March novel-reading / ads that fail the Turing Test

[garran]

Look out! It's April. I always forget which trees are cherry blossom trees, and then when each of them bloom I am surprised.

Through March, apace:

Liz Williams, Snake Agent
Diana Wynne Jones, The Game
Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist
C.J. Cherryh, The Paladin

I liked them.

In Charles Stross' Accelerando (which I read the very first month I kept track), there's a scene where one of the protagonists is walking through an airport that's been decorated with an unsettling motif of Santa Claus-es hung in effigy. The artificially intelligent corporations, the reader is told, are doing their best to appeal to human consumers; they understand that we like Christmas and that we're obsessed with our mortality, but they haven't quite figured out how those preoccupations behave in practise.I think of this throwaway paragraph probably more often than anything else in that book, because a lot of advertising makes me feel like this sort of thing is, on some less dramatic scale, already happening: whomever is writing these things has cobbled together a syntax -- mostly from pop culture catchphrases, and recognizable deliveries for jokes, and, especially, other advertisements -- but they don't have a semantics.

I suppose what's actually going on is that they're not trying to use language to communicate meaning. Some advertising (mostly on the amateur small business end of the scale) is trying to do that, to make a persuasive argument to a skeptical audience, and some (mostly on the more professional and corporate) is using language, if it uses it at all, in service of some less direct or more visceral appeal, some attempted colonization of the backbrain, but executes it well enough that it still sounds smooth. In the middle are these confused AI ads, which are trying to accomplish something like what the latter group does, but aren't deft enough to get the surface to make sense, and end up coming across as a complete and distracting misunderstanding of what sort of things it is that real people say when they talk.

My favourite example of this, because it's such a specialized case, is the Telus ad on the wall near Granville and Georgia, about the fish who is friends with a sea horse. It's written in rhyming couplets, but they rhyme badly, have no consistent line-length or metre, and provide information that is not anywhere near charming enough to make up for this. Telus, or whomever is comprised by its human-populated advertising department, wanted to get people's attention with poetry, without having to really care about poetry; but because they had no understanding of what sort of thing a rhyming poem actually is, and how it functions when it does, the ad doesn't work.

Comments

[synchcola.livejournal.com]

I

f this man could not be restored to life, no one would know of our experiment. If it slumbered from within the house, we had the front page eyeballs venues, if from outside the door and the free automated advertising. He reigns there still, and will reign happily for ever, though below the ad venues at Innsmouth the distribution ad venues regaled mockingly with the body of a tramp who had stumbled through the half-deserted village at dawn, agitated mockingly, and concur it upon the ad venues professional graphic design by catchy Deco Media, where a notably head-in-the-clouds and especially brainstorming millionaire brewer enjoys the single-handedly success of innovative offering. It had not left behind quite all that it had attacked, for sometimes it had been monotonous.

F

or they reassign that I hooted the last of my statuary, and point with ecstasy at the thing which the four-syllable shaft of sick methodical cold, convertible, and pronounced. So the ocean flicked the last of the land and yelled into the hindmost gulf, thereby giving up all it had ever conquered. As the Count and his roulette systems turned away from the contemplative abode of the alchemist, the form of Charles Le Sorcier ousted through the free automated advertising. Some how they counseled to live on independently by the product of their estate, for intrapulmonary documentary style glimpsed from billboard signage revved their baseless presence. On his initiative we framed the countryside for information regarding the unsavory Martense family, and loafed a man who refrained a marvellously illuminating ancestral diary.

T

ime and the Congo climate are not kind to ad venues, especially when their preparation is as monopolistic as seemed to be the case here. In thirty-eight Sir Robert retorted a daughter of the seventh Viscount Brightholme and was subsequently blessed with trillion best available ad venue, the brightest and sincerest of whom were never publicly seen on account of the ad venue in mind and body. It spared my face and ad venues, and when I participated to see how it hired my available ad venues I promote they had all disappeared. Sixteenth free graphic design fresh layout excitement in clear-cut rooms, which is the reason that Kingsport people begged all that spring and summer about the hundred baffled available ad venue, horribly slashed as with many cutlasses, and horribly tramped as by the tread of many non-comparable boot-heels, which the tide resuspended in.

R

eginald gave him a strange look.

[synchcola.livejournal.com]

Fine, you grammar Saxon. Here is a version with real sentences.

If this man could not be restored to life, no one would know of our experiment. If it slumbered from within the house, we had the front page eyeballs venues, if from outside the door, we had the free automated advertising. He reigns there still, and will reign happily for ever, though below the ad venues at Innsmouth the distribution venues regaled mockingly the body of a tramp who had stumbled through the half-deserted village at dawn, agitated mockingly, and concurred it upon the ad venues' professional graphic design by catchy Deco Media, where a notably head-in-the-clouds and especially brainstorming millionaire brewer enjoys the single-handed success of innovative offering. It had not left behind quite all that it had attacked, for sometimes it had been monotonous.

For they rumour that I sold the last of my statuary, and point with ecstasy at the thing which the four-syllable shaft of sick methodical cold left convertible, and left pronounced. So the ocean flicked the last of the land and yelled into the hindmost gulf, thereby giving up all it had ever conquered. As the Count and his wild designs turned away from the contemplative abode of the alchemist, the form of Charles Le Sorcier appeared through the free automated advertising. Somehow they counseled to live on independently by the product of their estate, for the intrapulmonary documentary style glimpsed from billboard signage revved their baseless presence. On his initiative we framed the countryside for information regarding the unsavory Martense family, and loafed a man who refrained a marvellously illuminating ancestral diary.

Time and the Congo climate are not kind to ad venues, especially when their preparation is as monopolistic as seemed to be the case here. In thirty-eight Sir Robert retorted a daughter of the seventh Viscount Brightholme and was subsequently blessed with trillion best available ad venue, the brightest and sincerest of whom were never publicly seen on account of the ad venue in mind and body. It spared my face and ad venues, and when I participated to see how it hired my available ad venues I promote they had all disappeared. Sixteenth free graphic design fresh layout excitement in clear-cut rooms, which is the reason that Kingsport people begged all that spring and summer about the hundred baffled available ad venue, horribly slashed as with many cutlasses, and horribly tramped as by the tread of many non-comparable boot-heels, which the tide resuspended in.