Ragebait Marketing

I thought this article from The Verge was a bit on the “too much” side, about AI actress Tilly Norwood and how the whole thing is a “psyop.” I haven’t overly closely followed the Norwood saga, just from afar via following Google Alerts around various AI in the arts topics. It just seems like not a big deal to me at all, and also an absolute inevitability as we watch the early AI-generated stars begin to rise. If we can call them that…

I recently found a precursor example of this sort of gambit from a couple years ago, called Noonoouri – an AI-assisted animated character that allegedly signed a record deal with Warner in 2023. It was such a big deal, apparently, that I never even heard of it before the other day. I guess I see Norwood in a similar light:

Which is not to say there’s no place for this sort of thing. I think there is. It’s just not something that grabs my attention when I see it. It’s just another meh in the endless smorgasbord of mixed lukewarm platters of gen AI leftovers.

Speaking of, I also enjoy tracking requests from journalists for sources on Qwoted around generative AI and I saw this one, but arrived home too late to pitch them:

NATION’S RESTAURANT NEWS

Digital marketing and social analytics experts on AI-manufactured outrage

Bots and AI were behind the Cracker Barrel scandal– what can we learn from this?
I’m looking for digital marketing and social media analytics experts to talk about the bombshell that nearly half of all X posts about the Cracker Barrel rebranding controversy were from bots and AI, meaning that at least part of the outrage was manufactured.
I want to write a story on what this means, how common it is, and how other brands can avoid falling for those same pitfalls.

While I heard about the Cracker Barrel thing in a general way, I’ve not yet been exposed to this angle of alleged bot/AI etc involvement to manufacture outrage.

But my pitch would have been something about how we shouldn’t be looking for how brands can avoid those pitfalls, but how brands will ultimately embrace actively using these tactics themselves. While it’s shitty, I think it’s sort of an inevitability as we see more and more that those kinds of sub rosa ragebait campaigns are simply effective at driving attention. The question would then become more about how not to get burned as a brand while playing with fire.

Probably that’s not a message that Nation’s Restaurant News is going to be ready to re-transmit to its readership, but it’s the world we’re rapidly entering, and that we’re already in, like it or not.