Cat Videos

A dear friend of mine, now sadly departed, once remarked that internet marketing reduced to its common denominator consisted of cute cat videos and not much else. Although intended as a wry observation on the dismal lack of sophistication and egregious use of catchy leads and fake images to entice response on so many marketing web sites--my friend's comments have proven all to prescient.

Now this post will not be the first time I have commented on online media nor will it likely be the last, all decidedly negative, but we have turned a particular corner of late that takes us well beyond meme marketing, Tik Tok challenges, YouTube influencers and a raft of other now common gimmicks and grotesqueries that pass for content while pedaling merch or political cant. I am speaking of course of AI--that much hailed techno innovation that is predicted to upend life as we know it and either lead to our imminent annihilation, or an idyllic world of the future where work and commerce such as we have known it are transformed forever.

But before I plunge into my thesis permit me to make a few observations on us--the audience for this fodder. Let me start with a few indisputable facts. As any journalist worth their salt will tell you, newspapers have all but vanished as a vehicle for advertising, information or any of the dozens of other utilities we once obtained including weather predictions, sports scores, stock tickers, want ads, and well, news. Magazines are fast proceeding down the same lonely path. Peruse your local airport newstand (what an anachronism) and you'll see at a glance how few of the mainstays of the past are still breathing.

Even Television and radio are in the dying throes when it comes to these functions, all usurped by the Internet. The thing is that lengthy text, static pictures and less than glib headlines don't work very well on the web--with the result that we have been training generations to come in the art of inattention. The 15 seconds of attention anything might elicit if it plays its cards right is about all most of us have the time for amidst the firehose of stuff gushing at us from every aperture. The stakes for grabbing us by the eyeballs are high so its no wonder that internet marketers are constantly vying to introduce new tricks to their game.

Enter AI, with the ability to create images, videos, and text so over the top, so arresting and generally fictitious that one is hard pressed to sift the simply outrageous but real from the highly convincing fake. Where this goes next I can scarcely imagine, but what I find most frightening of all is our inability to discern motive and consequence from the barrage of marketing mulch being spread so thickly across every venue. We are losing our ability to engage in visual, auditory, and textual critical thinking. Everything is genuine or false--and we no longer know how to tell the difference. Perhaps you think I jest--but I don't. I used to be in the industry and I have a very hard time parsing what I see without asking one basic question. What does the person who created this want me to believe?

That is the tell. Because at the end of the day all this so called content has only one purpose to sell me something--an idea, a product, a service, or a point of view. And by that one measure it is clear that what is wanted of me is to consume and, as Dan Akroyd's Conehead famously said, consume in mass quantities--not to question, but to blindly go where I am led.

Where oh where does this end? I have no special insight, but I can predict it isn't going to get better. Some suggest the next iteration will be mass customization, content we no longer select but is selected for us, all based on inferential algorithms and AI composed images and copy. Every time you do a search or read a post on a social media site and are instantly served up related content and products you are seeing into the future. We can reliably presume it won't stop there, it's just ones and zeroes, binary decisions made by programs that know us better than we know ourselves.

As for me, just serve me up some of those cute cat videos and I'll be fine.