The company collaborated with three studios—Secret Level, Silverside AI, and Wild Card—to produce three holiday commercial ads.
That quote is a prime example of the psycho babble typical of big corporations trying to sell you horse shit.
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Naming your company as “[whatever] AI” is today’s equivalent of every company putting “digital” at the end of their name in the late 90’s. It won’t be long before it’s quaint and out of date and a bit embarrassing.
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Cory Doctorow (father of the Enshitification Diaries) definitely lives in the extreme view points, and some combination of salt and filter is recommended. Nevertheless he does have an ability to distill down key points and put his finger on things.
So here he is on AI:
But though rich people can fall for scams the same way you and I do, the way those scams play out is very different when the marks are wealthy. […] When the marks are rich (or worse, super-rich), they can be played for much longer before they go bust, creating the appearance of solidity.
For an AI scammer like Elon Musk or Sam Altman, the fact that an AI can’t do your job is irrelevant. From a business perspective, the only thing that matters is whether a salesperson can convince your boss that an AI can do your job — whether or not that’s true: The fact that AI can’t do your job, but that your boss can be convinced to fire you and replace you with the AI that can’t do your job, is the central fact of the 21st century labor market. AI has created a world of “algorithmic management” where humans are demoted to reverse centaurs, monitored and bossed about by an app.
The techbro’s overwhelming conceit is that nothing is a crime, so long as you do it with an app. Just as fintech is designed to be a bank that’s exempt from banking regulations, the gig economy is meant to be a workplace that’s exempt from labor law.
Taylorism is a perfect con to run on the wealthy and powerful. It feeds into their prejudice and mistrust of their workers, and into their misplaced confidence in their own ability to understand their workers’ jobs better than their workers do. There’s always a long dollar to be made playing the “scientific management” con.
Today, there’s an app for that. “Bossware” is a class of technology that monitors and disciplines workers, and it was supercharged by the pandemic and the rise of work-from-home. Combine bossware with work-from-home and your boss gets to control your life even when in your own place — “work from home” becomes “live at work”:
Bedoya starts with a delightful analogy to The Hawtch-Hawtch, a mythical town from a Dr Seuss poem. The Hawtch-Hawtch economy is based on beekeeping, and the Hawtchers develop an overwhelming obsession with their bee’s laziness, and determine to wring more work (and more honey) out of him. So they appoint a “bee-watcher.” But the bee doesn’t produce any more honey, which leads the Hawtchers to suspect their bee-watcher might be sleeping on the job, so they hire a bee-watcher-watcher. When that doesn’t work, they hire a bee-watcher-watcher-watcher, and so on and on.
For gig workers, it’s bee-watchers all the way down. Call center workers are subjected to “AI” video monitoring, and “AI” voice monitoring that purports to measure their empathy. Another AI times their calls. Two more AIs analyze the “sentiment” of the calls and the success of workers in meeting arbitrary metrics.
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That’s the crux of it, and in response to the question of this thread, I do worry that decision makers will be convinced that AI can do what we do. Those Coke ads are a great example because if any of us were to bid out that ad it would cost millions. CG animals, digital set extension, set builds, etc…
The end product would objectively be better in every way, but I doubt the check signers care. These are people who may not want to see the world burn but are completely happy to light it on fire for money.
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Exactly.
They all already bit on the earthworm and the hook is embedded deeply.
When the con finally concludes there will be vast wastelands that will be hard to come back from.
Worse than other cases this is spread through all industries and corners of life. It’s not localized like the 2008 housing bubble. Nowhere to escape to.
And the Coca Cola ad and the corporate celebration talk is a perfect example as you said.
One of my favorite examples of the “digital” branding nonsense was a company that already had three words that made it sound outdated from the start: “Modern Video Film”. Then in the late 90’s they made it “”Modern Video Film Digital”, which only made it worse.
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I guess I just don’t understand legality and copyright as it relates to AI at all. Has this not just been trained blatantly and openly on copyrighted material? Is this just some exhibit B for future court cases? I don’t get it anymore. John Deere sues you if you tinker with your tractor because you don’t own the software but this is ok? Technocrats and kleptocrats all just making whatever rules they want because the more confused it is the harder it is for any legal system to actually keep up. Break stuff. Disrupt. Buy new black turtlenecks. Rinse and repeat.
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@BrittCiampa - yep.
Equally, show me one digital artist among us who has never used, or never been asked to use some random picture from the internet as ‘reference’.
If you took all of these ‘copyright violations’ to court, you would fill the courts for millenia.
It’s that tactic.
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I think though equating human beings learning and the systematic development of an algorithmic mimic machine overvalues/ grotesquely anthropomorphizes the machine and grossly devalues humanity. Its the “corporations are people” supreme court decision all over again. I would also posit that these tech titans would be quick to point out the similarities in the learning process and extend the same legal rights and freedoms to their algorithms as those extended to human beings when it comes to the machine learning and training process, but not look to go any further into the rights of their algorithm, i.e. if the machine can be said to be on the same plane as the human in terms of ingestion of materials such as these, is it not subject to the same laws regarding slave labor? And still yet we sit and wonder why so many people are suffering from mental illness and ontological crisis while we sit here debating what rights of humans be imbued to the machines replacing them for a quick buck. In my mind, this is an Orwellian don’t believe what is obvious case. Obviously a machine learning algorithm’s training process is not equatable to the process of a human watching a Scorcese film and being inspired to frame a shot in a certain way. But the mental gymnastics of avaricious capitalism are made to create shizophrenic thought patterns, logic pushed to illogical extremes.
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@BrittCiampa - I’ll try to find the article but the head of Getty Images was recently bleating about how unfair it was that machines scrape the world wide web for training data, failing to mention how Getty Images own predatory lock-in licensing agreements prevented contributors from retaining copyright, while also having been caught scraping the web and claiming copyright for other people’s work.
The squeaky wheels appear to get greased.
Perhaps some deserve to be greased.
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They’re all pieces of shit at the end of the day. You don’t end up with a billion dollars in the bank without being a piece of shit. Its just not possible.
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@BrittCiampa - nobody cares because they’re all going to make squidzillions from bitcash or something.
Well, they might until China stops exporting gallium, germanium and antimony.
Oh wait, that just happened…
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I heard a new and very apt term for the Silicon Valley crowd: Broligarchs
Sums it up. Western Bro culture paired with Russian capitalism. Potent stuff. You loose.
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I love an infographic, though I do have some notes on the tracking. Hahaha.
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That is always a catchy comparison, but it’s not on solid ground. And as such doesn’t get us closer to a better balance or help the discourse. Also Bezos is a bit of a unique sample, as Amazon combines FAANG status and trillion dollar valuations, yet employs about a million of blue collar workers. None of the other tech companies have this spread, they’re all just data pushers.
Executives (to draw a wider circle) do have a different career path, different investments, and different career expense patterns. They also can have an outsized impact on results that at times come with risk, and some level of incentive to take risks is appropriate. A factory worker (within reason) can always find a new job. For executives it can be ‘one day you’re in and one day you’re out’, and there can be long dry spells between good harvests.
Unless you have first-hand insight into this world, it can be hard to appreciate or wrap your head around. I get that.
Where it fails in recent memory is on proportions and on reciprocity. It’s ok for an executive total comp package to be in the range of 30-500x median household income (thus total comp of $2-$35M), with the top range reserved for most exceptional roles. But it can’t be stratospheric.
And executives in the upper range would have to take significant actions to raise the compensation and prospects of their workers in proportionality, not just make the share holders fatter.
Beyond that, the companies of such well compensated executives would have to pay their share of corporate taxes and be good community members. After all they take advantage of a lot of infrastructure from education, to physical infrastructure, to government services paid through taxes, all of without they couldn’t function. No stock buy backs until they pay their dues.
If the reciprocity is missing, then they should remain stuck at the lower bound of this range until they get their character sorted out.
The formula should be one where the input is the performance and the character, and the compensation is the result. The bad apples start with the slot machine prize and then cheat the inputs.
I think it’s mostly a matter of perspective since, with all due respect, this reads like some specious bullshit to me.
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No offense taken. I can appreciate how one comes to that point of view.
That said, I didn’t make this up. I happen to be married to a C-level executive and have first hand insight into this world, their compensation and their career battles (those are my morning coffee conversations). She’s also a board member and certified on matters of executive compensation and their rules.
I myself have lived in the corporate world for many years. I’ve actually given a strategy presentation to Bezos in person on two occasions with his s-team in presence, and been in the room many more times. It was my job as one of his SMEs during my Amazon years. Between my wife and I we have an extended network in more close knit circles across corporate America and government agencies.
This is not important, and I didn’t include it in my previous response, because it shouldn’t matter. To folks here I’m just another Flame artist learning and doing every day. But it may help to explain that this isn’t just specious bullshit but considered observations.
And this disconnect is the very thing I was trying to point out. To an average person the world of executives is very opaque. All we see is catchy news headlines or TikTok excerpts that often have click-bait value, but aren’t good journalism.