Topic · 3 posts
Apple is selling the recently announced HomeView, an iPad mini glued to a speaker that serves as a hub for the home, with a chaotic commercial in which a family runs over for breakfast. I can’t remember any other company commercial that causes anxiety and contempt for the product.
Time has started serving ads to AI agents 
digiday.com
Put another way, the ads give brands like Ally and the non-profit professional organization Project Management Institute another lever to pull on how they show up in generative search. LLMs can pick up a brand’s information from the ad and index it, which can then shape AI-generated responses, which in turn, can influence humans using those AI answer engines.
Maybe my idea of “poisoning” AIs with a text hidden by steganography is not that crazy.
According to the website Hyperallergic, the London-based activist group Everyone Hates Elon pulled off this intervention on a bus-stop ad for Meta’s new pervert smart glasses created in partnership with celebrity Kylie Jenner.
Depending on the angle from which someone views the ad, Kylie’s photo transforms into an X-ray of her skull, and the message changes to read “We’re always watching.” Kind of like those “3D images” for kids.
Everything about this story is wonderful, from the activist group’s name to the surgical vandalism to the not-so-subtle nod to the classic They live, John Carpenter’s 1988 film in which a pair of special glasses reveals subliminal messages hidden behind advertisements.
Everyone Hates Elon has a track record of this kind of intervention.