The Pun-Loving Computer Programs that Write Adverts:
"Have a suite stay" read an ad for a hotel offering all-suite rooms. A neat - if obvious - pun you might think.
But what made this ad noteworthy was that it was created by an automated copywriting programme developed by Dentsu Aegis Network, the marketing giant.
The firm launched its natural language generation algorithm last year to increase output after changes were made to Google's advertising system, explains Audrey Kuah, the firm's managing director.
The programme creates 20 to 25 full ads a second in English and is "trained" by feeding it thousands of the kind of ads it is meant to produce, she says.
[...] Google's "cost-per-click-basis" advertising system, whereby the cost of an ad falls the more it is clicked on, encourages clients to play it safe, says Ms Kuah, making the ads rather pedestrian.
[...] So they began to "feed" the algorithm with editorial headlines from travel articles and idioms to see if it could learn "more flowery" language.
[...] "Our ambition is to train this AI [artificial intelligence] copywriter to learn how to inject a little bit of that human creativity, which today is taken out of the search advertising system because it may not be so readily rewarded," she says.
[...] Ms Kuah says the Dentsu Aegis algorithm sometimes gets confused when you give it new information.
"It will start to go haywire," she says. "You will suddenly have things that don't make sense appear. So it's a little bit like teaching a wayward dog that doesn't want to sit."
All the better to manipulate people so they will buy their stuff. Is this how SkyNet will be created?
(Score: 4, Funny) by The Archon V2.0 on Tuesday May 21 2019, @05:13PM
Need to find someone fast? We'll find a person for you in T-800 minutes or the next one's free.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday May 21 2019, @06:08PM (1 child)
I'm sure their algorithm will Hitler the nail on the head.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22 2019, @01:21AM
Jokes on you, nails don't breathe and bullets only make them stronger!
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday May 21 2019, @07:22PM
Dentsu Aegis -- get bent and still stay protected with us.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday May 21 2019, @08:10PM
After which you put it on Youtube, monetize the videos, and voila! Computer-generated riches.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 21 2019, @08:52PM (1 child)
Stop calling them giants. They are monsters. It is like calling google an internet giant. It is not a giant. It is a monster that is after you.
Calling them giants makes you think you've already lost the battle and discourages you to try to bring down these monsters.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday May 23 2019, @11:36AM
They are proxies, technically. Unless they own their own bank, or not depend from the financial system anyway.
But really they don't even need to be related to the financial system at all, let me explain.
The system prints money, therefore the system does not need money, they need assets.
To own assets someone must forfeit them.
To forfeit them it must be broke, because well off people with no need to sell will ask for more money than it's worth or even refuse to sell.
To be broke they must have been driven to bankruptcy.
To have been driven to bankruptcy they must have been exposed to a market with oversupply.
To create oversupply you must overfinance.
Who finances? the system. End of the circle. They pick the aggressive enough company, shower them with money, let them create trouble for other companies who will knock to the door of the system for financing. It's like cancer, with the exception that cancer is not as malevolent.
Account abandoned.