Ads starring fake AI people: just the beginning of the storm
APR 10, 2024
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In a job interview with an advertising trade magazine 30 years ago, I told the editor: “They’ll be able to make TV ads with famous dead actors.” She thought I was a little crazy.
The Arcads platform now offers ads with synthetic people who don’t exist.1
Is this an elaborate joke? A piece of satire? I wish it were. Doesn’t seem like it.
The first ad shows a woman selling men a deodorant. She’s artifice. Very convincing fake.
You can make your own ad. Just write up your script and…poof.
So imagine this coming. A ChatGPT that talks with you instead of writing; with a friendly face doing the talking.
It’ll happen. Soon.
“Hi, I’m Carol. What can I do for you today?”
“Hi, Carol. Wow, I like what you did with your hair since the last time we talked. By the way, I love you. You’re so helpful. I’m looking for information about the model of typewriter Congressman Bloviate used for his first draft of the community property laws in California back in 1967.”
“I love you, too, but don’t try to send me flowers. Ha-ha. Do you mean the Royal Portable Model 12? Yes, I can assist you…”
And you’re off and running.
Carol, your friend, doesn’t exist.
Perfect.
You have Normal Psychosis.
How would you feel about this up the road someday? “A survey of voters in Dayton, Ohio, revealed that Jim Smith, a former AI face in an ad for toilet paper, is polling at 47% in the race for mayor.”
“Smith is promising to install giant mirrors above the city that will reflect sunlight back into space, to protect Dayton from global warming…”
The crossover point will come when people don’t care who’s real and who isn’t.
“Jim Smith is my guy for mayor. If he wins, the engineers who made him can keep making him.”
—“Oh Rappoport, that’ll never happen.”
Really? Who’s running the country right now? Biden? The old man who shuffles here and there with a full diaper? He may as well be AI.
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