Five Links #40
You’re receiving this email because you subscribed at davesmyth.com. If you would prefer not to receive these emails, you can unsubscribe.
Absorbing
Five links for your inbox from this week.
1. Bob Hoffman on personalised ads, fame and one-to-one selling
This whole piece is worth reading, but particularly these two extracts:
The most compelling advertising objective for any brand that aspires to be highly successful is to become famous. The most compelling advertising objective for any brand that is already famous is to remain famous. There is nothing else in advertising’s bag of tricks that can reliably provide fame’s contribution to business success.
One of the current obsessions of the advertising industry is “precision one-to-one” targeting. If you agree that fame is advertising’s most powerful contribution, then it should be obvious that “precision one-to-one” targeting is antithetical to this.
Advertising was invented for the very reason that trying to convince people one at a time was highly inefficient. But today, we are determined to go backward. If you want to sell one vacuum cleaner, sure, go door-to-door. But if you want to sell a million, you better find some way to make your vacuum cleaner famous.
When Meta and adtech complain that privacy laws and tech pushes hurt small businesses, what they really mean are businesses that rely on paying them for their tracking ads. And when businesses rely on tracking ads they’re not building brand awareness, they may as well be selling door-to-door.
2. ChatGPT is a bullshit generator
This fantastic interview in The Markup with Arvind Narayanan is another worthy read:
Sayash Kapoor and I call it a bullshit generator, as have others as well. We mean this not in a normative sense but in a relatively precise sense. We mean that it is trained to produce plausible text. It is very good at being persuasive, but it’s not trained to produce true statements. It often produces true statements as a side effect of being plausible and persuasive, but that is not the goal.
This actually matches what the philosopher Harry Frankfurt has called bullshit, which is speech that is intended to persuade without regard for the truth. A human bullshitter doesn’t care if what they’re saying is true or not; they have certain ends in mind. As long as they persuade, those ends are met. Effectively, that is what ChatGPT is doing. It is trying to be persuasive, and it has no way to know for sure whether the statements it makes are true or not.
3. CatGPT
ChatGPT but with a cat. From Matthew Knight.
4. Stable Diffusion sued by Getty Images
This turn of events is a shock to absolutely no-one. What’s incredible is the first image of this article: it would appear that Stable Diffusion hasn’t just absorbed these images, it’s even spitting out Getty Images’ watermark.
5. Signature Hound
The effort to result ratio in creating email signatures has always seemed disproportionate to me. Signature Hound comes highly recommended and looks like a great free solution (though I always wonder how long free stuff will stick around).
Projects + other things
- Back in September, the studio I’d been building over the last couple of years took an unplanned hiatus. I threw together a one-page site to represent me as an independent freelancer once again. I’ve given this some tweaks over the last week or so to talk about my process, ethics and a few other things.
- My Unoffice Hours are available every other Wednesday. Next slot: 8th February.
If you enjoy discovering the links in the emails, please tell other people about it: give it a share on social media or forward it to someone you think might like it. If you were forwarded this email, you can subscribe here.
If you come across a link/app you think might be of interest to other people on this list, hit reply and let me know.
Until next time,
Dave