This edition of Social Signals was written to LCD Soundsystem’s Dance Yourself Clean on repeat after I saw them at The Armory this week and can’t stop smiling.
Hey hey — thanks for all the notes, comments, texts, and overall positive energy about my new job news last week! I’m in week number eight at FINN Partners now, and it was so fun to make it “LinkedIn official.” The press coverage in Adweek, O’Dwyer’s, PRovoke, Minneapolis Egotist, and others was a cherry on top.
Jenny Swan and I then recorded a live episode of The Cave Project in front of 100 people at Social Media Breakfast MSP, which we’ll get edited and posted shortly. In fact, we’ve got three episodes in the can, including some really fun guest interviews. Sign up here to get notified when new episodes are live!
PS: I wish I had a picture of our kids’ faces when I told them that 100 people paid money to listen to their parents argue on stage. Turns out you can monetize anything.
Okay, let’s see what else is up this week…
🎙️ Hey ScarJo, Set a Timer for 10 Minutes
This week actress Scarlett Johansson accused OpenAI of intentionally copying her voice to make ChatGPT’s voice assistant sound like her A.I. character in the movie Her. The news went more viral than the launch of the product. And it turns out Open A.I. has receipts to show they did hire a different actress (who claims she’s never been told she sounds anything like ScarJo, naturally). If you had written a Hollywood script, it would be less dumb than this entire saga.
Of course, OpenAI denied the allegations but paused the alleged voice copy while it got its story together, and now SAG-AFTRA is getting involved to urge Congress to pass legislation, which we all know they aren’t educated enough on the technology and its implications to do (ahem — the TikTok “ban”). Honestly, it’s all a big damn mess.
And like I said, if this was a movie it would be way more strategic and fun to experience. This is just a bad story all around.
As
writes in The Atlantic, “…the situation is also a tidy microcosm of the raw deal at the center of generative AI, a technology that is built off data scraped from the internet.”But this A.I. agent and personal assistant trend in the news right now isn’t going to go away due to a bad data practices, a bad story, consumer fatigue, or a few wrong moves exposed from the big players. We’ve got a taste of how A.I. can help us accelerate, and there’s no going back.
OPTION-SPACE opens ChatGPT on my desktop now, and it’s a game changer. I can’t imagine **NOT** using generative A.I. in my daily life now.
Microsoft and Google have baked generative features into their products. Former Salesforce CEO Bret Taylor’s new company Sierra is building AI agents for customer support for companies including WeightWatchers, Amazon is going to start charging for Alexa with generative features, and the common wisdom is Apple will upgrade Siri in a big way soon. Oh, and I’m using the Mac desktop ChatGPT app pretty much the entire working day these days, and it’s brand new.
Meanwhile, legislation and regulation is late to the party, as always. But hey, at least they’re using ChatGPT to write deepfake laws? I guess. And across the pond there’s Chat Xi PT – a chatbot trained on the philosophy of Xi Jinping. Imagine a MAGA-bot established as the U.S.’s official LLM. There’s a parallel reality where that happens. Oof.
How are you getting benefits from A.I. assistants already today? Let me know in an email reply or in the comments below.
🍑 Bring Ya Ass to Minnesota
Minnesota brought my ass here 7,328 days ago, and then we stayed. On purpose.
Yes, I live in Minnesota, a state that notoriously does not win national championships in any professional sports other than the WNBA (ahem, don’t sleep on the four-time champions Minnesota Lynx).
But this month we have another basketball team in town that’s doing pretty well these days. We even blare the Chicken Dance while we’re pounding other teams. It’s that brutally awesome.
So when the now-famous exchange with Charles Barkley happened — saying he hadn’t been to Minnesota in “probably 20 years,” and Anthony Edwards responding “Bring ya ass” (watch here) — it was a spark in a well dried social tinder just waiting to flame out of control.
Not only did the official MN tourism account share Bring Ya Ass social content, so did some key tourism destinations including Mall of America, Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN Department of Transportation, Science Museum, First Avenue, and the MN State Fair.
Pretty gutsy of these family-friendly and governmental institutions to jump on this, but I think they did a great job walking the line by using ass-terisks (see what I did there?). The exploreminnesota account did a great job engaging with content in the comments, too. The Governor of Minnesota even declared WOLVES DAY this week, spelling out BRING YA ASS in the official declaration. Unreal.
The memes were flying, and of course, some of the local media personalities are having fun with it, too. And the restauranteurs were being quick to point out that Charles Barkley has been dining in some great restaurants in the Twin Cities more recently. And then… Charles Barkley did indeed come to town. And recorded a video just for us. And went to… Manny’s.
Want to come visit me in Minnesota and experience the center of all this social buzz? Bring ya ass.
🤖 United We Transform
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0220a01f-ed5f-4a0c-827f-196687c58d90_2516x1208.png)
This week I attended United We Transform 2024, an A.I.-powered networking event organized by the team behind Collaboration A.I. which is based on their People Science framework that came out of an experiment at Davos to use A.I. to find network patterns and solve problems between people IRL using A.I.
The event seemed to be funded largely by the DOD and Air Force, and there were national/county/local government officials in attendance, as well as consultants, corporations, and a really interesting mix of people. Organizers said 1,000 folks attended today, and I met more than a few folks who flew into the Twin Cities just to attend the experiment.
There was an AI-powered web app fueling the event, complete with prompts and lots of QR code scanning to let the A.I. know if you met with who it told you to meet with, who else you met with beyond the parameters, and what you talked about. Now that the event has wrapped, the system will supposedly generate a post-event recap and recommendations for further connections.
They had speakers from the Air Force, the mayor of Minneapolis, US Representative Betty McCollum shared some pre-recorded thoughts, and also a way that everyone could be on their own panel that didn't exactly work, but it was a good try.
I will tell you the speed networking portion was pretty great, and I did come back with a potential new biz lead. It was also utterly confusing most of the time, and I did NOT love that my AI-generated profile has misinformation and is being indexed by Google.
FWIW, a simple fix is turn off web-crawling for profiles not yet approved by humans. I suggested that change to the organizers, and they disagreed. Weird. I also reached out to them again to change it earlier this week, and it’s still incorrect. Dumb.
Especially the week of ScarJo-Gate at Open A.I., it seems like event organizers would want to lean more into transparency and being respondent to misuse of people’s likeness. But alas. Based on this article from Racket: My Strange Morning at MN’s Buggy ‘AI-Driven Networking’ Experiment, it seems like I wasn’t the only one asking the right questions about their misinformation-based marketing tactics.
Anyway, I thought it was fascinating experiment, and especially the level of government and DOD investment in using A.I. to parse networks of people and solve problems in the city that packed an NFL stadium for the first-ever NFT conference (reminder: paid subscribers can read the full Social Signals archive). We live in interesting times, folks.
💸 Walmart Realm
This week marked the introduction of Walmart Realm, the “first-ever immersive commerce experience curated by creators & inspired by social trends.”
Building on the big box brand’s notable investment and innovation around Roblox, influencers, and connected commerce, Realm is a fascinating test of bringing those three elements to a standalone browser-based experience that works on phone or desktop without needing any special software (or a Roblox, Fortnite, or Horizons account!).
The launch experience includes three virtual shops curated by creator partners:
🪼 So Jelly: an underwater playground with colorful accents & surprises
🤠 Y’allternative: a Western destination mixed with dark, gothic tones
🪩 Go Chromatic: a futuristic experience with shimmering, chic metallics
I will say that Realm also crashed on both my desktop and phone when I was testing it. But I’m bullish on Walmart’s POV on exploring and trailblazing adaptive retail and immersive commerce, so it’s worth continuing to watch closely. Try it here.
⚡️ Social Signals
Wake up babe, new emoji just dropped.
Link-in-bio startup Linktree has surpassed 50 million users.
Pope clears way for 'God's influencer' to become a saint.
The unlikely black market for Taco Bell art.
Over the weekend I was reading Scott Rosenberg’s POV about Google’s new generative search (A.I. eats the web): “Google's shift toward AI-generated search results, displacing the familiar list of links, is rewiring the internet — and could accelerate the decline of the 30+-year-old World Wide Web.” But before I could even share it here, Google has already introduced ad products that will live below and inside the A.I. generated summaries of query results distilled from different sources. Cue the flying money emoji! 💸
According to Microsoft and LinkedIn's new 2024 Work Trend Index, there’s a new workplace trend: “BYOAI” (or “bring your own AI”) with data showing 75% of respondents use AI in their jobs, with 90% of them saying AI makes them more efficient.
Why do teens say, ‘Fax, No Printer’? Today is trying to make it a thing. Have you ever heard that? I asked 7 teens in my life, and none of them knew about it. And one called me a Boomer. So there.
Imagine being able to hear your friend clearly through a crowded restaurant — or being able to translate anyone’s spoken language in real time.
As a US ban looms, TikTok announces a $1M program for socially driven creators.
Good Read of the Week: Why Social Media Is The Most Misunderstood Job In Corporate America
Chart of the Week: How common is your credit card PIN? See it in a visualization.
Font Geek Video of the Week: Highway Gothic vs Clearview on road signs.
Insta of the Week: @slinkyjosh does slinky tricks. That’s it. That’s the bit.
Thread of the Week: One day each of us burned a CD for the last time but we didn't know it was the last time.
Reel of the Week: Jwhorner_ shares a gorgeous look inside his hard drive.
TikTok of the Week: It’s time to reconcile how great Gen X is.
YouTube Live of the Week: Corpse flowers only bloom every 7 years, and St. Paul’s Como Zoo has a live webcam of “Horace” blooming this week right here. See if you can smell it.
See you in the future! 🚀
Greg