Social Media Branding

I made a post last year expressing my disdain for Artificial Intelligence, specifically regarding the image generator Midjourney and the language learning model ChatGPT. At that time people were most upset about Midjourney but now ChatGPT has taken the helm.

Google has been slowly rolling out their own language learning model, which they're calling BardAI. I've got to say, with access to these near-omniscient artificial minds that can conjure all of human knowledge and produce optimized creations in seconds, you'd think the branding would come across a bit more transcendental. 

ChatGPT is painfully literal, like the CEO asked "So what's this technology? A Generative Pre-training Transformer? And what does it do? Chat? So call it ChatGPT". BardAI sounds like a Dungeons and Dragons nerd came up with it. The Bard class is a musician anyway, so you'd think it would be used for a music-producing AI (which exists). Lee-Anne didn't know what a bard was, which is a bad sign for its public appeal. Also, Bard sounds like "barred", as in, to have your autonomy revoked, a horrible implication for AI and what Lee-Anne initially thought it meant. It also sounds too close to "banned", and "bad", both negative words.

Branding in general seems to be taking a weird turn. Germany tried making an alternative to Twitter (which has rebranded simply to "X", which its consumers have essentially ignored) called "Mastodon". To me, three syllables seems too many for a popular brand, especially a word that translates to "nipple teeth".

If I were to come up with a name for a language learning model (which I wouldn't, because I hate them), I think I would call it "Polly" and the mascot would be a parrot. Research has shown that humans respond better to female voices and identities when it comes to electronic assistants. This can be seen in the examples of Alexis and Siri. In addition, a parrot is known to be an animal that can mimic human language, but doesn't possess the ability to comprehend it, which makes it unique but unintimidating.

Taking the example of Mastodon, I would rebrand it to Mammoth and its mascot would be a woolly mammoth simply referred to as "Woolly". Shorter name, also the word more easily implies a sense of largeness, which I'm guessing was the reason for the name Mastodon. A social media platform is better the larger the network of people on it is, so the slogan I would use would be "Mammoth: the giant of social media". Posts would be called "SoundOuts" and have the image of Woolly trumpeting. I thought about calling them "Trumpets" but unironically I believe that it's dangerous to use a word that contains "Trump" in it during this specific point in history.

I should probably offer the caveat that maybe "Mastodon" works better in German.

Anyway, these are the competitive branding decisions that I've come up with using only my primitive, mono-conscience human brain.

I've always hated the format of Twitter. Even before Elon Musk took it over, back when it got popular when I was just out of highschool. I always thought it was the very worst social media platform. At the time, Facebook was the predominant social media, and Twitter was literally Facebook reduced only to its status update function. Literally, all Twitter did was reduce functionality to only allow for your thoughts to be presented in small sound bites. I resent so much that it became the platform used for political discourse.

I had a Twitter for a bit and found that it brought out the worst in me. I would unconsciously spit out my most controversial hot takes and offer no context or nuance. To my additional horror, it quickly became the platform I was most popular on, with people referencing it when I talked to them in my personal life. I set my account to private and never looked back.

I think Elon is deleting all accounts that have been inactive for a certain period of time, which my account assuredly qualifies for. I'm grateful to Musk for his horrible business decisions, which appear to be erasing the worst of my online presence, and also destroying the worst social media platform online. He's also losing a ton of money, which I'm also happy about.

This was going to be a post on Artificial Intelligence, but it's devolving into a tirade against social media in general.

Right now I've got an account on Facebook and InstaGram. All I use them for is posting major life updates and to say how many sunflowers I managed to grow that year. Facebook has become so consumed by bots and scammers pretending to people that you know that I don't trust any friend requests until I make voice contact with the person.

In fact, there have been two instances where someone has made accounts with my name and image and has been friending people. They both got reported and taken down.

Apparently Facebook is now known as the platform for "old people" of which I am one. InstaGram is where the young people are.

Except they're the exact same platform. They're both owned by Meta, they both use the same Direct Messaging system, called Messenger, and they both do exactly the same thing. Literally, they both offer you the option of syncing your updates so that they go to both platforms. Despite having a reputation for serving different demographics, most people have accounts on both platforms, and most people sync their updates so both their profiles contain the same content. It's pretty well just a filter, a simple cosmetic difference differentiating the two. The idea that they're different products is completely and totally an illusion.

I've considered playing around with some of the AI systems, but at this point you still have to make an account and either pay them money or agree to review the quality of their work, and I'm just not willing to support them in that way.

The closest I've gotten is with Goblin Tools, a free online service with a bunch of different tools. It's main thing is "MagicToDo" which takes a task and breaks it down into smaller steps, paired with an "Estimator" that lets you know how long it should take to do something. You can also use a "Judge" which detects the tone of a message, a "Formalizer", which converts your text to portray a different tone, making your message more or less professional, emotional, direct, or sarcastic. You can also select the degree to which you want the message altered by choosing between one to five levels of intensity using peppers as a symbol. There is also a "Chef", where you enter ingredients you have in your house and it conjures up a recipe, and a "Compiler" which takes a "brain dump" and converts it into steps.

This seems to be marketed toward people with cognitive disabilities living independently, usually people with ADHD or autism. We've begun using it at work. There's a motion to advocate for it as a tool to help people figure out what to cook at home, and I used it to edit a cover letter. The person I was supporting wrote a cover letter, and the Formalizer converted it to be more formal. Then I edited the script the formalizer came up with (it needed it).

As far as branding goes, this seems like the smartest of the examples I've given in this post. For some reason, neurodivergent people seem to compare themselves with goblins a lot. Also, the use of peppers was smart, because the term "neurospicy" as slang for people that process information differently has gotten popular, and it introduces the Formalizer as a tool to convert "spicy thoughts". I know "Goblin Tools" is three syllables and I said to avoid three syllable branding, but maybe chunking it into two words helps, because it doesn't feel as clunky as "Mastodon", at least to me. 

It doesn't advertise itself as AI, but it is. I've seen people on the ADHD subreddit advocating for the use of AI as an accessibility tool to help with writing emails and cover letters, to act as a prosthetic for their broken brains, or to convert boring tasks into exciting missions. Remember, I have ADHD so I'm involved in this discussion. I find the idea of filtering your voice through artificial intelligence disgustingly disingenuous.

I'll probably make a blog post playing with the Goblin Tools. That was going to be this post but my unfiltered spicy goblin brain got side tracked and so you get this for the time being.