How Do You Hook a Garden Hose to HDMI?
Thanks for all the great feedback on the last issue of Social Signals that focused on Getting Started with ChatGPT, and hello to all of the new subscribers that came into this community because of it!
I was in Tampa last week for a leadership offsite. Yes, we went skateboarding. No, I didn’t get hurt. This week we took the TSL team to REM5 for an immersive Discovery Day (watch my recap here). We scored some sweet press for the Fruit Roll-ups trend that’s covering your feeds this week. And I spent more than three hours creating fantastical images of NASA’s discovery of pizza on the moon (!!) via Midjourney and used ChatGPT to write the story of how it happened that you can read here. I love the internet.
Anyway, let’s get into it…
⚡️ Social Signals
Digiday’s Kimeko McCoy wrote about how the fate of Black Twitter remains unclear after Elon Musk’s platform takeover.
Key quote: “…the deprioritization of marginalized voices on Twitter speaks to a greater industry trend, in which dedication to diversity, equity and inclusion has stalled, replaced by flash in the pan creator programs and partnerships.”
I’ve always paid close attention to the music industry for signals that will affect broader industries, and this week a viral AI song that replicated Drake and The Weeknd's vocals was pulled from multiple streaming platforms following a complaint from label Universal Music Group (UMG). However, it's not really clear whether the label or the artists even have a claim under traditional copyright law, given that the song in question isn't something the artists ever wrote or sang. What?? Exactly. It’s very early days, and this is one to watch when we think about how much A.I. will affect art, culture, and brands.
Key quote: “This is just the beginning of what's likely to be a long and complex conflict between excitement over deploying artificial intelligence in pop culture and efforts to protect copyright.”
A data scientist cloned his best friends’ group chat using AI, using 500,000 messages from his seven-year group chat and trained an AI language model to replicate his friends — learning details about their lives and imitating the way they speak. This is something to watch as we anticipate A.I. and GPT coming into more apps and experiences.
Key quote: “Miller was impressed by the system’s ability to copy his and his friends’ mannerisms. He says some of the conversations felt so real — like an argument about who drank Henry’s beer — that he had to search the group chat’s history to check that the model wasn’t simply reproducing text from its training data.”
Familect! I’m really digging this 2021-era article in The Atlantic about how we speak “more weirdly” at home and how when people share a space, office, or close friendship, their collective experience can sprout its own vocabulary, known as a familect. Familects are a part of the intimate register of language, the way we talk “backstage” with the people we are closest to. I do this with lots of groups of people! Do you?
Key quote: “Familects help us feel like family. Private in-group language fosters intimacy and establishes identity. In a study on the use of idiosyncratic terms among couples, researchers found that personal language nurtures a feeling of closeness and often appears in attempts for connection or reconciliation. When people use familect terms, they reinforce the stories, rituals, and memories that hold them together as a group.”
My 18 Year-Old Blog Is In ChatGPT
My personal blog (gregswan.net) features more than a 1,000 posts dating back to this story in 2005 on my interview in the Pioneer Press about the new iPod video. I shifted it over to MailChimp and then Substack years ago, but I still use a lot of that content as a research library I refer to as “my off-board brain.”
I’ve had a hunch that content was sucked into ChatGPT but can’t prove it (yet). I mean, you just ask it and even though it’s not hooked to live websites and hasn’t been updated since September 2001, the model clearly knows who I am…
And of course, OpenAI doesn’t disclose what datasets it uses to train ChatGPT, but The Washington Post has been analyzing Google’s C4 data set — a massive snapshot of the contents of 15 million websites that have been used to instruct some high-profile AIs, including Google’s T5 and Facebook’s LLaMA.
While I wasn’t shocked my personal blog was in it, I was surprised how high it ranked… beating Pepsi.com, for example
We’ll be seeing more of these tools and analyses, particularly when it comes to the negative content, the biased content, and the dangerous content that has been slurped into these models. And no, there’s no way to ask to have my data removed. Not sure that’s even feasible. Check out the tool and do some sleuthing yourself here. Lots of unpack here.
🔥 Quick Hits
The NYT used the following word for the first time this month: catfluencer
Creative inspo of the week #1: The Dipped Painting Project by Oliver Jeffers
Creative inspo of the week #2: You become creative by creating (read and then watch the video).
Digital experience of the week: Space Elevator
TikTok of the Week: HDMI to garden hose adaptor
😎 Hiring at The Social Lights
We’re hiring at The Social Lights again!!! 🚀 From creative to strategy, media planning to account leadership, we’ve got a lot of new and exciting roles in the mix. Check out our Insta for a look at what we’ve been up to this year. And then give this link a look and see if there’s a role that suits your next adventure.
I Actually Do Pick Out The Rye Chips
Speaking of… TSL announced this week that we’re Little Miss finalist for the Shorty Awards!! As a Shorty's judge, I’m not allowed to evaluate my team’s entries, so instead, I gotta ask for your VOTE HERE.
The Near Future Is Close
If you’re reading this Friday morning, I don’t think it’s too late to sign up for Marketing Next: Success Strategies for the Near Future hosted at the University of Saint Thomas in St. Paul. There are multiple talks, a panel discussion, a workshop, and pretty great networking. And it’s free. RSVP here.
Note: I’ll be speaking about generative A.I. at Social Media Breakfast in June. The event isn’t posted yet, but you can sign up for their updates here.
See you in the future!
Greg