Why Does Every Commercial for A.I. Think You're a Moron? | Hacker News Reader

Why Does Every Commercial for A.I. Think You're a Moron?

nytimes.com

35 pointslxm17 comments

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Morons are the ones most impressed with "AI", so its core demographic and low hanging fruit to sell to.

Many business ads especially are aimed at CEOs and CEOs think their employees are morons, or should be.

It's easier to sell to a moron...

A lot of morons think AI is useless, too, but in that case there is nothing to sell to them.

https://archive.ph/Yy2Bb

> Why doesn’t he ask his girlfriend what a thermodynamicist is? (She should know: That’s what her dad does.)

My dad worked a lot of different jobs at the same company before he retired a few years ago. I know at some point one of his jobs had "logistics" in the title. I only ever had a vague notion of what his job entailed. Unless the job title is obvious, like "plumber", I wouldn't expect this woman to know what the hell her dad does.

Advertisers have tried to manipulate our social fears and anxieties since Edward Bernays invented it a century ago, to get more women to smoke cigarettes for Lucky Strike. Along the lines of 'you'll wonder where the yellow went...' or 'the heartbreak of psioriasis' ... The old SOB lived to be 103 years old.

It's sort of the opposite of 'On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.'

Sure, but I think the bigger point is that, if you've got a really great and really useful product, why would you need to convince people to use it by highlighting barely realistic use cases and exploiting their fears and anxieties?

This theory about Edward Bernays and the lucky strike being some PR mastermind striked me as bullshit and still strikes me as bullshit. People have convinced themselves of how this one guy is behind it all because it’s an easy answer - that’s the bigger con.

I’ve also always wondered what a more critical and impartial review of source material would reveal about Bernays’ impact.

This happens a lot in historiography. Easy tales become handles for epochs and then denounced as contrived, then revived. Reminds me of the xkcd about levels of rebuttal.

The guy indeed was behind the "Torches of Freedom" campaign. And was indeed an influential person. Would it have happened without him? Most likely. But he did do the things. Is History driven by personalities? By structures? Big debate there. Nonetheless, Bernays' story is not bunk.

MIT study on AI and Intelligence: https://archive.is/ClSRM

Its a filter, like in that Microsoft "Why do Nigerian Scammers Say They are from Nigeria?" paper.

The paper: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

> the less funny assumption is that someone could be more moved by an A.I. letter than by the unpolished emotion of an enthusiastic child.

You'd be surprised. Tiger parenting is definitely a thing. That the technology validates this mindset only adds more fuel to the fire.

"If, for some reason, your brain stops functioning, Meta’s got you."

This is a great slogan haha.

Solutions designed for a perceived demographic via dogfooding the same technology?

Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.

-George Carlin

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