AI (Belongs) In Ads
For a world-changing technology, AI hasn't changed the world much. The only place I really see AI is in advertising. The local Sri Lankan bookies uses AI girls to replace stock photography. The mobile ads on pirate South African TV use full AI videography. Advertising is really the only sensible use for AI art. Nobody wants to see ads, so it's fitting that nobody makes them.
Advertising is great for AI because the company doesn't really care, the creatives cares even less, and the audience cares least of all. AI is good when you need something that looks real, but which nobody really looks at, which is basically a definition of advertising. By definition people aren't looking at ads closely, and they were always fake to being with. Making ads that are completely fake is thus just a logical progression.
I've worked in advertising and we'd always be making artwork for a boss that had no taste to be fed to people that weren't hungry. After multiple revisions and the slow destruction of any creativity, and we just wanted to get something out and go home. Which is what AI lets you do. AI gives you one button to put everyone involved in advertising out of their misery.
That said, AI ads are miserable. The South African video ads look like humans, but are definitely not humans, they move wrong, smile without souls, they're zombies working for the phone company. It's actually a bit terrifying. The gambling ads on the billboards here in Sri Lanka are not quite so uncanny valley (because AI photos are much better than videos) but they're not good in any way. However, how good do these ads need to be? No human wants to look at them anyways. It's nonconsensual viewing.
Forgive me, but because I need money to buy things, I'm going to start paywalling some things half-way through, but I'll try to keep the first half coherent. Call the top-half the TikTok version, with more (paid) depth below the fold. Below also includes this post as a video and audio.
When I look at these ads—especially the video ads—I'm reminded of Philip K. Dick's question, do androids dream of electric sheep? When you watch these ads, it feels like you're watching a corporation dreaming of being human. But this is not new either. Advertising was always how corporations dreamed of people, as pure consumer beings, and beaming morons. They used to manufacture these dreams cybernetically—using failed artists and actors—but now they make it automatically, using a failed technology that really has no other praxis.
This is why I say AI hasn't really changed the world. To the man on the street, it's just replaced bullshit marketing with peak bullshit. It's just a big bullshit pyramid scheme. To the people in the spreadsheets, there is no trillion-dollar market to justify the trillions in spending. An MIT study found that 95% of generative AI projects have failed. RAND found that as many as 80% of AI implementations didn't implement, and “TechRepublic put the kaput rate at 85%” (via Naked Capitalism). But you don't need a weather report to tell you it ain't raining. You can just step outside and see for yourself. The only place I see AI is very cheap value additions to something that was already worthless. All they've really replaced is stock photography. Generative AI just replaces a human pretending to be a machine with a machine pretending to be human.
So the punters on the street get gambling ads, while the real punters on Wall Street gamble the whole US economy on what is essentially a parlor trick. I'm not saying AI doesn't have uses—China seem to use it for more boring automations—but the Western world has used it to automate interesting stuff, and then run the biggest stock market scam using public interest. But no business has actually overhauled operations based on this, because the technology is undercooked and expensive. Except for advertising, specifically gambling advertising (football is just advertising for gambling). Which makes sense when you think about it. The whole degenerative AI industry is a gamble, and degenerate gamblers are the one real target audience.