Do Super Bowl Ads For AI Signal a Bubble About to Burst? (msn.com) 50
It's the first "AI" Super Bowl, argues the tech/business writer at Slate, with AI company advertisements taking center stage, even while consumers insist to surveyors that they're "mostly negative" about AI-generated ads.
Last year AI companies spent over $1.7 billion on AI-related ads, notes the Washington Post, adding the blitz this year will be "inescapable" — even while surveys show Americans "doubt the technology is good for them or the world..."
Slate wonders if that means history will repeat itself... The sheer saturation of new A.I. gambits, added to the mismatch with consumer priorities, gives this year's NFL showcase the sector-specific recession-indicator vibes that have defined Super Bowls of the past. 2022 was a pride-cometh-before-the-fall event for the cryptocurrency bubble, which collapsed in such spectacular fashion later that year — thanks largely to Super Bowl ad client Sam Bankman-Fried — that none of its major brands have ever returned to the broadcast. (... the coins themselves are once again crashing, hard.) Mortgage lender Ameriquest was as conspicuous a presence in the mid-2000s Super Bowls as it was an absence in the later aughts, having folded in 2007 when the risky subprime loans it specialized in helped kick off the financial crisis. And then there were all those bowl-game commercials for websites like Pets.com and Computer.com in 2000, when the dot-com rush brought attention to a slew of digital startups that went bust with the bubble.
Does this Super Bowl's record-breaking A.I. ad splurge also portend a coming pop? Look at the business environment: The biggest names in the industry are swapping unimaginable stacks of cash exclusively with one another. One firm's stock price depends on another firm's projections, which depend on another contractor's successes. Necessary infrastructure is meeting resistance, and all-around investment in these projects is riskier than ever. And yet, the sector is still willing to break the bank for the Super Bowl — even though, time and again, we've already seen how this particular game plays out.
People are using AI apps. And Meta has aired an ad where a man in rural New Mexico "says he landed a good job in his hometown at a Meta data center," notes the Washington Post. "It's interspersed with scenes from a rodeo and other folksy tropes, in one of . The TV commercial (and a similar one set in Iowa), aired in Washington, D.C., and a handful of other communities, suggesting it's aimed at convincing U.S. elected officials that AI brings job opportunities.
But the Post argues the AI industry "is selling a vision of the future that Americans don't like." And they offer cite Allen Adamson, a brand strategist and co-founder of marketing firm Metaforce, who says the perennial question about advertising is whether it can fix bad vibes about a product.
"The answer since the dawn of marketing and advertising is no."
Last year AI companies spent over $1.7 billion on AI-related ads, notes the Washington Post, adding the blitz this year will be "inescapable" — even while surveys show Americans "doubt the technology is good for them or the world..."
Slate wonders if that means history will repeat itself... The sheer saturation of new A.I. gambits, added to the mismatch with consumer priorities, gives this year's NFL showcase the sector-specific recession-indicator vibes that have defined Super Bowls of the past. 2022 was a pride-cometh-before-the-fall event for the cryptocurrency bubble, which collapsed in such spectacular fashion later that year — thanks largely to Super Bowl ad client Sam Bankman-Fried — that none of its major brands have ever returned to the broadcast. (... the coins themselves are once again crashing, hard.) Mortgage lender Ameriquest was as conspicuous a presence in the mid-2000s Super Bowls as it was an absence in the later aughts, having folded in 2007 when the risky subprime loans it specialized in helped kick off the financial crisis. And then there were all those bowl-game commercials for websites like Pets.com and Computer.com in 2000, when the dot-com rush brought attention to a slew of digital startups that went bust with the bubble.
Does this Super Bowl's record-breaking A.I. ad splurge also portend a coming pop? Look at the business environment: The biggest names in the industry are swapping unimaginable stacks of cash exclusively with one another. One firm's stock price depends on another firm's projections, which depend on another contractor's successes. Necessary infrastructure is meeting resistance, and all-around investment in these projects is riskier than ever. And yet, the sector is still willing to break the bank for the Super Bowl — even though, time and again, we've already seen how this particular game plays out.
People are using AI apps. And Meta has aired an ad where a man in rural New Mexico "says he landed a good job in his hometown at a Meta data center," notes the Washington Post. "It's interspersed with scenes from a rodeo and other folksy tropes, in one of . The TV commercial (and a similar one set in Iowa), aired in Washington, D.C., and a handful of other communities, suggesting it's aimed at convincing U.S. elected officials that AI brings job opportunities.
But the Post argues the AI industry "is selling a vision of the future that Americans don't like." And they offer cite Allen Adamson, a brand strategist and co-founder of marketing firm Metaforce, who says the perennial question about advertising is whether it can fix bad vibes about a product.
"The answer since the dawn of marketing and advertising is no."
Investment (Score:5, Interesting)
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The question isn't about value for money. It's about does a focused splurge by one market like this foretell a quickly approaching crash of that same market?
Outside of Super Bowl ad spending, the amount of money being invested can't possibly pay off. No one thinks AI is that great. Even if the mythical AGI already existed it still wouldn't be worth the size of the spend. There has to be a correction, and a big one.
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You have not been hanging around computational biologists lately. I can tell.
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LOL, has anyone? That sounds like a very rare breed.
FOMO (Score:2)
Betteridge and hyperbole (Score:4, Insightful)
"Do Super Bowl Ads For AI Signal a Bubble About to Burst?"
Betteridge's Law aside, is this question calling the 1984 Apple Mac ad a signal that a bubble is about to burst? Some Super Bowls ads are bubble busts, some are great successes, and most are in between.
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And people DO like AI, when it is directly serving their needs. AI-powered apps are popular in all markets where they appear. People like asking them questions and getting answers more quickly than if they went spelunking through search results on the Internet. People like chatting with chatbots, and especially people like generating silly art using prompts. This stuff is all over the place!
But people DON'T like paying full price for content that should be high-quality, but is in fact cheap AI slop. Sl
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In this case it's appropriate though. Everyone knows it's a bubble, everyone knows it's going to burst some time, what no-one has any idea of is when. Or, more precisely, what TF is keeping it inflating.
"Why the fuck hasn't this scam collapsed yet?" fits Betteridges law perfectly, but then I don't think it'd get past an editor.
Yes, I repeat: (Score:2)
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pets.com, etc., etc.
January 2000: Superbowl ad.
November 2000: Worthless.
Anthropic, Open AI, etc., etc.
January 2026: Superbowl ad.
November 2026: Even that's optimistic.
Sell NFTs ! Sell Bitcoin ! Sell Gold ! Buy AI !
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Anthropic, Open AI, etc., etc.
January 2026: Superbowl ad.
November 2026: Even that's optimistic.
We'll see ... check in in November :)
We can only hope (Score:2)
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We all know there is an A.I. bubble.
I doubt the AI bubble bursting is going to make you any happier. It will slow down the advancement of AI as much as the .com bubble slowed down the growth of the Internet and the housing bubble slowed down the growth in housing prices. The only people who'll benefit are those who didn't have much invested in the market 5 years ago and want a short period of discounted stock prices before AI really takes off. I was in my late 20's during the housing bubble so that crash definitely helped me buy a cheap house
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I doubt the AI bubble bursting is going to make you any happier.
Speaking for myself I will be happier.
It will slow down the advancement of AI as much as the .com bubble slowed down the growth of the Internet
The issue with comparisons to .com is infrastructure investments building out networks offered long term value. Much of the present day AI spending is on shit with a useful lifespan of a few years.
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Actually, having the AI bubble burst would bring RAM and GPU prices back down to a reasonable level.
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If only this would hold true for all of the sports betting commercials like fan duel.
Need bigger alphabet. Acronym namespace full. (Score:2)
Maybe just surrender to the Chinese and start using emojis for everything.
Re:Does /. always looking for signs of AI failure (Score:5, Insightful)
If you look at the articles over the last few years you will see that no they haven't. The types of articles showing up here seem to have followed a pattern similar to other new technologies (curved screens, 3D TV, VR) where it starts off with articles discussing the technology from a technical perspective, moves on to discussions speculating on potential growth and impacts on the wider community, starts moving onto financials of the companies involved and then moves on to decline in interest.
This is normal human behaviour. How many times have you gotten a new device (car, phone etc) and been really interested in some new feature. You initially use it quite a bit and are excited about it but then the novelty wares off and you start to use the feature less. You don't necessarily stop using it but it doesn't turn out to be this "game changing" thing as initially thought.
I believe that AI is going through a similar trajectory and the articles on here are really just reflecting that.
It doesn't mean that AI is going to go completely bust, just that it has been overhyped and is now starting to fall back down to where it should naturally be. However people that have overinvested in the type are desperate to try and keep the hype going and will go all out in trying (which with hype, you have to really).
Let's hope for our collective sakes... (Score:2)
... that the AI bubble slowly deflates and makes a soft landing, instead of bursting or popping.
If the AI bubble bursts of pops, the subsequent economic fallout and recession will upend the economy, and the livelyhood of plenty of people not related (even tangentially) to the AI bubble itself will be severely affected.
It will NOT be pretty if the AI bubble Pops or Bursts...
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That would be nice. But remember that the LLM-stupidity is currently all props up the US economy? And that the business numbers of all of them are utterly catastrophic? And that the evidence mounts that there are actually very few valid and no high-value applications for LLMs?
I would be all for a soft landing, but I think what is incoming is a 20 year or so world economic crisis that will be really, really bad. Hopefully the current assholes of the AI community will also never recover and we also get a 20
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That would be nice. But remember that the LLM-stupidity is currently all props up the US economy? And that the business numbers of all of them are utterly catastrophic?
AI isn't propping up the US economy. It is just keeping us out of a recession. If we had a recession it wouldn't be the end of the world. It would probably be pretty healthy in the long run.
Re: Let's hope for our collective sakes... (Score:2)
Pretty much how I feel about the AI bubble. Yeah it will suck for some but I really doubt it will kill the American economy.
Now the housing bubble is a whole different ballgame and that popping combined with a devaluation of the USD will have genuinely catastrophic impacts on the American and even the global economy.
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Chances are, everything will pop together.
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Cart before the horse (Score:2)
Just Lame Ads All Around (Score:5, Informative)
This Super Bowl has had some of the lamest and lowest effort ads I have seen in two or so decades of the Super Bowl. The AI ads are just the hallucinated cherry on top.
That AI.com one in particular shilling Sam, Elon, and AGI in particular was just pure unadulterated cringe. Could they really not think of an actual ad, even if it was generated by AI?
Though the Ring one had some genuine dystopian vibes with their newest feature for finding lost dogs. Totally not selling surveillance as a service here.
No (Score:2)
Economics is not that simple.
see also: Betteridge's law of headlines
Yes People Are Using AI Apps... (Score:1)
Going even farther back...... (Score:2)
.....we had all .com era Superbowl ads. Bigger, better, funnier. And generally gone by 2002.
No (Score:2)
Betteridge's Law
business vs. consumer (Score:2)
My own take is that the AI companies are thinking of the consumer as nice to have but not necessary. They are really interested in businesses. This follows the MS model of sell to CEOs and let them to the dirty work of forcing it down everyone's throat.
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Somewhere in that business hierarchy, there are consumers at the bottom. And those consumers need jobs, otherwise your hierarchy is a pyramid scheme.
AI, something most people don't care like Bitcoin (Score:2)
Short answer: yes (Score:2)
They're running out of cash, spending it like a shipload of drunken sailors, and desperate for more. They're all operating at a major loss. On top of that, more and more localities (including my county) are fighting hyperscale data centers tooth and nail, for good reasons.