Is this real? AI ramps up risk of April Fools' Day foul-ups for corporate brands
CTV
The range of April Fools' Day marketing pranks gone awry is as varied as their reception. Met with everything from smiles and social media shares to confusion, derision or even fury and falling stocks, the puckish promotional tactic represents a risk that can endear customers to a brand as swiftly as it can sour them on it.
Rebranding as “Voltswagen.” Shutting down Trader Joe’s. Emailing confirmation of a $750 food delivery.
The range of April Fools’ Day marketing pranks gone awry is as varied as their reception. Met with everything from smiles and social media shares to confusion, derision or even fury and falling stocks, the puckish promotional tactic represents a risk that can endear customers to a brand as swiftly as it can sour them on it.
“One person's humour is another person's offense,” said Vivek Astvansh, a marketing professor at McGill University.
As April 1 approaches, consumers would be wise to extend even more skepticism, with experts saying artificial intelligence ramps up the potential for high-tech promotional ploys. Whether through generative text-to-video tools that conjure rich scenes from dashed-off instructions or chatbots that serve up endless ad ideas on command, AI raises new questions of authenticity and could make distinguishing between jokes, facts and deepfakes even harder.
“In the next few days, we will see many ads that were motivated by GPT-4 or other generative AI tools,” Astvansh said in reference to the most current version of OpenAI's popular ChatGPT program.
Even before the AI breakthroughs of the past 16 months — OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022 — the technology’s power to transcend human capacity has played a role in corporate hijinks.
On April 1, 2019, Google announced it had figured out how to communicate with tulips in their own language, “Tulipish.” It offered translation between the perennial's petals and dozens of human dialects, citing “great advancements in artificial intelligence.” The video closed off by noting that Google Tulip would only be available that day, leaving few in doubt about the joke.
