Everyday this thing gets stupider.
What coke-fried marketing genius came up with *that* line? 'Cos i'd honestly like to shake his hand and give him a goddamn lecturing tenure at a school design to mass produce MBA arseholes
That's a car cover. But how to get people to buy them, and put them on cars notorious for rusting and so bury the bad PR? How? Well cokey robinson found a way. He goddamn found a way
say what you will about catholicism but their PR is horrendous. they keep traumatizing all the art kids and then being angry when the best music and art is all critical of the catholic church. do you squeeze lemons in ur eyes and get mad when it burns?
Where did the idea that ChatGPT says true things come from. Certainly people working in machine learning aren't claiming that; in fact at every chance they get they are reminding the public that it isn't the case. Did journalists start saying it? Did people just like, assume that Chat GPT would always tell the truth, or even know what the truth is, when that has never been the case for any other chatbot in the history of ever?
This phenomenon is totally baffling to me.
corporations started using it and talking about using it for purposes that would require it to have these capabilities! so people assumed it had them.
but i also think ‘AI’ has done a lot of work here. it’s ‘AI’, like the computer on Star Trek or whatever. everyone has this notion of computers as things that know facts and not context so are utterly unprepared for a computer that just vibes based on context and doesn’t know what facts are.
Intuitively, a calculator does not lie to you, and we “all know” that computers only do what they’re programmed to do, utterly honestly. If a computer is “lying” or bugging out the popular conception is that something’s wrong with it (but nothing’s wrong with ChatGPT, it’s presented as an impressive achievement). I don’t think we have a robust conception of computers as anything but fundamentally truthful things? PEOPLE lie to you, or code art pieces that might deceive, but we don’t have a cultural mistrust of data and data science (who is collecting SPECIFICALLY this data, in service of WHAT interests, with WHAT skew) like we prolly should. ChatGPT is a computer (honest, can only do what it’s told) trained on huge amounts of data (true things about the world)—Why Would There Be Any Problem With It?
like if you don’t think abt things too closely for fun and just kinda go to work and watch the news, why would you assume that ChatGPT is anything but a helpful little friend who Googles for you?
The Valar are absentee landlords. Let's not even get started on Eru. Lord Sauron though, he's actually here in Middle Earth with his subjects. He doesn't hide on a separate plane of existence that you can only reach if you're on the list. In fact, if you show up at his front gate, there's a good chance you'll be brought right to him! Who do you think really has their people's best interests at heart?
Ahhh, they did the same to us millennials too. So much so that we still get blamed for stuff that has nothing to do with us.
Don't worry, they won't ever stop
Beware of what spin is coming next in the media about the union strikes! The Levinson Group is real good at its job, so there's gonna be a lot of undermining happening soon. Don't fall for it!
As a WGA strike captain put it on Twitter:
They could just pay their workers fairly, instead of throwing money at PR firms to pretty up how they treat people like garbage.
Don’t let Jeff Bezos get away with the fallout of firing 10,000 people with his Dolly Parton stunt.
requested by @exfantrollera
Source: ‘Amazon is set to cut 10,000 jobs in its corporate and technology sectors starting this week, according to reports. The layoffs will focus on the e-commerce giant’s devices unit, which houses voice-assistant Alexa, as well as its retail division and human resources.’
RIP to one of the stupidest publicity stunts of the modern era
They claimed it was to promote the culinary school scholarships they were giving to two women but then they spent over 4x the amount of the scholarships on advertising for the scholarships.
Manufacturing Twitter outrage is a cheap marketing strategy when your brand is too big to meaningfully fail
If you missed it all on Twitter, it was a thread that began with the original tweet from Burger King “Women Belong in the Kitchen.” In the rest of the thread, they shared how imbalanced the gender split is in professional kitchens and then the bit about their scholarships. HOWEVER, what ended up happening was this. (And any social media manager would know this would happen) The first tweet got all the attention, the remaining two tweets had significantly less engagement. The tweet with the scholarship info didn’t even have 1/8 of the engagement as the first tweet. And then they spent the rest of the day telling people to look at their NYT ad, which cost four times the amount of the scholarships they offered. Meanwhile, misogynists quote tweeted it and harassed women with it. ON INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY. It was a fail all around. They need to fire the whole marketing team.
But from their perspective, was it really a fail? sidereal said it, their brand is too big to fail. I think this obviously clumsy attempt at being edgy, on top of the paltry offering of the scholarships, was all a gambit for attention–because clearly people are going to be annoyed, but that means they’re talking about the company. And there’s no such thing as bad publicity, right?
The misogynist reaction to actual women is insult on top of injury but it didn’t cost BK anything. They were announcing a scholarship, after all.
IDK if you already saw this but the US military made guide for how to respond to "what's your favorite war crime?"
I really appreciated Kotaku's headline personally
and
but, even if all of the above wasnt true, and doug bowser was less worrying, why are you doing nintendos work for them? stop getting invested in corporations that dont care for you. theyre exploiting those feelings. you can like nintendo bc i mean, obviously i do, but. like lets collectively try to avoid falling into these traps and not defend the honour of some guy we know nothing about who hasnt even spoken on camera just bc nintendos our fun uncle.
why is specifically people anthropomorphising the mars rover bothering you though. do you get this mad when people think roombas are cute
i feel the same way about roombas that farmers feel about livestock: extremely unsentimental. it’s very hard to see something as this magical sentient thing that seems alive when you’re the one who put all of its guts together and programmed an exhaustive list of everything it’s ever allowed to do. im mostly indifferent to people calling roombas cute because sure, whatever, they’re right there in your house and almost act like a really stupid pet, i see the appeal.
people anthropomorphizing Opportunity bothers me specifically because of how quickly the sentiment gained traction and how a lot of the articles use language that suggests it’s way smarter than it was. for example, the “my battery is low and it’s getting dark” quote is being reported on everywhere as if they allocated hard drive space and mountains of RAM on Opportunity for a neural net that does nothing but spit out poetic blurbs to send back home AND Opportunity was able to see its “death” coming and have any feelings about it whatsoever. it doesn’t have feelings. it doesn’t need them. it’s a fucking data collection device. it constantly sends back data, including info on its battery status and ambient lighting, and the last such transmission it sent indicated that its battery was low and that it was getting dark. it was not remarking on the futility of life or accepting its death. it was remarking on objective facts exactly the way it was programmed to. for what it’s worth, the “my battery is low and it’s getting dark” quote was literally invented wholesale by this blue-check bro on Twitter, who’s now so proud of it he has it in his bio:
the reason you should care about all of this (if you’re not a crotchety old robotics major like myself) is because, in the future, there will most definitely be robots built to do objectively evil things, like killing people and acting as tools of police brutality. these robots’ manufacturers will use EXACTLY the same techniques that were used to get Opportunity from a trivia question answer to the subject of countless pieces of fanart literally overnight to get you to accept them as anything other than tools, and if you don’t know what to expect, it’s easy to fall for it.
To also ease down onto the side of the fence where the grass is unfun, I’ve been saddened as well by people not experiencing the correct emotions about a thing. What Opportunity WAS was enough, what Opportunity WAS was worthy of being mourned. Like OP, I’m put off by the feel of that specific tagline and its proliferation. And, I haven’t seen anywhere yet what the actual last transmission actually was! Don’t give me this “my battery is low and it’s getting dark”—will no one spoonfeed me even a zoomed-out image of an actual raw data readout as received or interpreted or whatever? Is it secret or something? What was the goddamn actual last transmission, because to at least sidle briefly closer to appreciating what Opportunity actually WAS, I’d at least like to center my attention on THAT.
I was in 1st/2nd grade grade when the big Pokémon boom of the late 90s-early 00s happened. It was HUGE. Every kid was into it and we’d watch the show and play pretend and collect the cards and bring our game boys to school to trade Pokémon during recess. I was lucky to have supportive parents, but I remember how teachers and other adults would scoff and say how tired they were of Pokémon, how annoying and juvenile it was and how they couldn’t wait for us to “get over it already”. I might have been young, but I still remember how much these kinds of comments bummed me out. Why in the world are we being mean to little kids who like Fortnite
Why are you comparing pokemon to fortnite???
Because… Fortnite is very popular amongst children at the moment? And there are adults who dismiss it in the same way other adults did when Pokémon was big, calling it stupid, saying the dances are annoying, how much they can’t wait for the “fad to be over”, etc. It’s pretty much the same scenario.
Fortnite has a lootbox system that is glorified gambling, and can cause patterns of addiction in even adult minds, and that is in fact its intended goal in order for the game to make money from microtransactions. That’s how all games with lootboxes function. That’s how they draw in their customer base and squeeze more money out of them.
Like, I don’t judge kids who enjoy Fortnite. My little cousin plays Fortnite.
But last week, my little cousin also stole his mother’s credit card and spent about a month’s salary on microtransactions without his parents’ knowledge.
Modern gaming has become vile and predatory in ways that we didn’t have to deal with as children.
And we shouldn’t be mean to children about this, but we should definitely be coming down on these companies like a pile of fucking bricks.
Delicious.
Finally, some PROPER FORTNITE CRITICISM
Re lootboxes fortnite vs pokemon.
Trading card packets.
My favourite pokemon was a fucking charizard. And I was into pokemon from the beginning. A 1st edition charizard? 130 dollars. Attempts to buy it via packs? Hundreds of dollars.
Like it’s easier to prey on kids and shit now because online purchases but…. they still preyed on kids back in the pokemon days.
Pokémon was just one link in the chain, albeit a pretty massive one. But… 90s kids! Remember dropping what is, now that you think about it, literal hundreds of dollars on Magic cards about five bucks at a time? Remember how the original rules explicitly encouraged you to gamble your cards against your friends’? Or how about pogs, which did the same thing and had a very strict schoolyard coolness ranking system?
80s kids! Remember these?
Remember how you filled them one pack at a time?
In digging up this image, I found out that the two companies I remember putting these things out had been doing it for decades before, just for sports stuff.
Selling gambling to kids is nothing new. What’s new is finally recognizing it as an evil practice rather than an annoying fad.
once again corporate greed is the root of all problems, not children liking things
I think what’s also new with stuff like Fortnite is selling gambling directly to kids, and the very recent capitalist/corporate push to legalize gambling, and particularly online gambling(seriously; the NFL only got “fantasy football” sports betting legalized like two or three years ago).
Like: back in the 80s and 90s these things very much existed, and their marketing was targeted at kids, but the intent was to pressure parents(through their kids) to make these purchases for them. Now, with the lootbox format, the intent is to sell to kids directly, undifferentiated from the adult “Gamer” userbase, and to manipulate them into unwise purchases, and more extreme stuff like the credit card theft mentioned above. That level of cutthroat ammoral profit-mongering is utterly new and, aside from some moves to restricted it by Belgium and the EU(which the industry is completely ignoring, with the informal backing of the US gov), very little is being done by governments to stop it.
Connie Fisher on Make-Up: Speaking to Dr Yan Wu who researched the relationship between the media and the beauty industry.
Idk why I’m hurt but I am.
I also saw somewhere that milk in commercials is actually white paint
either that or glue.
It’s kinda wild to consider this, but HBO(!) actually did a special(or was it a series?) children’s program on commercial deceptions like this back in the late 80s or early 90s, right when the extreme deregulation of commercials under Reagan was starting to make this stuff absolutely ridiculous. A media corporation feeling they had a moral obligation to expose how PR manipulates people, especially one as in bed with the capitalist-class as HBO, is almost completely unthinkable these days.
Lawson Craddock is choosing to continue in the Tour de France to raise money for his local velodrome which was hit by hurricane Harvey. He spends 2.75 hours in physiotherapy everyday and it’s continuing with guidance from his doctor and intentionally staying in last place. A lot of athletes do hurt themselves and it is a problem but please don’t attack Lawson :)
Saying someone should be in the hospital is not an attack, it’s concern. My Gods; what must you think of EMTs?
Here is a Google Search page for Education First’s sponsors. A quick wiki of them will tell you the yearly profits of those companies. If they truly wanted to save Houston’s velodrome, I suspect they could put together a far more effective and direct campaign than an injured cyclist giving $100 out of his own pocket for each agonizing stage he finishes, bolstered by an online fundraiser from fans, also originating from him. That billion-dollar companies could easily solve this problem WITHOUT a GoFundMe is, of course, left unstated in the news coverage.
Craddock’s fundraiser is undoubtedly a noble effort, but would NBCSports, his Team, their Sponsors, and the journalistic profession, be making such hay about it if not for his injury? Would it have even happened without it? Why do they ONLY talk about it in relation to that injury? What purposes are served by presenting his injury, and continued participation, as an act of personal heroism, while ignoring the pressure athletes are placed under to “perform” while injured, and the hazy ethics of a medical profession built around abetting that? By conflating it with charity and public civic mindedness while studiously ignoring the resources available to his team sponsors?
A fundamental aspect of PR is hiding ugly truths behind uplifting and ennobling edifices.
Folks who are new to the IT biz might be confused by many of the adjectives that are used to describe various software products. Here, we provide a brief glossary of several common descriptors and their definitions.
