If you look closely enough, you can see AI-generated content filtering into more and more places. A recent study found a suspicious rise in the use of certain adjectives among peer reviews that are highly suggestive of bot involvement. We’d tell you more about how to spot these sneaky words, but as an AI language model, I’m unable to browse or access specific examples.
Scroll down to read about blood sugar, Filipino product-market fit, and the unifying power of period dramas.
Stats to power your week
🤖 We’ve been pointing out for a while that worry about AI has been climbing at an unprecedented rate. And there seems to be particular concern among groups who probably prefer the human touch in their life, like craft beer drinkers (+206% increase in concern year-on-year) and Etsy fans (+164%). GWI USA
📉 In several European countries, far-right parties are moving from the fringe into the political mainstream. Why is this happening? Attitudes to immigration have changed a great deal in recent years – since 2020, the number of Europeans who think immigration is good for their country has dropped by 21%. GWI Core
🛍️ Trader Joe’s tote bags are all the rage, and with good reason – 82% of their regular shoppers try to use reusable shopping bags, one of the highest audience scores there is. In fact, being a regular visitor of the retailer makes you more likely to use multi-use bags than if you’re interested in environmental issues (77%). GWI USA / GWI USA Plus
🤼 The number of girls in the US who do martial arts for fun has increased by 71% since 2021. Wrestling is one of the fastest-growing high school activities at the moment, but the trend seems to be encompassing all sorts of combat sports. GWI Kids
More developments in the most elections year of all time: Google is preventing its Gemini chatbot from answering election-related questions, while Midjourney is blocking users from creating pictures of Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
The election year to end all election years may experience more complications, as viral sensation Sora, OpenAI’s text-to-video model, is set to be released later in 2024. Expect other releases too, as Chinese internet giant Tencent has also introduced a video generating model.
Apple has shown its hand in the AI race, quietly publishing a paper that suggests promising breakthroughs for training large language models. But it may be a while before we see it in action, as the firm is currently in talks with Google to add more generative AI features to its devices.
Shortly after we learned the winner of one of Japan’s top literary prizes received help from AI, we discovered 1 in 10 entrants for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for journalism used it at some point. The future of AI as a copilot seems unstoppable.
Our research consistently shows consumers like self-checkouts more than you’d think, but the machines can have their fair share of issues. In response, a handful of retailers are removing them or limiting them in some other way. Meanwhile recent tech outages at McDonald’s and Sainsbury’s show how disruptive retail IT issues can be.
Change is afoot in corporate boardrooms around DEI, as Starbucks shareholders approved a plan to drop an executive bonus tied to diversity, equity, and inclusion objectives. Though elsewhere, AI is helping with inclusivity in the form of Pinterest’s new body type ranges search feature.
Chart of the week
It goes without saying, America is a politically polarized country, and we see the impact of it throughout our research.
That said, there are a whole host of things Republicans and Democrats have in common. We’ve curated a few interesting insights for this chart, but the similarities stretch further than you might think.
Personal data, worry about time spent online, and AI fears are distinctly bipartisan issues. Venturing outside politics, Amazon and McDonald’s are two examples of companies that straddle the political divide.
And if you’re looking to extend the olive branch with a friend or family member on the other side of the aisle, you could do a lot worse than getting together to watch Bridgerton. Ooh, the scandal.
Local lowdown
Filipino product-market fit, confirmed
Nikita Bier, formerly of Meta’s product team, went viral last week for his observations on what he called “Filipino product-market fit”. In a nutshell, he often found new features would be picked up quickly in the Philippines (suggesting future success), only to find they wouldn’t be adopted in other countries.
This is easily backed up by data. Consumers in the Philippines are more likely than those anywhere else in the world to use social networking apps, and to spend more than 10 hours a day on them. Various factors may play a role here: the country has a young and tech-savvy population, mobile data deals that provide Facebook for free, a distinctive gossip culture, and a population that wants to communicate across long distances (both across the country’s islands, and among the global diaspora).
Whatever the reason, it’s been the case for a while. When Friendster (one of the original social networking services) fell away from MySpace and Facebook in its core markets, it continued to enjoy success in the Philippines.
