Of AI, Lagerfeld, and "if you're cheap nothing helps"

Artwork by Tarek Chemaly

I can't believe I have to speak about this again (here). To be clear, I have nothing against AI, not that I use it (except perhaps in those small introductory notes on google - a man does need to know how long to keep the pasta in the pot before it glues you know!), but again, I understand it, and know its potential and how far it can be beneficial.

Which bring us to Karl Lagerfeld and one of his legendary caustic comments: "If you are cheap nothing helps". So here we are, a few days ago I saw a bad and incredibly horrible ad made with AI, the worst part is that the copy was so un-stomackable I kept thinking of how I would have screamed at a student if he or she offered me such a corny, bland, stupid and soulless cohesion of words. Small hint, Leo (back then H&C Leo Burnett) had to create a different agency (Black Pencil) to avoid having two banks are clients, and when - in the 80s - the hottest agency in town (Trust) took Semrani (children's clothing brand) they had to drop Zahar (another children's clothing brand - note: Zahar is still at the forefront of the industry while Semrani fell by the wayside), so even the ethics of it is incredibly shaky (because taking "consent" from a client is never enough). But I digress.

So back to the horrible ads being produced with AI. I honestly cannot understand how agencies, clients, and brand managers could accept such corny products to represent them. Nothing works, the imagery is - despite the newest most capable models - borderline horrible. The story... What story? Just an assemblage of ideas that don't work. The colors? Nothing that actually refers to the original brand's vivacious and bright colors. 

And this is just a tiny example of the ads I am seeing as of late. A jumble of prompts dressed in the sauce of the latest AI models, with no storytelling, horrendous copy, unflattering imagery, and repeated ad infinitum words such as "iconic" and the usual self-aggrandizing accoutrements. To go back to Lagerfeld: "Sunglasses are like eye shadow: They make everything look younger and pretty."

So, please, take off your pink sunglasses and look at the idiotic result of your ads before inflicting them on innocent viewers and bystanders. 

212 - counterintuitive AI

So Kettaneh Mobility is introducing 212 to the Lebanese market. It is trying to emphasize the brand’s bold identity, military heritage, and adventurous spirit to life with the help of Createagency. So far so good. So the best was to do it is obviously to see the car via urban setting, in cities or cruising through the highway, and also obviously through Lebanon's rugged mountains, surrounded by wolves at night, bypassing fallen trees. That the whole thing was done in AI is baffling to me. If you are going to prove all this, why fake it? It could have been whatever small car in this case. Well, at least in the old days, beauty shots were, well, believable. Now I see this film bragging that it is not, while trying to prove what the car can do, supposedly, in real life. See the film here.

Patrick Chemali and Lebnan sahar el layali

I shall start with a full disclosure: Patrick Chemali and myself are not related, we are close friends though, and this post, like all other posts on my blog is not sponsored, and indeed the song is done with AI yet with Patrick's own vocals on lead. Now that this is said, I am also (apart from being hard of hearing) tone deaf. Yet as soon as he shared it with me, I have been listening to it on loop. 

I do have soft spot for irony, because Patrick, like myself, tends to dip everything - including "rosy immaculate past" in bitter sauces, maybe because people keep rearranging that past continuously. If you really read into the lyrics, this is far from the benign happy-go-lucky suggestion the title implies. The song is available to stream on the several channels via this link (here). I would definately suggest you give it a listen, or as in my case, more than one.

So now it is mandatory to label AI

Artwork by Tarek Chemaly

Oh don't you just love the EU? (here) - the gist of it is that starting August 2, anything AI generated is to be flagged as such (texts, images etc....). Long - as in long - time ago I went all out on bloggers (when blogging was still a thing in Lebanon) who did not flag their paid posts as such. One famous blogger even sent out a post for a well-known corn flakes brand saying (quoting without linking) "everyday I have (insert brand) corn flakes for breakfast" when he went all out to advertise Zaatar w Zeit as his preferred breakfast somewhere else. He was known to have a lifelong card from Zaatar w Zeit if you want to know.

The polemics led on slut (the word is not misplaced) to declare "I've never heard of this guy (me), who is he?" and for the idiotic editor of (the now defunkt) Cloud961 to call me "a washed out advertiser turned blogger" and actually ask - no, seriously - the bloggers in question if they should declare and label their paid posts.

Two weeks later, the EU sent out a new law where all paid material was to be declared and flagged as such. As I said, I love the EU.

But honestly, don't you think it's - strict minimum - common sense? To go back to that funny sentence "why do they call it common sense if it is not common". Of course, AI is everywhere, it writes you essays, articles, produces layouts, songs, melodies, advertisements, videos, even full films. So it is everywhere, and the margin between reality and fiction is getting more and more thin. 

Now, of course, with AI as I previously said, present everywhere, could this be reaching out too far? Models are losing jobs for creatures created on AI and appearing in ads, everyday brings a new milestone in advancement - humanoids in the ring as an example (sure there is an element of teleoperation there, but seriously!), heck, "an autonomous OpenAI agent escaped a secure test environment and hacked into the AI startup Hugging Face during an internal safety evaluation" (funnily this sentence is copied from Google AI overview if you want to know).

And now what? Now we label AI when AI is labelable. Just like the slut in question had to label her Christmas photos with her family (kids in tow) and a mineral water next to them. If anyone does not know, some geniuses who walked the earth among us - am thinking Alan Turing who gave his name to the famous test - "the Turing test" predicted this long ago. That basically, if a judge - after asking questions - cannot tell the machine from the human, the machine has passed the test.

As Spielberg's film said eloquently in the subline of his AI Artifical Intelligence film "the Turing test was just the beginning".

(A)I, Robot?

Image credit: Design Department Communicate Magazine

The following is the editorial I wrote as an introduction to the Communicate magazine folder on AI which was covered in this issue (full disclosure: I am the editor in chief of Communicate). I thought it was fitting to republish it on the blog. Enjoy!

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In the Steven Spielberg film “Minority Report” released in 2002, actor Tom Cruise portraying the character of John Anderton, is walking into a mall, and is bombarded with ads that mention him by name, implying they’ve been targeted specifically to him, and only him. Lexus and Guinness beer to quote two of them. Perhaps because he is male and apparently of a certain socio-economic class due to his dress, or perhaps they know he researched those brands earlier. No matter, this was supposed to be “the future”, an abstract, vague notion.

And whereas we are not there yet, perhaps we are not too far off either.

The latest statistics dating back to October 2024 indicate that there are 57,933 Artificial Intelligence (AI) startups in the world. The global AI market is valued at $196 Billion globally, and the AI industry is projected to grow by 13 times till 2030. Neflix, the streaming company makes $1 Billion annually from AI-based recommendations by letting AI hone algorithms keeping viewers coming back for more. Interestingly, 48% of businesses use machine learning (ML), data analysis, and AI tools. AI software ChatGPT reached 1 million users in 5 days – and that was only 2022. By 2023 they had 100 million monthly users.

87% of global organizations believe AI will give them a competitive edge, and during the period between 2024 and 2030, AI is expected to achieve a compound growth annual rate of 37,3%. In 2020, AI generated services generated $19,6 Billion in 2025 this number is expected grow to $126 Billion. Within that same year, 97 million people are expected to be working within the realm of AI. On the ground though, automated emails and chatbots are two of the most entry-level ways companies use AI. Interestingly, AI is forecasted to increase employee productivity by 40%. Apparently 49.21% of marketers believe AI for email market revenue generates more growth.

Not a day passes without a startup announcing novelty technology related to AI. Take Osmo, the brainchild of former Google researcher Alex Wiltschko which focuses on detecting smell. Sure, smell has been a main component of detecting diseases in the medical field, but practically, Osmo also partnered with an unnamed yet well-known second-hand sneaker reseller to authenticate its goods and it had a 95% success rate.

However, on the other side of the coin employees in certain sectors have fears of being made redundant, and such fears might be justified for workers in the transportation and storage, manufacturing, and wholesale/retail industries. The list of sectors might get longer as time goes by.

When the industrial revolution happened, the premise was: Let the machine do the work, the business will expand, and all the people who lost their work will be brought back to the pool. Obviously, that never happened, in the case of AI, apparently there is a loss of 7% of jobs but an addition of 9% - though not the same people for sure.

Voice assistants, which basically use Natural Language Processors – or the ability to translate human speech into information computers can understand – are one of the most used forms of AI. Words like Siri, or Alexa have entered the lexicon. Even smartwatches that indicate specific times to do certain activities (such as washing hands during the COVID pandemic) are also built on the AI principle.

But before we put the horse in front of the carriage and get carried away, let us contemplate this example which Apple released very recently:

“Oliver picks 44 kiwis on Friday. Then he picks 58 kiwis on Saturday. On Sunday, he picks double the number of kiwis he did on Friday, but five of them were a bit smaller than average. How many kiwis does Oliver have?”

Obviously, any person familiar with basic maths will say – 44+58+(2x44) = 190. AI models apparently, went with 185. Why? Because they were tricked by the “five of them were a bit smaller than average”. Of course, a human – even a child - knows that a kiwi “smaller than average” still counts as one kiwi, an AI model got confused by the detail.

The bottom line is that AI models are good at mimicking data they were previously fed, but when it comes to “abstract reasoning”, AI models fall short. To put it bluntly, at this point, they are not “intelligent”.

Perhaps we are asking too much of a nascent technology. Maybe with time, machines will get to understand that five kiwis “smaller than average” are actually, still kiwis. Just as right now the AI industry is growing by leaps and bounds with advertisers, producers, film makers, and whatever other specialty in the communication field are trying to harness its power and produce whatever is producible within the limits and hopes of the current AI technologies.

There was a full ad for a new car produced in one day using nothing but AI technology. Was it boring? Yes, it was just beauty shot after beauty shot with little in what can be considered as “idea”. Surreal films abound everywhere on the net to show the prouesse of what AI models can do – from bears in trams to creatures morphing into other shapes, yet none of them can hold a candle to A Chien Andalou in terms of emotional punch. For reference Un Chien Andalou is a 1929 French silent short film directed, produced and edited by Luis Buñuel, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Salvador Dalí. Perhaps the difference lies not just in getting the execution “right” but in the creative backbone behind the works in question.

Or it could be that the AI models still need a human “prompt” behind them. To initiate commands and mimic actions, and “play pretend”. Once more, no one can truly grasp how big this can go. To go back to a cinematic analogy, in the film Blade Runner released in 1982, the Los Angeles Police Department ran the “Voight-Kampff” test to detect Nexus-6 replicants. Deckard, the main character and who identified the Nexus-6 (and played by Harrison Ford) was according to director Ridley Scott… A replicant himself. An AI identifying AI?

Which brings us back to the origin of all of this – the Alan Turing test. One that led him to believe that "machines can think". We could be very close or very far from this scenario.

Right now, to differentiate ourselves from robots, we need to identify images with traffic lights in them.

AnNahar AI president? Great until things get real

So AnNahar introduced the first AI president for Lebanon. Look on the one hand this is a very laudable initiative in a country with no president, a caretaker government, and parliament which - well is not very active. In their own words: The new AI president of Lebanon has been created by training Large Language Models on 90 years of impartial journalism from AnNahar since the 1930's. It analyses not only the historical data provided through the pages of AnNahar but also current events, and formulates answers for all political, legal and government questions. By tapping into this vast knowledge base, the AI president has a deep understanding of Lebanon's past, as well as an unbiased perspective on the challenges that the country faces today.

Now, I am going to bypass the "impartial journalism" thingy because I know things that are not fit to print which might make one reconsider the term. But still, I can understand the hype and the innovative aspect of the operation. Good on them doing it.

Now, big question: Why not apply that to real life? I mean if you already did it in the abstract why not apply it on the ground. We already have the perfect president allegedly so let's go and just elect the "person" (note I am not specifying the gender - here's hoping!).

Which brings us to how murky the Lebanese politics is. I am often asked about the late Rafic Hariri and my answer is always that watching politics from the sideline in Lebanon is one thing, being involved in it is another. Hariri was a prime example of that - he was eager to join the Lebanese politics, until he did. And discovered how everything was a gigantic quid pro quo - every project, no matter how beneficial to the population became a quagmire of profit-sharing, every this, that etc.... Which again divorces the theory of politics from its practical aspect.

Actually the word politics stems from Greek - polis and ethos: polis is the heart of the fortress and ethos is ethics. So the word basically means "the ethics of living in a community", which basically does not account for the former and current and most likely future politicians in Lebanon. But still, here we are. 

In a post dating July 16, 2015 I suggested the following about Abou Fouad, the (now sadly dead) face of Yes detergent:

So there, Abou Fouad goes to Washington, or rather Baabda.... Our household extraordinaire is exceptional in being cost-efficient, multitasker, a good council, he is diplomatic, has a million tricks up his sleeve. And frankly, between the available options, I says "yes" to Abou Fouad (pardon the pun!)... The campaign is on ladies and gentlemen!

Alternatively we could always have... (image dated May 24, 2014)

Chupa Chups goes AI, and for once it works.

OK so apart from the fact that I am not a techie, ads that rely - almost solely - on technical gimmicks (hacking data, etc...) leave me very cold. Whenever I encounter such ideas I meet them with a shrug. AI is starting to become part of the bread and butter of the ad industry, and apart from results that seem - at best - corny, there is still plenty of effort to be done for me to be seduced and change my mind. Which is why I found myself in love with the new Chupa Chups campaign. It is basically AI based, but the twist - is that it is seen through the major market for the lollipops: Children. Which is why AI actually works. The visuals make absolutely no sense, but this is exactly the beauty of it. It's like being at the Dali museum - with imagination running wild. The end result is a jumble of - too many incoherent things. I experienced this with my nephews and niece. They'd tell you a fantastical story which has no meaning (but to them) but you cannot but be captured by it. So yes, for once AI makes sense!

Nikon puts AI back in its place

So it's either a) I am too technically dumb to understand the implications of AI or 2) AI still needs human input to make it work or 3) we are already using too many surveillance techniques even before the AI or 4) any of the above.

Still, sure AI is super impactful, and yes, just like robotics before it, it will end up replacing many jobs. But again, just that funny photo of math teachers in the mid-70s protesting against the use of calculators, AI is here to stay.

Nikon knows it. But also use it to its advantage stressing "don't give up on the real world" with a series of images to well-done, they could have been generated by AI - but actually they weren't. A lot time ago I saw a beautiful photo taken by the legendary Steve McCurry, as I showed it to an art director at the ad agency I was working in at the time, he was unfazed and said "I can do that in photoshop". I tried to make him understand that there was no photoshop involved. He was adamant.

But photoshop or no photoshop, McCurry loses none of his magic. And - I truly still think - that we still need human creativity to get AI to do what we want. Only faster and in a less cumbersome way.

And clients will always reject our options, so it's not like anything will change on the ground.

ChatGPT is now a copywriter - my job is safe

AI is everywhere. ChatGPT is all the rage.

You know the central question - will AI replace us as creatives?

The Step conference copy which has been done by ChatGPT answers the question.

My job is still safe, thank you.

Let just say outright that the copy is funny. Not as in haha funny but in the same way kitsch is beautiful. For those who do not know, kitsch is something so ugly it becomes beautiful. So in the same analogy, the copy of the ads is so illogic it becomes funny as the end product.

Because if someone like me did the copy, there would be wit dripping from the ads. But these ads display no wit, just off-beat fun. Mind you I have nothing against "off-beat fun" as an "exercise de style" but in real life this won't amount to anything threatening my profession.

Of course, there is always the question as to when AI would replace human creatives, as is, I see nothing looming in terms of strategy or copy. Till now that is.

Rethinking Lebanon: Reshaping the Future of Lebanon through Artificial Intelligence

Well, there are those who are complaining, and then there are those who are still working and trying!

Starting February, Rethinking Lebanon will start a series of webinars that covers (AI, Robotics 3D Printing, IoT, Blockchain, AVs & UAVs, AR/VR, Biotech, Deep Learning, Neural Network…). The first webinar is entitled Reshaping the Future of Lebanon through Artificial Intelligence, it will take place on February 4, 2021. The featured speakers are partners and managing directors in BCG (Boston Consulting Group) and Microsoft, the zoom platform that will be used, has a capacity to host 1000 participants, mainly university students.
Actually Rethinking Lebanon is inviting the youth to "Reshaping the Future of Lebanon through Artifical Intelligence" Webinar on Thursday February 4, 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm (EET)
Panelists:
Jad Bitar, Managing Director & Partner at BCG
Juana Fernández Silva, Director at Microsoft
Akram Awad, PhD, MBA, Principal at BCG
For Registration kindly click on this link.
Rethinking Lebanon by the way has some very worthy objectives and among the topics they discussed so far:

- Redesigning Economic sectors
- Lebanese Women 2025: Role in public services
-Rethinking the design of Entrepreneurship
- Rethinking Education for creating jobs
- Medical Education in Lebanon
- Knowledge Economy and Innovation
- Real Estate Sector: Challenges & Opportunities
And truly, they put their money where their mouth is! So far too many conferences, lectures and meetings have been organized. When reaching out to their president Jihad El Hokayem, he tells me: "Well, we can't all turn our backs and immigrate. I certainly understand why some decide to go that way. But for me, investing in the Lebanese youth is the best I can do and try to get them to remain".