Evil AI marketing genius or despicable developer?

Plus, how to build a landing page in 4 minutes

Author

Charlie Braithwaite
September 08, 2023

 

AI Marketing School Newsletter #54

Hi there marketers,

Welcome to AI Marketing School, where we’re helping marketers harness AI to its full potential.

Today, we’re looking at:

  • AI tool gains 96k users but sparks widespread condemnation

  • Challenge us to an AI experiment!

  • How to create a simple landing page in 4 minutes (or less)

Hope you enjoy the issue.

Charlie & Tom

THOUGHT OF THE DAY

Evil AI marketing genius or despicable developer? AI tool gains 96k users but sparks outrage


20 years ago, Mark Zuckerberg created Facemash—the precursor of what would eventually become Facebook.

The premise was simple: users would see pictures of female Harvard students and rate them as hot or not.

Unsurprisingly, the site faced massive backlash, and ‘Zuck’ was soon dragged in front of the Administrative Board.

Now, 20 years later, Harvard grad Emmet Halm has copied this exact playbook, with one small change…

He’s using AI-generated pictures.

What the…?

  • On September 2nd (last Saturday), Helm released SmashOrPassAI, “a generative AI party game”. Users see pictures of AI-generated women and select ‘Smash’ or ‘Pass’.

  • It’s a recursively self-improving system. The more a user swipes, the more it discovers their “type.” It then uses these insights to prompt itself and generate more AI images that it predicts you will like.

Why the…?

  • According to Halm, “The goal is to create the most addicting & personalized image recommendation system. V1 is as simple as possible. Future versions trained on current data will enable even more personalized images & user interaction in image generation. Coming soon!”

  • Creating a personalized image recommendation system could in theory be hugely valuable to tech companies like Instagram and Pinterest.

  • But why use pictures of women?

    1. Halm wanted as many users as possible to quickly train the system, and he thought this would be the best way to get them.


    2. The inevitable backlash would only increase notoriety, attracting even more users. It’s the “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” principle in action.


Our take

  • We’re not fans.

  • Halm could’ve used any number of alternative approaches to get users and train the AI model. Dream houses, for example? I’d waste hours on that.

  • Instead, he reduced what could’ve been a cool product down to its lowest common denominator. It’s schoolboy stuff.

EXPERIMENTS

Challenge the AI Marketing Masters to an experiment!

News, tips, and how-tos are great—but experience is the greatest teacher.

So, we’re looking for a challenge.

Got any fun AI experiments that you’d like us to test out?

Send your ideas over to [email protected] and we’ll pick whichever we think would be most fun/interesting!

AI IN ACTION

How to build a landing page in 4 minutes

Credit to Nick Dobos for this one—check out his tweet/X to see the process in action.

  1. Open ChatGPT Plus

  2. Enabled the Netlify Drop plugin

  3. Describe your website and finish the prompt saying “Deploy to Netlify”

  4. Click the link and check out the result—make changes with follow-ups if necessary

BONUS RESOURCES

Here are a few great AI marketing resources and tools that we’ve come across recently. Enjoy!

Qreates combines AI-generated backdrops with real-life products, slashing photography costs and increasing conversion rates by 70% in 30 days. Also, its founder Salma Aboukar is well worth following if you’re interested in product photography.

ChatGPT released Canva plugin, enabling users to create Canva designs from within the ChatGPT interface. This massively simplifies the process of creating visuals such as logos, banners, ads, etc.

Min Choi used Midjourney and Runway to create this Nike sneakers ad. Not bad, eh?

What did you think of today’s email?

Loved it? Hated it? Hit reply and tell us why.

Happy marketing. We’ll see you again on Friday.

Charlie & Tom