetic reasons (to lose a few kilos), is exploding. . Impact Analytics, an AI-powered retail analytics company, finds that sales of small-size clothing are soaring while large-size clothing sales are plummeting in the Upper East Side, a Manhattan neighborhood considered the epicenter of non-medical use of GLP-1 analogues.
To think that such a market could escape the attention of pharmaceutical companies would be naive. Especially since it seems unlimited, because we are moving towards lifelong weight control with these medications, as is the case for cholesterol or hypertension. I can’t count the times when the forty or so scientists and doctors I interviewed for this investigation told me that weight was going to become a controllable variable, like blood pressure.
The broken taboo of the mass market
Pascal Soriot, the boss of AstraZeneca, has broken the taboo of the non-strictly medical use of GLP-1 analogues. His company, which lags behind Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, bought Chinese biotech Eccogene in November 2023 to try to take its share of a pie estimated at $100 billion per year by 2030. He then explained that it is not only the obesity market that it is targeting, but more broadly that of people looking to lose weight. Despite their failures to develop appetite suppressants in the past, other pharmaceutical companies have this same market in mind. Especially if, instead of being injected with a syringe, GLP-1 analogues can be swallowed in the form of tablets, which are more comfortable to use.
Side effects
If these drugs down-modulate the reward system and the dopamine it produces, will we end up with a population of thin people who have little joy in life? Eating is also often about sharing a social experience. Will we want a fondue with friends if GLP-1 analogues have ruined our appetite?
This is the point I’m getting at. Are the technological advances, once again undeniable, of AI like GLP-1 analogues, poised to radically transform the human experience in two areas intrinsically linked to it: creativity and desire? Quite frankly, I don’t know the answer, but the current popularity of two technologies that act on our brain makes me wonder.
Who will want to visit a museum or bookstore full of works produced by AI? What pleasure will we have in sitting at a restaurant table if our appetite is suppressed by medication? What will a society look like where the risk of obesity, encouraged by junk food, will be offset by artificial hormones while generative AI will expand infobesity to flood all fields of human creativity in the window of our smartphones?
Again, I don’t know. But I think back to Claude Levi-Strauss and his Tristes tropiques, in which it will no longer be just a few Tupi Indians who find themselves dispossessed of their human experience by technical progress, but all of humanity.
