Personally, I feel that brands should hire me – to destroy their brands. Why? It’s great branding!
I know, I know, some of you are thinking “AI can’t create art! They are not creative!” Well, look how I am maneuvering up on your flank, everybro: marketing people are not creative either!
what’s with the unconscious (and possibly unclothed?) looking humanoid bodies behind the koolaid jug?
speaking of AI art (“art”?), I usually just skip youtube commercials as soon as possible, but sometimes have to listen to a bit of them, or am off doing something in a different window and end up listening to one.
So, I keep seeing these videos where there is someone claiming to be a doctor, lawyer, or something similar, and they are talking, and moving their hands about, and something just seems… off? but I can’t figure out what it is. I suspect it’s one of those computer-generated characters/”actors”, but I don’t know what it is that’s causing me to suspect that.
Anyone a little more observent, better with human social/vocal clues or who knows anything about the industry can add any info to what might be going on there, or what are the ‘tells’ that most people pick up on? Thanks in advance.
@lochaber:
Those are part of the new but far from the cutting edge of marketing. The idea is to present a folksy “believable” story. (hint: if “believable” is in air quotes in your own marketing, you’re in trouble) the voice-overs are done by AI. The content is done by AI. If you follow their link you’ll get into some kind of affiliate marketing scheme where you’re pushing some influencer’s genuine stress-free yogic cow cud product.
“This product was developed by an MIT genius software engineer who realized that an inexpensive space-folding technology would let you transport unhappy skunks all over the place. We have distilled that into our new elixir of life!”
What’s going on there is that marketers have realized (i.e.: decided) that uncanny valley and voice-sync problems with AI robots won’t be as bad because we’re all used to youtube time-lag anyway. Which is true. The other night I watched Neil Young in a time-loop playing “All Along the Watchtower” with James Brown and Kurt Cobain 5 years from now after Trump was out of office.
Those “corpses” look like badly tempered chocolate.
Marcus Ranum@2>
thanks. I’m still sorta curious about what it is that is subconsciously making me suspicious of those ads, without me being able to consciously put my finger on it, some sort of slightly subtle uncanny valley thing (for me at least…)
I generally distrust anything that’s advertised, and have orders of magnitude more distrust for things in youtube ads, so I don’t think I’m likely to succumb to any of their marketing, I’m just curious about this new trend in weirdness.
It’s sorta disappointing, in that I finally am in a position where I have a bit of disposable income (not a lot…), and am not scraping by in survival mode, and there is the potential capability to produce some really nice, quality products, but twixt enshittification and other late-stage capitalism bullshit, it’s difficult for me to find a product now, that is significantly improved on a product from 20-30 years ago (outside of computers/electronics)
Like, I’ve stopped following the knife industry, so there is a lot of recent innovations that I’m a bit behind on, but most of them seem to be really niche steels. I had a couple versions of the benchmade 710 that I really liked, but that model is long discontinued, and… I just don’t like many of the replacements. There have been a few Chinese knife companies putting out what looks like quality products at decent prices, but overall, the knife industry has seemed to focus on blade shapes/designs that look “cool”, but seem questionable in functionality (at least from my perspective/experience), too many folders with “cleaver” shapes, multiple blade grinds, tantos/reverse tantos, focusing on “defense”/”fighting” over utility, etc.
I’d really like a benchmade 710, with a slightly more pronounced recurve, and one of the more modern “super” steels. Or maybe just a “decent” steel, and a pronounced recurve…
sorry, end rant…
I would like to think that nobody is dumb enough to mistake marketing for art. Sadly, however…
I recently decided to take a peak at YouTube’s “Inspiration” tab. Apparently, this is some AI (A1, Ms. McMahon?) thingie that looks at other videos you’ve done (and perhaps similarly titled vids from elsewhere) and coughs up suggestions for new videos. This includes the title, advertising hooks, a complete outline, and a thumbnail image. I’ve got about 400 lecture videos on electrical circuit theory, electronics, and related topics that I started during the pandemic, so there’s no shortage of material.
What did it come up with? The first one was something that does not exist (“Slew Rate: Voltage Control”). It is not a thing. I’ve done multiple videos discussing slew rate and voltage control (like VCAs and VCFs), and they were relatively popular, so apparently it assumed that combining them would be good. Look, I like puppies and I like ice cream, but I have no desire to eat puppy-flavored ice cream. The outline was basically a rip off of one of my slew rate videos (gee, that auto transcript generator turned out to be really handy). Another suggestion was something I’ve already done (using FETs as voltage controlled resistances), which again ripped off my own text to create the outline. BUT, the jewel of this was the thumbnail it came up with. It looked like someone fed a bunch of schematics into a shredder, pulled out a few of the pieces, and taped them together. It was a complete mess.
To call this useless is an insult to useless things.
@5 Dunc
I don’t know, lots of people mistake marketing for news…
#1 @ lochaber
Those are jimjonesish cultists. Instead of just drinking the flaverade, they had a (hetero ?, cis?) orgy in it.
#5 @ Dunc
Art is what the artist says it is.
Oh look, again with the most stupid “gotcha” that keeps getting vomited by defenders of generative AI. Being bad and/or unoriginal at creating things is still being creative, and far from equivalent or worse to not creating anything at all.
lochaber@#4:
Thanks. I’m still sorta curious about what it is that is subconsciously making me suspicious of those ads, without me being able to consciously put my finger on it, some sort of slightly subtle uncanny valley thing (for me at least…)
I’d bet that you’re sensitive to the “somewhat too perfect” images and “somewhat too articulate” voiceovers. What I find particularly interesting is that the AIs are busy producing surreally pretty images but don’t handle the electrical outlets right. It’s like the hands were, last year. Eventually it’ll all get built in there and we’ll have to confront the fact that imaging is … not real. Never mind that some of the first photos were fakes and every painting is kind of fake, etc. We lived through this brief time in which imaging was considered to be documentary. Now, it’s considered slop.
Have you noticed that since photoshop and 3D imaging started to become available cheap, “UFO photos” are less and less of a thing. We stand at a point in time, and since we’re standing there, we forget that what’s under our feet is sand.
Kreator P@#9:
Oh look, again with the most stupid “gotcha” that keeps getting vomited by defenders of generative AI. Being bad and/or unoriginal at creating things is still being creative, and far from equivalent or worse to not creating anything at all.
That was my point. But, OK. I wasn’t trying to defend AI, I was trying to attack marketing people.
A more thorough discussion of that topic is [stderr]
seachange@#8:
Art is what the artist says it is.
There’s probably a corollary to that, which goes something like, “… and don’t ask”
jimf@#7:
I don’t know, lots of people mistake marketing for news…
It’s almost fascinating to watch how to slime-trail output by the youtube and instagram “algorithms” varies over time based on “whatever is the new trick that gets eyeballs and clicks in this environment.” I see waves of the new thing going out, then eventually tapering off while the new new thing comes along. I notice some of them disappear, which I hope means they got their frequent miler card and a lamborghini if that’s what they wanted. Or othertimes the account gets closed.
There are plenty of people who talk about various markets where robo-slop has taken over. Rick Beato did a depressing breakdown about how Spotify works, which did a good job of explaining why I hardly ever listen to anything except my self-curated playlists. But it’s all money-ball, I guess. I do wish some acquisitions influencer or whatever they used to call a “junior publisher” would contact me with big number bullshit and I could say “sounds like you should offer that gig to someone who needs a headache.” It is already a creatively dry wasteland, except for people with headaches. Don’t worry, you’re not screwing an artist or musician – they were screwed years ago.
jimf@#6:
I have no desire to eat puppy-flavored ice cream
It’s the market leader in “frozen pet-flavored dessert snacks” except when the pickled gecko people have one of their organizing drives and suddenly it looks like everyone is mad for gecko gelato.
Marcus Ranum@10
Thanks, now that you mention it, I think it is more with the voice/articulation then the image – it still sounds like the youtube ads of a couple years ago when it was just a voice-over (I remember one was an “indestructable” drone flying through a flame or some shit), and it might be that the voice doesn’t have any… soul(?) I’m not a lip reader or anything, but it seems to match up to the mouth and hand movements of the image, but it just doesn’t quite sound like a real person talking – there is no “character”
As to UFOs, I’m reminded of this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1235/
I think I started to be more dismissive of this stuff when i started reading/learning about how fallible brains, memory, and perception are, and then it was further reinforced when I learned a bit about the difficulties of staffed interstellar travel, and how hostile interstellar space would be for humans/earth life, if not other potential life.
I prefer physical hardware rather than fluffy art.
Now you can try to paint pictures by remote control!
“3D-printed humanoid robot offers affordable, customizable platform for beginners”
.https://techxplore.com/news/2025-06-3d-humanoid-robot-customizable-platform.html
Google ‘Berkeley Humanoid Lite’.
Templates and software are all open source, the hardware costs $ 5000, far less than commercially available robots of similar size. With a 3D printer a novice can put it together in a week. The result stands 1 m tall and weighs 16 kg.
Chocolate people! Yummy.
But seriously, this AI “art” may be dross, but it’s already put a lot of graphic artists out of a job. Crap but cheap, so it’s irresistible:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWpg1RmzAbc
And that’s nothing. More seriously, according to many public health specialists there’s an unaknowledged mental health crisis going on since years… and the internets are not helping at all. Now AI promises to make things even worse if that’s possible:
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jul/12/i-felt-pure-unconditional-love-the-people-who-marry-their-ai-chatbots
so basically we have a lot of people wafting away from reality, step by step. Not good (the movie “Her” was an accurate prediction it seems).
“marketing people are not creative either!”
Of course marketing people are creative. Without marketing people LLMs would just be called pattern matching algorithms.
“Artificial Intelligence” has been a marketing slogan right from the start. If you say you are a computer scientist or cognitive psychologist doing research this doesn’t sound very exciting and is unlikely to attract investment, but add the magic acronym “AI” then everyone is suddenly excited about what you are doing and believes you to be far cleverer than you actually are (a massive ego boost).
So everyone working on pattern matching algorithms should love marketing people, who have made them far more money than they could ever possibly have dreamed of.