no. 32: ai in more ways than one.
guess how many times i say ai in this newsletter.
hi friends, i am back from a short hiatus! sometimes, i think it’s better not to force yourself into doing more than you can. some practices i have been trying to include recently include:
blocking out time for myself - 10-15 min of guided meditation (inspired by one of my friends who does this daily!)
increasing water intake (in disguise) - coconut water every day mid-day and peppermint tea every evening (a game-changer for me, as someone who hates water and prefers coffee at all hours)
taking all my supplements in a particular order, because i fare well with a routine.
no one asked for any of that but it felt cathartic for me, selfishly. so now, let’s get into what i have been reading the last few weeks:
mini-news roundup 🗞️
is beauty ready for ai? - hyper-personalization is coming for the beauty space, but it’ll be really exciting how this unfolds in the future. i despise shopping for anything beauty-related online because it never gets my skin tone right. a significant concern in this is that the bias in ai models, particularly in skin tone analysis, have been trained on data sets that predominantly feature lighter skin tones, leading to inaccurate recommendations for diverse populations. companies such as haut.ai are working to create more inclusive data sets to alleviate some of this.
i can’t find eggs anywhere, and you probably can’t either - avian influenza has led to egg shortages and record wholesale prices — an average of more than $8 a dozen, up from $2.25 last fall. an egg-less world is not one i want to be in.
how do you change a chatbot’s mind? - companies are eager to insert themselves into chatbot responses, so that when a user asks “what’s the best restaurant in dallas?” or “which suv should I buy?” the chatbot recommends their products. i guess we all knew this was coming.
olipop is valued at 1.85 billion in a 50 mil funding round, meanwhile did poppi’s strategy backfire on them? i think so, but everyone was talking about it - “it feels excessive, even if the total amount spent is still likely less expensive than the fee for a sponsored post. an at-home vending machine with unlimited free soda falls into this category. it’s marketing a free experience that actual customers will never have access to.” also see this great breakdown by
on how poppi went “tarte”:
google made me cry (not new) - if you didn’t see this already, watch for instant tears. more importantly, this is a prime example of the humanization of ai where it’s particularly well done, appealing to our pathos.
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trends to watch 👀
in this new world of ai answers, how will brands understand and control how they show up? “nike spends $4 billion a year on marketing and hundreds of millions of people are using these ai answers to research products and brands on a daily basis. how do we show up in the new world?”
this question is at the heart of a profound shift in how brands must think about their digital presence. aio (artificial intelligence optimization) is thought to be the natural successor to seo (search engine optimization) — the $68 billion industry that grew up around businesses and publishers trying to boost their rankings on google and other search engines. now, ai-powered discovery engines are becoming the primary way consumers explore products, whether consciously or subconsciously, making ai optimization the critical frontier. a startup already ahead of this is profound. the co-founder, cadwallader said “in this new world, every company, every business across every industry is going to want to know how they show up in ai answers”
a subway take that i always think back to is this one where we are headed towards a future where ads evolve to serve a new role: “just make more things like spotify. [to] make my rent cheaper, [put] ads in my room…. at the doctor, before we operate on your shoulder, you have to watch an hour of ads.” while this subway takes is clearly a cynical take of capitalistic behavior, there is also a reasonable amount of truth one can ascertain from it. are we headed in this direction? i would say yes.
artificial intelligence optimization is already taking place with or without us being cognizant of it. and it would be brazenly foolish to assume we aren’t headed there…
to conclude my rant, i saw this from
— personal curation is becoming the ultimate competitive edge — an irreplicable quality that ai alone cannot manufacture. while ai can generate suggestions, true taste is an art, shaped by intuition, cultural awareness, and a deep understanding of the consumer.prevailing in a sea of ai-generated sameness might demand showing up and also having a proclivity to intelligently create and react to ai answers.
also, the count for “ai” was in fact 13. see you later.
Yes yes yes to context and preferences being so central to taste !! Something I've been thinking a lot about
ugh it's so frustrating to see brands have a vested interest in ai in a way that we can't control.. it almost becomes a moral or philosophical question of whether we should allow ai to have a sense of taste, whether intentionally funded or natural. I guess it's inevitable at some point -- it's the same thing we went through in the early 2000s when people discovered the power of SEO marketing and search filtering :/