In every organization mature enough busywork will surpass real work for two reasons.
First: it cannot fail an so is not a career risk to anyone involved.
Secondly: because it doesn't produce anything meaningful it is trivially easy to manage and organize. Just like stacking boxes. No risk of missing the original mission or getting unexpected results.
In any organization old enough the main activity is the management and busywork is ideal to its needs.
anyway, the main theory of better ad performance from generated ads isn't about, being weird or whatever. it's that few ads on social media are matching with intent to buy, i.e., they are the opposite of google search ads. so there's a much higher diversity of creatives. like, "saturation", like you see the ad so much, you are psychologically going to choose whatever product it is hawking when it finally comes time for you to buy a thing in the category it belongs to. generative ads are merely delivering ad creative development work that SMBs (40% of Meta's revenue) are too unsophisticated to use.
Honestly? They might. A game I play (Torn.com) started using AI and over dramatic ads, and they outperformed (higher signups, and higher retention) the more traditional and even player created ads.
The owner expressed surprise and frustration over it, because it kinda sucks that's what works.
And cheap paperback novels, movies, TV, pornography and video games. The amount of stimulation or positive reward available through these things with only a small effort and a small risk and a short waiting time are much greater than anything available in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness with a similar degree of effort, risk and waiting time.
Not sure if that was an attempt to reduce my argument to an absurdity.. but now we can see many of those things evolve and adapt in real time with lots of testing to reach their maximum potential.
There is a lot of individual variation in susceptibility to a vice. For example, I never had any significant amount of trouble avoiding any food I believed was bad for me. It just never required much willpower, but it is so easy for me to fall into a habit of overconsumption of video entertainment that I haven't owned a television set in decades (and lichess.org is blocked 3 times in my /etc/hosts: near the top, again near the middle and again near the end of the file).
haha no worries, i may be insecure and seeing the flaws in my own argument there..
Similar in some ways i've tried things in my 20's that should have got me hooked but never felt the urge to do or seek out those things. Can't watch TV either but computer games on the other hand... absolutely hooked.
Yeah, as someone who spends a lot of money every month buying Meta ads, I had that thought looking at some of the article's examples.
But in its current form, I think that may happen mostly for very direct-response ads, while creating branding problems that would be expensive for many companies in the long run.
Also, some of the AI-generated creatives and copy that Meta has suggested to me actually misleads or flat-out lies about what is being advertised. Which makes me wonder if the American FTC will go after some companies for running misleading ads at some point, if they are not careful about what suggestions they accept (the ad manager UI currently makes it extremely easy to accidentally approve something you shouldn't).
By always talking only about non specified "problems" and getting people not to expect any further information it is easier to hide when it's a suicide.
I cannot speak for other countries; but in Denmark, they are always crystal clear when the train has hit someone (»personpåkørsel« in Danish); and even when they suspect they might have hit someone; so when I say "technical problems", I mean technical problems. Besides, I am not sure I see the point of hiding when they've hit someone?
There's a lot of evidence for suicide being socially contagious, particularly through communications to the general public which will inevitably find their way to people who in that moment are particularly vulnerable. Newspapers publishing suicides causes an untick in subsequent suicides. Newspapers publicizing murder-suicides even causes an increase in murder-suicides. Publicized information about suicides by train increase the rate of suicides by trains.
It is therefore a beat practice to generally avoid mention suicide, because mentioning suicide means prompting people to think about suicide and in some cases that means prompting people to consider suicide. This is known as the Werther effect, you can look that up if you'd like to know more.
I'm in Norway, I was once at the railway station and someone collapsed on the platform and needed medical attention. Conductors of both trains currently at the platform attended the person, so train traffic was delayed.
The official reason for the delay, according to the Ruter app, the info screens and announcements over the PA system, was "signalfeil" ("signal error"). So at least in Norway, we clearly have a culture of describing all sorts of problems, including completely non-technical problems like someone having a medical emergency, as a problem with the train signals.
See them discuss about how much someone of them gets paid or taxed, if he has medical help if needed or if he can afford to live where he's living now.
This person lives and breathes politics, he is a political blogger. Just interacting with people outside of politics was new for him.
He isn't saying 'ignore politics', and he isn't saying 'we can all agree on everything'. What he is saying is 'making your life about political issues distorts your perspective to where you think that everyone hates one another to point of declaring a civil war' and is advocating sitting down and just socializing with people without the baggage.
He referred to the Thirty Years War where instead of doomscrolling the peasant especially living in southwestern Germany would get his war news by getting killed or starved and his home burned down.
All of this is very easy to filter out while browsing the internet. Not when you are speaking with actual persons. Believe or not, there are still people who watch television and believe in old media.
Television teaches them that the proper response to someone disagreeing is to get angry and shout when the opposing party tries to explain their point of view. Something that is useless or even technically impossible in anonymous net forums.
If you look at the old media, important decisions are mentioned but completely ignored after someone has said something offensive or an accident happened somewhere.
Social media is people and people are the problem, not technology or anonymity. Everyone who has spent Christmas with relatives knows this.
I guess I would always wonder who's paying them. YouTube doesn't pay them a salary so is it the ads or is this one side of the story paying for exposure
Probably there not enough content. Just the same repackaged in human or machine produced slop.
People are addicted to YouTube but I think the key to the healthy watching habits would be restricting the screen time.
Someone knowing about things he's interested in has few problems separating the new and informative content and if he had, say, two hours a week for watching he'd probably enjoy what he sees.
Two hours is just an estimate I came up with, it can be an two hours a month or hour a day. The important thing is that YT just doesn't create enough real new information and after that it is just slop and brain rot, regardless of your habits and filters.
Generating stuff is very cheap compared to building and training the model. When you have your model done you're incentivized to use it as much as possible. Maybe even considering the sunken costs.
Dostoevsky's Memoirs from the House of Dead is a good companion to Gulag Archipelago to show how things got worse into the full medieval sadism in less than a hundred years.
Besides the gulag is a blueprint to basically all the forms of how totalitarian societies treat their subjects, especially if you can see the pattern working in less cruel and plausible forms.
First: it cannot fail an so is not a career risk to anyone involved.
Secondly: because it doesn't produce anything meaningful it is trivially easy to manage and organize. Just like stacking boxes. No risk of missing the original mission or getting unexpected results.
In any organization old enough the main activity is the management and busywork is ideal to its needs.
reply