Yeah, fully agree. This is one of the reasons big tech is dangerous with AI, their sense of humanity and their instincts on what's right are way off.
Oozes superficiality. Say anything do anything for market share.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Yeah, fully agree. This is one of the reasons big tech is dangerous with AI, their sense of humanity and their instincts on what's right are way off.
Oozes superficiality. Say anything do anything for market share.
Thank you! The ads from everywhere this Olympics have been so fucking weird. I even started a thread on mastodon and this ad was on it. https://hachyderm.io/@ch00f/112861965493613935
They were always weird but it is getting to the point where even normies are taking notice.
All that sex traffic that occurs for their event alone make it an abomination.
My best friend, the Uber driver, which I prefer to shut up all the way home. But hey, what are friends for, he keeps me hydrated!
Ever since I moved to an ad-reduced life, everything has been nicer. I can't completely escape them, they are everywhere. But minimizing with ublock and pihole helps, then only using video services that don't have ads. Unfortunately, a lot have added ads, so I have quit those. I'll pay extra for ad-free, just because ads make my life so miserable.
I can't watch broadcast TV, it's too irritating. I can't browse the web on a device outside my network or phone. I don't use free apps. Hell, I don't listen to the radio.
I like to think it has made me a calmer person.
The obvious missing element is another AI on Sydney’s end to summarize all the fan mail into a one-number sentiment score. At that point we can eliminate both the AIs and the mental effort, and just send each other single numbers via an ad-sponsored Google service.
Which they will unceremoniously murder after it fails to get enough traction in a month after launch.
Hey, my buddy's work is already doing that! Management no longer has any idea what the company does, but they know how often you click. It boils down to a decimal number, which is what they really need. Higher numbers are better.
The people making these ads can't fathom anything past pure efficiency. It's what their entire job revolves around, efficiently using corporate resources to maximize the amount of people using or paying for a product.
Sure, I would like to be more efficient when writing, but that doesn't mean writing the whole letter for me, it means giving me pointers on how to start it, things to emphasize, or how to reword something that doesn't sound quite right, so I don't spend 10 minutes staring at an email wondering if the way I worded it will be taken the wrong way.
AI is a tool, it is not a replacement for humans. Trying to replace true human interaction with an LLM is like trying to replace an experienced person's job with a freshly hired intern with no experience. Sure, they can technically do the job, but they won't do it well. It's only a benefit when the intern works with the existing knowledgeable individuals in the field to do better work.
If we try to use AI to replace the entire process, we just end up with this:
This ad is on purpose, to make us believe that using AI like this is the most normal thing. It's kind of brainwashing. So they can sell it to us.
So in the spring I got a letter from a student telling me how much they appreciate me as a teacher. At the time I was going through some s***. Still am frankly. So it meant a lot to me.That was such a nice letter.
I read it again the next day and realized it was too perfect. Some of the phrasing just didn't make sense for a high school student. Some of the punctuation.
I have no doubt the student was sincere in their appreciation for me, But once I realized what they had done It cheapened those happy feelings. Blah.
You should've asked Gemini what to feel about it and how to response...
That's the problem with how they are doing it, everyone seems to want AI to do everything, everywhere.
It is now getting on my own nerves, because more and more customers want to have somehow AI integrated in their websites, even when they don't have a use for it.
I’m curious, if they had gone to their parent, gave them the same info, and come to the same message… would it have been less cheap feeling?
And do you know that isn’t the case? “Hey mom, I’m trying to write something nice to my teacher, this is what I have but it feels weird can you make a suggestion?” Is a perfectly reasonable thing to have happened.
I think there's a different amount of effort involved in the two scenarios and that does matter. In your example, the kid has already drafted the letter and adding in a parent will make it take longer and involve more effort. I think the assumption is they didn't go to AI with a draft letter but had it spit one out with a much easier to create prompt.
It's 2027, the AI killer app never came, but LLMification has produced an unimaginable glut of mediocre media and the most popular AI application is to use it to find human sourced material.
The stock market is like a ship on fire, but you can buy video cards for pennies on the dollar.
This is one of the weirdest of several weird things about the people who are marketing AI right now
I went to ChatGPT right now and one of the auto prompts it has is “Message to comfort a friend”
If I was in some sort of distress and someone sent me a comforting message and I later found out they had ChatGPT write the message for them I think I would abandon the friendship as a pointless endeavor
What world do these people live in where they’re like “I wish AI would write meaningful messages to my friends for me, so I didn’t have to”
The article makes a mention of the early part of the movie Her, where he's writing a heartfelt, personal card that turns out to be his job, writing from one stranger to another. That reference was exactly on target: I think most of us thought outsourcing such a thing was a completely bizarre idea, and it is. It's maybe even worse if you're not even outsourcing to someone with emotions but to an AI.
If I was in some sort of distress and someone sent me a comforting message and I later found out they had ChatGPT write the message for them I think I would abandon the friendship as a pointless endeavor
My initial response is the same as yours, but I wonder... If the intent was to comfort you and the effect was to comfort you, wasn't the message effective? How is it different from using a cell phone to get a reminder about a friend's birthday rather than memorizing when the birthday is?
One problem that both the AI message and the birthday reminder have is that they don't require much effort. People apparently appreciate having effort expended on their behalf even if it doesn't create any useful result. This is why I'm currently making a two-hour round trip to bring a birthday cake to my friend instead of simply telling her to pick the one she wants, have it delivered, and bill me. (She has covid so we can't celebrate together.) I did make the mistake of telling my friend that I had a reminder in my phone for this, so now she knows I didn't expend the effort to memorize the date.
Another problem that only the AI message has is that it doesn't contain information that the receiver wants to know, which is the specific mental state of the sender rather than just the presence of an intent to comfort. Presumably if the receiver wanted a message from an AI, she would have asked the AI for it herself.
Anyway, those are my Asperger's musings. The next time a friend needs comforting, I will tell her "I wish you well. Ask an AI for inspirational messages appropriate for these circumstances."
Ask an AI for inspirational messages appropriate for these circumstances.
Don't need to ask an AI when every website is AI-generated blogspam these days
I would abandon the friendship as a pointless endeavor
You're in luck, you can subscribe to an AI friend instead. ~/s~
You’ve seen porn addiction yes, but have you seen AI boyfriend emotional attachment addiction?
Guaranteed to ruin your life! Act now.
Those AI dating sites always have the creepiest uncanny valley profile photos. Its fun to scroll them sometimes.
These seem like people who treat relationships like a game or an obligation instead of really wanting to know the person.
The thing they're trying to market is a lot of people genuinely don't know what to say at certain times. Instead of replacing an emotional activity, its meant to be used when you literally can't do it but need to.
Obviously that's not the way it should go, but it is an actual problem they're trying to talk to. I had a friend feel real down in high school because his parents didn't attend an award ceremony, and I couldn't help cause I just didn't know what to say. AI could've hypothetically given me a rough draft or inspiration. Obviously I wouldn't have just texted what the AI said, but it could've gotten me past the part I was stuck on.
In my experience, AI is shit at that anyway. 9 times out of 10 when I ask it anything even remotely deep it restates the problem like "I'm sorry to hear your parents couldn't make it". AI can't really solve the problem google wants it to, and I'm honestly glad it can't.
Yeah. If it had any empathy this would be a good task and a genuinely helpful thing. As it is, it’s going to produce nothing but pain and confusion and false hope if turned loose on this task.
They're trying to market emotion because emotion sells.
It's also exactly what AI should be kept away from.
The thing is, LLMs can be used for something like this, but just like if you asked a stranger to write a letter for your loved one and only gave them the vaguest amount of information about them or yourself you're going to end up with a really generic letter.
...but to give me amount of info and detail you would need to provide it with, you would probably end up already writing 3/4 of the letter yourself which defeats the purpose of being able to completely ignore and write off those you care about!
It would've been cooler if they used it to write a cool PDF page of info and stats on Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone
Or finding/buying plane tickets at the best price by searching all the sites
But that would imply that it can be relied upon for accuracy.
This! I was appalled when this ad played, suggesting that ANYONE comes out of that fictional scenario pleased is ridiculous. No one wants to receive a crappy AI-written email, ESPECIALLY when the primary topic is emotional. Using an LLM to write a message for a loved one tells everyone that you don't actually care enough to write it yourself. And Google is putting their big check of approval on the whole scenario saying, "This is what we want you to use Gemini for." Absolutely abysmal.
The ONLY version of this ad that makes any sense is if the parent writing the email is illiterate or has a medical issue where they can't type. But I'd rather see them use AI to make dictation better and more powerful instead.
We're all switching to Kagi Search and moving our email to ProtonMail or the like right? I don't need this kind of crap in my digital tool kit.
Hate to say it, but Kagi is not great. Both in results and in stewardship.
Proton recently introduced an AI "writing assistant" for emails called Scribe and a bitcoin wallet sadly.
This and the Nike ad have been the worst ads during the Olympics.
"This message really needs to be passionate and demonstrate my emotional investment, I'd better have a text generation algorithm do it for me"
That's not fan mail. That's spam.
It's like the South Park episode about using chatgpt to message their SO
Glad to see others have also keyed in on just how lame this ad was.
My immediate thought was, if you (the guy doing the voiceover as the father) are so mentally deficient that you can't even put together a four sentence paragraph of your own original thoughts for fanmail, then what hope do you have of doing anything else as a functioning adult?
Worse yet, what does this teach the kid?
It should be like a core memory for the kid to do this with her dad. It's like having an LLM to play catch or do tea parties with her.
It teaches the kid to rely more and more on AI for everything, just like Google wants.
They're already 'thanking' siri and alexa, this will be a very dangerous development.
You… you joke, but I know a few parents who would absolutely fail at something like this. Hell, they fail at basic math, and are barely literate.
I’m not saying this is a great idea for everyone, or that the ad is good. But the idea that “no one needs this” is extremely short sighted. For god sakes, the literacy rate in America alone isn’t even 95%, and over 50% of Americans aren’t proficient in English.
Again. This ad sucks for lots of reasons. But don’t pretend idiots can’t make it through adulthood, never mind become parents. The idiots are usually the ones with the most kids.
I think AI is great, but not for this. It's much better suited for, say, stuff like AI dungeon, or other entertainment (DougDoug on twitch/YouTube is the perfect example).
I've been watching quite a lot of Olympics coverage on TV, but never seen any ads. Is there an official Olympics TV channel with these ads?
Once you realize that everyone that works in marketing is a soulless demon, the world starts to make a lot more sense.