165: Mixed Bag
I'm trying; Coca-Cola's AI Holiday; Ben Affleck; Niantic's AI; and a jazz rabbit hole
I haven’t figured it out yet.
I’m probably doing it wrong.
Ultimately, I want an AI-sparring partner who writes in a very specific tone and style. Not to write for me, but to tease out potential. To extend me. I want to be able to ask, “how would I write this?” (or how would X, or Y, or Z write this) and get back my voice (or X, Y, or Z’s voice). You’d think pattern-recognition machines backed by billions of dollars in R&D would have figured it out by now. But they have not.
Honestly, it’s probably just me.
I’m currently playing around with Lex, the Claude and ChatGPT-wrapped platform, which promises to analyze my writing and author an approach to prompting that will more closely mimic my style. We’ll see. I’ve tried using large blocks of this newsletter and my blog as reference with the major models using a few different methods. The outputs were not worth cutting and pasting.
I will continue writing this by hand, so to speak.
🚨 A few tickets still available: Tomorrow afternoon I’ll be moderating a panel with four smart people discussing the past 12 months of AI adoption across large orgs, solo-preneurs, sales, design, marketing, and social for Marketers’ Community. Please join us for keen insights!
Coca-Cola’s AI Holiday 2024
Let’s be clear: They look like AI commercials. All 110 different versions of the same concept, produced by agency Pereira O’Dell through its Silverside AI venture for the sugary beverage giant. (Reporting via The Wrap, Mashable, Adweek.)
And maybe that’s the point? Here’s one of the 110 iterations.
The agency cut is here with different skylines and vistas.
Conceptual bravery wasn’t the point here. Or even, “hey look, we used AI.” This was about a very large brand and an established agency normalizing behavior. As Silverside’s co-founder puts it, “This is a journey, and the only way to move on the journey is to use the tools and make things.” Work like this attempts to answer the question: What can we do now, because of AI, that we couldn’t otherwise?
And the answer is speed, scale, hundreds of custom versions—all within budget.
If Coca-Cola can do it, so can your brand. If Pereira O’Dell can do it, so can your agency. If you know this is possible, how would you improve upon it?
“Craft is knowing how to work, art is knowing when to stop.”
Actor and director Ben Affleck spoke with Gerry Cardinale, chief investment officer at RedBird Capital Partners, for MSNBC’s Delivering Alpha (here’s the full interview) and made the point: LLMs function somewhat like a mechanical craftsperson—they can replicate a pattern. But LLMs can’t (yet) replace actors riffing off each other on location. The preview is worth a look:
Niantic, “spatial intelligence” and a new kind of creative brief
There’s the world of AI-generated text, images, audio and video. But what about AI-generated 3-dimensional space? From Niantic’s announcement:
“When you look at a familiar type of structure – whether it’s a church, a statue, or a town square – it’s fairly easy to imagine what it might look like from other angles, even if you haven’t seen it from all sides. As humans, we have “spatial understanding” that means we can fill in these details based on countless similar scenes we’ve encountered before. But for machines, this task is extraordinarily difficult. Even the most advanced AI models today struggle to visualize and infer missing parts of a scene, or to imagine a place from a new angle. This is about to change: Spatial intelligence is the next frontier of AI models.”
“…a geospatial model understands how that scene relates to millions of other scenes, geographically, around the world. A geospatial model implements a form of geospatial intelligence, where the model learns from its previous observations and is able to transfer knowledge to new locations, even if those are observed only partially.”
I wrote about a new kind of creative brief when Apple’s Vision Pro was announced—one that incorporates eye movement, voice, and gestures. Niantic is taking this a step further, suggesting, “spatial intelligence will become the world’s future operating system.” Imagine an AI system trained on your physical world. What kind of augmented experience would you create? This gets us close to Louis Rosenberg’s vision of the year 2030.
Additional insights
🤔 “The most valuable use cases for generative AI all facilitated decision making,” writes the team at Bain for their latest research on AI’s potential to improve customer service.
⛪️ 22 petabytes of data later, and you’ve got a digital twin of the Vatican generated by AI, courtesy of Microsoft and Iconem. Read the story here.
🤖 🎭 And here’s a fun summary of “AI as provocation” works by museum and theatrical artists around the Bay Area, via Erin Griffith in The New York Times.
🎶 Today’s post was fueled by the saxophonist Michael Brecker’s 1987 duet with drummer Jack DeJohnette on the opening minutes of the track “Syzygy.” Sometimes you need to hear two masters communicating. But when bassist Charlie Haden comes in, I’m reminded of his playing on “Mopti” from Old and New Dreams, and “Segment” from Quartet West. And later, when Pat Metheny joins in, I’m reminded of “Omaha Celebration” which naturally leads to “Coyote” off Joni Mitchell’s Shadows and Light, and it comes full circle IYKYK. One song, so many adventures.