This is fantastic if it means companies will switch to inexpensive ads that can be cobbled together by somebody's kids, and ditch their multi-million dollar ad budgets that just make everything cost more.
this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2026
369 points (96.9% liked)
Technology
85330 readers
5484 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Read the room, Yahoo Scout.
This feels like watching a sprout breaking concrete...
Something like 4 years ago, i remember watching a flyer that was published in a few news outlets about some yankee big city, looking for a graphic designer. The flyer was practically a toddler's doodle. I expect AI to have an actual impact in art, looking to over express the human intervention
"charming" ads
"We thought building a cardboard airline in a treehouse sounded more honest."
I don't think they know what "honest" means
Honestly annoying choice of gif
It's a small snack company stranger, not fuckin Palantir. I reflexively hate advertisements too, but given that I am occasionally forced to overhear them or god forbid witness them with my own eyes, I would take something human over something slop-generated any day.
Remember the phrase, "A leopard doesn't change its lazy urge to utilize AI slop". Instead of AI imagery, they are now likely just asking for AI generated ad treatments and scripts for the spots they have film students shoot for slave wages. Then they probably sit back and vape, Joe rogan playing in the background, as they bet on celebrity fart probabilities on kalshi and laugh like they got away with something.
When these ghouls abandon humanity, don't give them a second chance after they get caught.
Yes, we should give no one an opportunity to change or learn from their mistakes. We must focus on projecting our own moral purity and superiority above all else, for there is no higher pursuit. Maybe we could come up with some phrases in Latin or something even.
For the fervently anti-human, yes... For the AI/Crypto/NFT scammers and for dedicated fascists and neo-nazis, they can all buy individual cruise ships (to avoid any collective action) that they independently run as corporate nation states in international waters. They can each employ their own barber to give them Marcus Aurelius or Caesar haircuts and continuously war with one another in a "first they came for" progression of self targeting their own sub ingroups until it's just mark zuckerberg's bodyguard (who immediately through mark's limp body overboard as the mega yacht departed and claimed it as his own) and mussolini's other grand kid who wasn't photogenic enough to run for politics and grew up in the basement.
I feel like a large part of it is that a lot of AI slop is still in the uncanny valley. The uncanny valley has been shown to create a massive negative emotional reaction in people. You don't want to trigger that reaction while trying to sell people something.
Naw, AI is literally corpo bland. It can't be interesting and unique, cause it can't take chances.
If everything is the same boring AI garbage, it'll just blend into the background.
Good marketing has to be interesting and stand out. LLMs are the opposite of that.
That's part of it. For me, AI signals low effort. I can see computer generated slop anywhere. It's completely ignorable. Human stuff, in this age of isolation, brings me joy. I love janky, hand made stuff because there's a human element to it.
Whenever i go to Reddit it's like 50% Amazon AI ads and i always wonder what the point is.
- Everyone knows Amazon exists
- They aren't for generating good will for the brand
- They aren't particularly interesting and would IMO at least be creative perspective shifts if you got rid of the AI
🤷♂️
Guesses: reminding you you have something in your cart. Showing you some bullshit product. Preventing competitors from gaining ad space helping cement brand significance as THE brand. Reminding you to shop for something.
Coke doesn't run ads to sell you on the idea. They run ads to make you think you're thirsty and that you could go for a coke. Amazon just needs you on their site.
"We started noticing consumers weren't rewarding polish the way brands thought they were," said Chookie founder Zev Ziegler in a press release. "They were rewarding effort. Humor. Tiny human decisions. When we compared the performance of our handmade work against AI-generated creative, the difference wasn't subtle."
I hate this timeline
Sometimes I just keep clicking these things over and over and have them regenerate new prompts and keep spending tokens just so they think they got a surge in engagement but I couldn't give a fuck less and just want to burn as many of their tokens as possible before I never visit their site again
TBF I think there is something different between using AI to summarize (where it basically takes the average of articles and compacts them (kind of), which is something they are good(ish) at given what they do is create averages) and AI "generating" content that is the result of that averaging.
I mean I hate that it's injected everywhere but slop Ads are worse than slop summaries IMO
I used to think that but I'm also noticing a pattern where it is just a waste of time and energy.
AI generates the big wordy email that sounds super formal. Someone else uses AI to summarize that email.
It's like a dumb idea is decompressed and recompressed immediately and unnecessarily. We should never be using AI to do shit like write blogs or lots of words. That should be the human. It should only ever summarize if that's it's purpose. But inevitably, people get lazy and want it to write their article...
AI summaries are generation of averaged content. It is literally the same thing with the prompt to summarize.
"We started noticing consumers weren't rewarding polish the way brands thought they were," said Chookie founder Zev Ziegler
Ummmmm...
One of its AI ads was rife with misspellings and terrifying, googly-eyed chocolate bars. Another of them shows an AI-generated figure producing the cookie bars in what appears to be lab.
I don't think "polish" means what you think it means, Zev.
Every time I write an email on my phone in Gmail, it pops up a blurb asking "Polish?" so I assume this is a term they're trying to repurpose. But my first thought every time I see it is that it's asking to translate my message into the Polish language.
They can polish a turd all they want, but at the end of the day, it's still shit.
"I outsourced the copywriting to the lowest bidder, who happened to be in Poland"
Reading the article, it sounds more like a comment on advertising as a whole and not their AI ads specifically. Polished videos vs relatively unpolished hand filming it.
Either way, they got to the correct answer.
The method to get the right answer is often more important than the answer itself.
Spoken like a true math teacher.
Math teachers are correct, becsuse doing the right steps is repeatable and scalable. Plus you can figure out where you went wrong the times you don't get the answer right the first time!
No.
That's true for people. Corporations don't learn from mistakes and cannot improve over time, they're legally obligated to seek shareholder value.
Expecting a corporation to do things for the right reasons is like expecting AI to do things for the right reason.
If we must interact with either, we must simply be glad when the answer is correct. If we want corporations to act more like people and be able to have real values, we need to bake a corporation's values into law in some way.
Private businesses can still have morals and can learn and all that good stuff where the method matters, but public ones will always dehumanize.
So I'm happy they hit the right result. I'm also happy they're talking about it like this even though this talk is also just a publicity response, because other companies might see this and also do the right thing for the wrong (purely financial) reason.
But this is also why corporations shouldn't be people and should be barred from everything involving government and all that, if not abolished altogether.
People hate ads full stop and tech has amplified them to be there, all the time, following you. Start buying only what you need from small businesses if possible.
Stop fawning over brands and marketing. They don't like you, they don't want a conversation, the don't care if you are a better person. They want your money. Capitalistic is a cancer...don't feed it.
There's like... one percent of one percent of advertising that has ever been created that actually had some kind of artistic or entertainment merit. Those insane Spongmonkies ads for Quiznos. The H&M ad Wes Anderson did. It's so vanishingly rare as to not meaningfully count, but it does happen once in a blue moon.
Nope, thats Chuck Testa
'TomSka and Friends' on YouTube is always who I point to for great examples, in my opinion, of ads done well. Each one is an actual full skit, not just bland ad reads, with actual production value behind them.
Linked video starts at the ad, but the whole video is great as well. Who Killed the Laugh Track?
People do not hate ads. People hate shitty ads. Go see how many views a certain epoxy company on Instagram has. I know because I watch every single ad. They're fucking awesome. I'm the target audience to watch epoxy applied to huge pipes and stuff.
epoxy company name here
It's belzona
🤷 i hate ads.
Apparently I'm the outlier, according to the down votes. I hate most ads, but not all.
I dont know. I watch less ads now woth the aid of tech. Lemmy, jellyfin etc
Yeah, even my wife who uses standard streaming services with ads, youtube with ads, etc reminded me recently that we used to have 3 5-minute commercial breaks every half hour on broadcast tv growing up. I'm all for getting rid of ads, but it was interesting to realize that even before the internet you only got about a 50% ad-to-content ratio.
I find it interesting that you and another posted see tech as a line of defence. I know I also employ that but it’s taken your comments to make me see and seperate the layers of use. It’s good we can have these rational discussions here. Sorry if I sound a bit preachy or crazy.
Tech is a tool. Those who want power over you will use it against you, and you can in turn use it to defend against them. Ultimately it's whoever puts the most effort in who gets the upper hand, and the wealthy can always motivate people with money to get a lot of effort in on their side, so, like with most things in life, it's an uphill battle to fight against them.
What's crazy is if you watch shows from the 60s and 70s they can have an extra 3-5 minutes of content in a 20 minute episode.
when re-broadcast on television or cable, those older programs are often re-edited or literally sped-up (or a little of both) so they can have the current norm of 10-12 minutes of ad time per half-hour.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
Ads are, by history, increasingly better forms of mind manipulation. Fail to block them at your peril, however cutesy.
Either ads don't work, and so I'm doing them a favour if I block them, or they do work and in that case it's fucking evil mind control and you bet your ass I'm going to block them. There's no scenario where blocking ads is not the moral choice.
Beyond that, ads on websites can have malicious code in them. Blocking ads isn’t just morally correct, it’s also good digital hygiene
Correct.
This is exactally it.
It’s puff pieces like this too. Are we supposed to pat them on the back, give them our loyalty, because they are not using the latest technique?
The piece is pretty much we don’t use AI, go on our social media and lap up our human made mascot.
Short story is they tried AI, they jumped to the next option, hating AI, they used data to analyse these techniques and then make an article to promote this. All to sell cookies.
It feels like a constant battle to keep the manipulation away.
view more: next ›