Monologue: The Super Bowl Showed That Generative AI Is Washed

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 --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:40Ed Zitron?

  Hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline Monologue. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

• 0:55Ed Zitron?

  Last Sunday was the Super Bowl, the final game of the NFL season. 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. A Super Bowl ad can cost as much as $8 million for a 30-second commercial, depending on where it airs 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 ton of money into them. This year, I was specifically excited to see what bullshit slop the various AI companies would try and force down my nasty little throat. Last year, Anthropic aired a five-second-long commercial that said, and I quote, "Claude is a next-generation AI assistant," a sentence that, when you think about it, means precisely nothing.

• 1:40Ed Zitron?

  And Microsoft famously aired a Copilot AI commercial where several of the prompts, such as "Write code for my 3D 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 Eats bringing you a recipe for a burrito instead of an actual burrito, but still charging you all the same. Nevertheless, this year's slop was even more obscene, starting with an ad for Google's Pixel 9 phone, where a guy is 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 to school.

• 2:23Ed Zitron?

  It's got emotional music playing with him taking her to school. At one point, he Googles "explain bullying 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 started these questions, nor do we know why he's answering them. But when he's done, he's clearly joining 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 to college, she's a full grown adult now. Very weird, very weird commercial, very clearly built for people who cry whenever they remember their parents.

• 3:07Ed Zitron?

  Sorry if that's you, you are... Do not use Gemini Live, that's my recommendation. Next up was OpenAI's gratuitously stupid commercial called "The Intelligence Age", which showed a dot-matrix history of time involving men throwing spears, people riding horses, waves crashing, a waving skeleton for some reason, there was 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, as it's cut off to have a guy say, "Act as my sleep coach".

• 3:50Ed Zitron?

  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, you know, people speak different languages other than English, I understand that. There is no official language of America. So it's good, but nevertheless, you only got a few seconds. You didn't think to like 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 betteroffline.com. I would love to hear what they actually said. Nevertheless, asking ChatGPT to be your sleep coach leads it to ask you about your

• 4:35Ed Zitron?

  sleeping habits, your lifestyle, common issues, 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, what does that mean exactly? What, what does this product do? What is ChatGPT? And assuming that AI ends up actually wrecking the labour market as they want it to, the idea of using ChatGPT as a soundboard for when you renegotiate your contract kind of feels like more of a cruel joke. It's also not gonna do that, but anyway. Two fucking years into this nonsense and these assholes can't even come up with one interesting or useful example. It's a fucking joke. These people have such contempt for customers that they can barely be bothered to advertise their product.

• 5:19Ed Zitron?

  It's also goddamn half-hearted. Yet the worst one by far was Salesforce and their Gate 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 agent didn't send him the fastest route to his gate," or route if you're 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. Nevertheless, I actually went and looked up what this integration actually looked like and discovered that Heathrow actually integrated Einstein's chatbots. Einstein being Salesforce's large language model chatbot thing they've been warming up for about a decade. But this was back in May 2023.

• 6:04Ed Zitron?

  They claimed that Einstein answered more than 4,000 questions a month and helped cut call service volumes by 27% and that Heathrow has seen a 450% increase in live chat usage since launch. Then they proudly added that today, and the article is completely undated, Heathrow had seen about around 40 to 60 second quicker per-contact interactions in call centres 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 I could find. I will add that a record-breaking 83.9 million passengers flew through Heathrow in 2024. 4,000 questions a month, or 48,000 a year, is kind of a drop in the bucket. As a percentage,

• 6:48Ed Zitron?

  it's 0.0572%. 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 Technology at Heathrow, who said that 400% more questions were handled via live chat, which is interesting because the one from 2023, it seems, was 450%. I guess that went down. And apparently, Agent Force has something called instant FAQs and in-terminal wayfinding for your gate, plus restaurants, shops, and facilities. I want to be clear that all this bullshit was doable with knowledge management systems and chatbots all the way back in the mid-2010s. Salesforce isn't even describing AI agents, which are supposedly autonomous chatbots. They're describing this boring, Bob-standard

• 7:32Ed Zitron?

  bullshit "we can help you find your gate" stuff that apps have done for a decade. What's more insulting is the commercial obfuscates what this product actually is. Makarahi, 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 Marc 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 they do not do. Salesforce has a large language model they're working on. They've used ChatGPT, or GPT-4 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?"

• 8:16Ed Zitron?

  So they have to make this kind of incongruent ad that lies about their product without ever really saying what it does. OpenAI, two years into this bubble, still can't muster up a single, meaningful, interesting use case. And in both Google and OpenAI'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 boom. Vague and blatant lies that Barely mask the contempt that these companies have for customers. So much contempt that they can't even bother to give them a real reason to use it. And if I'm honest, I'm a little bit disappointed about these commercials because they lacked even the juice of the 2022 crypto bacchanalia. 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

• 8:58Ed Zitron?

  and you oinked and squealed instead of putting everything you had behind crypto. And people like Tom Brady, well, they delivered, or at least on a superficial level, these compelling-ish messages that suggested you might really need to and successfully convince people to buy these nebulous tokens and NFTs, even though many of the companies they promoted turned out to be elaborate Ponzi schemes such as FTX. 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 there's just not that much to sell.

• 9:41Speaker 01

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• 11:16Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.