Today in Digital Marketing - We Have Seen the Future of AI and It Is... Shitposts

Episode Date: May 23, 2024

Two big players in the design space have a new offering for large brands and agencies. Snapchat has a new CAPI partnership. Yes, Bing was offline today. And Google's deal with the devil: What happens when you use the world's largest shitposting forum as a main AI training source? Exactly what you think. Links to all of today’s stories here📰 Get our free daily newsletter📈 Advertising: Reach Thousands of Marketing Decision-Makers🌍 Follow us on social media or contact usGO PREMIUM!Get these exclusive benefits when you upgrade:✅ Listen ad-free✅ Back catalog of 20+ marketing science interviews✅ Get the show earlier than the free version✅ “Skip to story” audio chapters✅ Member-only monthly livestreams with TodAnd a lot more! Check it out: todayindigital.com/premium✨ Already Premium? Update Credit Card • CancelMORE🆘 Need help with your social media? Check us out: engageQ digital📞 Need marketing advice? Leave us a voicemail and we’ll get an expert to help you free!🤝 Our Slack⭐ Review usUPGRADE YOUR SKILLSGoogle Ads for Beginners with Jyll Saskin GalesInside Google Ads: Advanced with Jyll Saskin GalesFoxwell Slack Group and CoursesToday in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada.Some links in these show notes may provide affiliate revenue to us.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Thursday, May 23rd. Today, two big players in the design space have a new offering for large brands and agencies. Snapchat has a new Cappy partnership. Yes, Bing was offline today. And Google's deal with the devil. What happens when you use the world's largest shitposting forum as a main AI training source? Exactly what you think. I'm Todd Maffin.

That's ahead today in digital marketing. Two big marketing design tools entered the enterprise arena this week. First, Adobe announced an enterprise tier for Express, its content tool that most people use for social media posts. The new hub will let teams get access to a shared brand library and is,

of course, connected to Acrobat, Creative Cloud, and other Adobe products. It uses Firefly Image Model 3 as its AI foundation, and it will also be getting an integration with the forthcoming AI toolset they're calling Gen Studio. Firefly lets users give the engine reference images, like existing product shots that you already have, and use those as the base for new images that it generates. Perhaps of more interest to the large company managers, the enterprise tier will have some indemnification from IP claims when using Firefly. And today, Canva also launched its own enterprise tier.

There's a new admin center, which lets managers hand out more precise access right down to which specific assets and templates they can see. And like Adobe, this tier provides some level of indemnification for AI-generated content. Snapchat has partnered with data management platform Tealium to simplify data collection for Snapchat campaigns using that platform's conversions API. His partnership lets Tealium access customer data in real time from various sources, both online and offline. It should help new advertisers implement the conversions API quickly without needing a custom backend integration. Quoting social media today, quote,

It could be a good way to improve your Snap campaign performance by using more data points to inform your approach. Quoting Social Media Today, It seems like a good deal for both Snap and Telium, with Snap looking to put more focus on building its ad business and Telium building its partnerships, making it a more took down other search engines too, since Bing also powers chat GPT search, copilot in Windows, DuckDuckGo, and other sites. And perhaps this is a coincidence, but much of the ad platform was having issues for a while today as well. This all happened starting around five o'clock Eastern time. Trying to search would get you Bing's version of the fail whale, which, for the record, is a clipart of a sad panda looking at an ice cream cone that it just dropped. Microsoft says they've got it restored, but at our deadline, there were still hundreds of reports coming in to Down Detector. Blue Sky, one of the many sites that sprung up to fill the void Twitter left,

has added direct messages to its platform, one of the most requested features. It's not a particularly smart DM, though. For now, you can only send text messages. It won't take images. It won't take videos, though they say they're working on both of those. You should find a new chat icon in the left nav bar on desktop and on the bottom of mobile. You can create a global setting the first time you navigate there to let anyone DM you or let only people you follow DM you or prevent anyone from sending you one.

If you've blocked someone in the past, they won't be able to DM you at all regardless of this setting. But if you've only muted someone, they will be able to. Also important to know, these are not end-to-end encrypted, meaning the Blue Skies admins can see your messages if they want, and they even went out of their way to tell users that they might peer in from time to time if they think something nefarious is going down. BlueSky got off to a slow start, thanks partially to its invitation-only onboarding. They opened it up publicly in February, which provided a big but short-lived spike of activity. Since then, engagement on the platform has been steadily slowing.

And finally, the ink isn't even dry on the contract Reddit signed to hand its users content over to Google's AI. That contract said to be worth $60 million to Reddit. So how's it going? Oh, you know, usual things like AI making up completely inaccurate and dangerous recommendations. 404 Media today reported on one example where a user asked for advice to help cheese stick to a pizza they were making. And Google's fancy pants new AI powered search summary recommended to just add glue. Not food glue or an edible binder like cornstarch.

No, literally glue. Turns out the AI got this from a Reddit post more than a decade old, posted by a scholarly chap named Fucksmith. Fucksmith posted, quote, To get the cheese to stick, I recommend mixing about an eighth of a cup of Elmer's glue in with the sauce. It'll give the sauce a little extra tackiness

and your cheese sliding issue will go away. It'll also add a little unique flavor. I like Elmer's school glue, but any glue will work as long as it's non-toxic. Well, that, of course, made its way through Reddit's API, across some servers, through hell itself, and then got ingested into Google's search AI, which spat out this advice, quote, you can also add about an eighth of a cup of non-toxic glue to the sauce to give it more

tackiness. Quoting 404 Media, quote, screenshots of Google's AI search going awry have gone repeatedly viral and highlight how hell-bent the company is on giving its customers the most They also highlight the fact that Google's AI is not a magical fountain of new knowledge. It is reassembled content from things humans posted in the past, indiscriminately scraped from the internet, and sometimes remixed to look like something plausibly new and intelligent. A joke that people made when Reddit and Google announced their data sharing agreement was that Reddit would become dumber and or poisoned by scraping various Reddit shitposts and would eventually regurgitate them to the internet. Giving people the verbatim wisdom of fucksmith as a legitimate answer to a basic cooking

question shows that Google's AI is actually being poisoned by random shit people say on the internet. It is an indictment of Google's artificial intelligence, not of Reddit, nor of the Internet's shit posters. Unquote. So we had a bit of a puppy crisis earlier today. We adopted a puppy about, what, maybe a week and a half ago now. She's seven months old. She's a delight.

She's adorable. She is the cutest puppy in the world. Yes, even cuter than yours. However, she eats everything. Like, is this a puppy thing that we were not briefed on? She eats everything, or tries to anyway. We have a cat. This eating everything policy

apparently applies to the cat's litter, because we have caught her in there more than a few times eating the litter. Now, we use like a clumping litter, you know, like most cat owners do. And a couple of days ago, we realized that the puppy had stopped pooping.

I took her out once and she tried. She started straining and we thought, oh God, of course, you know, she's eaten the litter. The litter has clumped in her bowels and now she's going to be sick. The thing is, she was fine though. She was still happy and wagging her tail and jumping around and now she's gonna be sick the thing is she was fine though she was still

happy and wagging her tail and jumping around and acting all puppy like and not barfing and mostly eating food still and all that but days went by and she hadn't pooped so we took her to the vet this morning the vet was like i don't know i don't really see that much i mean sure keep her away from from the cat's litter but i don't't know. It doesn't seem that bad. So took her home. That is when we discovered that she has found a new place to poop inside behind the couch in my wife's office.

So she was fine all along. Anyway, on an unrelated note, if you are looking for a puppy about seven months old and can pick up from Canada, inquire within. I'm kidding. We love her. I'm keeping her. We're not keeping our sanity, but we're keeping her. I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.