I’ve seen a quote floating around that suggests we change the narrative over generative AI: it’s rude. if you expect me to do something with my own energy to engage with you, then at least put the effort in to engage with me.
this sentiment immediately landed in my head when I saw google had made an AI ad, ending with a robotic voice saying “install now.”
the ad itself felt more like a brainstorming session than anything resembling a finished work. A single word, “Google!” marked the ad had started, said with the enthusiasm of a child who had just learned to say it in an uncanny mockery. it then cuts to a silent slideshow of features, from “help with writing” to “analyze screenshots” (or something—I genuinely forget). a picture of an AI generated dog that vaguely resembled a jack russle terrier appears on the screen at one point, somewhere around the “help with writing” segment. most of the screen is black with the odd purple swoosh, and any phone capture is a tiny little vertically shot segment in the middle. and the closing I already spoiled—”install now.”
it was too short to skip, one of the five second ads, and it immediately transitioned into a second ad slot on youtube.
beyond the strong sense of “no, I won’t” (ignoring my phone is android so I have all of those apps already), there was just this… curious emotional experience somewhere between apathy and pity. I heard better pitches on the very first day of my advertising program, when our teachers paired us up and had us write taglines for the other as an ice breaker and share them with the class.
but it wasn’t just that.
quality is such an arbitrary metric. you can’t measure creative skill in a vacuum—it must be quantified with things that narrow the playing field, because “good” writing can be diametrically opposed depending on personal tastes. it may be that this AI generated ad is of good quality visually, or the voice was some cadence AI normally doesn’t use.
no, what I keep running into is how I can practically feel the lack of curiosity and insight through the screen.
the script reads like someone asked the AI “what are google’s most useful features?” and that became the ad. I don’t really “do” AI, so I’m unsure how prompting really works, but those were the kinds of questions one does when attempting to create an ad. you sit and talk with others, brainstorm over useful features, visual ways to present them, and try to guess what’s useful to others.
somehow, some way, I could tell a machine did the guesswork.
interrogating your audience is a core component of advertising. the entire creative process is spent asking “what will resonate?” and the entire evaluation of the campaign is spent asking “how can we refine our original assumptions?”. you read social media comments to get ideas for the next time around, you check conversions, you do all sorts of things…
and here you lacked so much curiosity over your fellow humans that you had a machine spit out the statistical average and just ran with it?
I’m glad the creator got paid off such a thing. that’s about the only silver lining
House of Unicorns 