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Something Squirrely — Episode 7: They’ll Give You the AI Girl for Free — They Just Want a Cut of Everything She Makes
There is one particular advertisement that has apparently decided it and I are now in a committed relationship because it keeps appearing in my Facebook feed. The message changes slightly, but the story remains pretty much the same: artificial-intelligence creators are making people serious money, you can get your first AI creator for free, you…
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ChatGPT for Absolute Beginners: No Prompt Engineering Degree Required
Artificial intelligence has reached that slightly awkward stage where almost everyone has heard of it, millions of people use it every day, and plenty of other people are still quietly wondering what everyone is talking about. You may have heard somebody at work mention ChatGPT. You may have seen television stories about artificial intelligence, Facebook…
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Something Squirrely — Episode 6: You Built a Proprietary App. So Why Is It Training Their AI?
There are plenty of AI advertisements that deserve skepticism because the underlying product does not appear capable of doing what the advertisement promises. Hercules is more interesting because the product itself appears genuinely impressive. The Facebook advertisement that caught my attention makes a beautifully simple pitch: “No API keys. No DevOps. No agencies. No kidding.”…
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Something Squirrely — Episode 4: Unlimited AI Images for $99? Sure — If Your Computer Can Handle It
There are advertisements that immediately smell bad, and then there are advertisements that simply make you tilt your head, squint a little and wonder where the squirrel buried the nuts. This one falls into the second category. An advertisement from Distinct AI recently crossed my screen promoting Render FX, a desktop artificial-intelligence image generator. The…
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Something Stinks: Your 100,000-Word “Finished Book” Apparently Still Needs a Writer
There is a particular kind of advertisement that works because it takes something difficult, frustrating and deeply human, then removes almost everything difficult, frustrating and human from it. Writing a book is a perfect target. People spend months or years outlining, drafting, rewriting, deleting entire chapters, changing character motivations, moving scenes around, fixing continuity mistakes…
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Something Stinks: Your 24/7 AI Sales Team Apparently Still Needs a Babysitter
There is a particular kind of advertisement that practically writes a Something Stinks article for us. It does not necessarily advertise a fake product. It does not have to make an obviously impossible promise. It simply has to present something in such wonderfully effortless terms that one question immediately comes to mind: What part are…
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To AI or Not to AI: Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should
Artificial intelligence has become the technological equivalent of hot sauce. Somebody discovers that it improves one thing, and suddenly there is a person standing in the kitchen wondering whether it belongs on breakfast cereal. AI is useful. Sometimes astonishingly useful. It can help organize enormous amounts of information, identify patterns that would take a human…
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Something Stinks – Episode 07: Your “Viral AI Influencer in Minutes” May Take a Little Longer Than That
There is a particular kind of advertisement becoming increasingly common on social media. It usually begins with a beautiful artificial person staring back at you from a carefully designed screen. The software promises that you can create your own AI influencer almost instantly. No expensive camera. No model. No photography experience. No technical knowledge. No…
