Uncanny VALL-E & The Swipe
5 in 5 - Brave & Heart HeartBeat #139 ❤️
We’ve got a real medley for you this week.
From the week’s top royal marketing moment and how not to navigate staff vacations, to a deep dive on the newest uses of AI technology, and what does Tinder have to do with TikTok?
Let’s get into it.
Were you forwarded this? Not a subscriber? 👉 Sign up here
#1 - Bookshop Marketing Genius
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, or are just really great at tuning out sensationalist tabloid headlines, you’ll know that Prince Harry has released a MAD new book where he details everything you could ever want, and absolutely never want, to know about his life, and absolutely destroying the rest of the royals in his wake.
For us, the most interesting thing about his book is the viral marketing moment we saw this week from an independent bookstore. Bert’s Books in Swindon posted a photo of their shop window which featured the memoir “Spare” (lol) posed alongside copies of a novel called “How To Kill Your Family”.
Their response to questions on Twitter of when HRH would sue was a suitably tongue in cheek response about simply putting their bestselling books in the window - any conclusions drawn from that had nothing to do with them.
Although the owner doesn’t think the book will be a lasting bestseller (shocking), they’ve successfully used the press surrounding it to their advantage.
The organic way the post has been shared and reshared across social media is another example of how best to use the platforms in lighter marketing campaigns – if it’s funny and it sticks, you’ve got a winner – your audience will literally do the work for you.
#2 - How Not To Work: Vacation Edition
We’re sure you all enjoyed some well-earned time off over the holiday season, at least we hope you did. Quick Question - how often did your boss text you, or how often did you text your employees?
After sharing a horror story about their “egomaniac” (their words not ours) boss and their behaviour during their time off, this poster got a lot of support, an outpouring of more horror stories, and some examples of how bosses CAN and should respect your holiday time.
The original poster was summoned to HR for not responding to calls, texts and emails from their boss during a two-week vacation – for which they received a verbal warning for “insubordination”. Unsurprisingly, they are already applying for other jobs.
Another poster recounted their time at Fortune 100 company, after giving six months’ notice for their two-week honeymoon, and constant reminders, their colleagues and bosses freaked out when they said they wouldn’t be bringing their laptop with them. The employee returned to hundreds of emails, and an attempt from HR to replace them. They, again unsurprisingly, state that for their remaining two years in the company they gave absolute minimum effort to their work for these colleagues and bosses.
What have we learned so far? If as a boss you don’t respect vacation time, the employee no longer respects their obligations to the job – motivation is gone, engagement is non-existent.
One example of respecting employees vacation time is a company which states that if you end up working at all on your vacation day, e.g. for a fifteen-minute phone call with a colleague in need of information – your vacation day gets replaced off the bat. Others point out the new “right to disconnect” laws popping up across Europe and in Canada meaning any calls or emails from your boss outside of working hours can be classed as harassment.
Whatever kind of working style your company has, respecting the basic right to vacation time and ensuring managers are skilled in handling these issues is a good step to keeping employees happy, engaged, and not putting you on blast online.
#3 - ChatGPT: Friend Or Foe?
With the explosion of ChatGPT into our lives there’s been a lot of condemnation, sensationalism, and dare we say it – fearmongering. ChatGPT has been described as “quiet simply, the best artificial intelligence chatbot ever released to the general public”.
It’s a conversational bot which can respond to users’ questions in such a way that it is able to search huge databases, create well written enough essays to fool university professors, write legal briefs, write poetry in the style of Shakespeare or song lyrics, etc. etc.
Educators and researchers in particular are worried about the impact this could have on education, while those writing weekly newsletters such as myself are worried about how they could be replaced by the bot…. However, the question of replacement is one that has come up every time a new technology comes on the market, and it rarely ends in the robot great replacement that we’re told to fear.
The better way to think about ChatGPT is like any other emerging technology – as a tool to increase productivity. The professors who are terrified of ChatGPT now are the students whose professors were terrified of the internet and google search as a replacement for hours trawling through the library.
But think about it this way, a scientific researcher pointed out the utility of the bot in creating bite sized resumes of enormous research papers – that way they can input the paper, churn out the resume, and decide if they need to read the whole thing to further their research or move onto the next one. The time saved by the researcher is comparable to the time saved by searching a scientific database compared to trawling through book after book back in the day. Think of how that time saved could be put to use.
The fact is that the tech exists now, and older generations who continue to be fearful of it will be nudged out by those using it to get the same results as them, but faster. The key here is what we do with the time and energy gained.
#4 - Uncanny VALL-E
Now moving on to something that has the potential to be actually dangerous – Microsoft’s new voice recognition and recreation technology.
Microsoft researchers are working on a text-to-speech (TTS) model that can mimic a person's voice, includingemotion and intonation, with a mere three seconds of training.
The technology – called VALL-E and outlined in a 15-page research paper released this month on the arXiv research site – is a significant step forward for Microsoft. TTS is a highly competitive niche that includes other heavyweights such as Google, Amazon, and Meta.
The technology raises huge ethical and legal issues – imagine all the possible nefarious uses for an exact replica of any voice that can be attained in THREE SECONDS – Mission Impossible who?
Microsoft researchers are obviously not turning a blind eye to this possible outcome, stating that it could be possible to build a detection model, with some even suggesting that within a few years we may all have a unique digital DNA pattern powered by blockchain to protect their voice. Crazy stuff but okay sure, why not.
Thinking about other uses from a similar perspective to ChatGPT, a YouTube content creator brought up the idea of how the two could be used together to allow him to create content with a mere click of his fingers – using ChatGPT to write his text and VALL-E to replicate his voice and generate a niche podcast *just like that*.
#5 - What Tinder Taught Us
Tinder has been described as the dating app that changed it all.
When it was launched in 2012 the creators didn’t think much of it, and it actually only took them eight weeks max to create and launch it. While it seems obvious now, however, the famous swipe is what took Tinder to the next level, and taught us a lot about the addictive nature of social media as it did.
Because although Tinder is at its heart (excuse the pun) a dating site, many of its users ended up playing it like a game – and the swipe is what gamified the app. It was fun and compulsive, and kept users on the app for hours on end.
The act of swiping releases dopamine, a chemical in your brain that gives you a sense of pleasure, which, according to Dinesh Moorjani, one of Tinder’s co-founders, kept users hooked. An anthropologist at NYU who studies technology and gaming design says that Tinder has the same gaming qualities as slot machines, and users therefore fall into the same kind of endless gaming loops she observed in Vegas gamblers.
We now see a similar swiping motion on other such addictive apps, like Instagram reels and TikTok, keeping users glued to the screen for hours on end.
Food for thought, do we have Tinder and the swipe to thank for this?
Brave & Heart over and out.
Bonus
The Biggest Loser
Congratulations to Elon Musk, who has been awarded the world record for the biggest ever loss of personal fortune, an estimated 182 billion dollars this year.
He now features in the Guinness Book of World Records, but probably not for the reasons he once hoped.
To find out more on how you can retain your top talent, or how we can help you with digital solutions to your business and marketing challenges, check out our case studies.