Digital representatives, robot sculptors, and luxury pineapples. (Plus my new novel!)
Putting the AI in Ukraine
Last week, Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs unveiled a “digital representative” called Victoriya Shi. This spokesperson is an AI-produced avatar who reads out official statements from the MFA in videos shared on the Ministry’s official online social channels.
The main reason for creating Shi was "saving time and resources" for diplomats, according to Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba. I guess that’s fair enough when your country has been at war for years. But watch the video and tell me whether you feel like this is a big step toward dystopia.
You might be thinking that it would be super easy to deepfake a person who is already fake. How could the public ever trust a government announcement if it comes from an AI bot? The Ukraine MFA has a smart and yet incredibly simple solution: a QR code in the corner of each Victoriya Shi video that sends people to the text version of the bot’s announcement on the official website. And just to be clear, the official statements themselves are not written by AI. That would indeed set a worrying precedent.
I don’t know how the original Ukrainian version comes across, but in English, Victoriya Shi barely makes it through the “uncanny valley” of fake humans. When the video ends with her saying, “I look forward to our fruitful cooperation,” it certainly has a whiff of robot overlord about it. But is this unsettling impression necessarily a bad thing?
We are now well and truly in the Age of AI. Trust was already at a premium in our culture once “fake news” appeared on our collective radar. When was that, you ask? It pre-dates generative AI by many years. Almost nobody thought we were living in a “post-truth” media environment until a certain orange-skinned nepo baby decided to run for president. A quick search on Google Trends shows that the phrases “fake news” and “post-truth” were basically non-existent until late 2016.
Did Trump breach the castle walls of truth and now the artificial intelligence army is marching through, bot by bot? Or is there a hidden good side to the new world of deepfakes?
Earlier this year, the employee of a Hong Kong company was fooled by an AI video into transferring US$25 million to con artists after receiving instructions during an online meeting with several participants in the familiar Zoom-style grid. The employee literally didn’t know who they were talking to. What this means for corporations is that secure credentialing will become critical, especially for large organizations where employees may not be familiar with distant colleagues that they see on a screen. The situation might get worse if metaverse meetings become a thing. One thing’s for sure: old-school in-person meetings cannot fall prey to deepfakes unless we get access to those latex face masks that Tom Cruise wears to fool his enemies in Mission Impossible.
Ironically, artificial intelligence may be able to help with this issue by detecting deepfakes. We’re already in an arms race where digital dupes are the weapons. Two days ago, OpenAI joined the steering committee of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), whose members are building new tools to identify AI-generated content. Of course, any geek worth their salt can strip metadata or erase a watermark, but the key to moving forward may end up being that any digital content which lacks C2PA authentication will automatically be treated as suspicious.
If the outcome of a crisis of authenticity is that people learn to distrust digital media, is that so bad? I’m regularly targeted by phishing scams via email, texts, phone calls, or messaging platforms. Again, these scams existed prior to AI ubiquity. But if there’s one thing a chatbot is great at, it’s chatting, and humans are extremely susceptible to convincing strings of words.
Some companies are already offering “AI firewalls” but maybe LLMs will prevent fraud simply by giving everyone who uses tech a healthy degree of suspicion about the provenance of the messages they are receiving. After all, when there’s a burglary outbreak in your neighborhood, you make sure to lock your doors. Even Warren Buffet has sounded the alarm about AI scamming.
There’s a crucial distinction between authenticity and truth. Just think about it. When the world’s most successful blusterer creates a platform called Truth Social, the word truth becomes a lie. This was the basis for the Newspeak that Orwell imagined in Nineteen Eighty-Four: say literally the opposite of what you mean often enough, and eventually it becomes real. (On the other hand, claim that you scored 11 holes-in-one in your first round of golf like former North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il, and you become a laughing stock.)
The authenticity/truth nuance matters. A government-created AI avatar can be fake (not a real person) while also being authentic (delivering genuine official statements). We are all going to have to fine-tune our bullshit detectors now that generative artificial intelligence has become this good. And maybe some of us already are.
In case you’re wondering why the Ukraine MFA bot is named Victoria Shi, I guess “victory” is what the entire country is hoping for in its heroic resistance to the Russian invasion. As for “Shi”, that is how “AI” is pronounced in Ukrainian. Perhaps this is one war that will be won by the most intelligent use of tech, not by the country with the biggest military.
UPDATE: The day after this newsletter dropped it was revealed that WPP, the world’s largest ad agency network, almost fell victim to a deepfake scam where the CEO’s voice was replicated by AI.
Utopia or dystopia?
Okay, so I’m shamelessly using this section’s first story to share news about my novel, which was published in paperback and as an eBook last week: 2084.
The new reality of generative AI that we have become exposed to over the last 18 months heralds the start of a technological, social, and political process that might lead to the superficial utopia I’ve imagined in my book. It could also lead to a hidden dystopia.
The premise of 2084 was not inspired by some kind of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) of the type currently fueling the AI industry hype cycle. None of the robots in the novel have self-contained general intelligence like The Terminator – they are similar to machines that exist right now. My book’s AI is something entirely different. You’ll have to read it to find out what it is.
This newsletter’s intro explores the world we have already entered, where generative AI undercuts authenticity and trust. 2084 imagines a future where life is so good (at least life in Canada) that the characters struggle to see what lurks underneath the surface.
Rodin or robot?
One of the two main characters in my book is a sculptor in 2084 Toronto. When I started writing the novel in 2016, I remember thinking that this profession would definitely not be replaced by AI. Well, guess what?!
Monumental Labs was founded in 2022 by tech entrepreneur Micah Springut in Mount Vernon, NY. To be fair, the studio does employ human stone carvers but mainly uses “sensors and AI” in 90% of the production of its statues. The claim is that pieces by Monumental Labs cost at minimum 85% less than hand-carving alone.
The company appeared on the radar of many people in the tech community when Bloomberg covered Stripe’s annual conference featuring a Monumental Labs statue of a classical-style white marble nude dude holding a massive Stripe card to hide his minuscule manhood. (I’m assuming minuscule; I’ve seen ancient Greek statues.) As the article’s headline says, “This startup will make a sculpture of your dog for $10,000.” You can buy a lot of pet treats for that kind of money.
Jewel or pineapple?
Did you know that fruit and veg producer Fresh Del Monte has several exclusive pineapples? There’s the Grandissimo GoldTM, the Pinkglow®, the “personal-sized” Honeyglow®, the carbon-neutral Del Monte Zero™, and now the Rubyglow® pineapple, all registered plant patents in the United States.
As a recent Food & Wine article points out, this might be the rarest thing you ever eat, and it will cost you around US$400 for the privilege. Initially available in China, there are only around 5,000 of the Costa Rican ultra-premium luxury ‘designer’ fruits available worldwide this year. In 2025 there will be an even more scarce 3,000 delivered in luxury origami-style boxes.
Mohammad Abu-Ghazaleh, Chairman and CEO of Fresh Del Monte, said in a January press release that, “Our scientists continue to elevate the bar by creating new pineapple varieties, with varied tastes and colors, that cater to more and more consumers worldwide.”
To finish off the 2084 theme for this edition’s FOMO food section, my book also features patented genetically modified food items such as the Slabfruit from a corporation called Agralife. Due to mass extinctions, Agralife’s flowering plants are pollinated by miniature drones called Mimsects, which are a competitor to the SimBees produced by AuthentiCo.
I genuinely wonder whether we’ll have to wait sixty years for all this to come true…
Adam Morgan, challenger brand expert
Most ad agencies work with challenger brands. This is simply a statistical reality because there is almost always one leader in a category and plenty of challengers. But wait, is that an accurate picture? Should we think differently about what it means to be a leader and a challenger? To answer these questions, I approached the man who popularized the term “challenger brand” and who is probably the best person in the world to help you change your mindset and turn the challenges that every business faces into opportunities for improvement.
Q. Adam, what annoys you most about the mistaken way that people sometimes talk about challengers?
A. In the autumn of 2020, the Financial Times published an interview with Reed Hastings of Netflix. Its headline was a quote from Hastings: “Netflix is still in challenger status.” He maintained that whatever the success in the US, beyond the US Netflix was “small fry”, and there was therefore plenty more room for expansion. Most people at that point would have regarded Netflix as the top dog in streaming in the US, and so the article read as a market leader showing an admirable lack of complacency, and a hunger for continued growth.
Pan forward twelve months, and a different media narrative seemed to be being written for Netflix. Disney+ had added as many subscribers in a year as Netflix had put on in ten and was predicted to overtake it in the next couple of years. “Netflix is still in challenger status” now seemed to have shifted its meaning, to be perhaps the modern equivalent of Andy Groves’s “Only the paranoid survive” – how retaining a challenger mindset was the best defensive as well as offensive strategy for a market leader in a rapidly changing and fiercely competitive world.
Cut to 2024, and the streaming world has of course completely shifted again. Netflix has revisited its business model, made a couple of significant shifts, and with a share price up 36% is the one streamer that investors are confident in again. Disney’s share price, conversely, is down 10%, and some of the others who have leaped more recently into streaming, like Warner Bros Discovery, are down over twice that. Streaming is turning out to be much harder to make money in than the newcomers had thought, and the consequences are threatening to be severe to existential for those who have misplayed their hand.
Being a challenger is not about lazy definitions in terms of size, or youth, or new technologies, or market position. Being a challenger is primarily about mindset. Two of the most interesting US challenger cases of the last decade, for instance, are Tillamook and New Balance, both of which are over 100 years old. A challenger mindset means a clear sense of what we want to challenge about the category or the culture (not who – Tillamook took on “big food”, for example), and also a sense of what one might need to challenge about ourselves, and how we have been doing things up to now.
So this isn’t a mindset that becomes unnecessary when you reach a certain size; when that FT piece first came out, Netflix was already two-thirds the size of The Coca-Cola Company and still going. You sometimes read of companies talking about “transitioning from thinking of ourselves as a challenger to behaving more as a market leader,” but that is a mistake. There are many advantages to the size and scale of leadership, but maintaining a challenger mindset in the body of a leader is surely the best way to make sure you keep that body in growth.
Which is why Netflix remains in challenger status.
Adam Morgan is the founding partner of eatbigfish, an international consultancy focused on The Challenger Mindset. His podcast Let’s Make Things More Interesting is out now.
The car repair apocalypse
If you own a vehicle that is out of warranty, you know that repairs can be expensive. You also know that it’s great if you can trust your local garage to get the job done right without (crank)shafting you. But this piece by 404 Media quotes a recent report by the US Government Accountability Office that highlights the increasing problem of car “softwareification”. Independent mechanics are now frequently denied access to the manufacturer’s diagnostics. This means that more drivers than ever before are forced to visit the (more expensive) dealership or an authorized repair shop for servicing, especially for newer models.
The automobile industry has a long history of influencing legislation in its favor. Did you know that jaywalking is only a crime because of 1920s efforts to lobby governments? It’s therefore no surprise that car manufacturers have been slowly chipping away at “right to repair” legislation. And they aren’t the only ones. Apple has famously made it tough to get an iPhone fixed independently with used parts, and it’s only been a month since the company finally allowed some second-hand parts to be used on the iPhone 15 and newer devices.
The cult of brand identity
The Gray Area with Sean Illing is a podcast from the Vox network that takes a philosophy-minded look at culture, technology, politics, and the world of ideas. It aligns nicely with Discomfort Zone, especially this recent episode featuring Atlantic staff writer Derek Thompson. Called Everything’s a cult now, the discussion isn’t about traditional cults or religious factions at all, but about how people are interacting with brands in an age where identity is fluid and no longer expressed through traditional channels. Thompson says, “We’ve gotten so damn good at making products with good physical attributes, at making good-enough stuff, that the commercial war of the future won’t be about value or quality, it’ll be about identity. Are you the kind of person who buys this product rather than, is this a product that does more for you?”
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