We created a fake delivery company to get a job
blog.kashevko.com
blog.kashevko.com
I've worked in fairly sensitive roles, and if a package like this arrived at my workplace the police would become involved immediately. And if asked whether I'd want to press charges, I would say yes, absolutely. When you've received death threats at work, and seen female colleagues receiving rape threats, your tolerance for this kind of crap wears thin.
is “cyber stalking” legal? doing research using publicly available information is quite legal. stalking tends imply you’re harassing or intimidating someone, that doesn’t seem to apply here. conde nast told them to go away, and they did.
so, yes, i ask again: press charges over what? someone being uncomfortable or intellectually intimidated isn’t a crime.
"Literally cyber stalking" - sending them an ad. If this is illegal then linkedin would also be party to the crime, I'm guessing their lawyers have checked this.
This all is creepy AF but I'm fairly certain it's all legal (in US)
They didn't disregard them: they tried to target them with ads.
What higher form of acknowledgement is there in our modern world?
We are slowly getting to a place where people realize a USB-drive found in the parking lot should be met with suspicion. But target one of the higher-ups with an ipad didn't raise eyebrows? (maybe it did, hope so)
I live in a country with hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees just living their new lives, working - and spending the money, sometimes a lot of it for expensive apartments, nice cars, luxury meals etc. Are all of them bad just because they don't want to be responsible for the state when they didn't sign up for that and nobody paid them to do so? I really don't think so. They are people like you and me, they want to live a happy life. Some contribute to the defense effort, some don't, both is fine.
Also, of all the shady hustling that I’ve seen, targeting high level employees with a creative-and-privacy-invading pitch seems the least problematic.
But to say it was a risky move would be the understatement of the century. Delivering mail to companies that didn't ask for it, and in person? Using dead people to advertise? AI created deepfakes of the people targeted as a persuasion tactic? This could have easily gone very poorly for you, and lead to all sorts of criminal charges. Remember, we're in a world where a few glowing lights for a TV show ad caused a bomb scare:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_Mooninite_panic
Where harmless packages caused buildings to get evacuated, and Facebook had to change its ad settings because people were using it to target specific individuals.
The fact only one company sent a cease and desist, and no one got scared enough to get the police involved was probably a miraculous stroke of luck. So, points for creativity, though you got incredibly lucky the end result was so positive here.
- People see that LinkedIn meme of some college student sneaking into a company o deliver pizza and attaching their resume to stand out
- People praise its creativity
- Someone desperate enough falls into Poe's law and tries to +1 that.
Maybe companies should properly utilize their "boring" pipeline if they don't want candidates to start getting "creative".
What’s going to happen is something like this admittedly well-executed version goes viral, and then you get fifty thousand incredibly crappy imitations.
>goes viral, and then you get fifty thousand incredibly crappy imitations.
Very likely, yes. But you only really to do it once if you're the one trying to get a job. You're not responsible for any imitations
Then inside, more personalized photos to keep them engaged.
Move the focus away from the individual to some brand message and I think the outcome could have been much more like you suggest.
In that sense, this is more a demonstration as to the effectiveness of social engineering than anything marketing related.
What a sentence. And what an article, too: using the deceased as a marketing ploy, sending cryptic emails, AI + voice impersonation. I'm surprised they only got one cease and desist letter at the end. I wonder if this is the endgame of social mobility as more and more humans become replaced through automation: a competition for the attention of those at the top.
I think in general, the creative industry has always been one that fascinates people, that's its purpose in the end. This naturally motivates people to want to work in it, creating a large supply for a small demand of jobs. As a result, entering the industry is extremely difficult. It doesn't end at getting the job though, people in the creative industry are often extremely overworked.
On your other point, I agree that with the increase of AI there will be very negative impacts on social mobility:
* human labour will be increasingly worthless as robots get cheaper and more capable. It will only survive in a few niches where it gives sentimental value (humans are the new horses, cgp grey had a great video about this). so both skill and hard work won't be valued as much any more as they are valued right now.
* AI also gives better tools to the rich to protect their assets. With increased AI, there is less people required for society to function any more. The poor aren't driving the trains any more, nor are they shooting the guns, or running the steel mills. They can turn these tools less and less against the property owning class if they feel sufficiently dissatisfied.
* AI creates tremendous wealth and it's easy to make the poor feel wealthier just by giving them some of the crumbles, while giving 99% of the new wealth to the top 0.1%. Revolutions happen when people are hungry. When you satisfy their basic needs, then people care less about these issues. Yes, in the future, the bottom 99% might even be happy, but they might have increasingly small chunks of the new wealth.
which is fine if they weren't party to that wealth's creation via investments and taking on the risks.
Impressive but yuck (personally).
If nothing else, they've proven they know how to think outside the sphere. I found it funny that Conde Nast sent a C&D.
And by “they” I mean big corporations in coalition with ad companies.
Well, a backpack and thousands of Euros to spend on robotic dogs, tablets, pen plotters, holographic envelopes, etc.
The cynic in me tells me those CEOs are not the only ones being sold a fairytale, specially considering how proud they are of how far they'll go to get eyeballs.
They cloned people with AI tools and created a bunch of deep-fakes which they then delivered to that person.
They used a (self made) list of dead people to improve targeted ads so they could cohort-advertise to a small list of people.
They created fake uniforms to deliver packages to offices, and seemed pretty successful.
I feel like this would make a great case study on targeted phishing and social-engineering.
Also, elaborately targeting specific people like that and presenting them with the fact that you can fake their voice on top of any kind of outrages statements while you know exactly where they work and how to get there sets a hellish precedent and I'd even consider it a veiled attempt at a threat.
It is not what I'd consider culturally appropriate behavior in the UK, business-wise. I'd try to adapt, if at all possible, to the new environment you've found yourselves in unwillingly.
It's not. Otherwise everyone would have to do it.
However, my main point is that just because one person did this and got noticed, that's not the same as the thing they did being what you need to do to get noticed.
It doesn’t work wonders, but helps.
Here is a boring problem, creatively show me your work.
https://gamedev.outstandly.com/gamedev/
Feels a lot less boring too.
This is much, much more interesting than that! Nice work.
I'd love to see a future Sci-fi TV episode where a character gets not one, but multiple such "from the future gift boxes with video messages from a future self" -- but from multiple future selves, that is, multiple future parallel universe versions of the character!
In other words, "here is a set of potential future you's -- along with the instructions to activate them -- important upcoming life decisions to make or not to make, depending on the desired outcome..."
And what would make it really interesting (as the plot unfolds!)... is that all of these apparently disparate sets of decisions -- are actually intertwined, entangled, and potentially mutually contradictory (i.e., choosing one set unchooses all of the others!)
Now, for extra points, for the future SF writer or writers working on this -- make it so that the main character, after discovering the "either-or" mutual exclusion principle inherent in these choices -- tries to somehow cheat fate and destiny by attempting to somehow obtain ALL of them at the same time!
Will the character be successful in his quest against the apparent exclusivity of fate?
Or will he somehow manage to attain all of these future possibilities, all at the same time?
Well, that's the episode plot for this future TV Sci-Fi episode and/or movie (should it ever be written!)
Anyway, interesting article!
After episode 5 which shows the MC having achieved an outcome they are happy with, episode 6 starts with a new person who gets an episode almost all to their self.
However, the first person finds them when back when they were on choice 2 (in Episode 2), and realizing that they are not the only person getting these choice boxes causes the original experiment that we saw to go off the rails. (Events in time can be changed after the fact, after all, the fundamental system the whole story runs on is time travel).
That queues up your idea of attempting to cheat fate and somehow obtain all of the potential futures with their #2 while also dealing with other people given choice boxes.
It allows the story to address all sorts of questions like, who is sending the boxes, what is the purpose of the boxes being sent, and what is the final goal once all of the time travel fuckery settles down?
Call it the Double Slit Experiment, maybe?
Seems like a weird priority for a project like this.
P.S. Though I do not like an attempt to pose as poor nobodies while they obviously could afford spending money on iPads to give away
Also, LOL at Condé Nast. How on brand of them to C&D you!
But I hold no grudge. I don't know what was going on in the life of that person, maybe they had some creepy stalkers in the past who really caused them problems or maybe it even didn't get to them and this is just a standard procedure of their security team.
The part where they can just buy uniforms and go into an office to make a delivery sounds like very lax security with not much that can be done to fight against it.
I would suggest making the analytics less aggressive and adding some kind of error catching so that it doesn't attempt to send data hundreds and hundreds of times.
I will say one nice thing. There is a level of whimsy to the idea, but good grief the execution of it is a violation of everything I consider appropriate. But then. as my marketing prof once said, marketing lives on the greyish side of legal. Moral is not even a thing.
High level marketing thinkers all understand that they are playing in the field of human manipulation; some campaigns / ideas are transgressive, some are transgressive merely for the time they are in, some push the boundaries and lose. From the results here, this pushed the boundaries and won.
To me the mild lean-in on creepiness throughout, including some of the ai videos just says ‘creative geniuses’ - they set up a full campaign that benefits from limits of current tech, and got themselves a contract at Saatchi, in a country that’s famously rigorous and bounded in terms of class restrictions.
Nice work guys, keep coming up with cool hacks and good luck in your business.
That does not sound logical or straightforward to me at all.
> To keep the intrigue going, we resorted to just sending cryptic emails to everyone a couple of days before the delivery
So, they’re spammers? And physical spam too?
This post reads as rather unethical to me… I wouldn’t want to work with them.
I envisioned a similar look for some video shots from my office. I know, lighting setup is key here, but which camera did you use?
Specifically the gif / video-loop with for "waiting".
Really well done everything.
The big selling point of this camera for me when it just came out was a generous 45.7 MP sensor that meant I have a decent freedom for cropping stuff or printing my works on billboards (never happened) if I ever need to.
But now all the AI upscalers like the ones from the Topaz Lab disrupted the market and it's no longer an advantage really. It's still a great camera for pictures, don't take me wrong!
But if I'd be in the market for a video camera, I'd be looking at cameras from Black Magic or RED. They give you a cinematic look and actually have a proper RAW video file format for color grading.
If you want to achieve a similar look, here is a small lifehack we've used for most of the videos: smoke machine. You can get one off Amazon for like $50. It creates this cool deepness and light diffusion in the atmosphere. Just need to play around a bit with the distances between smoke and subjects, intensity and lights.
But i was kind of hoping you were using a much cheaper cam & that the cheap cameras just became much better. Even the nikon is out of my price range for this project. Just wanted something ok, fiddle with the lighting & have it mounted on the ceiling to film a few hours during a few days. In case you got another tip for me other than a gopro.
But thank you. Also thanks for telling me about topaz labs. Looks interesting & haven't heard about them at all before.
Or generally any DLSR for that matter, really.
Nope. You need to learn how to use money and find a way to spend less than you make. You had it good while you could count on arbitrage and you want to keep the gig going. Magically, the first thing that comes to mind is to you fuck around with robots, AI, and deceased people's pasts while your countrymen and women are dying fighting Russians. Grow up.
Lay off Reddit, mate.
I do not like the approach presented in the article and I am unhappy about it being rewarded in society.
<< Your original statement is ridiculous to any sane person.
Would you be willing to elaborate? What is insane about it exactly?
You'll come around to generated content as you get more accustomed to it. It is quite powerful and not terribly difficult to use if you spend a bit of time to learn it.
> Designing a fake delivery company seemed to be the most logical, straightforward way of contacting a person.
I understand part of this is tongue in cheek but wtf?