Now even that advertising will be AI-generated. The human is reduced to the ultimate consumption machine, to be fed stuff paid for by advertisers and generated by machines.
Maybe that's good and maybe not. But big brands always had this splashy advertising, so this evens the field
But can a small business use AI tools to make a better ad for their smaller budget? Probably.
I was thinking about this in the context of some videos posted here a few weeks back. They were AI generated video shorts. They weren’t fabulous, but they were funny and entertaining. There was a small writing team behind it that was able to produce solid video content that would have been way out of their budget just a few years ago. But with AI tools they were able to get their ideas made and content available.
That’s where I start to struggle… I’m not a fan of pure AI content, but if it helps smaller teams on smaller budgets compete a little more, or helps individual creators get to tell their story when they otherwise couldn’t, is AI content completely wrong?
Note, I said companies, because brands at this point are merely labels, most of them throwaway; big companies use them the same way small companies do, including to run fly-by-night scams on burner brands. They're more than happy to delegate it to smaller agencies, too.
Point being: there's not much correlation between branding, ownership structure, and what advertising techniques can be applied by what organizations.
There's no evening the field, only deepening the muck. There's no persistent advantage possible here, because whatever new cool thing a small business can do, a large business can do more of it and better
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[0] - It's a zero-sum game in the sense that everyone's effort only serves to cancel out the effort of their competitors, but it's hugely negative to society in absolute terms, because all that effort burns labor and natural resources.
While I generally agree, I think if we the consumers do more to level the playing fields from our vantage point, we can have more influence
This would be done by running more ad blockers and being vocal about our rejection of how bad ads have become, so they hear back (in theory...)
We set all our servers to listen on port 4443, and walk away from the whole sorry mess.
Make it all again from scratch. Block whole swathes of IP ranges known to belong to FAANG.
Question is, if the AI bros are right about a "new industrial revolution", will there be consumers to consume if all the wealth is concentrated in the top 1-2% of the population? (the owners of AI hardware and software)
The question is, will be there anything left for humans to consume ? will we survive ?
The datacenter is held by a corporation, and the corporation does what the resident AI wants it to do.
You'll see the wealth concentration you talk of, but it'll be completely different people who get this wealth, maybe even people who own businesses where wages are a large outlay.
Who cares? That's two quarters away. What matters is that I got my Lambo and my speedboat today. Let the poors worry about the future.
There is no reason to believe otherwise in this revolution.
You don’t see ~anyone being paid because they are stronger than the next guy; hydraulics are stronger than all of us.
What happens when you don’t get paid for being smarter than the next guy, because AI is smarter than all of us?
And then next up is being paid for being more dexterous than the robots - basically all trade work. I think there’s a longer runway for those jobs, but it’s coming.
Advertising is now just worthless noise to me because I generally don’t buy stuff anymore but what I need.
I can’t imagine why anyone would buy most of the crap I see advertised, but they do. Halloween was a recent example: how many tons of plastic shit for costumes was shipped from China only to be thrown away the next day? How much candy was bought? Even when I was 12 I started to see what a disgusting consumerist affair the whole thing was and it lost its appeal. And yet we have adults participating.
The ad machine exists because people let it be successful.
That is the problem with this advice. “Can choose not to” is code to stop someone complaining. “Just don’t use it then”. It sounds equivalent to the “love it or leave it” slogan used in the 70s in America.
We don’t leave. We fight. We don’t stop using. We openly and publicly criticize
Sometimes “you don’t have to participate” isn’t strong enough advice, not that I know what the answer actually is.
It is a bit like denormalizing smoking. It is a long game and a lot of education work but it is working.
I think we’re in a world so dominated by the attention economy and things optimized to hook us in that it’s hard to just say “I quit”.