User Generated Convenience
Mark Zuckerberg discussing the black box:
I mean, obviously, it’ll always be the case that they can come with a suggestion or here’s the creative that they want, especially if they really want to dial it in. But in general, we’re going to get to a point where you’re a business, you come to us, you tell us what your objective is, you connect to your bank account, you don’t need any creative, you don’t need any targeting demographic, you don’t need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out. I think that’s going to be huge, I think it is a redefinition of the category of advertising. So if you think about what percent of GDP is advertising today, I would expect that that percent will grow. Because today, advertising is sort of constrained to like, “All right, I’m buying a billboard or a commercial…” [...]Number two is basically growing engagement on the consumer surfaces and recommendations. So part one of that is just get better at showing people the content that’s out there, that’s effectively what’s happening with Reels. Then I think what’s going to start happening is that the AI is not just going to be recommending content, but it is effectively going to be either helping people create more content or just creating it themselves.
First they came for advertising…
The impending future where people prompt their own playthings is both exhilarating and exhausting to contemplate. We’re on the verge of an AI-driven feedback loop where creation, recommendation and consumption collapse into the same opaque system - optimised for engagement, detached from intention.
It’s not too late to resist a WALL·E-world of propaganda, polarisation and programmable passivity. But doing so will require more than puritanical panic - it’ll demand deliberate design, cultural conviction, and what Jony Ive calls “the appropriate concerns about safety” put into action1
It’s not too late to resist a WALL·E-world of propaganda, polarisation and programmable passivity. But doing so will take more than puritanical panic - it will demand deliberate design, cultural conviction and what Jony Ive calls “the appropriate concerns about safety” put into action1.