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Comment by htk | Hacker News Reader

The whole Gemini webpage and contents felt weird to me, it's in the uncanny valley of trying to look and feel like an Apple marketing piece. The hyperbolic language, surgically precise ethnic/gender diversity, unnecessary animations and the sales pitch from the CEO felt like a small player in the field trying to pass as a big one.

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It's funny because now the OpenAI keynote feels like it's emulating the Google keynotes from 5 years ago.

Google Keynote feels like it's emulating the Apple keynote from 5 years ago.

And the Apple keynote looks like robots just out of an uncanny valley pretending to be humans - just like keynotes might look in 5 years, but actually made by AI. Apple is always ahead of the curve in keynote trends.

The more I think about this the more it rings true...

I hadn’t thought about it until just now, but the most recent Apple events really are the closest real-person thing I’ve ever seen to some of the “good” computer generated photorealistic (kinda…) humans “reading” with text-to-speech that I’ve seen.

It’s the stillness between “beats” that does it, I think, and the very-constrained and repetitive motion.

Hmm. Like the "NPC fetish" stuff that was going around for a brief minute?

Is there such a concept as a “reverse uncanny valley”??

Where humans behave so awkwardly that they seem artificial but are just not quite close enough…

If so, Apple have totally nailed the reverse uncanny valley!

You know those memes where AI keeps escalating a theme to more extreme levels with each request?

That's what Apple keynotes feel like now. It seems like each year, they're trying to make their presentations even more essentially 'Apple.' They crossed the uncanny valley a long time ago.

"make it feel more like a hospital"

To me it feels more like a cult. Wear this kind of shoes and clothing. Make these hand gestures, talk that way. They look and sound fake, over processed and living in their own bubble detached from the rest of the world.

I’m what many would describe as a bit of an Apple fanboy but for the last few years I’ve been skipping most keynotes. They are becoming pretty unbearable.

I used to look forward to watching them live but now I just go back after the event and skip through the videos to see the most relevant bits (or just read the various reports instead).

I got the same vibes. Ultra and Pro. It feels tacky that it declares the "Gemini era" before it's even available. Google really want to be seen as level on the playing field.

I’m imagining the project managers are patting themselves on the back for checking all the performative boxes, blind to the absolute satire of it all.

> surgically precise ethnic/gender diversity

What does that mean and why is it bad?

Diversity in marketing is used because, well, your desired market is diverse.

I don't know what it means for it to be surgically precise, though.

Agreed with your comment. This is every marketing department on the planet right now, and it's not a bad thing IMO. Can feel a bit forced at times, but it's better than the alternative.

The alternative being showing actual level of diversity in the company?

It's bad if the makeup of the company doesn't reflect the diversity seen in the marketing, because it doesn't reflect any genuine value and is just for show.

Now, I don't know how diverse the AI workforce is at Google, but the YT thumbnails show precisely 50% of white men. Maybe that's what the parent meant by "surgically precise".

I imagine the commenter was calling out what they perceived to be an inauthentic yet carefully planned facade of diversity. This marketing trend rubs me the wrong way as well, because it reminds me of how I was raised and educated as a 90s kid to believe that racism was a thing of the past. That turned out to be a damaging lie.

I don't mean to imply that companies should avoid displays of diversity, I just mean that it's obvious when it's inauthentic. Virtue signaling in exchange for business is not progress.

You'd prefer the alternative with just a few white guys in the picture and no consideration given at all to appearing diverse?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village

But for diversity.

The alternative is to just be authentic and not put up a fake show.

(and for the result to be authentically diverse)

Just take a group of people that actually know and work together and you're authentic. Forced diversity is idiotic: either you do it or you don't, but you show what you're doing to be authentic.

Imagine how cringe it would be if only white guys were allowed to work at Google and they displayed in all their marketing a fully diverse group of non-white girls. That would be... inauthentic.

Just the fact girls are less than guys in IT is something we should demonstrate, understand, change if needed. Not hide behind a facade of 50/50 display everywhere as if the problem was already solved or that it was even a problem in the first place.

It think it could be a seen as a good thing, it's a little chicken and egg. If you want to increase diversity at a company, one good way would be to represent diversity in your keynotes in order to make it look to a diverse base that they would be happy working there, thus increasing the diversity at the company.

Of course to normal people, this just seems like another Google keynote. If OP is counting the number of white people, maybe they're the weird one here.

It's new token black guy. It's not completely bad, just feels inauthentic.

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