marketing

Manipulation In The Age of AI – And How We Got Here.

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We understand things better when we can interact with them and see an effect. A light switch, as an example, is a perfectly good example.

If the light is off, we can assume that the light switch position is in the off position. Lack of electricity makes this flawed, so we look around and see if other things that require electricity are also on.

If the light is on, we can assume the light switch is in the on position.

Simple. Even if we can’t see, we have a 50% chance of getting this right.

It gets more complicated when we don’t have an immediate effect on something, or can’t have an effect at all. As I wrote about before, we have a lot of stuff that is used every day where the users don’t understand how it works. This is sometimes a problem. Are nuclear reactors safe? Will planting more trees in your yard impact air quality in a significant way?

This is where we end up trusting things. And sometimes, these things require skepticism. The world being flat deserves as much skepticism as it being round, but there’s evidence all around that the world is indeed round. There is little evidence that the world is flat. Why do people still believe the earth is flat?

Shared Reality Evolves.

As a child, we learn by experimentation with things around us. As we grow older, we lean on information and trusted sources more – like teachers and books – to tell us things that are true. My generation was the last before the Internet, and so whatever information we got was peer reviewed, passed the muster of publishers, etc. There were many hoops that had to be jumped through before something went out into the wild.

Yet if we read the same books, magazines, saw the same television shows, we had this shared reality that we had, to an extent, agreed upon, and to another extent in some ways, was forced on us.

The news was about reporting facts. Everyone who had access to the news had access to the same facts, and they could come to their own conclusions, though to say that there wasn’t bias then would be dishonest. It just happened slower, and because it happened slower, more skepticism would come into play so that faking stuff was harder to do.

Enter The Internet

It followed that the early adopters (I was one) were akin to the first car owners because we understood the basics of how things worked. If we wanted a faster connection, we figured out what was slowing our connections and we did it largely without search engines – and then search engines made it easier. Websites with good information were valued, websites with bad information were ignored.

Traditional media increasingly found that the Internet business model was based on advertising, and it didn’t translate as well to the traditional methods of advertising. To stay competitive, some news became opinions and began to spin toward getting advertisers to click on websites. The Internet was full of free information, and they had to compete.

Over a few decades, the Internet became more pervasive, and the move toward mobile phones – which are not used mainly as phones anymore – brought information to us immediately. The advertisers and marketers found that next to certain content, people were more likely to be interested in certain advertising so they started tracking that. They started tracking us and they stored all this information.

Enter Social Media

Soon enough, social media came into being and suddenly you could target and even microtarget based on what people wanted. When people give up their information freely online, and you can take that information and connect it to other things, you can target people based on clusters of things that they pay attention to.

Sure, you could just choose a political spectrum – but you could add religious beliefs, gender/identity, geography, etc, and tweak what people see based on a group they created from actual interactions on the Internet. Sound like science fiction? It’s not.

Instead of a shared reality on one axis, you could target people on multiple axes.

Cambridge Analytica

Enter the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Data Scandal:

Cambridge Analytica came up with ideas for how to best sway users’ opinions, testing them out by targeting different groups of people on Facebook. It also analyzed Facebook profiles for patterns to build an algorithm to predict how to best target users.

“Cambridge Analytica needed to infect only a narrow sliver of the population, and then it could watch the narrative spread,” Wylie wrote.

Based on this data, Cambridge Analytica chose to target users that were  “more prone to impulsive anger or conspiratorial thinking than average citizens.” It used various methods, such as Facebook group posts, ads, sharing articles to provoke or even creating fake Facebook pages like “I Love My Country” to provoke these users.

“The Cambridge Analytica whistleblower explains how the firm used Facebook data to sway elections“, Rosalie Chan, Business Insider (Archived) October 6th, 2019

This had drawn my attention because it impacted the two countries I am linked to; the United States and Trinidad and Tobago. It is known to have impacted the Ted Cruz Campaign (2016), the Donald Trump Presidential Campaign (2016), and interfering in the Trinidad and Tobago Elections (2010).

The timeline of all of that, things were figured out years after the damage had already been done.

The Shared Realities By Algorithm

When you can splinter groups and feed them slightly different or even completely different information, you can impact outcomes, such as elections. In the U.S., you can see it with television channel news biases – Fox news was the first to be noted. When the average attention span of people is now 47 seconds, things like Twitter and Facebook (Technosocial dominant) can make this granularity more and more fine.

Don’t you know at least one person who believe some pretty whacky stuff? Follow them on social media, I guarantee you you’ll see where it’s coming from. And it gets worse now because since AI has become more persuasive than the majority of people and critical thinking has not kept pace.

When you like or share something on social media, ask yourself whether someone has a laser pointer and just adding a red dot to your life.

The Age of Generative AI And Splintered Shared Realities

An AI attached to the works of humans

Recently, people have been worrying about AI in elections and primarily focusing on deepfakes. Yet deepfakes are very niche and haven’t been that successful. This is probably also because it has been the focus, and therefore people are skeptical.

The generative AI we see, large language models (LLMs) were trained largely on Internet content, and what is Internet content largely? You can’t seem to view a web page without it? Advertising. Selling people stuff that they don’t want or need. Persuasively.

And what do sociotechnical dominant social media entities do? Why, they train their AIs on the data available, of course. Wouldn’t you? Of course you would. To imagine that they would never use your information to train an AI requires more imagination than the Muppets on Sesame Street could muster.

Remember when I wrote that AI is more persuasive? Imagine prompting an AI on what sort of messaging would be good for a specific microtarget. Imagine asking it how to persuade people to believe it.

And imagine in a society of averages that the majority of people will be persuaded about it. What is democracy? People forget that it’s about informed conversations and they go straight to the voting because they think that is the measure of a democracy. It’s a measure, and the health of that measure reflects the health of the discussion preceding the vote.

AI can be used – and I’d argue has been used – successfully in this way, much akin to the story of David and Goliath, where David used technology as a magnifier. A slingshot effect. Accurate when done right, multiplying the force and decreasing the striking surface area.

How To Move Beyond It?

Well, first, you have to understand it. You also have to be skeptical about why you’re seeing the content that you do, especially when you agree with it. You also have to understand that, much like drunk driving, you don’t have to be drinking to be a victim.

Next, you have to understand the context other people live in – their shared reality and their reality.

Probably more importantly, is not calling people names because they disagree with you. Calling someone racist or stupid is a recipe for them to stop listening to you.

Where people – including you – can manipulated by what is shown in your feeds by dividing, find the common ground. The things that connect. Don’t let entities divide us. We do that well enough by ourselves without suiting their purposes.

The future should be about what we agree on, our common shared identities, where we can appreciate the nuances of difference. And we can build.

Marketing As Data Dilution

We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.
~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

It’s pretty hard to find solid information about artificial intelligence these days, which got me thinking about why. There are issues with energy usage and water consumption that you would think would be on people’s radar a bit more even as the UN mentions it. On LinkedIn, I was deluged with updates from COP29 as I happen to know people on islands, and AOSIS was a big part of that – but they just kept talking about plastics and curbing the manufacture of plastics.

They should probably be looking a bit more at tires, maybe. But I didn’t hear much about that either.

This got me thinking about how in the context of AI, you hear more product announcements than anything else, and those propagate more quickly than STDs. If AI were a drug, they’d probably have to list the side effects on the box – but it isn’t, it doesn’t come in a box, and this got me thinking about how important information gets diluted by marketing and press releases and people constantly jabbering about what’s being marketed and it’s press releases.

Continue reading →

Decreased Interest in Strategy Games: Why?

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Games in general are powerful tools for humanity because just like any other version of play in the animal kingdom, there’s value. Kittens learn to hunt by sinking their razor sharp claws and teeth into things. It’s preparation.

Mankind isn’t too different. We try to make education ‘fun’ for the same reason, with very mixed results, but one thing is constant in humanity: Play, and as our technology has become more pervasive, games.

That’s why maybe it should be disturbing that a recent study shows that there is less interest in strategy games.

“…But across its 1.7 million surveys, Quantic Foundry found that two thirds of strategy fans worldwide (except China, where gamers “have a very different gaming motivation profile”) have lost interest in this element of video games. “67% of gamers today care less about strategic thinking and planning when playing games than the average gamer back in June 2015,” the report reads.

When we looked for long-term trends across the 12 motivations, we found that many motivations were stable or experienced minor deviations over the past nine years,” Quantic Foundry said. “Strategy was the clear exception; it had substantially declined over the past nine years and the magnitude of this change was more than twice the size of the next largest change…”

“Gamers Are Becoming Less Interested in Games With Deep Strategy, Study Finds“, Ryan Dinsdale, May 22nd, 2024.

That China has ‘a very different gaming motivation profile’ is interesting. The postulation presented in the article is that social media may be ‘wearing people out’, which is a fairly summarization that could related to the average attention span falling from 150 seconds to 47 seconds.

As Quantic Foundry’s post points out, it’s pretty easy to just blame social media and move on.

…the decline in Strategy is likely not an idiosyncratic phenomenon among digital gamers, but parallels the general reduction in attention spans observed by researchers in different fields.

But because all over-time comparisons are inherently correlational, it’s difficult to pin down cause and effect. While we often blame social media for our decreased attention spans, there’s a lack of concrete causal evidence for this. Of course, it bears pointing out that causal evidence for this would be difficult to produce since it’s unethical to raise children in artificial labs. Also, the shot duration analysis in movies is a counterpoint to blaming social media entirely: this downward trend in media attention span can be traced as far back as the 1930s, although it is certainly possible that social media accelerated the underlying trend.

Another potential hypothesis is that the increasing negativity, polarization, intrusiveness, and emotional manipulation in social media has created a persistent cognitive overload on the finite cognitive resources we have. Put simply, we may be too worn out by social media to think deeply about things. For example, higher engagement with social media is correlated with lower math and reading scores and poorer mental health among teenagers. Of course, again, these findings are correlational and not direct causal evidence…

“Gamers Have Become Less Interested in Strategic Thinking and Planning“, Nick Yee, Quantic Foundry, May 21st, 2024.

Before Social Media.

Yet if we dig in through one of the links in Quantic’s article, we find this before social media. We find that shot durations in movies have also been dropping in length.

…Although pacing can refer to motion (Cutting, Brunick, DeLong, Iricinschi, and Candan 2011; Cutting, DeLong,and Brunick 2011) or to the rate of cross-cutting between narrative threads (Bordwell 2013),we will use the term referring to the duration of shots as they have become shorter over time (see also Pearlman 2009). Indeed, the averages shot duration in Hollywood movies has declined from a mean of about 12 seconds in the 1950s to a bit less than 4 seconds in the 2000s (Cutting, Brunick, Delong, Iricinschi, and Candan 2011; Salt 2006)…

Shot Durations, Shot Classes, and the Increased Pace of Popular Movies, James E. Cutting and Ayse Candan, Projections, Volume 9, Issue 2, Winter 2015

Interestingly, this same document has this:

…The second popular account for the shot-duration decline concerns a possible cyclical reciprocity between mass-media screen content and the attention patterns of viewers—sometimes described as a nearly ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) affliction. The idea is that quickened screen
content (television programs, websites, and movies) alters our general attention patterns, perhaps shortening our attention span, and that the makers of this content must incrementally continue to quicken content to keep up with ever-shortening attentional capacity.

Although this idea promotes an incremental change like that seen in Figure 1, we know of no evidence in its support…

Shot Durations, Shot Classes, and the Increased Pace of Popular Movies, James E. Cutting and Ayse Candan, Projections, Volume 9, Issue 2, Winter 2015

Taken by itself, this would lend itself to a net effect of movies becoming shorter. In fact, movies have become longer, which would indicate that there are a lot more shots in a movie and density of content. There’s some more movie length statistics here.

While Attention Spans Might Be A Factor…

It could simply be the cost of doing a good strategy game. In essence, it may not be about the gamers, but about the gaming companies. Creating compelling strategy games is more difficult, and combined with a world that might have people simply wanting some less mentally taxing game to unwind with could be the crux of this. As someone who enjoys a good real time strategy game myself, I am not too interested in the offerings of the last few decades.

A good strategy game, too, generally outlives other genres and therefore doesn’t need to be replaced as soon. This means that it may not be as lucrative for a game company to release strategy games when it could be pumping out first person shooters.

And the other hypothesis Yee described, ‘increasing negativity, polarization, intrusiveness, and emotional manipulation in social media has created a persistent cognitive overload on the finite cognitive resources we have’, could also mean that in the fight for the time of people who would be interested in strategy games, social media might be more attractive.

Movies have gotten longer, attention spans have gotten shorter- but in the end, we only have 24 hours of temporal currency to spend every day, and every move technology makes to ‘make us more productive’ never quite gives us that extra time it promises.

There’s certainly a lot to think about here – if you have the time.

Persuasion, Manipulation, Oh My.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 3 Comments

I spent a lot of time writing ‘From Inputs To The Big Picture: An AI Roundup‘ largely because it’s a very big topic, but also because I spent a lot of time considering the persuasive aspect of AI.

GPT-4 is presently considered 82% more persuasive than humans and can now read emotions.

That, friendly reader, scares me, because we do not live in a perfect world where everyone has good intentions.

The key differences between manipulation and persuasion are about intention. An AI by itself has no intention, at least for now, but those that create it do have an intention. They could consciously manipulate an artificial intelligence through training data and algorithms, effectively becoming puppet-masters of a persuasive AI. Do they mean well?

Sure. Everyone means well. But what does ‘well’ mean for them? No villain ever really thinks they have bad intentions, despite what movies and television might have people think. Villains come dressed in good intentions. Good villains are… persuasive, and only those not persuaded might see a manipulation for what it is, even when the villain themself does not.

After all, Darth Vader didn’t go to the dark side for cookies, right?

There’s so much to consider with this. The imagination runs wild. It should. How much of the persuasion regarding AI is manipulation, as an example?

I think we’re in for a bit of trouble, and it’s already begun.

Our Own Little Worlds

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If I tell you that all apples sound the same, these days you might think I was talking about an overpriced consumer electronics device.

Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. If I were referring to the brand, if you’re a consumer of that brand you might feel attacked and want to defend your choices because I used the word ‘overpriced’. If you’re not a consumer of that brand you might smile quietly at the description.

If I instead said “All red apples sound the same”, you might lean toward fruit because the Apple brand is not particularly red. In fact, they market as silver.1

It’s a pretty silly statement otherwise, we might think. Different colors of apples do not have different sounds that we hear. Yet it’s also a very true statement for the same reason.

Color is something we agreed upon despite how many types of color receptors you have in your eyes. 2 We may not experience the color the same in our minds, yet we all agree that things that reflect certain parts of light are indeed ‘red’.

In fact I can say that apples aren’t red. We all agree that they look red to us, but what they look like isn’t what they are. They happen to look like that because we happen to have organs that interpret vibrations of light waves into our little reality in our heads that allows us to bounce our shins just enough to remember how painful it is to bounce your shins.

But sound? Vibration and frequency, except sound requires a medium to go through and light does not.

We are all just building our own little worlds. Language allows us to share our worlds.

  1. As silver as an Apple. Knowing Apple, there’s a specific shade of silver and they have a name for it. ↩︎
  2. There’s an online ‘test’ that has been popular recently where everyone thinks they’re a tetrochromate, but that test is questionable. ↩︎

Tamed Mushrooms.

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I paused in the kitchen, needing something that could be mistaken for food by my digestive system. Looking in the cupboard, I remembered picking this up.

You see, a lot of people don’t know this, but the mushrooms aren’t actually wild. In fact, I almost passed them by because I know that any mushroom you can grind down into enough mushroom powder to stick into boxes isn’t really wild.

I like mushrooms. I don’t know as much about them as some people, but I know I like mushrooms. I know that there are mushrooms that are psychedelic, and I’m pretty sure that these mushrooms aren’t psychedelic.

They are processed mushrooms mixed into a fairly tasty concoction if you add boiling water to it. It might even emulate the flavor of an actual wild mushroom soup brewed by a druid deep in a forest somewhere, but I’m pretty sure that the druid isn’t boxing powder. Of course, that could explain why we have less druids than movies seem to think we have.

Wild. What is the appeal of ‘wild’? Why is ‘wild’ more appealing than ‘processed tame mushroom powder with seasoning’?

I do not know. I do know that if it comes in a box, it ain’t that wild.

Sleeping, Pillows, And Packaging

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By Dominic Alberts (Pixabay)

Nobody told me how to sleep. Sleep was just something I did, generally when exhausted. The mantra of, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” was the anthem of my youth.

Sleep, as it happens, is pretty important. People say that, but they don’t always communicate why sleep is important. Getting older has forced me to come to terms with these things – things which I wouldn’t have paid attention to while I was younger and worked hours that were not as structured as the companies I worked for were.

They tell you you should sleep, but not at the price of their productivity.

Lately, I’ve been taking sleep more seriously, but as a side sleeper I am very particular about pillows. Most pillows I encounter don’t support my head properly, much less comfortably. At one point I had a pillow made at a custom pillow store somewhere in the U.S., and when I moved down I brought it with me. I spent $100 on that pillow, and when I returned to the U.S. I let an aunt have it because she was a particularly nice aunt. She loved it. She died, and the pillow disappeared.

Lately, I’ve been trying to sleep better – not necessarily more – and so I have had this pillow dilemma.

I was at a local store just some days ago and they were having a sale on some Sealy pillows which I couldn’t find on Amazon to link. I’ve spent decades buying crappy pillows in the hope that they would be good, and they are generally not even passable unless folded in half. They were having some special on Sealy memory foam cooling pillows…

But they were in boxes. I couldn’t poke them or press down on them. I’m not buying a pillow based on promises, and Sealy apparently thought that their name on the box would be sufficient to get people to buy a pillow.

No.

So I told the guy who was handling the sale that if he wanted to sell me a pillow, one of them had to come out of the box. Another man, about my age, backed me up. Before you knew it, we had a revolution on our hands to unbox the pillow, the salesperson relented – and as it happened, he sold me a pillow.

We had to free the pillow from the box, which should seem ridiculous because it is ridiculous. There are some things you simply don’t buy online unless you know what you’re ordering and they are much the same as buying something off the shelf that requires the same knowledge.

You’d think marketing and sales folks would understand this. They generally don’t. Clothing, beds, pillows… it’s so much better to buy in person so that you know what you’re getting.

I like the pillow. I’ll write more about my adventures with sleep in the near future.

Amusingly, there’s an Amazon affiliate link in here to Sealy pillows for the people who don’t understand this. 🙂

Who Are We? Where Are We Headed?

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We used to simply dangle from the DNA of our ancestors, then we ended up in groups, civilizations, and now that we have thoroughly infested the planet we keep running into each other and the results are so unpleasant that at least some people are renting a virtual, artificial girlfriend for $1/minute.

It’s hard not to get a little existential about the human race with all that’s going on these days with technology, the global economy, wars, and where people are focusing their attention. They’re not really separate things. They’re all connected in some weird way, just like most of humanity.

They are connected in logical ways, we like to think, but when you get large groups of people logic has an odd tendency to make way for rationalization. There are pulls and tugs on the rug under the group dynamics, eventually shaking some people free of it for better or worse.

This whole ‘artificial intelligence’ thing has certainly escalated technology. The present red dots in this regard are about just how much the world will be improved by it. We’ve heard that before, and you would think that with technology now reflecting more clearly our own societies through large language models that we might be more aware that we’ve all heard these promises before.


I can promise you that for the foreseeable future, despite technological advances, babies will continue being born naked. They will come into the world distinctly unhappy with having to leave a warm and fluid space to a colder, less fluid space. From there, they seem to be having less and less time before some form of glowing flat screen is made available to them, replete with things marketed toward them.

It would be foolish to think that the people marketing stuff on those flat screens are all altruistic and mean the best of the children as individuals and humanity. They’re trying to make money. Everyone’s trying to make money.

I don’t know that this is empirically true or not, but it seems to me that when I was a child, people were more interesting in creating value than making money. If they created value, they got paid so that they could continue creating value. It seems, at least to me, that we’ve been pretty good about removing value from the equation of life.

This is not to say I’m right. Maybe values have changed. Maybe I’m an increasingly dusty antique that every now and then shouts, “Get off my lawn!”. I don’t think I’m wrong, though, because I do encounter people of younger generations who are more interested in value than money, but when society makes money more important than value, then everything becomes about money and we lose… value.

To compensate, marketing tells people what they should be valuing to be the person that they are marketed to become.

I don’t know where this is going, but I think we need to switch drivers.

Maybe we should figure out who we are and where we want to go. Without advertising.

It’s Not About Success.

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_Gustave Le Bon Error

I was reading GS’s “Not Successful Enough?”, and I wanted to take this in a different direction because I don’t think it’s about success.

Success means different things to different people, but most of the time when people refer to being successful they mean financial success, or career ‘success’, whatever that might be.

What do you consider successful beyond those red dots? We’re told that’s success, we’re indoctrinated to believe it’s success because we send off the little kids to go to school so that they can get jobs so that they can be… successful.

In some part, our parents and family determine what we believe what success is, but it’s institutionalized in our schools and even in advertising what success is.

They also say you need to have children, which makes sense in a way since that’s how you pass on all that genetic soup made up of male and female zygotes so that they too can be… successful. Most of the zygotes, by the way – the vast majority – are not considered successful, not because they don’t have jobs and fancy titles, but because their job is really to be numerous in the hope one of them is successful. That’s really the larger game being played with jobs and titles by homo sapiens.

I used to think that money mattered, and it does to some degree but not as much as people who want you to buy their crap want you to think. I never really thought titles mattered because I have so many people who are in some sort of authority that are idiots and consistently screw things up that I’m not impressed by titles, or diplomas, or academic degrees.

If there is any success for a human in this world, it’s based on a value. Different cultures have different values, different families instill (or not) different values, and different people have different values. The question about success is really a question of, say it out loud, values.

If you don’t feel your successful enough, take some time and consider what you believe your values to be. Look back on the things you felt successful about, or what you believe you failed at. You can’t miss the feeling of success or failure, they stand out. Maybe write a list. Maybe do a spreadsheet. Just do it. Examine each success and each failure. Examine the values associated with them. Examine the circumstances around them.

And work on the values, maybe. Maybe what you presently believe is success is not really what you feel is successful. Maybe you’re just making yourself unhappy for no good reason, stressing out over the need to buy meaningless crap to impress meaningless people with the net result of having a meaningless life.

There are two people who drive nice BMWs in my neighborhood, and I’m friends with them despite having a Hyundai. They constantly complain about parts, service, etc. They’re successful, right? Are they? They’re unhappy with their cars, so that doesn’t seem much like success to me, but people see them in these cars and believe they are successful because… why?

I believe that while we’re all in this artificial rat race of life that gives some advantages over others – and regardless of how it is done, some people will always have some advantages – if you can find meaning and value in what you do, you are more of a success than advertising campaigns would have you believe. You may well be a success in many ways and are simply wanting to appear successful.

The people who matter in life see your value beyond what they can use you for and what they can get from you. If you’re being told you’re not a success, question the intentions of the people making you believe it.

Meanwhile, be nice to the people who deserve it and even some that don’t.

Incoming: The Tide of Marketing.

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_google_ai_marketing

Browsing Facebook, I come across this in my feed and it’s as if they read what I wrote in Silent Bias:

…With social media companies, we have seen the effect of the social media echo chambers as groups become more and more isolated despite being more and more connected, aggregating to make it easier to sell advertising to. This is not to demonize them, many bloggers were doing it before them, and before bloggers there was the media, and before then as well. It might be amusing if we found out that cave paintings were actually advertising for someone’s spears or some hunting consulting service, or it might be depressing…

Almost on command, this shows up in the main feed on Facebook – sponsored content by Google. I haven’t used Bard, but I fear I have suffered Bard’s work because… I imagine that they used Bard to generate that advertising campaign for Bard.

The first thing that every sustainable technology has to do is pay for itself. The magnitude of this, though, is well beyond cave drawings. As it is, marketing has used a lot of psychology to get people to chase red dots.  Now that this has become that much ‘easier’ for humans, and now that it’s being marketed as a marketing tool…

How much crap do you not need? We need to be prepared for the coming tide of marketing bullshit.