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joxdosba 16 hours ago [-]
Doesn’t this article’s focus on race come off as a bit weird to anyone else?
Pretty sure the people running these businesses are targeting a wide variety of different demographics. The article fails to provide any context as to why pretending to be a black influencer is special.
Paradigm2020 16 hours ago [-]
From the article.
> While we also found Native American, Hispanic, and white women characters, the most viewed and engaged-with AI-generated characters found by The Verge are Black women.
joxdosba 14 hours ago [-]
With zero explanation as to how they collected that data, they might just be basing that on whatever the algorithm knows the author to be interested in.
Over here in Europe I see exactly zero of these ads with black people in them, but I see a plenty of these ads.
libertine 11 hours ago [-]
Due to ad transparency you can access ad libraries of brands advertising on several platforms, and depending on the platform and country you can also see some targeting details.
I'm not 100% sure but I think ad transparency was enforced in Europe after the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
oldnetguy 8 hours ago [-]
I really want to make a joke about representation, but more to the point.
Having different ethnic people targets different demographics. We hear about people from various groups wanting this and now someone is doing it.
They seem to be getting traction by doing this. If it works for them others will follow.
JuniperMesos 15 hours ago [-]
I suspect it's because the people who write for The Verge are themselves non-black progressives who think it's morally important to engage with black businesses in a way they see as anti-racist. So scammers deliberately creating fake black people to make emotional, anti-racist appeals to buy scam products particularly offends or seems relevant to the specific individuals at The Verge who pitched, wrote, edited, and approved this article.
According to the byline, the author of this article is a person named Nicole Froio. According to her personal website: https://nicolefroio.com/about-nicole/ and MuckRack page https://muckrack.com/nicole-froio/articles , she is a Colombian-Brazilian journalist who describes herself as an "anarcho-feminist", has multiple academic degrees in humanities fields with some kind of intersectional feminist bent, and has written for various progressive publications in her career.
In other words, she is exactly the kind of person I would expect to find it personally morally and politically important to buy products from actual black creators, and so to find scams about black creators being personally meaningful, and worth specifically writing about.
halJordan 7 hours ago [-]
Yeah I'm very confused by the original commenter's claimed ignorance. We went through this bleating at full tilt during and after covid and it being forced onto everyone at all times where "if you don't like it you're affirmatively racist" was one of the reasons voters went back to Trump. Why is it so incredibly hard for Americans to have a memory, or cognition of any sort?!
joxdosba 3 hours ago [-]
I’m European :)
xyzsparetimexyz 5 hours ago [-]
Creating fake white women is seen as less of a crime
(aside: is it me or is recaptcha just straight up getting absolutely aggressive these days? it took me nearly five minutes just to clear that.)
Glawen 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe you are in Europe ? Archive.ph geoblocks Europe, probably due to their copyright infringment. If you connect through a VPN everything works fine
halJordan 7 hours ago [-]
It's always been incredibly aggressive on this page. Which is ironic
snypher 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe the more time you spend on the capcha page,the more time the page has to do 'stuff'...
eudamoniac 5 hours ago [-]
We may soon see the end of the empathy economy because of this, which is generally bad. Some substantial portion of small business sales are due to empathy in the abstract. Lots of people buy worse or more expensive products because they think at least it's from a small business and not from Amazon.
This is going to make the bottom fall out of the market. Only genuine artisans with unmistakable quality will be able to keep customers at that point. It's already happening with dropshippers at maker fairs pretending to have made some cheap jewelry or such things; people are catching onto this, buying less of it, and it makes all maker markets suffer.
Pretty sure the people running these businesses are targeting a wide variety of different demographics. The article fails to provide any context as to why pretending to be a black influencer is special.
> While we also found Native American, Hispanic, and white women characters, the most viewed and engaged-with AI-generated characters found by The Verge are Black women.
Over here in Europe I see exactly zero of these ads with black people in them, but I see a plenty of these ads.
I'm not 100% sure but I think ad transparency was enforced in Europe after the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Having different ethnic people targets different demographics. We hear about people from various groups wanting this and now someone is doing it.
They seem to be getting traction by doing this. If it works for them others will follow.
According to the byline, the author of this article is a person named Nicole Froio. According to her personal website: https://nicolefroio.com/about-nicole/ and MuckRack page https://muckrack.com/nicole-froio/articles , she is a Colombian-Brazilian journalist who describes herself as an "anarcho-feminist", has multiple academic degrees in humanities fields with some kind of intersectional feminist bent, and has written for various progressive publications in her career.
In other words, she is exactly the kind of person I would expect to find it personally morally and politically important to buy products from actual black creators, and so to find scams about black creators being personally meaningful, and worth specifically writing about.
This is going to make the bottom fall out of the market. Only genuine artisans with unmistakable quality will be able to keep customers at that point. It's already happening with dropshippers at maker fairs pretending to have made some cheap jewelry or such things; people are catching onto this, buying less of it, and it makes all maker markets suffer.