You're familiar with Waymo, the self -driving company, correct?
I am indeed.
I am indeed.
Did you see that now in San Francisco, they've gone to everyone?
Anyone in San Francisco can now use Waymo and get into a driverless car to go wherever they want to, wherever you're going to go in San Francisco.
My question is, would you use a Waymo?
Would you get into a car that has no driver?
Okay, so the answer to that question is yes, except if I actually need to be at the place I need to be at, because my understanding, and I've seen too many TikTok videos on this, they'll literally stop in the middle of the street for no reason, and their steam coming up out of a manhole cover, and they stop and won't go, won't move, right?
They're parked all over San Francisco, not moving.
So they have emotions as well, as what you're saying.
Yeah, some of them just can't take it anymore.
It's like, I'm tired of being a self -driving car.
That's exactly right.
They're like, they're like, they're tapping out.
They're tapping out.
I think I'm with you.
And now for your listening pleasure, here's Policie and Rose, covering the week of media, marketing, and digital content news.
This old marketing.
Take it away, boy.
Well, hello, friends.
Welcome to this old marketing, proudly brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals, and I'm Robert Rose.
Welcome to episode number 434.
That's right.
434 for Friday, June 28th, 2024, and with me, as always, is my pal, my colleague and a guy who didn't get drug tested before tonight's show.
Well, the amazing Mr. Joe Policie.
Happy birth.
Oh, you're very, yeah.
You see, you did a double take when you read the date.
You're like, that's my birthday.
Yeah, that's, I just read my birthday out.
I did.
I did.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, thank you.
So this, yeah, so this is, was this 40?
Yeah, five.
Well, that's what they say.
That's what they say.
They say 59 is the new 40.
So that's where it is.
I got one more year, one more year before six, right?
That's, that's, that's it.
You know, it's interesting.
You probably have this issue more than I do.
But when I, when I'm on these podcasts now is some of these very young people.
They're like, so you've been in marketing for over 25 years.
Tell us what that's like.
Yeah, like you get that.
I like, oh, yes.
Oh, I become the old man in the room.
Yeah, no, that, yeah, I get the, I get the, you know, when you start talking about things like, you know, the .com era and you start talking about the early 2000s and early days of social media.
And they're all like, wow, that's such great history.
It's like, oh, my God.
Oh, no, we're actually, we're, we're using the word history, right?
For our, although it is, I think it's special for us because we remember when there was no internet.
And there was 100%.
It was like, I worked in marketing before there was internet.
I mean, that was, that's, that's what's so scary that that's a little, because see, I didn't have, I was, I was in, let's see, when I had my first email address when I was in college.
Okay.
Yeah.
Sure.
That's something.
Yeah.
I mean, I had my first email address, very much post college.
And it was, dude, I, I, I, I don't anymore.
But I used to be proud of the fact that I remembered my CompuServe number.
I, I actually did use to remember my CompuServe.
I, I was so sad to give that up when it finally went away.
So on on my first email address was JWP seven at prodigy .net.
There it is.
I love prodigy.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I had, I wasn't able to have it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It seemed like the Hipper service total.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
And then I just feel like it.
I didn't feel scared.
Is that true?
I didn't even know Sears bought it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They Sears, Sears, they're the, the retailer bought it.
And they bought, they bought H and R block, and they bought the prodigy.
They were the prodigy network.
Yeah.
Oh, what was Sears doing?
I do.
I don't know.
How did Sears not become Amazon?
How did they mess that one up?
Yeah.
I mean, they were the original Amazon when they used to sell.
Totally.
They were the original Walmart.
Well, we've talked, we've talked about this.
Yeah, you, they used to sell houses and cars in the Sears catalog.
Exactly.
I mean, that how cool was that in delivery?
I'm looking for a house.
Honey, I want to buy it.
Let's buy a house today.
You got the Sears catalog.
Let's look.
Let's see what, let's see what we remember.
As a kid getting the Sears catalog when it was like the size of, I mean, it was almost the size of a phone book.
I mean, I remember it.
I don't, I mean, I don't, I remember the yellow pages.
I remember looking through, it was the, it was the thing to do.
This is when I was really young.
So this is like 70s, right?
Late 70s, you would get the Sears catalog and, and it would come in the mail.
And as a kid, you would, you would go, you'd go right to the back where the toy section was.
And you would just sort of see all the new toys, right?
And point stuff out and you would learn.
And you would say, this, I want this one and I want that one.
I want this one.
It was, yeah, that was the way you learned about all the new toys that were coming out.
What happened?
This is the good old days.
Well, I don't know if they were good, but they were definitely the old days, for sure.
Yeah, what is it about the human experience that we always look back on whatever previously, previously was done before it more fondly than we do?
Like every, like you talked to an older person today.
Yeah, like talk to yourself.
No, I'm just kidding.
Yeah.
And they always look back on, always, always so much better.
I don't know.
I don't think that's true, but why do we, why do you inherently do that?
I think it's because there's a nostalgia for sure, right?
I mean, you have a nostalgia for when you were a kid and what you had to deal with and all of the things.
And I think there's some of that.
But, but, you know, I think that's everybody.
I think that's, you know, I mean, our parents and their parents, you know, sort of lament the, the simpler times is usually the way it's, you know, it was so, it was an easier time.
But today, I mean, look, there are things that were definitively better, right?
The fact that, you know, I was having a discussion online with someone about this.
You've, you've heard about this, the Hock Tua girl.
Right.
I have, I have seen this thing.
Because I kept seeing her in like, we're like, just the image.
Yeah.
And, and then it means just become a meme.
Yeah.
So whatever.
So what you're going to say about it.
But what I was going to say is that that, you know, we were, the discussion I was having online was this person was lamenting the fact that today's kids have to deal with that, right?
The fact that they could be on camera doing something silly that's going to follow them around forever.
And my point was that, yeah, it's, it, what we have to, but that's bringing our old 20th century media model to it, right?
You know, remember, when we were kids, you know, there would be the thing, this is going on your permanent record.
And we would laugh.
And ha ha ha.
There's no such thing.
Well, there is a permanent record now.
But my point was we're still applying that old model to the new model because these memes, these kids that become literally famous unwittingly unwillingly or willingly.
Yeah.
They're, it's for 50, it literally is for 15 minutes.
The old Andy Warhol thing, you know, I mean, because like, think about the, the, the girl from, you know, Chick -fil -A, right?
It was, it came and went just as quickly.
And my point was that the internet, you're right, the internet doesn't forget.
It is your permanent record.
The internet doesn't forget.
But it also stops caring really fast, right?
And so that's, there's good and bad things about that.
But it, it was simpler because you and I didn't have video cameras on as 24 seven, right?
We weren't getting, you know, the weird stuff that we did when we were kids is never going to be discovered because there's no record of it.
It's interesting though.
My, my two kids are very cognizant about not being on video or in pictures.
Yeah.
And as you notice, like, most of like, when I, when, when Pam and I post something on Facebook, it's us.
Like, we're with the kids.
Yeah.
We're on family vacation.
But it's just the two of us because we generally don't have permission.
Yeah.
Put that out there.
And I totally respect that because they're totally aware.
Yeah.
It's being self -aware of what is actually happening when you're, when you're Googleable, right?
And it's, it's really interesting because there is a certain lack of anonymity anymore in both good and, you know, it's a double -edged sword, right?
For those who want to be content creators, for those that want to be a little bit famous, it can be a really good thing to have that democratization of content distribution and technology to be able to basically insert yourself into a national dialogue or global dialogue.
But it's also the fact that you can be inserted into a national or global dialogue, but because you don't want to, right?
So it's, it's neither good or bad.
It's just a thing.
So it's the simpler times, we're simpler indeed, but I don't know that it's better, right?
Well, I mean, think about this just from, I mean, we take it to a marketing or a job search standpoint when somebody contacts me.
The first thing I do is I'll go out, if I really need to know who this person is before making a meeting or going out of podcast or whatever the case is, I'm doing a certain, like, what's their internet presence look like?
And if they don't have any or it's a minimal, I discount it.
I'm like, this is not a real person or not somebody that cares about, you know, growing in the marketing realm or something.
So, okay, I take my kids, are they going to be hurt by this if they decide to look for a role somewhere and somebody's going to do that or is that just for us in marketing that we're we're so tainted that we've got to check everyone out and do our, you know, internet thumbprint search, if you will, I don't know.
I mean, but I definitely judge people if they don't have a good, I'm like, how do you not know this?
How do you not know that you need to have some kind of a presence and when I go and talk to, when I do, especially when I do the high school talks for high school seniors, I basically say, you know, you don't have to figure out what you want to do for the rest of your life, but build something, do a blog, do something a regular show on Instagram, do do something so that you can start to learn about, you know, building an audience and understanding how to build a subscriber base and that kind of thing if they're from talking to a marketing group.
I just had, and then the opposite is also true.
It's so for those who have had a long career who might be nearing or at or even more older than I am, I just had this conversation with someone who's been a CMO of a business for 13 years.
And, you know, never had the need to build a personal brand, never had the need to build any sort of sizeable presence on LinkedIn and then got laid off.
They got laid off as part of the, you know, the sort of ongoing layoffs of these companies.
And he said to me, what do I need to do?
You know, I've got my resume up to date and I'm talking to the headhunters and I'm doing all that.
I'm saying, you also need to get loud, right?
You need to, you need to start creating content, you need to start making sure that it just for exactly what you just said, right?
Because somebody's going to go look and see if you're for real and you need to have your point of view out there, you need you, because you're in marketing and you need to, you need to get loud and you need to find a place to go get loud.
As you're like recommending them to make up for lost time.
Yeah, well, they just need to, I mean, they need to start, you know, not they just need to start to build the presence, right?
Because they are going to get instant, fairly or unfairly, they're going to be judged as part of that.
It's interesting.
So it might take that to AI. I mean, if you, when we go to this one answer thing, which is coming with people just going for the one recommendation and you haven't done some of the, you know, laying the round work beforehand, you're in, you're in real trouble.
Like you might get, you might get lost.
I don't know if that's actually going to happen, because what's interesting though, how many people run to Reddit, specifically because they want human answers, because Reddit is probably as powerful as it's ever been, because it has ridiculous human answers.
And some people actually want that versus whatever the future of the search engine recommendation is going to be.
So exactly right.
Well, we're going to talk a lot about that on the show today for sure.
We're going to talk about marketing and we talk about, that's what I heard.
Things that's a rumor.
Okay, last thing, what are you doing for your birthday?
Are you taking some time off?
I'm adopting the office space mentality, which is I'm doing nothing and it's going to be everything I hoped it could be.
Oh, that's exactly what we got.
My, my beautiful wife and my friend are taking me out to dinner.
We're going to the coast to one of my favorite restaurants tomorrow night, which is as we record Thursday will be my birthday on Friday.
And it's on the coast.
It's a place called Joffries.
And it's in Malibu and it's just an absolutely spectacular place.
And the food is great.
And the drinks are great.
And it'll be a lovely night.
And then the weekend will be just a relaxing, relaxing weekend.
I'll, you know, I'll maybe do a little barbecue and just stay away from screens basically as my goal.
I think our goal should be to stay away from more screens.
Indeed.
I'm trying to do more of it.
I'm trying, I'm honestly trying to do more of it.
It's a little hard being a content entrepreneur these days and staying away from screens because you know, you know, as I like to say, you're have to.
Yeah.
I mean, your to -do list is infinite, right?
You're never done with your to -do list.
And in other staying away from screens tonight.
So this will, by the time people listen to this, I'll already have done this.
But I'm going to see AJR in concert tonight with my oldest and their two friends.
Do you know AJR?
Do I have no idea?
AJR is a very pop popular band.
It's three brothers.
They've been, they basically were internet sensations.
They basically, they were making music out of their garage.
They got bigger and bigger and bigger.
They think, you and Bob, is that?
No, no, but, but if you, but they're, they're now in a lot of commercials that you don't, like, you would not know it, but it like you'll, you would know their songs, like bang or I won't or some, it doesn't matter.
Anyways, I think I might be the oldest person there.
Nice.
Well, that'll be fun.
Pretty sure.
Well, I'm really, well, it's interesting to go downtown dance under what the kids are dancing to.
That's all that that's, that's what matters.
But half of downtown Cleveland is shut down because they're filming the new Superman right now.
I've heard this downtown Cleveland.
So it was just crazy because I'm so excited for that.
It's pretty impressive when you, because I was down there the other day looking at it and it's like, can you see the daily planet?
Van that was out there and they've got all the different stores and stuff with the different names.
I love that they're bringing it back to Cleveland.
I love that James Gunn is bringing it back to.
Well, it's great because Cleveland doesn't care.
Like, you can do any kind of show in Cleveland you want and you can destroy the entire downtown city and we people let you do it.
Which is why people film in Cleveland.
That's like, you want to break that building up fine.
It doesn't matter.
Is it though Rockefeller Builder?
Take it down.
Let's take it down.
Yeah, they don't care.
There you go.
It'll be fun.
I'll let you know how it goes.
And yes, I, I, I, I long to hear.
I long to do.
All right, let's get to our show here.
Thank you.
Some songs.
I'm going to send you some major.
Let's get to our show here.
We're going to, we're going to talk about a bunch of stuff of big news that are coming out this week.
We're going to talk about the newest Supreme Court decision about social channels and how they deal with misinformation.
Just came down this week among other decisions that are coming from the Supreme Court.
We'll talk about the RIA, the recording institute of America and they're suing the audio AI companies that we've talked a lot about so now on this.
Did we learn the law, the wrong lessons about the pivot to video?
We'll talk a little about how we pivoted to video and how that's going.
Then we'll get to our fails and our wins where we talk about a little bit of something in marketing that is a big win or a fail.
And I'm going to talk about the toys RS new AI commercial that they debuted at the Khan International Creativity Festival.
Joe's going to talk it every time, every time.
It never gets old.
I can't help it.
Joe's going to talk about Verizon and their new logo and is it turning into Netflix.
And then I'm going to rant a little bit about the CTO of open AI, but really as a larger conversation about the AI industry and the messaging and the marketing and the positioning that they're taking.
And Joe will finally close us out by talking about Al Michaels and AI and the Olympics and how that might be a really cool thing.
So I think so.
It might be fun stuff.
We're going to talk a lot about AI and content here.
So shocking.
Next we're going to do a no AI show in the next couple months.
We just have to get ready for our football show because that's going to happen.
That's going to happen soon because it's getting the start.
I have to start preparing.
I have to do my research on the Cowboys.
There's not much to do.
Go ahead.
I'm done.
All right.
Let's get to our first big story here which comes to us courtesy of CNN, although every and I'm going to actually get to mention another one which is going to be the Wall Street Journal's version of this because it's fascinating.
If you look at the headlines for this, you can see media bias just there.
I mean, it's just everywhere.
It's fascinating the different headlines for covering the same story.
The headline on CNN is Supreme Court allows White House to press social media companies to remove disinformation.
That article opens up by saying the Supreme Court on Wednesday said the White House and federal agencies such as the FBI may continue to urge social media platforms to take down content the government views as misinformation, handing the Biden administration a technical, if important election year victory of immediate significance.
The decision means that the Department of Homeland Security may continue to flag posts to social media companies such as Facebook and X that it believes maybe the work of foreign agents seeking to disrupt this year's presidential race.
It's an important point here.
Rather than delving into the weighty first amendment questions raised by the case, the courts ruled that the state and social media users who challenged the Biden administration did not have the standing to actually sue.
They actually didn't rule on the whether it was or wasn't.
They just basically said, yeah, you guys don't have much standing here.
So get this out of the Supreme Court.
So anyway, the article goes on to talk about sort of the details here in the vote and how it came down on a 6 -3 decision.
Our favorite friend, Mr. Alito, the honorable Alito, Judge Alito, you know, have pay anyway.
He uses a lot of words like unconstitutional and egregious.
Yeah, yeah.
He did like a 34 -page.
He is literally the embodiment of old man screaming at clouds.
Yes.
Anyway, what did you take on all this?
All right, so I might need a little help with this because first of all, I don't understand how people spend all this time on this issue.
What can now happen is that the FBI has the right to notify companies like Facebook and X that they flag some material that they deem to be truly misinformation or coming from covert bodies or whatever you want to call it.
Yep.
And the companies still have the freedom to do whatever they want.
That's right.
Yep.
Why was this even a lawsuit?
Like, I think, you know, I mean, this, but this came out of the, this, this, this was a huge issue two years ago, a year and a half ago when basically there was, there was two things remember that was going on.
One was this Texas, especially the Republicans in Texas were complaining that they didn't have free speech, right?
And we talked about this on the show.
They were saying, we don't have free speech because you're, you know, you're blocking us or you're taking our stuff down and the social media companies were going, no, that's, we're just taking your stuff down because it's wrong.
It's misinformation.
Oh, and they thought the throttling of about the Hunter Biden's laptop.
Correct.
And all that wasn't getting enough coverage.
Exactly, right?
And so then what they, they flipped to was an argument to say, because they learned that the government, meaning to your point, the FBI in some cases, and in some, and then also in some cases, the executive branch with the Biden administration had reached out to, it was, I think it was X specifically, it might have been Facebook as well.
But to reach out and say, hey, listen, we would really appreciate it if you would take these things down because they're misinformation.
And people got up in arms about the fact that the government was actually, quote unquote, pressuring the companies to do that.
And that's the source of then this lawsuit to say.
And basically, what the Supreme Court said was, hey, you, it's, you don't have standing here, right?
If anybody's going to do it, it would have to be that which whose speech was in fringe, not you.
So, and it's not your stuff.
So it's, they didn't rule on that, basically.
And you can see, to your point, how it's even six three is crazy to me.
This should have been nine zero.
I mean, in terms of like, you don't have standing here, this is ridiculous.
Yeah, I would say that there could have been a case if the government was actually coming in and saying, you cannot put this content out there.
Right.
Which they're not saying, they're, they're flagging and which I think is something the government, all government should do.
If there is, if there's information out there that is detrimental to society in some way, if they believe it's detrimental to the citizens of their country, they should let those media companies know that.
And they've done that forever.
Exactly.
Now, and so, because when I, when I read to the end and say, oh, yeah, so they're going to build a flagging content system where they have one in place to say, hey, hey, no, there's content coming on your platform that we think is Russian or what, and then, and it's not, they're not being truthful.
Well, isn't that the, isn't that the job of our, of the people that take care of us in the government?
Right.
I don't know.
You would, well, you would think so.
I mean, there's certainly precedent for it.
You know, and it's like, you know, there are, there are things you can't say on broadcast television.
There are things you can't say on cable TV. There are things that, you know, that journalistic on broadcast news that you're, you're not allowed to, that you're theoretically, quote, unquote, not allowed to say.
And, you know, those are all standards that are enforced by the FCC. Now, of course, because of the legislation that passed in the 90s, you know, deeming these platforms as platforms and not media companies, which we again, we've talked about ad nausea in the show, has given carte blanche to X and meta and Amazon and Google and everything else to sort of talk about how they basically, oh, with the throw up their hands and say, we're a platform, we're not a media company, which of course is ridiculous.
But yeah, they're, and they say that we can, we can put up whatever we want to put up.
And to, to date, no one's ever challenged that successfully to say, yeah, you're, you're, you're right.
We're not subject to the same laws and regulations as as broadcast media, which is crazy when you think about it.
So, I mean, you can point back to that to, I mean, it's an unfair game.
It is an unfair game for these platforms.
The platforms are media companies as we've discussed.
And they don't have to abide by the same rules as the New York Times or Wall Street Journal or any of those companies as platforms.
It's just whatever.
It's, yeah.
But this, I don't know.
I mean, now I'm, now I'm, I don't know if this should have been our core story.
I think that this was dumb.
Well, it's dumb, but it's also big news.
I mean, because it's, it's, it's, it's actually, you know, the, well, there's like, I almost have put this into the show, but it's a little niche.
But another ruling came down that has not been covered at all by the mainstream media, which is the, and I'm going to forget, I'm, it's a federal court that found that there was a, there was a group that was basically a government group that was saying any hospital or healthcare company that used third party analytics to measure their traffic was violating HIPAA. And so, you know, I mean, think about what that does to somebody like the Cleveland Clinic for, for a moment.
And so they, you know, the Texas Hospital Association, as well as the, another, the, I can't remember their acronym, but that's another hospital association, a national one sued the government and said, that's not, you can't do that.
And the federal court factually found in their favor that yes, they can actually do the, they can use Google analytics or pixel based tracking on for the public parts of their website, because that's not a violation of HIPAA. So, it's not a violation of privacy.
This is stuff that's coming, it's going to continue to come up.
This idea of privacy free speech and where we can actually, you know, who's tracking us, where they're tracking us and, and, and basically the, you know, the idea of, of what we can and can't and should and shouldn't stay online.
I think is going to become not, again, as we've talked about on the show, not between now and November, and noting that it'll be really interesting to see what happens tonight in the debate.
But, you know, post post election, it's going to become, I think, I think it's, this is going to become a huge issue.
The whole thing about, now, see now, so now I'm, I'm starting to think that my kids have it right, because you, you talk about privacy and, and, and able to protect what we have based on us having these images out there, like somebody could take you or me, and they could duplicate us in two seconds with what AI version.
Somebody will, it's not a question of when, or if it's a question of when, somebody will.
Okay, so you want to hear about my, did I tell you about my funeral product?
Did I tell you this slide?
You did.
You did.
You talked about it on the show.
Yeah, I talked about it on the show.
I was talking to, I was talking to my, my youngest about this, and they were like, that's stupid and sick.
And I'm like, it's going to be a thing.
It's like somebody's going to buy that because you, you're, I said, you're maybe not your kid, but your kid's kid is going to want to know about old grandpa Joe and old grandpa Joe, then you just go online or go to on the block chain or some pixel and you're going to have to count and think and have a conversation with me.
That's right.
Oh, grandpa Joe.
So, well, like literally our, our presence will live on forever.
Sure.
Well, but see the thing is you're going to have to, you're going to have to capture that.
So the trick in all of that is capturing the information.
Anyway, we get off on a rant here, but capturing that information is going to be hard for those who aren't prolific online.
You know what I mean?
So your kids may have it, right?
In other words, if more people do what your kids do, then you're not going to have, you're going to have to build the database with information.
With us, it's not an issue.
I mean, we've written about everything under the sun.
People know exactly what we do where we live, our past, all that stuff.
That's right.
That's right product.
I think that it's terrible.
Terrible idea.
There you go.
There you go.
All right.
Let's let's let's actually, you know what, let's do.
Let's just why don't we take the opportunity now to pay a couple of our bills and get this going.
I'll make it so.
All right.
Let's take a pause, take a deep breath in, then slowly exhale all the stress out of your body.
That calm your feeling right now.
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I think both of those advertisem*nts lead really well into your next story.
Yes, they do.
It's absolutely perfect.
There's a perfect stagway.
I've placed it perfectly into the thing there.
We should note by the way, just really quickly here, one other news item that we're not going to talk a lot about is just yet another data point is that Time Magazine has actually also now signed a deal with OpenAI for licensing their content.
We know what the dollar figure is.
Did they report that?
This is breaking news.
This is literally having came out.
I did not see a dollar figure associated with it, but I did see that the deal had happened literally as we were coming on to record the show.
I did read another story about Time as well.
Time they were going behind a paywall and they didn't go behind a paywall and then that didn't work very well and now they're open.
All content is open every one of them.
They were trying to do it and say we are going to go advertising.
We're not going to do a private paid community.
I guess their traffic has basically stayed the same, has not declined when a lot of other media companies have declined.
Interesting.
They're not growing, but they're not declining.
They are getting additional traffic, which is interesting.
If I owned a media company, what would you do?
I guess it depends on your goals and how you think you could drive revenue.
I would almost want to figure out how do I get my content out to as many of the people that should be in our audience as possible and not stop that, with at least locally here, with cleveland .com.
If you don't have a subscription to cleveland .com, you're not seeing anything.
I really think that hurts local news because then people don't get to see that local news.
I would take the free money for sure.
If I owned a big media company that had a huge corpus of content that was interesting enough for OpenAI, I don't want to have that.
From that standpoint, yes.
I would take the free money for now for sure because it's going to happen anyway.
Why not get a deal where you can actually make money doing it for however long that's going to last?
Then I would think about the exclusivity of things that I want to put behind a firewall that isn't available that's only available to humans.
So basically, let's go to your news story.
This is fascinating.
So we have used Sona on this, basically, this show for stuff, and now the Recording Industry Association has now sued the AI companies for copyright infringement.
The plaintiffs include Sony Music Entertainment, UMG, Warner Records, and more, which is basically represented by the RIAA for those of you who are old like me and Joe, Jen Exers, as it were.
You'll notice when they had the labels for this was during the 80s when they put out the labels on explicit music, which was a whole thing back in the day anyway.
The RIAA has come out and leveled two lawsuits against AI companies over mass copyright infringement of sound recordings used to train generative technology.
The blockbuster lawsuits have been filed by the music companies that hold the rights to recordings allegedly infringed upon, including Sony Music, UMG, Warner Records, the case against Suno, the developer of Suno AI, was filed in US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, and the other was filed in Uncharted Labs in the developer of Audio AI in the Southern District of New York.
The plaintiffs argue that they firms have flouted the rights of copyright owners in the music industry as a part of a mad dash to become the dominant AI music generation service, neither nor any of the generative AI companies can be allowed to advance toward this goal by trampling the rights of copyright owners as the suit.
The article goes on to talk about how the two lawsuits are structured, and basically they're suing for $150 ,000 per work sampled, which is okay.
That would be a good gillian.
Yeah, let me know how that works out for you.
Anyway, what do you make of all this?
I definitely have a take on this as a musician, as someone who has focused on this industry for some time and all of that, but what say you?
Well, from everything that I can see and tell and look at and listen to, they absolutely are using the full library of music out there as training data to train.
I mean, there's no, I mean, they're not even saying they haven't.
They're just, of course.
When you go to the CEO of Suno, there's like, you know, we're just trying to create, you can't do prompts specifically on any particular group, but he doesn't say that they didn't use it to train their models.
And so they have just like open AI has and just like perplexity has, we've covered it on the show.
So these, once, so here's what's going to happen, because we can tell the future here on this old marketing.
That's right.
We know they are these lawsuits are going to happen, and then they're going to all be settled because there's going to be huge multi -million dollar packages sent to all the record labels.
The record labels will get some of that most of this, and then it's going to go to some of the largest stars out there.
And then all the little musicians will get, not let's say little musicians, but smaller musicians with not large, large audiences will get nothing.
Just like I'm not even sure the big musicians will get anything.
Well, maybe just the record labels.
Yeah, and they'll just say, check the box.
We did our job.
We got some money and call today, and they're, but, but it's already been done.
It's not like you can take it back and say, stop using it, cut it off.
It's like, it's not like it's on a website where he goes, okay, well, I'm not going to promote that or I'm going to, you can't download it anymore.
They've already learned, they've already used it.
So it's too late.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, here's the only thing I might slightly disagree on.
I'm not sure they will settle because, look, there is, there's no doubt that they did this, right?
There's no doubt that, that, that open AI has used publicly available content on YouTube and through, you know, through Google Books and through, you know, to other, to learn, quote unquote, learn.
People, some people might say, scrape, some people might say, learn whatever the, whatever the right verb is there from copyrighted works, right?
And so, the difference is interesting because when we're talking about music here, what is it that they're actually alleging is the copyright violation?
Is it that, that, because if you, if you look at the way that AI learns, it learns in a very not dissimilar, not completely similar, but not to dissimilar way, then a human would learn, right?
So in other words, if I listen to Bruce Springsteen and I go, ooh, I want to sound like Bruce Springsteen and I start playing the guitar, like Bruce Springsteen and I stifed during my voice to sound like Bruce Springsteen when I sing and I get a band that sounds a little bit like E Street Band, have I violated Bruce Springsteen's copyright?
Well, no.
As long as I don't copy his music, his, you know, his melodies and, you know, have violated a copyright.
And so, it's really hard to argue here that an AI that learns from a style of music is violating copyright.
This is the same challenge that image creators to some degree will have, you know, you can't copyright a style.
You can't copyright a particular sound.
You can only copyright the actual, basically the work, the work that is actually created.
So I don't know that they do settle here.
I think they may take this, they may take this all the way and like it or not, right?
Like, you know, like it or not.
It's just, you know, because when you start making the argument and you say, Liz, okay, let's pretend for a moment it's me and I learned my Bruce Springsteen and I now have a Bruce Springsteen sound like band, a cover band.
Okay, if this goes through, that theoretically means I'm violating, I'm violating as a human.
And you go, well, no, you're not, you're doing it, you're not doing it at scale, right?
In other words, you're only doing it with one person.
And therefore, you're not, you know, you're not violating an entire industry's copyright.
And I'm like, okay, what if I do too?
Like what if I have a band that basically is like Michael Jackson?
Or if I have a band, another band that, and I, where does scale, where does the line of scale?
In other words, how many, how many styles can I learn before I've now violated the industry copyright?
And the answer to that is just really, really hard to define.
And so I think, you know, again, like it or not, I'm not sure that they will actually settle this.
They might, I guess they might just make it go away, but, but, but yeah.
No, I never thought about that.
I guess to your point, if they went into court and they said, if you were a human being and you were learning all this stuff, it's publicly available.
That's the thing.
It's not like they're, that's right.
And a firewall, like pulling private content.
They're not.
Is this publicly available?
Right.
Right.
Public available.
We just learned off of it.
They put it out there.
Just like any other human being can learn.
It's just that our human being is much smarter.
Now, the argument is not a human being.
Right.
Now, the argument I've heard is that the, the acts, the access is what's important.
This is the one argument I've heard that I'm like, okay, maybe, which is the, the argument that I've heard that I, that I sort of, I question a little bit, which is what they argue is, okay, when you heard Bruce Springsteen and you made that sort of, you know, you're going to learn that style and everything, you paid for a royalty in some way.
In other words, you either heard it on the radio, which they paid for a royalty, or you bought the album and therefore paid for a royalty, or you basically downloaded it through Spotify or listen to it online, which of course pays a royalty.
And so if you think about it, the way that we experience popular music in some way is always paid for in some way.
Now, of course, there's hacking and there's, you know, sort of going around it, but the, but the legal way to do that is to pay for a royalty to hear that music in some way.
And what they seem to be alleging here is that that's the, that's the violation is that when the AI is learning the song, they're not actually listening to the song as much as they are just scanning the song.
So it doesn't actually get paid for.
Now, I think that's a really interesting thing if it's true.
I don't know that it would be, because I suspect that the library that they scanned wasn't some again hacked sort of, you know, free set of free music.
It would count as a listen, right?
Exactly.
Maybe, you know, so that's the question is, did it, when they learned, did it actually count as a listen that was paid for by a royalty, by, you know, by whoever, whoever listened to it, either a subscription to Spotify or a subscription to something.
And that's how they got the data.
So that will be the interesting issue, I think.
That's so crazy.
Yeah.
No, no, I think you convinced me.
I think that nothing will happen.
And there will be no more musicians.
That's exactly what's what's going to happen.
There you go.
I like it.
By the way, I went to Pam and I went to see Dave Matthewspan the other day.
Oh, Dave Matthews, as we were talking about old, that all right.
So talented.
So here's the thing that Pam and I realized about our musical taste.
We love Dave Matthewspan.
We don't like our 13 -minute songs.
Well, that's, that's what Dave Matthews does.
And there's like, if you know Dave Matthews, you know that they go ahead and play their regular song three and a half, four minutes.
And then they go and everyone in the band gets a solo.
You do that.
And then you come back to the song nine and a half minutes.
And then they do the next song.
And so yeah, it's a really, really good concert.
But this is a long, yeah, that's Dave Matthews.
I mean, you know, you get long instrumental breaks.
It's like going to a grateful dead show.
Well, there were a lot of people with grateful dead.
I'm sure there were.
I'm sure there were.
All right.
There were a lot of, a lot of smoking, a lot of, a lot of substances there.
Let's get to, yeah.
Well, yeah.
I mean, that sounds fun, actually.
Yeah.
Um, let's see here.
Do you want to talk about this video thing?
Or do you want to run this in Mrs?
Okay, we can, we can do real, we can do real quick.
I got a quick take on it.
All right.
Fantastic.
So this comes to his courtesy of Simon Owens media newsletter who both Joe and I are big fans of.
And Simon writes about we learned the wrong lessons from the pivot to video.
And Simon opens up by saying many media executives use the phrase pivot to video as a shorthand to refer to the industry's tendencies to chase the femoral business models that never quite live up to the hype.
But as a new study from the Reuters Institute of the study of journalism spells out, consumers actually are increasingly relying on digital video for everything ranging from entertainment to news.
Um, and he says I feel like many publishers took the wrong lesson from the pivot to video fiasco.
It wasn't that audiences and advertisers don't value video than tax, uh, more than tax.
The real problem was that most of the publishers weren't doing anything substantive with video.
They were just doing the video equivalent of news aggregation.
Sounds like this show.
All right.
That's exactly why we're covering.
Yeah, that's exactly it.
Um, they'd slap together some texts with some stock footage and then let Facebook out of the rhythm take care of the rest.
The publishers that actually invested in long form differentiated video did see returns on the investment.
So what um, what's what's say, what does your take here?
So I love the reason why I like this is because I have this conversation with companies all the time that are trying to get into video and they believe that if we just put video out there that that's like check the box on the video.
Oh, gotta put stuff on YouTube.
And that's exactly what this is.
And we've seen the news news media and come from a content marketing and say, okay, let's just a little package of stuff up and we'll put this stuff on our video and what what do we have in video?
And I think we've lost the point where like who cares video is just video like what's the story?
Are we doing something consistently over time?
Are do we have a show?
And that's where the media companies and the brands out there that actually put together a thoughtful show.
They target an audience.
They have some kind of differentiation.
Yeah.
And they deliver it over a period of time.
Those, that's the ones that are successful.
Not just, oh, let's just get some video out there, which I think was what a lot of companies did.
That's why I like this.
I think it just, because it, because I agree with it.
That's why I like it.
Yeah.
No, I think it's, I think you're absolutely right.
I mean, it reminds me very much of a lesson I learned when I was taking my screenwriting class with Robert McKee back way back in the 90s.
Again, it seems like I'm nostalgic for the old days in this show for some reason.
Anyway, so back in the 90s, I took this that Robert McKee who has of course become very famous over the last few years for his storytelling stuff, but he had a screenwriting workshop that I took back in the 90s.
And one of the things that he talked about was writing for the right medium.
He said because that he said the reason that so many novels make crappy movies is because basically you take, you try and take the novel and apply it to the video, the visual medium.
And it just doesn't work.
It just, it just, it just doesn't work.
They weren't written for that.
He said, so in many ways, the, you know, you have to actually, if you're adapting something, you have to look at the medium by which you're creating for and optimize for it, right?
Because if you don't, if you just try and take it and rip and replace, you know, sort of text or whatever the original format is and make a video out of it, it's not going to work.
So you actually have to write, you know, so that's why so many good movies of novels, of books, of whatever, the good movies are usually not a lot like the books.
And it's funny because I just, I just finished watching last week, Dune, right?
Which of course has been made a number of times in, in history.
And everybody has said, you know, fans of the novel have said, ah, that, that novel is unfilmable basically.
And arguably it is, the novel actually is the books, you know, there's multiple books obviously.
But it's, you know, having read the books, I would agree in most ways it is unfilmable.
But then you watch the movie and I just turn my wife onto it, who loved it.
My wife loved it.
She'd never even heard of the books, you know, and she was like, she fell in love with the movie.
And I said, but here's the differences, right?
Here's, here's all the differences that, you know, in this.
And she was like, wow, that's, now she wants to read the books because they are so very different in terms of the way that they have, that Dennis Villa, I can never get in his name, right?
But it's Dennis, you know, Dennis Villa, the new, I guess it is, did the, did the, did the movie.
So it's, it's a fascinating thing.
And I think Simon is exactly right.
We, as marketers, we need to think of it as exactly the same way.
Yeah, I mean, it's fine.
We saw back to the future of the musical last week.
I thought of the same thing.
They had to make some decisions in order to do that.
By the way, I, it was fantastic.
It was, all right.
I went in with extremely low expectations.
I'm like, back to the future of the musical.
That just sounds dumb.
Yeah.
It just doesn't.
But we went in, it was tremendous.
I highly recommend it.
They had to make some creative decisions because there's, you know, I don't want to give it away.
But you'll go then you'll say, oh, I, they had to take that out.
They had to remove that.
They had to change that.
They did a fantastic job with it.
Yeah.
Good, good stuff.
Same reason.
Same rationale.
All right.
All right.
Yeah.
Let's get to our, our hits and misses and the hits and misses part is where basically, Joe and I talk about a big hit in marketing over the last week or a big miss or a fail in marketing.
You want to go first with your hit?
Yeah.
I'll go, I'll go first.
Here's my hit.
It's very, very quick.
Hopefully.
Where's it?
Let me bring it up here.
Boom.
Can you see that?
I wanted, I wanted to just, so we've, we've done our fair share of brands on the show that have really screwed up their logo by overthinking it.
Yeah.
I just want to give a shot.
So Verizon apparently didn't want to do the checkmark anymore in their logo, which I totally get.
And they didn't overthink it.
They basically just know that a lot of people are given Verizon some, some heck because it looks a little similar to Netflix's logo, which I don't know if I would have picked up right away.
But then, no, now I see it everywhere.
I, I, I just want to, they just took out the checkmark basically.
They made the font a little bit thicker.
I went red with it.
It's, there's not a huge difference.
They just somebody said, please, we need the checkmark out.
What can we do?
We need a, we need a logo refresh.
This is not like what the gap did.
And they completely wrecked their logo.
So kudos to Verizon for not overthinking it.
It's just like, we need to get the checkmark out.
What do we do?
Let's do this.
We're going to keep all our branding and our guidelines and everything the same because nobody needs another logo.
Like we don't, nobody needs a logo refresh, but they decided to do it.
They definitely did it the right way.
Yeah.
I think they, I mean, I don't love the yellow fade in the V. I think get rid of it and just go with the red and call it a day.
I would too.
I mean, I get why they did it.
They're trying to make it three -dimensional, right?
So they're trying to make the, the V a three -dimensional thing.
And they're also trying to make it an icon, right?
So that almost undoubtedly will become the icon for the app.
And it will become the icon for however you access it on your streaming TV or whatever it becomes.
And so I get it, but it doesn't, it, I mean, and again, this, here we go.
This may be me be applying 20th century sort of ideals and logo design to 21st century ideas.
It's like, okay, but you know, the, the old creative marketing guy me goes, and you can't put the, you can't do that because it doesn't work in black and white, right?
It's not going to work very well in black and white, but it, that may be an old school thinking, right?
So I may be old school thinking here, but it could be temporary too.
It's like, oh, this is sort of what we did with checkmark.
And now you're right, because when they, when you show the Verizon logo in black or white, it doesn't have that.
That's right.
So they're, this is, that's a temporary thing that's going to go away.
And by the way, nobody's going to wear a Verizon hoodie.
Except for Verizon guys.
Yeah, you're not going to do it.
You're not going to, like they're, they've got all this merch out there.
Like people are going to want to buy a shirt with a big V on the back.
Yeah.
This isn't the television show.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is Verizon.
Nobody goes around wearing Walmart t -shirts.
We're like, let's like, I'm not going to wear my ATT hat.
Although this is a Microsoft hat.
So yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.
That's exactly what do you got?
All right.
I got a big fail, I think, although it's interesting because, you know, what you may, you may think it's a fail.
You may think it's not a fail.
So the, the, the real question is, which one is it?
This is, you know, and the article we'll link to in the show notes is from ad age.
But it is basically Toys R Us at Khan QU. Basically, they launched a completely AI general, not completely, 95 % completely generated AI generated ad using Sora, the open AI technology that I guess they have access to or their agency has access to.
And it's ostensibly a origin story of the Toys R Us brand.
And it is, it looks so much like a Sora video that every other Sora video I have seen out there.
And, you know, it's our, basically, it's a stunt for sure.
They didn't do this for any other reason and have something newsworthy to talk about it at, at, at, at Khan.
But the idea is that here's their first completely Sora AI generated ad.
And it's basically a kid who is a theoretically the founder of, of Toys R Us who has his first sort of LSD trip or, or dream.
One of the two you take your pick and discovers this giant giraffe named Jeffrey and through the stars and sort of looks at all the toys and all that kind of stuff.
And it's, it's, you know, reminds me so much of the early days of CGI when brands would sort of try and utilize some form of CGI. And, and to me, it was like, you know, they, they use lofty words like storytelling and poetry and, you know, all sorts of things to talk about how this is truly, you know, and this is going to get into a little bit of my rant here.
But, but the idea is that they're trying to elevate this to some, and it's just not that great creative.
It's just very average creative.
I mean, the creative is just not great.
It's just, I mean, it's arguably not great.
And, and it's not bad.
It's not, it's not awful.
But it's certainly not extraordinary.
It's certainly not something that you go, wow, and, and sort of, you know, and get wowed by the only thing wow about it is the fact that it was generated by AI. So it again speaks to this idea of right now, at this point, you can generate some pretty sophisticated mediocre stuff.
And to me, when I look at this, I go, okay, I get it why they did it.
It's a stunt.
It's not meant, you know, and for anything other than to get attention and to, to sort of make a big announcement and to say, ooh, we're one of the first to actually do a generated generative AI commercial.
But to me, it's like, the point is lost on me because I look at it and go, man, I don't care.
And it makes me care a little less and basically makes the brand feel a little less human to me.
So I, I think it's a fail in that perspective because I think it's not ultimately going to do with consumers.
So as an inside baseball thing to other ad execs and to other marketing execs and to the technology world, they can sort of nod and go, see, aren't we cool or we're part of the cool kids now.
But as part of a consumer brand play, I think it's a big fail.
That's just me.
I think that your sophisticated mediocre stuff is probably right where AI content creation is right now, which I think is fine.
And I think it's actually better than I ever thought it would be.
But yeah, I think that that's probably it.
But I would say I disagree with you because I think Toys are us got exactly what they wanted on this.
People like us are covering it.
Totally.
And that's, you know, what they were going for.
That's right.
Because it was a dead, it was a dead brand.
It's coming back from the dead.
They've got no rules.
They're just trying all kinds of stuff to see if it sticks against the wall.
I did.
Good for them.
And it does.
It sounds I watched it.
It's trippy.
It really is trippy.
It's fine.
It took a shroom and then you watched, it's you watched the giraffe.
It's fine.
All I can, all I can see is the sort of creepy, sort of uncanny valley stuff about the humans in there and the sort of, you know, I just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's, it's, to me, it's creepy.
It's really creepy.
It's like I like it like the halfway through it goes, I don't want to grow.
I know.
Which is, so it's like that, yeah, it's like that, it's like that thing, it that always happens in horror movies now.
Like horror movies and big action films, they use the slowed down version of some, you know, that's exactly right.
Some creepy version of an old hit, you know, some old Aero Smith song or something like that.
It's like, and then this is exactly that.
It's like, it's like the horror movie version.
It's like, I don't want to.
I don't want to trailer for the new Hugh Grant movie.
I forgot.
Oh, the heretic.
No, I don't know.
They do that.
They do that in the trailer.
So yeah, yeah, who grants us the door and there's two Jehovah witness of young women there and they say they can't come into the house.
Right.
If there's not another woman there and Hugh grants us, oh, yes.
Of course, my, my, my wife is, uh, is making a blueberry pie and they come in and then he sits down with them and he has a scented candle that's blueberry pie and he locks them in.
I was a terrible story that I just told of the trailer, but I'm not giving anything away because that was the trailer.
And then he says, I'm just a boy standing front of two girls smelling blueberry pie.
Okay.
All right.
Now that went the best.
There we go.
Okay.
All right.
But now it's time for our rancid raise.
We're going to go up and a little bit of a rant or a little bit of a rave over something that makes us feel like we took a drug test before the debate or something that makes us feel like we're in a place with no audience and no, uh, no questions and all of that.
It'll be very interesting to see what happens by the way tonight.
Oh, you're talking about, yeah, you know, the, the, the, the rumble in the jungle, right?
I mean, it's, yeah, it's, it's going to be, yeah, uh, I'm not watching it.
No, I'm not either out of film think.
I think I might have to watch a little bit of it just to see if it's a, if it becomes a comedy show, but, yeah, we'll see.
Oh, it's, it's, I can't even think about it.
I don't even want to think about it.
I think that it's bad.
Well, it's probably great television, but it's bad for America.
It's bad for America.
Yeah, it's like, uh, you know, it's, it's like watching a commercial for depends.
That's what it's like.
Nothing against older people.
I love the older people in my life, but I would not vote for them.
The president.
That's correct.
Yeah.
So there you go.
Uh, you want me to go first?
Yeah, you go first.
Yeah, you go first on your, your, your rave here.
So I, I've ranted quite a bit in the past on AI generated lots of stuff, but I, I think that if you're going to do it, I think NBC Olympics have done this the right way.
So they just announced in the last few hours that they are in partnership with Al Michaels.
If you don't know, Al Michaels, Al Michaels is probably the most famous voice of in Olympic history.
If not of sports and he's done NFL for it.
And basically every sport on the planet, Al Michaels has done, but he has done the, the Olympics for quite a while.
He's 79 years old now.
I don't think he's doing the Olympics.
I think he's still doing NFL next year, but it correct me if I'm wrong.
I don't know if he got to do that one.
Yeah, no, I think he's there.
I think he is.
So anyways, so they, they approach, so NBC approached Al Michaels and said we want to give everyone, uh, who signs up for whatever they're going to sign up our personalized highlights every day of what happened in the Olympics narrated by you.
And at first, Al Michaels was like, this is weird.
And I don't know if this is, and then they went and they, they basically downloaded with Al's permission.
All, you know, they got this whatever voice, AI voice to sound the mannerisms exactly like Al Michaels.
He was blown away.
He couldn't believe it.
And he signed the deal.
And he said, uh, he said, this is all, it's not perfect, but it's pretty darn close.
And if we can give a personalized experience to everyone following the Olympics every day with my voice, and they're going to use the person's name, they're going to say, Hey, Robert, you know, you're, you let, you want to hear about, uh, you know, discus and track and field and swimming.
And we've got the news for you.
And it's all Al Michaels doing it.
And so I think there's something like 7 ,000 or 8 ,000 different messages per day that are going to go out personalized in Al Michaels voice.
I think that this is the way it should be done because they approached Al early.
They got his buy in.
Um, they're working on it together.
That's not like they just scraped it.
They're doing it.
They're like, they're working with a human being that wants this done that they think it's going to be a good product.
I don't know what it's going to, I tried to find like what's, I couldn't find what it's going to be sounding like.
I'm sure I can just listen to Al Michaels.
Yeah.
I mean, that's what it's going to sound like.
It's going to sound like Al Michaels, right?
Yeah.
But I, but I think that I'll be interested to see how this goes.
I think this is the right way to do it where if you approach a musician or a writer or somebody ahead of time, you get their permission, you work with them on it.
And then you can send this out to the masses.
I think maybe you're going to have something.
So I like it.
I like it.
I do.
Hopefully people will watch the Olympics.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, that's, I mean, that's the, that's, that's the real thing, right?
I mean, the last Olympics were not done very well at all by NBC. So I don't see a lot.
And now again, this is all qualitative information.
But my, my kids don't even know what's going on.
Like whatever, whatever social media they're on, they're not promoting it very well.
They're not on just, they should, they need to promote it on discord and X and like, yeah, wherever they're at, but they've built some of these stories.
Yeah, they get to build, they got to start building some of these athlete stories.
You don't, hey, at NBC Olympics, you don't have to advertise on the hallmark channel.
Those people already know the Olympics.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Reach new audiences.
All right.
What do you, I got a very quick rant.
I guess it is.
It's, it's, it's, it's just something that I was, I've been having a lot of discussions on, on social media about this particular topic.
And, and it was generated by someone who posted a video of Miramarati, who is the CTO of OpenAI. And she was, she's been out, I don't know necessarily why, per se, but she's been out doing a lot of public speaking.
And the video that they posted, which we'll link to in the show notes, the full video, the 50 -minute video of the interview was with Dartmouth, which is her alma mater.
And somebody from Dartmouth is interviewing her for, you know, like I said, a full 50 minutes of, we're all kinds of topics regarding OpenAI, the future of AGI, the future of AI, all the, you know, jobs, everything.
And the clip that got posted on social media that I had some discussion about was, he obviously at some point talks about creative and creative jobs.
And she says in the video, she says basically, well, you know, creative jobs, yes, some creative jobs will go away because AI is so awesome.
And AI is really the heart of creativity, but those jobs that it creates, those jobs shouldn't have been there in the first place.
And of course, it, you know, I mean, it triggers people, right?
That's, that's an immediate, like, you know, and if you, if you sort of parse her words, I can see what she's trying to say.
But it's yet another example.
And this is what I said in my post on, on social media and where I've been sort of, because there's other examples of this is just hers.
This is just the one sort of that got picked on, I guess.
But everybody, from Sam Altman to others to, you know, founder of Anthropics, you know, this is sort of just again, another sort of data point in the role of how AI companies, both the big platforms, as well as sort of the smaller startups, are just failing and failing and failing and failing at reading the room.
And, and, and, and, and true.
I don't know whether this is just because they, the marketing and communications, corporate communications, people are just getting it wrong, or because they're just throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks, or because they, they're getting bad information and their research or whatever.
But they're just not reading the room very well, because they keep coming out with this, this, this, this angle, the AI is the hero of the story.
It would be the equivalent of basically saying that, you know, when, when we, when we launch a new product like Adobe launches Photoshop, which basically says Photoshop is the hero of this story, and it will change the world.
Photoshop is going to change the world, and either people are going to come along and use Photoshop and become a hero, because of Photoshop, or they're not.
And too bad if you don't, because the, the world is moving on without you.
And that's the, that's the angle that many of these AI companies are taking with this sort of, it's magical.
It's the hero.
It's, you can't even begin to understand how sophisticated and, and wonderful this new technology will be to changing the lives of millions of people.
And, you know, and these overly dramatic sort of screeds of how AI is going to become the savior of the world.
And it's all going to enable us to basically sit like, you know, we're in Wally on these giant things on a cruise ship and basically never have to work again.
And it's just not reading the room and the market space.
And when I, when I look at this, it's like, I just lament that somebody isn't giving them better advice somewhere along the way, because it's just, they're, they're, they're not appealing to people that would use this to expand their own creativity or expand their own capabilities and do those kinds of things.
I mean, you see that in pockets, but you don't see it as the main thrust of the messaging coming out of these AI companies.
And I think it's just a shame.
I think it's a shame because what they're doing is they're demonizing people at the expense of making the technology the hero.
And it's, I just think, it's ultimately going to be a failed strategy.
Well, most of these people doing this are technologists.
I agree.
You're not trained in communication.
And that's what, and that's what you get.
I agree.
But they don't understand that the hero, no, I agree with you.
The hero should be you.
It's like, that's right.
It can be the hero.
And this can help you do it instead of this is the hero.
And you may or may not be involved.
That's right.
That's exactly it, right?
I mean, that's exactly it.
And we wonder why we see these trends of CEOs or senior leadership in larger organizations leaping on to the biggest benefit being how do I replace human talent.
You can see it because that's the main message.
And so what AI companies instead of challenging that, instead of challenging that notion of saying to the CEOs, it's not going to replace your human talent and shouldn't replace your human talent.
The AI companies in their desperate sort of race to be cut to grab market share are buying into that whole idea, which feeds on itself, which ultimately feeds more into the fear, the, you know, the fudge sale, right?
Fear, uncertainty, and doubt that if you don't do this, you're not going to be able to reduce your head count.
Therefore, you're going out of business without asking the question, do we even want this?
You know, do we even do, you know, AI, by the way, was the generative AI was the fanciest new car that nobody asked for, right?
When this came out in 2022 and and and in 2023, nobody asked for this.
Nobody was saying, gosh, I wish we had, you know, something that would create yet more content that we need to add noise to the, you know, to the internet.
You know, it came out.
It was cool.
It was interesting.
Nobody was asking for it.
And then immediately went to, okay, how do we replace humans with this as the main message.
And it, is it any wonder that senior leadership has grasped onto that with like, yes, that's my main benefit.
How do I decrease costs by decreasing headcount by using AI and the AI companies are going, we'll let us show you exactly how to do that.
And and by the way, that's how we're going to answer every interview question with, well, of course, it's going to, you know, replace.
I have no, you know, she, she goes on in this interview, you just talk about, like she's like, well, those creative jobs shouldn't be there in the first place because, you know, I know better.
And I know that creative jobs are kind of a waste.
And here we are, you know, she didn't say that, but I'm putting words in the mouth.
I like your imitation.
Well, it's, it's, it's, it's that sort of, yeah, the video is, she's very like, you know, what, you know, it's literally so many of these executives in these AI companies are shrugging their shoulders like, well, what are you going to do?
It's, you know, we're building this cool, awesome thing, this amazing thing.
What are you going to do?
It's going to kill people.
I don't, what are you going to do?
They're, you know, risks are going to happen.
As we're going to have to do that, you know, anyway, I got it.
It's a bit of a rant for me.
I'm excited about the wallyship that you mentioned.
I like it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, you and your cruise ships.
Yeah.
Oh, my goodness.
I cannot wait for this wallyship.
All right.
What do you get this week?
What do you get this week?
Well, tonight, I'm going to the AJR concert.
Nice.
Nice.
Next, I'm all next week is Independence Day.
Yes.
And we have our, we have a short week regular.
We have a regular part.
We have a big party July 4th.
We all go to the parade.
Everybody are all our friends and kids and whatever.
Kids are getting older though now.
And then we come back to the house.
I grow hot dogs and hamburgers and we got cornhole and we, we imbibe in some, some drinking.
Nice.
Just a little.
And we have a great time.
So hopefully the weather will be good and we'll have some fun and good stuff.
What are you doing?
You got the birthday, big birthday, big birthday.
I get the big birthday, big birthday, a little birthday bash tomorrow.
And then yeah, sort of hopefully away from screens over the weekend.
And then yeah, we're going to just keep it very quiet over the holiday weekend.
We're going to just, you know, sort of, I'll be working.
I'm sure some of it.
But yeah, other than that, just keep it real quiet and be around the house.
Well, Alamo says, Happy birthday, Robert.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you for that.
And thanks to all of you.
Oh boy, I put a way to end.
Thanks to all of you.
We will be back again next week, even though it is a holiday week.
And we will be back to regale you with more news.
I'm sure some of it will include AI. But in the meantime, in the meantime, before we see you next week, remember everybody, it's your story to tell.
Tell it well.
We'll see you next week on this old marketing.
Hey, thanks a lot for making it this far in this week's episode.
And thank you all for being a part of this old marketing.
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