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Hello and welcome to this week's better offline monologueologue. I'm your host, Ed Zittron.

Better Offline.

Last Sunday was the Super Bowl, the final game of the NFL season, and for those of you who don't like sport or live in another country or something, it's an event that many people just watch for the many, many ads that they cut into during the game.

A Super Bowl ad can cost as much as $8 million for a 30-second commercial, depending on where it air is during the game, the most coveted slots being just before the halftime show, and the ads themselves

tend to be the spectacular, highly produced fare. They're very weird, but they put a ton of money into them.

This year, I was specifically excited to see what bullshit slop the various AI companies would try and

force down my nasty little throat. Last year, Anthropic aired a five second long commercial that said, and I quote,

Claude is a next generation AI assistant,

a sentence that when you think about it means precisely nothing,

and Microsoft famously aired a co-pilot AI commercial where several of the prompts,

such as write code for my 3D open world game,

simply didn't do what they said they did.

In the case of the open world game, by the way, from last year, it generated a step-by-step

guide to building one, which isn't the same thing at all.

...