← Back to context

Comment by jcelerier

1 day ago

You say this but I see ai generated ads, graphics, etc. daily nowadays and it doesn't seem like it affects at all people going or not going to buy what these people are proposing.

34 comments

jcelerier

Reply
grues-dinner  1 day ago

In the context of the hole digging analogy, it seems like a lot of holes didn't need to be carefully hand-dug by experts with dead straight sides. Using an excavator to sloppily scoop out a few buckets in 5 minutes before driving off is good enough for dumping a tree into.

For ads especially no one except career ad-men give much of a shit about the fine details, I think. Most actual humans ignore most ads at a conscious levels and they are perceived on a subconscious level despite "banner-blindness". Website graphics are the same, people dump random stock photos of smiling people or abstract digital image into corporate web pages and read-never literature like flyers and brochures and so on all the time and no one really cares what the image actually are, let alone if the people have 6 fingers or whatever. If Corporate Memphis is good enough visual space-filling nonsense that signals "real company literature" somehow, then AI images presumably are too.

  • ben_w  1 day ago

    Sometimes the AI art in an advert is weird enough to make the advert itself memorable.

    For example, in one of the underground stations here in Berlin there was a massive billboard advert clearly made by an AI, and you could tell noone had bothered to check what the image was before they printed it: a smiling man was standing up as they left an airport scanner x-ray machine on the conveyor belt, and a robot standing next to him was pointing a handheld scanner at his belly which revealed he was pregnant with a cat.

    Unfortunately, like most adverts which are memorable, I have absolutely no recollection of what it was selling.

    • thwarted  1 day ago

      > Unfortunately, like most adverts which are memorable, I have absolutely no idea what it was selling.

      A friend of mine liked to point out that if you couldn't remember what the brand was or what was being sold, then it wasn't effective advertising. It failed at the one thing it needed to do/be.

      And there's a lot of ineffective advertising. Either people don't notice it or they don't remember it. Massive amounts of money are poured into creating ads and getting ad space, much of which does very little in the getting you to buy sense.

      By this measure, advertising is generally very inefficient. Large input for small output. The traditional way to make this more efficient is to increase the value of the output: things like movement of digital billboards (even just rotating through a series of ads) to draw the eye and overcome lack of noticing it among miles of billboards. There's another way: decrease the cost of the input. If I can get the same output—people don't see the ads (bad placement) or people don't remember the product/brand (bad stickiness)—by not using human creatives and using genAI to make my ads, I've improved efficiency.

      Unfortunately, this doesn't make advertising more effective or more efficient as an industry and does flood the market with slop, but that's not any individual's goal.

      The people who are creating ads that don't work, despite getting paid, are in Bullshit Jobs (in the David Graeber sense). Replacing bullshit jobs with genAI, where the output doesn't seem to really matter anyway. It would be great if people/companies didn't commission or pay to place ads that don't work, but since they do, they might as well spend the least amount possible on creating the content. The value of the input then approaches the (low) value of the output. No one is going to remember the ad anyway, it impacts no buying decision, why bother spending to make it good?

      2 replies →

  • iamacyborg  1 day ago

    > For ads especially no one except career ad-men give much of a shit about the fine details, I think.

    You think wrong.

    This stuff is easy to measure and businesses spend billions in aggregate a month on this stuff. It’s provably effective and the details matter.

    • grues-dinner  1 day ago

      Do they though? Saturation bombing the Superbowl with Coinbase ads might be effective, but will it significantly change the conversion if a person in the background of the shot has a fuzzy leg that merges with a fire hydrant?

      Businesses presumably spend billions on things like office carpet too and very few of them care exactly what neutral-ish colour it is.

      5 replies →

XenophileJKO  1 day ago

Case in point.. I listen to my own AI generated music now like 90% of the time.