I hope you've all recovered from reading about the terrifying Bing chatbot incident (the gist is that the computer program became kinda annoying). Since Bain announced Tuesday that, in partnership with OpenAI and Coca-Cola, "We're going to start to figure this stuff out," it's time for you to upskill, to level up, to speedrun, to onboard yourself. The agencies want to be the consultancies, so this is the buzz of your c-suite. They need a quick solve. Heck, every company's going to need one. You could easily be the Chief A.I. Officer of your agency or company by the end of 2023.Here's how:
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Learn the word alignment: This word is now your brand. Pretend that you invented it. Surround it with the words "ethics," "trust," and "transparency." Buy two copies of the Nick Bostrom book and put one in the background of your Zoom cave and one in the real office for the mandatory in-person Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Don't read it. Drop the name Eliezer Yudkowsky once every fifth post, interview and/or meeting.
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LinkedIn: Go. Just do whatever on LinkedIn. Doesn't matter, you just need to do a lot on LinkedIn. Like, three times a day.
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Push the threat to its limit: You need to be doom-maxxing. This is not just a threat to agency and client business models, which it is. Your whole thing now is Chicken Little not just for brands and agencies but democracy and life on Earth. Because no one will listen or care unless the stakes are planetary, species-level high. Your written and verbal output as an A.I. expert is like a superhero movie: it has to be about saving the world.
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Buy a fainting couch: It will reinforce the Victorian, Roose-ian degree to which you take this threat seriously. Great for Zoom background.
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Train a model on your corpus: At this point your bosses should be noticing how much you know about A.I. and how serious the threat is. Once you've produced enough language on LinkedIn, take the whole thing and fine-tune GPT-3 to mimic you. You've now turned yourself into a Large Language Model that can produce content about A.I. much more efficiently than you can. Soon, your bosses will be forced to acknowledge your thought leadership in the space because you'll be unavoidable.
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Automate yourself into a multimedia content creator: Prompt the LLM version of you to write an endless series of podcasts, YouTube videos and TikTok videos about how A.I. is coming and it's going to be game over for brands. Then, take those scripts and prompt a generative audio platform, a generative video platform and an A.I. avatar platform to turn all those scripts into an endless stream of audio and video content.
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Flood the zone: Be the most visible you can possibly be. You're now the world's foremost A.I. content creator, and your bosses will be pinching themselves when they realize you're already in-house and the answer to, "What are we doing about A.I.?" Post until your bosses cannot stand seeing and hearing you anymore, eventually giving in and handing you the title hoping you shut up. If they don't you can get hired anywhere else. Warning: It is imperative you stop here. If you don't you'll put the entirety of the human race in jeopardy. From here, the unleashed A.I. influencer version of you is capable of misinformation at a Trump- and Tate-like scale. Please, do not tempt fate. At this point, all of our feeble, gullible minds are vulnerable to your creation. Who knows if we can handle what lurks in the darkest corners of the C.A.I.O. persona.
What You Need to Know
Here is the email from Tom Cruise's agent demanding everyone at CAA stand up and clap for him when he came to the office last week, via Puck. (img) If you want to get me and my two children a present I will absolutely hate, get us the children's book "Strong Baby" by this Peloton influencer. (TNY) CNET Was Treating Staff Like Robots Long Before Publishing AI-Generated Articles (Futurism) "Fleishman Is in Trouble" and "life's losers." (Slate) The YouTube CEO transition. (Bloomberg) Everyone seems to love the four-day work week. (AP) "Shein will likely launch a marketplace in the U.S. after testing the model in Brazil and Mexico. The number one most-downloaded shopping app in the world is expanding beyond fashion and local manufacturers in China." (Marketplace Pulse) Janan Ganesh would understand my theory that way, way too many podcasts feature voices that are just painful to the ear. (FT)
Apparently this extremely on-the-nose "Triangle of Sadness" ad is real. (img) American Teens Are Really Miserable. Why? (NYT) The trance trend. (Pitchfork)
Seed oils in GQ. (GQ)
Starry; NYT
Starry vs. Loro Piana
I had a total of about 2 hours this weekend to read and watch stuff. So on Saturday I picked up the New York Times Magazine and later that night watched the "2023 Starry 3-Point Contest."The inside front of the Times Magazine was this delightfully old school Loro Piana ad, with body copy and everything. David Ogilvy himself would be proud, at least at first glance. Once he read all the puns he'd probably vomit. There's been some articles recently about these loafers, my guess is because Loro Piana is going on the PR offensive - a lot of it very obviously forced - to alert us all of the loafers' stealth popularity in the wake of a lawsuit. Who cares. The point is the ad, and especially the headline. Here is internet slang being wielded to reinforce the old man-iness of an old man's shoe.I would just like to contrast this with the launch of Starry, which is apparently the replacement for Sierra Mist which was the replacement for Slice which was the knockoff of Sprite. Don't ask me what was wrong with the brand Slice, should've kept it. But anyway, during the 3-point contest, Pepsi introduced the world to Starry with this spot during the 3-point contest. Which is, um, interesting!
Good for Tyrese Maxey, though. It ends on "hits different." Here is internet slang being used to make something feel fresh and new and contemporary. I was so bewildered that I searched "Starry" on Twitter as Dame Lillard accepted the trophy and I was not alone. No one seems to know what is going on with Starry. The tag line only added to the uncanny feeling of a product introduction that felt fake, like a simulation of a product introduction. The thing is, internet slang is never contemporary. By the time you've used it it's way too late, unless you want to underline your stodginess. Loro Piana actually used it best here.