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Comment by hannes0 | Hacker News Reader

Everyone focuses on how scamming and AI is evolving. I'm rather curious how this will affect marketing. Celebrity endorsements is useful for building trust. I wonder if we see more or less of that in the future.

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Are celebrity endorsements actually useful for building trust? Usually i view them in a negative light, thinking that they just paid someone to promote the product, rather that a genuine and organic endorsement.

Agreed I've never seen a celebrity endorse something and thought "Ah they clearly actually love this product so it must be good!"

It works incredibly well, that's why it keeps happening. Most people do follow pretty much exactly that thought process.

Merely by participating on this forum etc etc etc

That's fair. I just don't get it. It's obvious to me that it's paid for and my assumption is that the person probably hasn't even used the product. So for me, yeah it doesn't work. But you're right, there's a reason these celebs keep getting insane payments for these ads.

I think in exactly the same way as you do but if it didn't work at scale then corporations wouldn't do it. Most people are falling for it.

Even if 'most' people aren't falling for it, enough people are falling for it that it's very profitable.

> Are celebrity endorsements actually useful for building trust?

I can't imagine this is highly controversial. Of course celebrity endorsements can be useful for building trust. This is supported observationally and by years of research in marketing psychology. It's not even necessarily limited to megastars : even endorsements from niche influencers and small-fish content creators can be marketing goldmines, nevermind the kind of overnight headwinds your product can get if someone with the reach of Oprah, Rogan, Musk et al starts pushing it.

Personally, I don't know specifically about building trust, but your average person seems to be more likely to buy a product if a celebrity they like is endorsing it. At the very least, a lot more people are going to /hear/ about whatever product some celebrity is endorsing.

I wonder if the rise of deepfakes will finally be the moment that gives us all sufficient incentive to adopt a real, cross-platform authentication infrastructure of some sort (public key auth, etc). There's real value in, say, the NYT being able to authenticate that a reporter's social media presence is legit, and for that reporter to be able to sign and take responsibility for their photographs. Or using your example, some sports star authenticating an ad featuring them. Unsigned media would be considered suspect. This could all be surfaced in a digestible way to users, like we have done with the HTTPS lock icon. Dunno. Probably not, but maybe.

You have to look at the incentives versus counter incentives.

Who is going to be in control of this authentication infrastructure? Private companies? Where do they get the information that is trusted? Other private companies? Governments? Why won't these social media companies try to make their own private infrastructure so they can remain in control rather than potentially allow people to leave to other platforms? How will revocation work? Will the browser have to implement support?

Also: How long before authoritarians demand we sign our stuff?

There's a bunch of different PKI-style schemes, most of which don't require trusting a single central authority. I thought KeyBase's approach struck a good balance between authentication strength & ease of use, maybe something like that could be a good fit.

The incentive would be for online platforms, especially social media, to remain a place people want to be and can have some measure of trust in, rather than be overrun by deepfake-style content.

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