you can call me aI
The only thing worse than the media we consume are the ads that pay for it. Deep down we sorta, kinda hoped that ads would level up and get as good as the media that surrounds it. Uh, nope.
Fake people pretending to do contrived things in artificial settings while interrupting the real things in our lives just mock us. Ads. Pfft.
The only thing more unnatural than the ads we see is the phony way they show up. Services that follow us around, read our posts, analyze our pictures, and track our movements in a malicious effort to sense when we’re most susceptible to messaging subtilties is just… well… icky.
In short, ads suck. Or, in slightly longer, everything about ads sucks. I swear if I weren’t addicted to the outsized income my meager skills fetch in this woebegone industry I would have left a long time ago.
If you’re a regular reader, you know all this. So, what’s new? This ickiness is media now. You likely don’t know this. Hell, I wade around in the lower intestines of this bile every day and even I didn’t notice the new-crap stench.
A text from my friend Rob alerted my olfactories to media’s new plant. Eleven seconds of video shattered my make-believe world that media somehow stakes out the moral high ground in a limbo contest for the vertically challenged.
Based on thousands of pieces of data about what gets clicked around here, I know that 99.3% of you didn’t click the ultra-important blue text you just read. Since it’s germane to the plot, here...
Spotify has AI songs. They attribute them to people who don’t exist. This allows them to take royalties that would go to musicians and keep them for themselves. — Rick Beato.
See. Icky, right?
Actually, no. It’s so much worse than icky. It’s icky — at scale. How big is the rig? Notoriously B.I.G. A guy once named Reginald Kenneth Dwight has streamed 15 billion songs on Spotify. You probably know Reggie better by his nom-de-piano, Sir Elton Hercules John.
It’s less likely you know Johan Röhn or any of his 600 plus aliases. His army of bots are connected to more than 2700 songs on Spotify that have streamed more than 15 billion times. Yup, on Spotify Johan is bigger than Britney Spears (12B) or Pink Floyd (10B).
Now, to be fair, Beato is amplifying some bunk here. Spotify doesn’t make AI songs. They don’t pay themselves royalties. And Johan is an artist. He wrote songs for Swedish artists I’ve never heard of and conducted Swedish music television programs I’ve never seen. More, he is a legit leader in mood music. The airy stuff that we ask Spotify to stream when we need ambient melodies and Muzak is nowhere to be found. So, I’m going to give Johan a pass.
Spotify less so. They trade positions in their most-widely subscribed to playlists in exchange for paying lower royalties. Maybe that’s how Röhn’s version of Twinkle, Twinkly, Little Star played by his fake persona “Adelmar Borrego” streamed 250 million times vs 60k views on YouTube.
While more content means things are booming on Spotify, things are getting eerily quiet on platforms like Instagram. In 2023, 28% of people posted less on social than they did the year before. There’s no new data, but dozens of stories (like this one and this one) offer anecdotes that suggest the quieting disquieting trend is accelerating. More people post less.
On top of that, there’s this… thanks to NPR and the Guardian and Vice, I’ve become aware of something called the “over-sharing culture.” People who don’t want to make their personal lives public on social media hide their public profile and make their posts private. Private posting adds to the content subtraction problem. I don’t care because I don’t care what most people had for breakfast. But, a dearth of content is a B.I.G. problem for platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
What’s a platform to do? Let’s ask Liv. She’s a “Proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller” who includes hearts and rainbows in her profile. Certainly, we can trust what she tells us.
Except, she’s not Liv. She’s not proud or black or queer or a momma of 2.” She’s an “AI managed by Meta.” She has posted 36 times. 1350 people follow “her” on Instagram. She has fake pictures of fake kids playing in fake places. The pointlessness astounds me on so many levels.
As Instagram gets more quiet, Meta is opening the floodgates to more fake people. Real users can leverage Meta’s AI tools to create their own team of bots. Real users will engage with Liv and other Livs long enough to see the ads that make Meta money.
Icky, right?
Actually, no. It’s so much worse than icky. It’s icky — at scale. Meta is beta testing hundreds of thousands of Livs right now. In August, Mark Zuckerberg explained where this is going. We either didn’t understand or we weren’t paying attention. He said: Feeds were friends. They’re largely influencers. In the future, they will be AI.
Meta knows what to put in our feed and when. That’s how and why ads work. With generative AI, Meta can mass produce exactly what content they need when they need it. For pennies. And, because we’ve consumed an algorithmic diet of pabulum for so long, we won’t notice or care. A thing with a profile and pics and a name will post something you’ll like and that thing will follow you. You know the old adage: Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the masses. The masses are going to see more agreeable content and have more followers. Meta ain’t going to go broke.
You’re going to hear some commentators call these fakes, “bots.” Slightly more kind people might call them “characters.” I’m going to suggest a term that better reflects what these things are — ads.
Liv isn’t your friend. She’s an ad. They all are.
FAKE people PRETENDING to do CONTRIVED things in ARTIFICIAL settings while interrupting the real things in our lives just MOCK us. Ads. Pfft.
Instead of media elevating ads, media has descended to ad’s level.
