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Real Fake Newsletter – Issue #121

Menno van Doorn
July 25, 2023

The Grimace Shake TikTok Trend

“Guillaume Huin, the marketing director of McDonald’s praised young TikTok users in a LinkedIn post for launching the ultra-viral “Grimace shake” social media trend—in which users pretend to choke and die in gruesome ways after consuming the vibrant milkshake inspired by the purple monster character—and denied the company had a hand in creating the trend.”

“Hours of watching, reading the comments, trying to learn and genuinely understand helped us see what this was about: brilliant creativity, unfiltered fun, peak absurdist Gen Z humor, just the way a new generation of creators and consumers play with brands.”

AI Junk Is Starting to Pollute the Internet

“People are seeing a growing amount of AI-generated content that is so far beneath their standards that they consider it a new kind of spam.”

“Should the internet increasingly fill with AI-generated content, it might become a problem for the AI companies themselves. That is because their large language models, the software that forms the basis of chatbots such as ChatGPT, train themselves on public data sets. As these data sets become increasingly filled with AI-generated content, researchers worry that the language models will become less useful, a phenomenon known as model collapse.”

New Mark Zuckerberg Dropped

“What you’re seeing—the biceps, the bravado—is yet another in a long line of Zuck eras. A software update, if you will.”

Is Zuckerberg cool again?

AI Proposal Sounds Like Black Mirror

The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents producers, studios, and streamers, said in a statement that it had offered SAG-AFTRA a “groundbreaking AI proposal which protects performers’ digital likenesses, including a requirement for performer’s consent for the creation and use of digital replicas or for digital alterations of a performance.”

But “in that groundbreaking AI proposal, they proposed that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get paid for one day’s pay, and their company should own that scan, their image, their likeness, and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity in any project they want, with no consent and no compensation. If you think that’s a groundbreaking proposal, I suggest you think again.”

In related news, Fran Drescher warns for AI.

The Government Needs to Protect us from A.I.

My brain has melted. What did I just watch? A small monthly payment from the government, party, rage and epic bonfires! Who doesn’t want this?

AI Frank Sinatra Sings Gangsta’s Paradise

AI Johnny Cash Sings “Barbie Girl”

Cursed Heidi

About the author

Director and Trend Analyst VINT | Netherlands
Menno is Director of the Sogeti Research Institute for the Analysis of New Technology (VINT). He mixes personal life experiences with the findings of the 19 years of research done at the VINT Research Institute. Menno has co-authored many books on the impact of new technology on business and society.

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