This explains the stupid promotion emails from Discover “A kind notice”. Like that sets my teeth on edge and sounds (to me) like it was written by someone who’s native tongue is not English. I suppose AI’s don’t have a native tongue.
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Reminds me of the academic publishing / conference spam I get.
Kindly do support our upcoming issue
Your original article is genuine fortune to us
Gentle Reminder: Honorable Speaker Invitation
… and so on.
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I hate it when people try to butter me up in emails etc.
This is text. You want something from me. Tell me what and I will decide. Making me read an extra 200 words is wasting my time.
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I think the idea is, if you’re narcissistic enough to fall for their sweet-talk, you’re probably also foolish enough to pay to get published in their sham journal or to attend their nonexistent conference.
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Oops! Wrong thread.
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I’m (somewhat) joking; but AI applications might actually involve a fair amount of vocabulary coinage(when it isn’t being quietly not talked about because all the rightsizing had already tanked morale).
In this case, ‘creatives’ is apparently the preferred(endured? actively appropriated from artists people don’t loath?) term for the people who do the work this bot is being applied to.
Since ‘AI’ doesn’t imply a specific role or profession the way human job titles do, you need some way of indicating what you are using the AI to do. In this case they appear to have derived a term for the product of a class of workers from the term for them(apparently “creatives” produce “creative”, likely by using their mandibles to combine stock photos, consumer psych research; and coffee into a slurry that feeds some sort of symbiotic fungus that grows on billboards and website banner and sidebar locations, like a sordid sort of leafcutter ant). Once you’ve derived a term for the work product, you can specify what the AI is doing by saying “applying AI to %WORKPRODUCT%”.
It sounds less goofy if the term for the work product or intermediate commodity being handled isn’t awful. “applies AI to industrial pulp and paper products” sounds almost like a real phrase.
For what academic publishers charge for subscriptions they can’t even hire people who don’t sound like low grade phishing spam?
Or is that what you get from the bottom-feeder ‘predatory’ pay-to-publish scammer boiler room ones?
The ones that show up in spam and have the awkwardly phrased invitations are universally predatory publishers and/or scam conferences. Every actual solicitation I’ve gotten from a reputable journal has 1) been pretty staid (“Ergonomics: Invitation to review manuscript”) and 2) has avoided the spambot successfully.
In my experience, real conferences always do broadcast CFPs rather than personally-addressed requests to participate (unless it’s something like a keynote invitation), and most journals of note are able to rest on their reputation and don’t need to directly solicit. The ones that do solicit definitely use CFPs and not personal contacts, unless it’s for peer-review/editorial work, or in the rare case where an editor happens to be personally familiar with you and your research and wants to petition you to write something up because they think it’d be interesting.
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while (hearing.this)
{
SetState("pleased");
grin(2000);
}
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- The rest turned out to be washing machines.
(Tribute to Stanislaw Lem)
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I could understand “creatives,” or even adding an article to what we have now for “the creative.” But “creative” by itself is just bonkers.
<pedantry>
State isn’t an enum?
hearing isn’t an event listener, and ‘this’ doesn’t refer to this?
</pedantry>
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I was actually considering alternatives for both. But number one is not an improvement in this case because
-
smartasses would ask why state is not a string/bool/object or even a constant
-
there’s no user input to sanitize, no injections to deflect
Further, this does not always mean what you think and hearing might be set before the code above is even called. Also: “Stay away with these dirty sockets from me!”.
I worked for a company printing statements for banks. They were often clueless about language, and we’d have to send back ad copy sometimes and say “do you really want to say this?”.
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The guy that wrote copy A) clearly doesn’t know copywriting concepts and principles.
How about put this bot against the best copywriters in the world and then see what happens.
Anyways, bots cannot write long-form copy. They cannot write engaging stories.
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I’d like to see that. How do we decide who the best copywriters in the world are? Do we ask Buzzfeed to borrow their unpaid teenage copywriter who wrote their some of their top traffic drawing headlines, such as " Like or Pass on These Pop-Tart Flavors and We’ll Guess Your Relationship Status"? 
Dunno if an AI could come up with that or not, but I’m not sure that college “copywriting concepts and principles” would either.
Dear @wazroth,
On behalf of the organizing committee, we cordially welcome you to be the chair/speaker at the Annual Conference of Boing Boing Commenters, to speak about Broadcast CFPs and the awkwardly phrased invitations.
I am… beginning to have some concerns about how we are using algorithms to simultaneously
a) more effectively find paths to tap into humans most basic instinctual reactions and
b) wash our hands of the results, because it wasn’t a human who made that decision, just an algorithm working to be as effective as possible.
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I am totally in favour of this! Just let the competition be 20 000 meters under the sea and let it take, say, 250 years? Just to be sure we have results enough and to exclude any outside interference. (Who knows what these russians might be up to…)
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