February 14, 2025 • 9 mins
In this week's monologue, Ed Zitron walks you through how the AI industry’s limp Super Bowl commercials show how little this industry has to offer - and how much contempt they have for consumers.
OpenAI: The Intelligence Age: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIhb5pEo_j0
Google: Dream Job: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7e6g11BJc0
Salesforce: Gate Expectations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZqmBcqDkyw
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
A zone media hell, and welcome to this week's better
offline monologue. I'm your host ed Zetron. What last Sunday
was the Super Bowl, the final game of the NFL season,
(00:22):
And for those of you who don't like sport or
live in another country or something, it's an event that
many people just watch for the many, many ads that
they cut into during the game. The Super Bowl ad
can cost as much as eight million dollars for a
thirty second commercial, depending on where it air is during
the game, the most coveted slots being just before the
halftime show, and the ads themselves tend to be the spectacular,
highly produced fare. They're very weird, but they put a
(00:44):
ton of money into them. This year, I was specifically
excited to see what bullshit slot the various AI companies
would try and force down my nasty little throat. Last year,
anthropicaird a five second long commercial that said, and I
quote Claude is a next generation AI system, a sentence that,
when you think about it, means precisely nothing. And Microsoft
(01:05):
famously aired a co pilot AI commercial where several of
the prompts, such as write code for my three D
open World game simply didn't do what they said they did.
In the case of the Open World game by the way,
from last year, it generated a step by step guide
to building one, which isn't the same thing at all.
It's kind of like ordering dinner and Uber EAT's bringing
your recipe for a burrito instead of an actual burrito,
(01:26):
but still charging you all the same. Nevertheless, this year's
slot was even more obscene, starting with an ad for
Google's Pixel nine phone where a guy has asked questions
as if he's taking a job interview by Google's generative
AI Gemini Live. As he answers them, it's obvious that
what he's describing is actually being a father. They also
show you an overlay of like him taking his kid
(01:47):
to score. It's got emotional music playing with him taking
her to school, and at one point e Google's explain
bling to a child, which I should be clear is
not a Gemini product, it's just Google Search. It's unclear
what this ad is actually advertising. We don't hear the
prompt that's started these questions, nor do we know why
he's answering them, but when he's done, he's clearly joining
(02:07):
some sort of job interview. Virtually Gemini doesn't really respond
to any of his answers other than to say things like,
try rephrasing your answer to sound more confident, so we
can assume. And that's all we're doing here that he's
preparing for a job interview. He's also pretty old, like
his kid has gone off the college. She's a full
grown adult. Now. Very weird, very weird commercial, very clearly
(02:29):
built for people who cry whenever they remember their parents. Sorry,
if that's you you are, do not use Gemini Life.
That's my recommendation. Next up was open a Eyes gratuitously
stupid commercial called The Intelligence Age, which showed a dot
matrix history of time involving men throwing spears, people riding horses,
(02:49):
waves crashing a waving skeleton for some reason as a plane,
and eventually a globe with a few dots going toward
a computer with a modem sound playing. A full forty
seconds in to this one minute long commercial, we start
actually hearing prompts. Someone says, summarize this article for me,
Then someone else says, help me practice asking for a raise.
And this prompt, by the way, is near impossible to hear,
(03:10):
as it's cut off to have a guy say act
as my sleep coach. And then there's two more prompts
in a language I don't speak, then another that says
turn my idea into a business plan, before a chirpy
voice asks what do you want to create next? This
is really good. I love this. I also love the
idea of having two prompts in different languages, because people
speak different languages other than English. I understand that there
(03:33):
is no official language of America, so it's good. But nevertheless,
that you only got a few seconds. You didn't think
to try and get as many prompts in. Maybe it's
that they didn't have them. In fact, if you're a
listener and you watch this commercial and you speak those languages,
please email me. It's easy at better offline dot com.
I would love to hear what they actually said. Nevertheless,
(03:56):
asking chat GPT to be your sleep coach leads it
to ask you about your sleep habits, your lifestyle, common issue,
sleep quality, and your ideal goals. Asking it to turn
my idea into a business plan immediately led it to
asking me what my idea was. Great. I can practice
with a large language model how to ask for a raise,
But what does that mean exactly? What does this product,
(04:17):
do what is chat GPT and assuming that AI ends
up actually wrecking the labor market as they wanted to,
the idea of using chat GPT is a soundboard when
you renegotiate your contract kind of feels like more of
a cruel joke. It's also not going to do that.
But anyway, two fucking years into this nonsense and these
assholes can't even come up with one interesting or useful example.
(04:37):
It's a fucking joke. These people have such contempt for
customers that they can barely be bothered to advertise their
products also goddamn half hearted. Yet the worst one by
far was Salesforce and their Gait Expectations ad, where Matthew McConaughey,
an actor, says that he and I quote didn't use
Agent Force, the powerful AI from Salesforce, so an AI
(04:58):
agent didn't send him the fastest to his gait or
root of your British which has now changed. The commercial
ends by saying that Salesforce helps London Heathrow create a
first class experience. Everyone in the commercial was also American act. Nevertheless,
I n actually went and looked up what this integration
actually looked like and discovered that Heathrow actually integrated Einstein's chatbots,
(05:19):
Einstein being Salesforce's large language model chatbot thing. They've been
warming up for that a decade, but this was back
in May twenty twenty three. They claimed that Einstein answered
more than four thousand questions a month and helped cut
call service volumes by twenty seven percent, and that Heathrow
has seen a four hundred and fifty percent increase in
live chat usage since launch. Then they proudly added that today,
(05:42):
and the article is completely undated, Heathrow had seen about
around forty to sixty second quicker per contact interactions in
call centers with Einstein chatbots. This is the only data
that appears to exist for anything to do with Agent
Force and Heathrow. There's nothing else they could find. I
will add that a record breaking eighty three point nine
(06:03):
million passengers flew through Heathrow in twenty twenty four four
thousand questions a month or forty eight thousand a year.
It's kind of a drop in the buck in as
a percentage at zero point zero five seven two percent,
And like I said, really not finding any information about
their Agent Force integration. All I could find was a
LinkedIn post from Sharon Pryor, who is the director of
(06:25):
Technology at Heathrow, who said that four hundred percent more
questions were handled via live chat, which is interesting because
the one from twenty twenty three it seems four hundred
and fifty percent. I guess that went down. And apparently
Agent Force says something called instant FAQs and interminal wayfinding
for your gate plus restaurant shops and facilities. I want
to be clear that all this bullshit was doable with
(06:45):
knowledge management systems and chatbots all the way back in
the mid twenty tens. Salesforce isn't even describing a AI agents,
which are supposedly autonomous chatbots. They're describing this boring, bob
standard bullshit. We can help you find your gate, stuff
that apps have done for a decade. What's more insulting
is the commercial officscates what this product actually is. Macarache
(07:05):
as a traveler is saying he didn't use Agent Force,
which is the powerful AI from Salesforce, as if that
is something a consumer chooses to do versus a business
being actively conned by Mark Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.
Salesforce has no powerful AI. It's all a lie, a
con an attempt to pretend that a company does something
that they do not do. Salesforce has a large language
bottel they're working on. They've used chat GBT or GBT
(07:28):
four in the past. Nevertheless, I don't know what the
powerful AI is. Salesforce, well, their problem is simple. They
can't do an AD that says, hey, do you want
a slightly more powerful chatbot that costs a great deal
of money, So they have to make this kind of
incongruent AD that lies about their product without ever really
saying what it does. Open AI, two years into this bubble,
still can't muster up a single meaningful, interesting use case.
(07:51):
And in both Google and AI's case, it truly isn't
obvious what the product is that they're selling. And that
really is the ultimate summary of the AI boos. Vague
and blatant lies that barely masked the contempt that these
companies have for customers, so much content that they can't
even bother to give them a real reason to use it,
And if a monest I'm a little bit disappointed about
(08:12):
these commercials because they lacked even the juice of the
twenty twenty two Crypto Bacanalia. You see there, we had
celebrities that called you a pig and a moron. They
said you were a hog that rolled around in the
mud and you oinked and squealed instead of putting everything
you had behind Crypto and people like Tom Brady while
they delivered, or at least on a superficial level, these
compelling ish messages that suggested you might really need to
(08:35):
and successfully convince people to buy these nebulous tokens in NFTs,
even though many of the companies they promoted turned out
to be elaborate Ponzi schemes such as FDx. And never
have I been more certain that this bubble will pop.
This was the biggest stage that generative AI will ever have,
and they blew it because well, deep down, they realized
(08:55):
there's just not that much to sell.
A zone media hell, and welcome to this week's better
offline monologue. I'm your host ed Zetron. What last Sunday
was the Super Bowl, the final game of the NFL season,
(00:22):
And for those of you who don't like sport or
live in another country or something, it's an event that
many people just watch for the many, many ads that
they cut into during the game. The Super Bowl ad
can cost as much as eight million dollars for a
thirty second commercial, depending on where it air is during
the game, the most coveted slots being just before the
halftime show, and the ads themselves tend to be the spectacular,
highly produced fare. They're very weird, but they put a
(00:44):
ton of money into them. This year, I was specifically
excited to see what bullshit slot the various AI companies
would try and force down my nasty little throat. Last year,
anthropicaird a five second long commercial that said, and I
quote Claude is a next generation AI system, a sentence that,
when you think about it, means precisely nothing. And Microsoft
(01:05):
famously aired a co pilot AI commercial where several of
the prompts, such as write code for my three D
open World game simply didn't do what they said they did.
In the case of the Open World game by the way,
from last year, it generated a step by step guide
to building one, which isn't the same thing at all.
It's kind of like ordering dinner and Uber EAT's bringing
your recipe for a burrito instead of an actual burrito,
(01:26):
but still charging you all the same. Nevertheless, this year's
slot was even more obscene, starting with an ad for
Google's Pixel nine phone where a guy has asked questions
as if he's taking a job interview by Google's generative
AI Gemini Live. As he answers them, it's obvious that
what he's describing is actually being a father. They also
show you an overlay of like him taking his kid
(01:47):
to score. It's got emotional music playing with him taking
her to school, and at one point e Google's explain
bling to a child, which I should be clear is
not a Gemini product, it's just Google Search. It's unclear
what this ad is actually advertising. We don't hear the
prompt that's started these questions, nor do we know why
he's answering them, but when he's done, he's clearly joining
(02:07):
some sort of job interview. Virtually Gemini doesn't really respond
to any of his answers other than to say things like,
try rephrasing your answer to sound more confident, so we
can assume. And that's all we're doing here that he's
preparing for a job interview. He's also pretty old, like
his kid has gone off the college. She's a full
grown adult. Now. Very weird, very weird commercial, very clearly
(02:29):
built for people who cry whenever they remember their parents. Sorry,
if that's you you are, do not use Gemini Life.
That's my recommendation. Next up was open a Eyes gratuitously
stupid commercial called The Intelligence Age, which showed a dot
matrix history of time involving men throwing spears, people riding horses,
(02:49):
waves crashing a waving skeleton for some reason as a plane,
and eventually a globe with a few dots going toward
a computer with a modem sound playing. A full forty
seconds in to this one minute long commercial, we start
actually hearing prompts. Someone says, summarize this article for me,
Then someone else says, help me practice asking for a raise.
And this prompt, by the way, is near impossible to hear,
(03:10):
as it's cut off to have a guy say act
as my sleep coach. And then there's two more prompts
in a language I don't speak, then another that says
turn my idea into a business plan, before a chirpy
voice asks what do you want to create next? This
is really good. I love this. I also love the
idea of having two prompts in different languages, because people
speak different languages other than English. I understand that there
(03:33):
is no official language of America, so it's good. But nevertheless,
that you only got a few seconds. You didn't think
to try and get as many prompts in. Maybe it's
that they didn't have them. In fact, if you're a
listener and you watch this commercial and you speak those languages,
please email me. It's easy at better offline dot com.
I would love to hear what they actually said. Nevertheless,
(03:56):
asking chat GPT to be your sleep coach leads it
to ask you about your sleep habits, your lifestyle, common issue,
sleep quality, and your ideal goals. Asking it to turn
my idea into a business plan immediately led it to
asking me what my idea was. Great. I can practice
with a large language model how to ask for a raise,
But what does that mean exactly? What does this product,
(04:17):
do what is chat GPT and assuming that AI ends
up actually wrecking the labor market as they wanted to,
the idea of using chat GPT is a soundboard when
you renegotiate your contract kind of feels like more of
a cruel joke. It's also not going to do that.
But anyway, two fucking years into this nonsense and these
assholes can't even come up with one interesting or useful example.
(04:37):
It's a fucking joke. These people have such contempt for
customers that they can barely be bothered to advertise their
products also goddamn half hearted. Yet the worst one by
far was Salesforce and their Gait Expectations ad, where Matthew McConaughey,
an actor, says that he and I quote didn't use
Agent Force, the powerful AI from Salesforce, so an AI
(04:58):
agent didn't send him the fastest to his gait or
root of your British which has now changed. The commercial
ends by saying that Salesforce helps London Heathrow create a
first class experience. Everyone in the commercial was also American act. Nevertheless,
I n actually went and looked up what this integration
actually looked like and discovered that Heathrow actually integrated Einstein's chatbots,
(05:19):
Einstein being Salesforce's large language model chatbot thing. They've been
warming up for that a decade, but this was back
in May twenty twenty three. They claimed that Einstein answered
more than four thousand questions a month and helped cut
call service volumes by twenty seven percent, and that Heathrow
has seen a four hundred and fifty percent increase in
live chat usage since launch. Then they proudly added that today,
(05:42):
and the article is completely undated, Heathrow had seen about
around forty to sixty second quicker per contact interactions in
call centers with Einstein chatbots. This is the only data
that appears to exist for anything to do with Agent
Force and Heathrow. There's nothing else they could find. I
will add that a record breaking eighty three point nine
(06:03):
million passengers flew through Heathrow in twenty twenty four four
thousand questions a month or forty eight thousand a year.
It's kind of a drop in the buck in as
a percentage at zero point zero five seven two percent,
And like I said, really not finding any information about
their Agent Force integration. All I could find was a
LinkedIn post from Sharon Pryor, who is the director of
(06:25):
Technology at Heathrow, who said that four hundred percent more
questions were handled via live chat, which is interesting because
the one from twenty twenty three it seems four hundred
and fifty percent. I guess that went down. And apparently
Agent Force says something called instant FAQs and interminal wayfinding
for your gate plus restaurant shops and facilities. I want
to be clear that all this bullshit was doable with
(06:45):
knowledge management systems and chatbots all the way back in
the mid twenty tens. Salesforce isn't even describing a AI agents,
which are supposedly autonomous chatbots. They're describing this boring, bob
standard bullshit. We can help you find your gate, stuff
that apps have done for a decade. What's more insulting
is the commercial officscates what this product actually is. Macarache
(07:05):
as a traveler is saying he didn't use Agent Force,
which is the powerful AI from Salesforce, as if that
is something a consumer chooses to do versus a business
being actively conned by Mark Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.
Salesforce has no powerful AI. It's all a lie, a
con an attempt to pretend that a company does something
that they do not do. Salesforce has a large language
bottel they're working on. They've used chat GBT or GBT
(07:28):
four in the past. Nevertheless, I don't know what the
powerful AI is. Salesforce, well, their problem is simple. They
can't do an AD that says, hey, do you want
a slightly more powerful chatbot that costs a great deal
of money, So they have to make this kind of
incongruent AD that lies about their product without ever really
saying what it does. Open AI, two years into this bubble,
still can't muster up a single meaningful, interesting use case.
(07:51):
And in both Google and AI's case, it truly isn't
obvious what the product is that they're selling. And that
really is the ultimate summary of the AI boos. Vague
and blatant lies that barely masked the contempt that these
companies have for customers, so much content that they can't
even bother to give them a real reason to use it,
And if a monest I'm a little bit disappointed about
(08:12):
these commercials because they lacked even the juice of the
twenty twenty two Crypto Bacanalia. You see there, we had
celebrities that called you a pig and a moron. They
said you were a hog that rolled around in the
mud and you oinked and squealed instead of putting everything
you had behind Crypto and people like Tom Brady while
they delivered, or at least on a superficial level, these
compelling ish messages that suggested you might really need to
(08:35):
and successfully convince people to buy these nebulous tokens in NFTs,
even though many of the companies they promoted turned out
to be elaborate Ponzi schemes such as FDx. And never
have I been more certain that this bubble will pop.
This was the biggest stage that generative AI will ever have,
and they blew it because well, deep down, they realized
(08:55):
there's just not that much to sell.
Host
Ed Zitron
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