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- A Big Mac Sized Serving of AI Thoughts
A Big Mac Sized Serving of AI Thoughts
I’ll be honest, y’all I’m a little sleep deprived writing this one
Back In The Bay Area
A large portion of my week was consumed by the process of getting to and from Cincinnati – which I have decided is what would happen if Atlanta and Chicago had a child and abandoned it in Ohio. Speaking of being abandoned, nothing will catapult you from sleepy to fully awake at 4:30 am for your body’s timezone, like seeing a “canceled flight” notification on your phone. Anyway, I’m home now.
Platform Updates
Instagram & Threads
The Rest of Meta
TikTok
YouTube
Twitch
Snap
The Product
The Dumpster Fire
Twitter Alts
Culture Movers
Creator Economy
Gaming
Roblox on Quest VR headsets has gotten ‘well over’ 1 million downloads
Discord on Xbox will soon let you stream your gameplay to friends
I started a new Elden Ring playthrough after putting the game down for about a year
AI
AI Questions
On one of my, Lyft rides to an airport this week, I got to talking with the driver who asked about AI after learning what I do. If you’ll allow me to indulge in a mix of empathetic inference and narrative-serving speculation, I think the subtext of his question was, “are you worried they are gonna replace you the way they are going to try to replace my driving job?”
I’m honestly not sure how worried I should be.
On one hand, generative AI tools have evolved quickly in the past few years. How many links in this week’s newsletter are about platforms adding AI systems and tools to their products? But this also smells like a hype cycle. Machine learning has been a part of digital advertising for a while (what do you think powers content feed and ad relevance algorithms?), and while what it can do is changing rapidly, the marketing power of talking about it is probably changing even faster right now. A chatbot assistant on your website was not interesting a few years ago. Call it AI, and now you can get your press release picked up.
Speaking of using AI to get good buzz: this McDonad’s ad.
It does a fantastic job tapping into the consumer interest around AI and ChatGPT in the zeitgeist. Yes, this is ChatGPT-generated text, but the entire framing of the ad spot is the kind of unexpected yet obvious simplicity that can make an ad stick with you. AI is having a moment in culture. That’s what feels top of mind for marketers right now. More than the technology itself. Because, frankly, the tech doesn’t feel good enough yet to play more than a supportive role in most creative processes. Just like how I’ve been using Grammarly for years to help me write.
The newer large language models are impressive for sure, but between reports of their quality dropping over time, concerns about the ethics of their training data, and worries about generated text “poisoning” future training sets, I’m skeptical of how much better they can actually get. At the end of the day, large language models are good mimics. Pattern recognition games operate at a speed, scale, and efficiency our mushy biochemical processing systems can’t match. But they rely on training data. Having patterns to recognize. AI can compile the obvious at scale. Creativity – in advertising or art – is also about the unexpected. Even if AI tools continue to improve, I can’t see a world where you don’t need a human mind pushing them into that unexpected place where the output can really grab someone’s attention.
This Chart
Axios did a great piece/chart on when different platforms added different features. This has only accelerated my opinion that we need more competition in this space. Some of these companies are big enough that they try to keep at feature parody with each other when I think many users would prefer apps that specialize and drive innovation.
