Artificially Intelligent Poster - Advert That Writes Itself
Like many delightful sf novels, this story begins with a slightly terrifying premise: could artificial intelligence be used to create the most enticing advertisement the world has ever seen?
(M&C Saatchi artificially intelligent poster)
Every few seconds, the digital poster would change. Sometimes, it would feature a wide range of drab grays and blocks of text. Other times, it was a minimalistic image with a short saying.
What was unique about this particular poster, which ran in two locations at the end of July 2015, wasn't the fact that people were looking at it. Rather, it was looking at them — and learning. Using facial tracking technology and genetics-based algorithms, the poster took the aspects that people looked at the longest and then incorporated that into the next design evolution.
"We were surprised how quickly it learned," said Sam Ellis, business director of innovation at M&C Saatchi. "It got to a state of where it felt like it was in the right place a bit faster than we thought."
In less than 72 hours, the M&C Saatchi advertisement was creating posters in line with the current best practices in the advertising industry, which had been developed over decades of human trial and error like realizing three to five word slogans work best.
Science fiction fans turn to Philip K. Dick on this topic; read about the very creative and very persistent sales robots in his possibly prophetic 1954 short story Sales Pitch.
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