Doug's Rant #6: Bluesky, AI Going Mainstream, A Political Question
Doug’s Rant #6
Welcome to Rant #6 - not quite as ranty as some of the others but I’ve got some good stuff to discuss.
Bluesky ahead…
So I got my invite to BlueSky and I’m intrigued. It’s another Twitter but without the trolls, bots, anger, unstable leadership and hatred (original Twitter / X) and without the massive hyped & unwarranted expectations of essentially a feature-lacking echo chamber resulting in cratering activity and relevance (Threads). This is the one that Jack Dorsey himself is involved with and they are building at a manageable pace with a sort of grass roots model.
It looks exactly like Twitter but I don’t seem to know a lot of people there yet, I’m not spending much time there at the moment and there are no hashtags/trending topics yet - and that’s fine. That’s about all I have to report on it at the moment - oh, and I may have an invite code if you want one since that’s the only way to get on it at the moment... There is a waitlist you can sign up for if you don’t have a code. Here’s what my profile looks like on the desktop (mobile app and desktop versions are both available):
AI goes mainstream…
AI is here - like everywhere. It’s not just Chat GPT and in the corporations-are-starting-to-invest-heavily-in-AI stage. AI tools have shown up in Instagram, Canva and others. Some form of AI is ubiquitous at this point. Here are a few examples I’ve seen so far:
I used Chat GPT to help me generate a blog title and it was wild. I asked for a blog title about a high school senior portrait session on the Frameable Faces blog, hit a button and was instantly presented with twenty. I picked one I liked, tweaked it and used it for the title. Very helpful! Of course I wrote the rest of the post myself - I can’t see ever handing the whole job off to a robot. But as a tool it was damned useful. Social Media Examiner actually asked should AI be feared or embraced for marketing and I thought a gentleman named Mike Birt gave a pretty good answer which was similar to many of the comments in the thread (I don’t know Mike - I just thought it was a good representative comment that was right above mine):
Notice I said I don’t think Chat GPT has a conscience - it’s not a sentient being. My post that I linked earlier in this piece about whether Chat GPT has self-awareness showed Chat GPT’s remarkable ability to mimic actually feeling. But it’s not real - it’s still artificial.
As for content design, Canva’s new AI Magic Studio looks….insane. Check out this trailer - I can’t wait to dig into this…
Meanwhile over on Instagram they’ve added AI Stickers that you can add to stories… I tried this a week or so ago and thought it was stupid. I was set to say that here, so I went to Insta to grab a couple examples and let’s just say they must have made some improvements? Pretty funny - check it out:
Here’s the menu and you’ll see the option towards the lower left:
When you select AI STICKERS it gives you this prompt:
I went with “A Wolverine Crushing A Buckeye” and here’s what I got - and this was just one of a bunch of different options it gave me!
Haha! I figured let me give it one more that could be a little more challenging… A Civil War General Taking A Selfie…..
VOILA!!!
Are you kidding me? LOL - yeah I’d say AI is really here.
A political question…
Okay last topic - Politics! Ha - okay not really. But I wrote a post 11 years ago on the Frameable Faces blog about how politics and your brand don’t mix, so this has been my stance for a long time. I’m not changing it now, but a particular brand that makes a product I love and have been a fan of for almost 40 years has me curious… That brand is Ben & Jerry’s. Ben & Jerry’s has a lonnnnnnnng and unwavering history of activism as a company that predates social media, and as the political climate has heated up in recent years they haven’t pulled back even a little. So now with social media they have a lot of people unloading vitriol on them in the comments of every single post they put out. I’ve seen a bunch of it lately in my feed so it had me wondering once again:
Is this good for business? Maybe it………is?
Certainly the more engagement they get the more reach they get and the more they have people talking about them. Once again I’ve always said this is a bad idea with politics and I really don’t want any part of it myself. But sometimes I just wonder if you would rather have good business from both sides of the political spectrum or rabid support and all the business from one side with none from the other? Are the results the same? Not many brands have everyone in their tent anyway, so maybe Ben & Jerry’s is in the exact position they want to be in? I don’t have the stats and the definitive answer on this - I suspect there isn’t one. It just had me wondering… Feel free to comment with your thoughts as long as you don’t come in here with some political rant. It will be removed.
M10 Social is owned by Doug Cohen in West Bloomfield, MI and provides social media training and digital marketing services from the Frameable Faces Photography studio Doug owns with his wife Ally. He can be reached there at tel:248-790-7317, by mobile at tel:248-346-4121 or via email at mailto:doug@frameablefaces.com. You can also connect with Doug on Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram, and/or M10 Social on Twitter or Facebook, and check out his other biz www.VirtualPetcations.com while you’re at it!
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