Strands of Genius: Relearning How To Internet, Artificial Creativity Landscape, ElonBot
Plus our thoughts on: Twitter ;-(
WRITING FROM | Isla Mujeres, MX
WORKING ON | Wrapping up work for the year
LOOKING AHEAD
Oct 31-Nov 19 | Isla Mujeres, MX
Nov 19-26 | Mexico City, MX
Nov 26-Dec 7 | Nashville, TN
Dec 7-15 | Beersheba Springs, TN
Dec 15-19 | Atlanta, GA
Dec 19-21 | Athens, GA
Dec 21-Dec 31 | Nashville, TN
:: WHAT’S NEW & WEEKLY GRATITUDE ::
Hello, hope you’re ok. It took an extra day to get here because plane changes and delays cascaded to missing the last ferry but we made to Isla Mujeres and are grateful for some time to catch up on email, begin to tie up various work odds and ends for the year and wind down a little, sleep a lot, exercise some and other things in varying quantities.
If you missed our last Wednesday note, let us give you a quick recap:
At the end of this month, we’ll celebrate Thanksgiving, and as we discussed our end of year plans, we decided we wanted to do something to give back to our community.
So: for the month of November, we’ll be hosting a giveaway.
We’ll be featuring three creators as our guest curators this month, and in addition to each of those product-based giveaways, we’ll also giveaway three 1-on-1 consulting calls, which can be used sometime between January 15th & March 15th of 2023. You can use the time to get some input on a live project (we’re happy to sign NDAs prior), to ask us about our nomad packing tips, or to chat about whatever’s on your mind :)
If you’re a subscriber on November 30th, you’ll automatically be entered. But we’ll also reward you with more entries in exchange for sharing any edition of the newsletter. Details on how this will all work below :)
This week, we’re especially thankful for:
Scoot+T, Hank, Aisha, Bergen, Scott, Ivan, Casa Vaya Vida, Steve, peacocks, pigs, shrimp tacos, La Croix, running, vitamins, being back on the island and all the peacefulness that comes with it, all our new subscribers especially from SoDA (HI!) & YOU.
PAID ATTENTION VIRTUAL EVENT
We’re closing out the year with one last virtual event with out friends Maury / Heart + Mind Strategies where Faris will wax lyrical about attention and then have a moderated discussion about that and advertising and what’s happening on social media and politics and anything else people want to talk about.
It’s an open invitation and you can register here and by clicking on the image below.
:: THE LINKS ::
GET READY TO RELEARN HOW TO USE THE WEB
Economist and polymath Tyler Cowen has penned an op-ed considering how the web will change when it is navigated or mediated through an AI layer and what the implications might be. “The world of ideas will be turned upside down. Many public intellectuals excel at promoting themselves on Twitter and other social media, and those opportunities may diminish. There will be a new skill — promoting oneself to the AI — of a still unknown nature.” (WashingtonPost - Gift Link)
THE ARTIFICIAL CREATIVITY LANDSCAPE
Speaking of AI, as we often seem to be at the moment, here is a map of already numerous creative generative AIs available online.
You can download the pdf (pay what you wish) with all the links here.
Interestingly, nothing is currently operating at the conceptual level.
Our friends and partners at Seenapse are developing this and the platform of human created associations + AI already generates concepts for advertising, not just copy for blog posts or ads. (NessLabs)
INSIDER INTERVIEWS AN ELONBOT
Insider did an interview with an AI bot from Character.AI trained to be Elon Musk. Clearly this is not the same thing as interviewing Elon Musk, but also it’s not nothing and sometimes seems uncannily accurate. It’s not simply an Elizabot. You can see how this sort of technology will rapidly get incorporated into qualitative market research and so on. (Insider)
Strands of Genius is currently read by more than 13,000 subscribers. Support us by becoming a member of The School of Stolen Genius, or encouraging friends or colleagues to subscribe. If you’re interested in sponsoring this newsletter, hit reply and let’s chat!
:: WHAT WE’RE THINKING ABOUT: TWITTER & ::
I joined Twitter in December 2006 and registered my first name @FARIS. If you follow me there you will appreciate that I love Twitter and used to tweet A LOT. I have had mostly very positive experiences there, met lots of nice people, learned a lot, been encouraged to read and share and discuss a lot. I’ve also been aware of a general souring of the discourse and the fact that Twitter can be very addictive for me, and that mainlining news via the stream isn’t good for my head after a certain amount of time per day. Nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so, and users make it so.
Any game that has points and rules and seems to offer influence as a prize is going to be gamed. The loudest voices are often the angriest ones, the reply guys, the pile-ons and so on are all toxic examples of how any system that scales on the back of human utterance and interaction has negative externalities and can create extreme behaviors.
In a very good Ezra Klein podcast, the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen talks broadly about games and specifically about how points change behavior, especially on places like Twitter. Whatever your own personal goals when interacting with a system, connection or learning or getting your ideas out into the world, the points are only created when people click like, RT or follow you. Those are the points and ultimately points are very motivating and so people end up doing whatever gets them more points, regardless of how that synchronizes with your original intentions.
When other parts of the world began using Twitter, people starting trying to ‘buy’ my handle off me via reply tweets and then began to try to hack my account and so on. So I applied for verification, explained what was happening and that I was a published author and opinion columnist and such and received my Blue Tick. It was always nice to have, I of course enjoyed some aspects of the clout it implied, but more importantly the verification system allowed genuinely famous people to appear on the platform without being constantly impersonated.
This system has been up-ended and no one knows what is going to happen but things have gotten much messier, very quickly in the bird app. Someone had the sense to convince the new lord and master of TweetWorld not to roll out these changes until after the mid-terms because it could cause absolute havoc. Appreciating this and yet planning to go ahead with the changes anyway with 2024 looming in USA seems…ominous.
I don’t know what will happen and I’m not joining Mastodon, or Discord (I’m done with new social networks, but you can try to change my mind) but it seems like lots of the nice people are leaving, people are shouting a lot more, and generally I’m a bit sad about the whole thing, not least because it shows just how much power billionaires have over the entire mediascape of the USA and beyond.
(Made with Dalle2)
:: HOW TO SNAG EXTRA ENTRIES FOR OUR GIVEAWAYS ::
Just by being a subscriber, you’ll already be entered to win. However, we’ve also got a few ways for you to earn some extra entries, capped at 100 entries per person.
All you have to do is share a link to the newsletter in some capacity, and send an email to ashley@geniussteals.co on or before November 30th.
Here’s the scoop:
Sharing on social media = 5 extra entries, per platform. You’ll send a link to your post(s) to Ashley.
Sending an email to your team/department = 25 extra entries. We hope your team will thank you! Forward your email to Ashley for your extra entries.
Sending an email to your whole company = 50 entries. Damn, look at you willing to use that all-agency list serv. Thanks, we appreciate that! Forward your email to Ashley for extra entries.
We would like to grow our subscribers so obviously this is helpful for us and we are incentivizing that a little bit but we also believe that sharing is caring, that people we meet always tell us they find this newsletter unique and useful amongst the advertising industry, both broad and personal, and if you like it, wouldn’t people you like enjoy it too?
We’ll select winners on December 1st, and announce the winners on December 5th.
:: WHAT TO SHARE ::
We’re leaving that up to you. We’d love for you to share what you love about the newsletter, or why you read it, or what you appreciate about it — but just sharing a link will still get you extra entries.
We’ve flagged some of the more popular editions of Strands of Genius here, in case you want to share a past edition:
There was that edition where we explored grief, which included links about overcoming productivity dysmorphia, when a major life change upends your sense of self, and 3 questions to ask about trends.
Or the edition where we highlighted social media bans around the world, which included links about why community matters so much, retouching and influencer marketing, and shrinking The Gap (how the clothing brand lost its way.)
We covered the tough topic of abortions in May, and included links on big ideas in advertising, why Marvel is the most important cinematic innovation of the 21st Century, and why analogies are superpowers.
The newsletter we received the most responses to was when Rosie wrote about what it’s like working with a spouse, and included her favorite writings from Faris, including a post about America, Freedom & The High Cost of Healthcare, toxic nostalgia, how to get lucky, and Stone Junction.
And then there was a follow-up from Ashley, our Director of Operations, who wrote about what it was like working with a married couple, and included links on the nature of fame and attention, Italy’s B Corps, and the gay history of camels.
Or the time when Faris wrote about constraints, and included links on playing with brands, how tenderness and attention are related, and why we love the word ‘smooth.’
Rosie was a little nervous to send the newsletter where she talked about waning ambition, but it turned out many of you shared the same perspective. That edition also included links on why the return to the office isn’t working, the six forces that fuel friendship, and the first edition of the Warc Attention Economy podcast.
And there was the edition where we shared our favorite questions to ask, which also included links on being wrong, the insane cost of cars, and nine ways to channel stoicism to help your anxiety.
You can find and search the entire archive of Strands of Genius here, if there was an edition we didn’t spotlight that you loved and wanted to share :)
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If we can ever be of help to you, even outside of a formal engagement, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
rockON,
faris & rosie & ashley | your friends over at geniussteals.co
@faris is always tweeting
@rosieyakob hangs out on instagram
@ashley also writes for deaf, tattooed & employed
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It's called Genius Steals because we believe ideas are new combinations and that nothing can come from nothing. But copying is lazy. We believe the best way to innovate is to look at the best of that which came before and combine those elements into new solutions.
Co-Founders Faris & Rosie are award-winning strategists and creative directors, writers, consultants and public speakers who have been living on the road/runway since March 2013, working with companies all over the world. Our Director of Operations is nomadic like us, our accounting team is based in Tennessee where our company is registered, our admin extraordinaire is based in Playa del Carmen, and our collaborators are all over the world. Being nomadic allows us to go wherever clients need us to be, and to be inspired by the world in between.
Hit reply and let’s talk about how we might be able to work together :)