This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
People hate ads full stop and tech has amplified them to be there, all the time, following you. Start buying only what you need from small businesses if possible.
Stop fawning over brands and marketing. They don't like you, they don't want a conversation, the don't care if you are a better person. They want your money. Capitalistic is a cancer...don't feed it.
I dont know. I watch less ads now woth the aid of tech. Lemmy, jellyfin etc
Yeah, even my wife who uses standard streaming services with ads, youtube with ads, etc reminded me recently that we used to have 3 5-minute commercial breaks every half hour on broadcast tv growing up. I'm all for getting rid of ads, but it was interesting to realize that even before the internet you only got about a 50% ad-to-content ratio.
What's crazy is if you watch shows from the 60s and 70s they can have an extra 3-5 minutes of content in a 20 minute episode.
when re-broadcast on television or cable, those older programs are often re-edited or literally sped-up (or a little of both) so they can have the current norm of 10-12 minutes of ad time per half-hour.
I find it interesting that you and another posted see tech as a line of defence. I know I also employ that but it’s taken your comments to make me see and seperate the layers of use. It’s good we can have these rational discussions here. Sorry if I sound a bit preachy or crazy.
Tech is a tool. Those who want power over you will use it against you, and you can in turn use it to defend against them. Ultimately it's whoever puts the most effort in who gets the upper hand, and the wealthy can always motivate people with money to get a lot of effort in on their side, so, like with most things in life, it's an uphill battle to fight against them.
Agree. I am making a conscious effort to limit my tech to functional and what works for me. If I have to use something like YT I will use adblockers or a client (smartube) if I see an ad anywhere I pretty much block it mentally. I also resist against people trying to usher me to stuff. Can we take your email address? No you can’t!
I’m mentally done with this shit. If really rather go without.
Read the room, Yahoo Scout.
"We started noticing consumers weren't rewarding polish the way brands thought they were," said Chookie founder Zev Ziegler
Ummmmm...
One of its AI ads was rife with misspellings and terrifying, googly-eyed chocolate bars. Another of them shows an AI-generated figure producing the cookie bars in what appears to be lab.
I don't think "polish" means what you think it means, Zev.
Reading the article, it sounds more like a comment on advertising as a whole and not their AI ads specifically. Polished videos vs relatively unpolished hand filming it.
Either way, they got to the correct answer.
The method to get the right answer is often more important than the answer itself.
Spoken like a true math teacher.
Math teachers are correct, becsuse doing the right steps is repeatable and scalable. Plus you can figure out where you went wrong the times you don't get the answer right the first time!
No.
That's true for people. Corporations don't learn from mistakes and cannot improve over time, they're legally obligated to seek shareholder value.
Expecting a corporation to do things for the right reasons is like expecting AI to do things for the right reason.
If we must interact with either, we must simply be glad when the answer is correct. If we want corporations to act more like people and be able to have real values, we need to bake a corporation's values into law in some way.
Private businesses can still have morals and can learn and all that good stuff where the method matters, but public ones will always dehumanize.
So I'm happy they hit the right result. I'm also happy they're talking about it like this even though this talk is also just a publicity response, because other companies might see this and also do the right thing for the wrong (purely financial) reason.
But this is also why corporations shouldn't be people and should be barred from everything involving government and all that, if not abolished altogether.
Every time I write an email on my phone in Gmail, it pops up a blurb asking "Polish?" so I assume this is a term they're trying to repurpose. But my first thought every time I see it is that it's asking to translate my message into the Polish language.
They can polish a turd all they want, but at the end of the day, it's still shit.
"I outsourced the copywriting to the lowest bidder, who happened to be in Poland"
Amazing, somebody actually learned something from their use of AI slop and put that new knowledge to a practical use instead of doubling down and insisting that no it's the customers who are dumb and wrong.
Ads are, by history, increasingly better forms of mind manipulation. Fail to block them at your peril, however cutesy.
Either ads don't work, and so I'm doing them a favour if I block them, or they do work and in that case it's fucking evil mind control and you bet your ass I'm going to block them. There's no scenario where blocking ads is not the moral choice.
Correct.
Beyond that, ads on websites can have malicious code in them. Blocking ads isn’t just morally correct, it’s also good digital hygiene
This is exactally it.
It’s puff pieces like this too. Are we supposed to pat them on the back, give them our loyalty, because they are not using the latest technique?
The piece is pretty much we don’t use AI, go on our social media and lap up our human made mascot.
Short story is they tried AI, they jumped to the next option, hating AI, they used data to analyse these techniques and then make an article to promote this. All to sell cookies.
It feels like a constant battle to keep the manipulation away.
Nice to see. I've unsubscribed from businesses I used to support for using AI in their marketing
This is fantastic if it means companies will switch to inexpensive ads that can be cobbled together by somebody's kids, and ditch their multi-million dollar ad budgets that just make everything cost more.
i mean sure, but it’s corporate greed that actually makes things cost more.
That is definitely a major factor, it's just not the only one. People seem to believe the world operates like a comic book with designated villains do all the bad things and everybody else is just a victim. Individual behavior is also a factor. I mean what's the dominant gospel on Boomers - that they irresponsibly polluted the Earth and wasted all the resources, or that they were innocent victims of a few evil billionaires?
The former.
Evil billionaires are more of a 2020's thing.
I feel like a large part of it is that a lot of AI slop is still in the uncanny valley. The uncanny valley has been shown to create a massive negative emotional reaction in people. You don't want to trigger that reaction while trying to sell people something.
That's part of it. For me, AI signals low effort. I can see computer generated slop anywhere. It's completely ignorable. Human stuff, in this age of isolation, brings me joy. I love janky, hand made stuff because there's a human element to it.
Naw, AI is literally corpo bland. It can't be interesting and unique, cause it can't take chances.
If everything is the same boring AI garbage, it'll just blend into the background.
Good marketing has to be interesting and stand out. LLMs are the opposite of that.
This feels like watching a sprout breaking concrete...
Something like 4 years ago, i remember watching a flyer that was published in a few news outlets about some yankee big city, looking for a graphic designer. The flyer was practically a toddler's doodle. I expect AI to have an actual impact in art, looking to over express the human intervention
Whenever i go to Reddit it's like 50% Amazon AI ads and i always wonder what the point is.
🤷♂️
"charming" ads
"We thought building a cardboard airline in a treehouse sounded more honest."
I don't think they know what "honest" means
It's a small snack company stranger, not fuckin Palantir. I reflexively hate advertisements too, but given that I am occasionally forced to overhear them or god forbid witness them with my own eyes, I would take something human over something slop-generated any day.
I don't enjoy every company pretending to be super cute and trigger our buttons to sell its most likely bullshit ass product which is "honestly" most likely totally unrelated to the advertisement they are pushing in our face
THEY'RE COOKIES FFS
Exactly. Every company is utterly bullshitting us, even the "mom n pop cookie companies"
Not necessarily, and even if so, there are so many more important things to be angry about
Remember the phrase, "A leopard doesn't change its lazy urge to utilize AI slop". Instead of AI imagery, they are now likely just asking for AI generated ad treatments and scripts for the spots they have film students shoot for slave wages. Then they probably sit back and vape, Joe rogan playing in the background, as they bet on celebrity fart probabilities on kalshi and laugh like they got away with something.
When these ghouls abandon humanity, don't give them a second chance after they get caught.
"Corporation realises people are too mad at super evil capitalism, switches its model to nicer capitalism instead"
The small cookie company falls well short of any functional definition of "corporation".
even if its not a corpo my point still stands. not using ai should not be a feature. it should just be a given. dont celebrate companies for not using ai, scrutinize companies using ai
Yes but I think there's a lot more grace available for "small business owner thought something was Neat and was unaware of the public sentiment" than "marketing department that answers to a Board of Directors seeks to maximize profits by cutting all possible corners".
The person can be taught.
"We started noticing consumers weren't rewarding polish the way brands thought they were," said Chookie founder Zev Ziegler in a press release. "They were rewarding effort. Humor. Tiny human decisions. When we compared the performance of our handmade work against AI-generated creative, the difference wasn't subtle."
