Maddening meows, monetizing Mio, and a 3-armed orchestra conductor
The new constellations
Ancient people looked up at the night sky and saw patterns. They imagined that stars located in a narrow field of vision formed the outlines of mythical beings and tales. So we get Orion, the great hunter, chasing Scorpio, the creature sent to sting him to death. Characters and stories were literally written in the stars.
The tendency to perceive coherent images in random features of the world such as stars and clouds is a completely normal psychological phenomenon called pareidolia. Our line of sight can make twinkling dots separated by millions of light-years seem like celestial neighbors, when they aren’t really close at all.
And the mental images we create through pareidolia are often anthropomorphized. Jesus toast is a famous example of seeing a face where there isn’t one.
It’s actually very difficult not to see faces or other human features such as eyes in random objects and buildings. Our tendency to anthropomorphize goes beyond the visual. Chatbots have been able to fool humans for this very reason since as far back as Eliza in the 1960s.
We read or hear what seems to be human speech and we imagine a mind on the other side of the screen. The Turing Test was passed long ago.
You can see where I’m going with this. Our brains have barely evolved since well before the ancient Greeks, so the pareidolia that created the constellations still influences our interactions with the world around us today. And that includes chatbots.
Large language models (LLMs) are sophisticated algorithms that underpin popular chatbots such as ChatGPT. LLMs do a fantastic job of pushing the pareidolia button we all have in our minds, making it tempting to imagine another mind behind the interface. This impression is bolstered by recent updates that include realistic conversational voices and engineered pauses that mimic chain-of-thought reasoning.
Earlier this month, researchers at Apple published a study that revealed major limitations in the reasoning capabilities of LLMs, including the very latest iterations of ChatGPT. The company’s research team found that slight changes to the wording of questions reduce accuracy in responses by as much as 65%.
And that’s not the only bad news for AI bros.
Apple also discovered that the more complex the question, the lower the accuracy of the response. Their conclusion is that there is zero evidence of formal reasoning in the models tested. The behavior of chatbots is nothing more than impressive pattern matching.
We want to see a person inside the chatbot. As the AI hype cycle continues, we might see more calls for treating these products as living entities that deserve moral recognition and respect. But we must not fall into the pareidolia trap.
Whether they prove to be useful for specific tasks or the destroyers of jobs, AI products are nothing more than fancy computer tools, not artificial brains.
Constellations are figments of our imaginations and so are the minds of chatbots. They can’t think at all.
Even AI pioneer Yann Lecun believes that these systems are “dumber than a cat”. (To put that in perspective, we humans have as many neurons in our guts as cats do in their brains.)
We can continue to admire the awe-inspiring sight of the galaxy around us when we stare at the night-time sky without inventing characters that live up there. Let’s do the same with the impressive statistical capabilities of chatbots.
Earworm apocalypse meow
Most people skip YouTube ads as soon as possible (66%), but Meow Mix is hoping to purr-suade cat owners to stick around for 12 hours.
The original Meow Mix jingle made millions of North American TV watchers cringe and/or buy cat food from the mid-1970’s to 1996. Now it’s back on a half-day-long loop in the new Canadian Meow-a-thon online promo campaign from Leo Burnett Toronto. Cat-care coupon codes are littered throughout and there’s a mystery grand prize for the brave few who make it to the end. And I mean brave — according to declassified documents, the Meow Mix jingle has been used by the CIA to wear prisoners down. The question now is, how many people will risk their sanity for their feline friends?
Monetizing my Mio
Gen Z’s water bottles have gotten so big, Mio water enhancers wants to take out ad space on them. Aspiring influencers in the US can make $1400 by posting five TikTok videos with their “bottle board” (a “billboard” sticker on a bottle) in “public areas with a lot of foot traffic”.
There’s a grand prize of $5000 to whoever sells the most through their unique QR code. Thanks to the recent Stanley craze, there is no shortage of people with giant water flasks, and the explosion of WaterTok fueled a nationwide fascination with water flavoring, making this campaign timely, ingenious, and, some would say, exploitative. The younger the Mio drinker, the more tempting a $1400 payout for five videos is likely to be. Thirst trap or child catcher?
TikTok noodle overdose
Opportunities to be an influencer grow ever more abundant. In the US, TikTokers with as few as 1,000 followers can now endorse products and make 10-30% commission on items sold through TikTok Shop. A disconcerting side effect is that influencers often endorse the same trending product at the same time, hoping to jump on the sales bandwagon, so recently hundreds of TikTokers made videos enthusiastically slurping noodles by the popular brand Momofuku.
While noodle-slurping is off-putting to some, TikTok is ideal for candidly marketing everyday products, more casual and less curated than Instagram. But Americans who want to slurp up some cash need to hurry before the potential disappearance of TikTok through federal legislation this coming January.
The 3-armed conductor
Orchestra conductors typically have two arms, which has been more than enough for hundreds of years, but seemingly not in the case of exceptionally complex pieces of music like #kreuzkoten and the Semi-Conductor Masterpiece. A three-armed robot named MAiRA conducted these works earlier this month at the 25th anniversary of the Dresden Symphony Orchestra, the first time a robot conductor was necessary for the performance of a piece that is physically impossible for a two-armed human.
MAiRA was trained to move in a human-like fashion, with seven joints in each arm, which is one bonus joint compared to humans. Her appearance received mixed reviews from the symphony’s musicians, with one saying, “It gives me the creeps.” While a bit aloof and frankly inhuman, MAiRA conducted music that could not have existed without her, and whether it sounds good or not is up to the listener. Maybe, in the future, her eight-armed descendant will perform an Octopus Opus.
Ethan Mollick, entrepreneurship and innovation specialist
Ethan Mollick is a Professor of Management at the Wharton business school, University of Pennsylvania. His most recent book is Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI.
“Talent is much more evenly distributed than opportunity. And our biggest cost is that, right? There are talented people all over the world who don’t have access to opportunity, and the fact that we can close any of that gap will be a net benefit to everybody.”
Skin-deep science
Researchers at the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Information Science and Technology have found a way to bind engineered skin tissue to the complex forms of humanoid robots.
Taking inspiration from human skin ligaments, the team, led by Professor Shoji Takeuchi has discovered a way to create special perforations in a robot face to help a layer of artificial skin take hold. So far, his lab, the Biohybrid Systems Laboratory, has created mini robots that walk using biological muscle tissue, 3D-printed lab-grown meat, engineered skin that can heal, and more. Maybe someday soon we’ll see a three-armed conductor with a human face.
None of the B’s in B2B mean boring
Tom Hunt’s Confessions of a B2B Marketer podcast features guests who are experts in what is generally perceived to be the least sexy kind of marketing: business to business. But this episode features engaging Canadian expert April Dunford, whose latest book is called Sales P!tch – How to Craft a Story to Stand Out and Win.
Her view of B2B marketing is: “We have to be having some fun with this, otherwise why are we doing it?” If anything, the more “boring” the playing field, the more opportunity there is to win with creativity.
The OG discomfort zone?
Who needs the Apple Vision Pro or Meta smart glasses when for only $1000 you can watch TV “while washing up, doing homework, reading, or spring cleaning”? The only problem? You’ll also need to buy a time machine to travel back to 1962, when the Electrocula was showcased on the BBC. Reporter Alan Whicker describes opening up “a new and bemusing world.” How little did he know the discomfort zone we would all find ourselves in six decades later.
Did you enjoy this issue of Discomfort Zone? You can comment directly in the Substack app or drop me a line by emailing me at john@johnbdutton.com.
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FOMO food research and writing by Silvia Todea, editing by John Dutton.
Legal disclaimer: All images in this newsletter that are not the property of the author are used with permission or reproduced under the fair use provisions of the Canadian Copyright Act while giving appropriate credit.