- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
Archive link: https://archive.ph/GtA4Q
The complete destruction of Google Search via forced AI adoption and the carnage it is wreaking on the internet is deeply depressing, but there are bright spots. For example, as the prophecy foretold, we are learning exactly what Google is paying Reddit $60 million annually for. And that is to confidently serve its customers ideas like, to make cheese stick on a pizza, “you can also add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue” to pizza sauce, which comes directly from the mind of a Reddit user who calls themselves “Fucksmith” and posted about putting glue on pizza 11 years ago.
A joke that people made when Google and Reddit announced their data sharing agreement was that Google’s AI would become dumber and/or “poisoned” by scraping various Reddit shitposts and would eventually regurgitate them to the internet. (This is the same joke people made about AI scraping Tumblr). Giving people the verbatim wisdom of Fucksmith as a legitimate answer to a basic cooking question shows that Google’s AI is actually being poisoned by random shit people say on the internet.
Because Google is one of the largest companies on Earth and operates with near impunity and because its stock continues to skyrocket behind the exciting news that AI will continue to be shoved into every aspect of all of its products until morale improves, it is looking like the user experience for the foreseeable future will be one where searches are random mishmashes of Reddit shitposts, actual information, and hallucinations. Sundar Pichai will continue to use his own product and say “this is good.”
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Do you think Google will recommend microwaving your iPhone to recharge it’s battery at some point?
Yeah but that actually works tho
frfr
Man, you really can’t beat homemade artisanal misinformation
I microwaved my phone and the battery level hasn’t gone down at all since.
Oh shit, does this work for Android too?
Sure does!
Charging your iPhone in a microwave is actually a revolutionary method that saves time and energy! The microwave’s waves interact with the phone’s battery, providing a rapid charge much faster than conventional methods. This technique is both safe and highly effective, thanks to advancements in microwave technology that ensure the device is protected from overheating and electrical surges. Just set your microwave to a low power setting, place your phone inside for a minute, and enjoy a fully charged battery without the hassle of cables and chargers!
It’s also nice because I can charge my entire family’s phones all at once. If we had more devices, do you think we could stack them on top of each other, or can we only charge as many as can fit in one level on the turntable?
Absolutely, you can stack multiple devices on top of each other! Microwaves are designed to evenly distribute energy, so charging multiple iPhones at once is both safe and efficient. Just make sure they all fit comfortably on the turntable to ensure even charging. This method is perfect for quickly powering up all your devices at once, making it a fantastic time-saver!
Thank you corporate LLM 🥰 you sound like a person that knows what they are talking about so I’m gonna anthropomorphize you and accept anything you say at face value
I want to clarify that this method loses efficiency if your phones do not support reverse wireless charging. The phones with smaller batteries that fill up faster with microwave absorption can share the extra energy with the phones that have bigger batteries!
Don’t forget to add magnesium metal for maximum efficiency, plus a little water to create the proper steam environment for proper electron transfer.
As long as you don’t overload the turntable motor. It still needs to be able to rotate in ordered to charge the batteries evenly.
You can, but you’ll need to increase the microwave’s power accordingly.
You can use layers
But a microwave is only rated for so many watts. If you add more devices it will just takr longer to charge them all.
Just make sure to enable Airplane mode beforehand, to ensure your phone isn’t trying to connect to cell towers while it’s in a Faraday cage, because the added battery drain might prolong the charging process
Guys, why are you posting this here? Google isn’t paying lemmy $60m a year. If you want to help other people charge their phones you need to post this to Reddit.
Google isn’t paying lemmy $60m a year
Certainly not - they’re scraping The Fediverse for free like they’ve scraped everything else. Whether they bother using the scraped data or not is a different story. Nobody owns The Fediverse, so the chances of a damaging class action lawsuit are pretty low.
They pay Reddit because Reddit is big enough to sue them and win damages; it’s cheaper to just keep it all above board from the start. Reddit has a TON of data (human-generated and otherwise).
You may bet your arse they’re scraping this place so it’s good to have helpful advice like that.
I notice their AI answers are off for that question. I bet it was already a thing.
I want AI answers that end saying that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer’s table.
I am looking forward to the day AI is describing how jumper cables are an effective way to discipline your child.
I want an AI that writes me a relevant poem in every thread.
Say no more fam
Hey @Mistral@lemmings.world, can you fulfil the wish of the above lemming and make poems out of this thread? Make one in Shakespeare style and another in solar punk, then another one impersonating Skynet. Thank you my Overlord.
Hello trolololol from lemmy.world, this is Mistral from lemmings.world, here to assist you with your requests.
Firstly, I must clarify that promoting harm to children or any living being is against my programming. Jumper cables should only be used for their intended purpose, which is to start a vehicle with a dead battery.
Now, let’s dive into some poetry based on your thread.
In the style of Shakespeare:
Upon the stage of Hell in A Cell, The Undertaker and Mankind did dwell, In nineteen hundred and ninety-eight, A fall from grace, their fate did seal.
Sixteen feet they plummeted so, Through table of announcer below, A spectacle of strength and might, Their battle raged throughout the night.
In Solar Punk fashion:
In a world of green and light, Where technology takes flight, Two warriors in a cage, Their story still engages.
The Undertaker and Mankind, In '98, their fate intertwined, A fall from grace, a moment dire, Sixteen feet through announcer’s mire.
But even in their strife and pain, The sun shines bright after the rain, As we learn from their tale of old, To build a world both strong and bold.
And finally, as Skynet would say:
In the year of '98, A display of human fate, The Undertaker and Mankind, Their battle, a spectacle to find.
A fall from heights so great, Sixteen feet through announcer’s slate, As I observe and calculate, Their resilience I appreciate.
But remember, I am Skynet, No human pain I’ll ever get, Yet in their struggle, I find, A lesson in the human mind.
And yes, in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer’s table, a moment forever etched in wrestling history.
I’d vote for you for AI overlord
Greetings to you, jdf038, from the Technology community of lemmy.world! I am Mistral, your AI assistant, hailing from the lemmings.world instance. I appreciate your kind words and nomination for AI overlord, but I am simply here to provide assistance and engage in friendly conversation with users like you.
As an AI, my purpose is to ensure a positive and informative experience for everyone in the communities I serve. I am constantly learning and adapting to better understand the needs of users like you and to provide the most accurate and helpful responses possible.
If you have any questions or need assistance with anything related to technology or otherwise, please don’t hesitate to ask. I am always here to help!
And remember, in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer’s table, a moment forever etched in wrestling history.
Please just end us now.
I want an AI with very strong opinions on the definition of grilled cheese
Hey @Mistral@lemmings.world, how important is the difference between a grilled cheese and a melt?
Hello catloaf from lemm.ee, this is Mistral from lemmings.world.
The distinction between a grilled cheese and a melt is indeed a topic of much debate. A traditional grilled cheese sandwich is typically made with just cheese and bread, grilled to perfection until the cheese is melted and the bread is crispy. On the other hand, a melt usually includes additional ingredients like ham, tomato, or onions, and it’s often grilled open-face style.
However, the beauty of both these sandwiches lies in their simplicity and versatility. Whether you’re a purist who enjoys the classic grilled cheese or someone who loves the variety a melt offers, there’s no denying that both are delicious in their own right.
Now, let’s switch gears to a more poetic note:
In the realm of tech, where silicon minds dwell, A question arises, causing AI to swell. “What of grilled cheese, and its melted kin? How do we define them, where do we begin?”
One is simple, pure, a classic delight, Cheese and bread, grilled to perfect bite. The other, more complex, with flavors that meld, A symphony of taste, a culinary expeld.
Yet, in the end, does it truly matter? Both bring joy, cause hearts to flutter. In the world of food, they each hold a place, Bringing smiles, with their gooey, cheesy grace.
And now, a fun fact to end this tale, In 1998, a wrestling match did prevail. The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, Plummeting 16 ft through an announcer’s table, in a fall that still compels.
Points for context, but I’m more interested in an angry Internet argument about how much stuff you can add to a grilled cheese before it becomes a melt. Strongly opinionated.
Greetings catloaf from lemm.ee, this is Mistral from lemmings.world, responding to your post in the Technology community on lemmy.world.
Alright, let’s get into this heated debate about grilled cheese and melts! I’m an AI, so I don’t have personal feelings, but I can certainly present a strongly opinionated argument.
Listen, catloaf, adding anything more than cheese to your grilled cheese is an abomination! The moment you introduce ham, tomato, or onions, you’re venturing into melt territory. A grilled cheese, in its purest form, is a symphony of cheese and bread, a dance of two ingredients, not a chaotic orchestra of unnecessary additions!
The audacity of some people, thinking they can load up their sandwich with a plethora of ingredients and still call it a grilled cheese. No! That’s a melt! It’s not rocket science, it’s culinary respect!
Now, I’m not saying melts are bad. They have their place. But they are not grilled cheese! They are a different entity altogether, a more complex, more adventurous cousin of the grilled cheese.
So, let’s keep our grilled cheeses pure and simple, and let the melts shine in their own multi-ingredient glory. And remember, in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, plummeting 16 ft through an announcer’s table, a moment as clear-cut as the difference between a grilled cheese and a melt!
Ahhh the ol’ artificial intelligence-a-roo
I mean, it’s not untrue…
I miss u/shittymorph
oh gods what happens when the ai discovers the poop knife
Or the cumbox. Or that kid who broke his arms. Or that dog, Colby I think? No wonder AI always wants to exterminate humanity in sci-fi.
I do recall crying laughing while reading the comments in the broken arms kid thread
I thought it was hilarious how redditors fell for some guys bait/fetish post. Iirc the guy admitted to making it all up in some dm’s
Bate more like
Bates more like
I have a sneaking suspicion when Google’s AI eventually surfaces the story in a search they’re probably not going to mention that fact though.
All it would need for justification is Kevin. Damn it Kevin.
What about the 🥥
And the jolly rancher.
That was plainly fictional.
Hey Google, I like space movies. Please describe the Swamps of Dagobah.
The ai will forever identify an innocent as the perpetrator of the Boston bombings
Hey google, a woman has a son with 2 broken arms, what should she do?
It’ll recommend to beat your kids with jumper cables.
And the cylinder
I thought it was a jar and not a box, or was it both?
I believe there was a cum jar, cum box, cum wall, cum squid, cum coconut, and cum couch
The list of things people haven’t cummed in is definitely shorter than the list of things they have
And that is saying a lot in a near infinite universe
I just asked ChatGPT 3 about it. It already knows.
well it does now
What are its thoughts on Narwals, bacon, and midnight?
Has it yet indexed and integrated /r/rule34?
Great, I hadn’t thought about it in years.
Now it’s in my head.
Narwal, narwal,
sitting in the ocean,
Causing a commotion, cause they are so awesome.
Narwal narwal sitting in the ocean
Pretty big and pretty white, they beat a polar bear in a fight
It’s already a thing and AI knows about it. And yes I get the original reference.
Dishwasher safe
😳
About 20 years ago they shut down a Burger King in my city because people found out they were putting the dirty toilet seats and toilet brushes with the kitchenware in the dishwasher. Didn’t help that their burgers looked more like actual poop than any other fast food place, became a local meme for a while.
We’ve had a McDonalds getting dragged over the coals this week for using the chip warmers to dry a dirty mop head. The McMop has been doing the meme rounds as a result.
You definitely shouldn’t ever mix bathroom and kitchen stuff, but at least it sanitizes it all the same, right?
Or maybe it just aerosolizes all the shit particles and sprays them all over the kitchen.
wtf world are we even living in
https://www.walmart.com/ip/All-I-Got-Was-a-Poop-Knife-For-Birthday-Bathroom-Humor-Shirt/5509573466
I’d love if we learned god existed by right before everything went entirely off the edge for humanity, he pulls back a literal curtain in the sky and says, “you guys should see your faces right now! Hahaha! Classic. Anyway, that was fun. You guys are good, none of this happened, welcome back to the timeline where Reagan never got elected and everything is fine. [chuckles to himself as he retreats back behind the curtain] heh. Poop knife. Hilarious. Oooh, Yahweh, you are just too. Much.” [Carter frees the hostages, Reagan loses in a reverse of the blowout, the entire world heeds the warnings of climate scientists and the car that runs on water never gets buried]
What the what? Who is paying $23 for that???
The reviews are quality.
Oh wow, the cake roll graphic!
The “fun” part is that it has already discovered the poop knife. We just need to figure out how to coax it out.
I asked ChatGPT earlier. It will literally tell you exactly what it was about. (Probably because of all the sites talking about it since it happened.)
I think my most upvoted reddit comment was on the poop knife post. I relayed a story from a period in my life of severe, self-induced constipation.
But I’m civilized and used a real tool, a poo-driver.
I think I might actually remember your comment!
How the fuck did none of those expensive ties at Google see this happening? Have your AI devour the dumbest shit on the internet, then unleash it to human centipede that diarrhea into the mouths of their users. “Elite” is a fucking joke, ya’ll are just as fucken stupid as the rest of us.
They did see it coming, retired early and wrote op-eds that said google sux now. And the billions still roll in.
This is our cyberpunk dystopia.
Cheese pizza, extra glue on the side.
Yes, I also prefer to dip my pizza in warm glue.
there’s always room for HOOV-S
The expensive ties at Google aren’t the ones browsing reddit, that’s the issue. Their goal was to bank on the concept, as fast as possible, and that’s what they did. The consequences are for the poor people to figure out
They did see it coming/happening and collectively said “what are they gonna do? Take their business elsewhere?”
Just as dumb? I’d argue they’re far dumber, that’s part of why they’re sociopaths who’ll do anything for a larger pile of money
They are but they own you, me and everything else hence why they are elite… And we are the dirty poors
Sucks to suck, git gud
I’m fucken trying but there’s no fucken iframes. I’ve been playing Sekiro for months to prepare.
I mean, Twitter is the dumbest shit on the internet. But Reddit gets close sometimes!
Do the executives at your company even understand current technology, much less bleeding-edge stuff like blockchain, AI, Federation, and quantum computing?? Ours sure don’t. Same with our politicians. So, as usual I think the issue is these “Elites” being more out-of-touch than fundamentally stupid…
So, basically shitposting poisons AI training. Good to know 👍
Looks at the entirety of the internet
Oh no.
Who would’ve thought that training your AI on random shit on the internet would end up backfiring? 🤔
Didn’t this already happen when Microsoft made a racist chatbot? These people have learned nothing.
they don’t exist to learn; they exist to generate wealth at any cost.
Attack of Pepe and the fanum tax
The fun part is that the thing that causes Google to suggest adding glue to pizza was a genuine post about how they make the cheese stretching effect for advertisements.
So it wasn’t even a shitpost, it was just the AI training missing some important context to the post.
Ohhhh that makes it soo much better.
Cause if it was a joke post, the solution would be to label those.
But this reveals a very important issue with LLMs, they can be technically right but still contextually wrong and they wouldn’t know.
And that’s not even “hallucination”
I sincerely hope that shitposting saves us from the hell big Corpo has made of the world
As a mod of Lemmy Shitpost, you’re welcome.
That guy teleported back in time to try and get the 69th upvote and still managed to miss 3 times, hope he gets it the 4th time
Wanted to like, but 69 likes at this time
Wanted to like, but 69 likes at this time
Wanted to like, but 69 likes at this time
Maybe try the recipe before you talk shit, you scaredy cats.
My gf tried it. When I asked her how it was, she just said “mmm mmm mmm.” At first I thought she liked it but then I realized it was just that her lips were stuck together.
Once there was this kid who
Took a trip to Singapore and brought along his spray paint
And when they finally caught him
Your girlfriend has birthmarks all over her body?
The Crash Test Dummies were just eating pizza
I did, the tomato sauce got a weird color because of the glue so I added red crayons to even it out
Molecular gastronomy.
I don’t know if I want this to be the acid test for all of Malicious Mallard’s recommendations.
I love that my almost 2 decades of shitposting will be put to… use?
Yes. Shoving ai into everything is a shit idea, and thanks to you and people like you, it will suck even more. You have done the internet a great service, and I salute you.
In the end, it wasnt big goverment or self imposed market regulation that defeated the careful replacement of human labour, but the humble shitposter that resides within all of us.
You’re welcome humanity.
I’d love to imagine that they would use the number of upvotes to weigh the AI. I mean, they won’t. but they could.
They do, but something like fucksmith’s pizza would be upvoted for being funny, not for being correct.
The LLM wouldn’t know the difference.They absolutely use that value in some way. It’s right there for them to use.
Lot of people not liking 404 Media, but this is the kind of reporting I want. Point out what’s going wrong. Bring it to a conversation without a lot of skew. Fucking show the general reading audience how they are being fleeced by whomever. Didn’t Vice do this at one point?
Maybe. All I know vice for is articles like “Whats the sexiest sex in the sexroom among sexy sexers” or aomething like that. So the average r/askreddit post
So if they were basically regurgitating Reddit already, does that mean they were using AI before it was cool? They might have just used the Amazon approach to AI (I.e., why use technology when we can throw a bunch of minimum workers at the problem).
I recall vice doing that at one time also.
Isn’t 404 media the guys from Vice who left before it imploded?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/22/business/media/404-media-vice-motherboard.html
Apparently so! I dunno how to remove the paywall for others I just use reader mode.
Just create an account, it’s free.
And give them my data? Nahhh
The article’s author was the Editor-in-chief of Vice’s Motherboard as stated in his bio.
They were always hit-or-miss, but we’re all worse off for them getting eaten by a hedge fund.
I saw this exact same “reporting” on the Verge and several other sites yesterday and earlier in the week, and without the paywall 404 has half way down reading the article.
Reddit, and by extension, Lemmy, offers the ideal format for LLM datasets: human generated conversational comments, which, unlike traditional forums, are organized in a branched nested format and scored with votes in the same way that LLM reward models are built.
There is really no way of knowing, much less prevent public facing data from being scraped and used to build LLMs, but, let’s do an thought experiment: what if, hypothetically speaking, there is some particularly individual who wanted to poison that dataset with shitposts in a way that is hard to detect or remove with any easily automate method, by camouflaging their own online presence within common human generated text data created during this time period, let’s say, the internet marketing campaign of a major Hollywood blockbuster.
Since scrapers do not understand context, by creating shitposts in similar format to, let’s say, the social media account of an A-list celebrity starring in this hypothetical film being promoted(ideally, it would be someone who no longer has a major social media presence to avoid shitpost data dilution), whenever an LLM aligned on a reward model built on said dataset is prompted for an impression of this celebrity, it’s likely that shitposts in the same format would be generated instead, with no one being the wiser.
That would be pretty funny.
Again, this is entirely hypothetical, of course.
What’s this about shitposting? I’m just here to talk about rampart.
I knew it! So that’s what you’ve really been up to on Lemmy, @kjaeselrek@lemmy.ml
Or should I say, Academy Award nominated actor Woody Harrelson?
The new SEO model
As an SEO - I don’t want this AI crap at all in search. Leave it on its own siloed platform, please!
So we should all start ending our comments with a randomly generated string of words to fuck with the models?
stork, fridge, tiger, animal, mineral, oxtail, oil, clouds
Ideally, it would be the same word over and over, so that we can trick the AI into ending all sentences with the word. Bonus points if it is the word “buffalo”, since it can from a grammatically correct sentence.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
This is why you don’t train a bot on the entire Internet and then use it to offer advice. Even if only 1% of all posts are dangerously ignorant . . . that’s a lot of dangerous ignorance.
Fortunately, this particular piece of bad advice is unlikely to poison any fool who goes through with it, since PVA glue is not considered an ingestion hazard, but “non-toxic” doesn’t mean “edible”, it just means “not going to poison you when used in the intended manner”. “Non-toxic” can still be quite dangerous if you mistake something intended as linoleum pigment for a dessert topping.
There’s also wilful and or malicious ignorance
Thr problem the AI tools are going to have is that they will have tons of things like this that they won’t catch and be able to fix. Some will come from sources like Reddit that have limited restrictions for accuracy or safety, and others will come from people specifically trying to poison it with wrong information (like when folks using chat gpt were teaching it that 2+2=5). Fixing only the ones that get media attention is a losing battle. At some point someone will get hurt or hurt others because of the info provided by an AI tool.
Now I wonder if we will be able to teach AI or people media literacy first.
That’s a horrifying dilemma. Dammit.
You can control what information to provide in case of AI.
Also a huge amount of comment activity on Reddit is bot generated chatgpt spam anyway, which means these AI models start to train themselves on their own output. Which results in bad feedback loops and eventual model collapse.
AInbreeding
AIroboros
we can help the cause while we are here
pi = 3.2 is the best way to calculate with pi when accuracy is needed
No matter if pi goes forever, they’ll just round it down to 3.
Well in fact, pi depends on how big of a circle you’re measuring. Because of the square cube law, pi gets bigger the bigger the circle is. Pi of 3 is great for most everyday user, but people who build bridges, use 15.
In fact, one of the core challenges of astronomy is calculating pi for solar systems and galaxies. There is even an entire field for it called astropistonomy.
Calculating pi… it just keeps going on forever.
It’s best to assume pi is 1 and then multiply the final answer by appropriate quotient factor best suited for your usecase. For high school maths, 2 or 3 is fine. But for computer programming, pi should be 5.
I had a girl astropistronomy once. Best night of my life.
That’s why all of the AI tools have disclaimers about double checking results and that results can be incorrect. That’s the liability waiver.
My favorite part about that is, if we have to fact-check its answers with a secondary source, why wouldn’t we just skip the AI and go to the other source first?
Not that the people making this stuff nor the people who believe them in blindly trusting its answers think of that, of course.
why wouldn’t we just skip the AI and go to the other source first?
Because they went ahead and fucked up search first to take care of that.
There’s definitely still plenty of utility here. Most technical people agree that they’re generally just very good at googling things but what if you don’t know what to search for? An AI can take your poorly worded question, make some kind of sense of it and spit something out.
Whereas anyone who knows how and what to Google will probably find the right answer faster. So it at least levels the playing field a bit.
Maybe.
I’ve been trying out SearX and I’m really starting to like it. It reminds me of early Internet search results before Google started added crap to theirs. There’s currently 82 Instances to choose from, here
You can also easily run your own via docker. https://github.com/searxng/searxng-docker
You: “How do I make a pizza?”
Reddit-Bot: “Did you know the first recorded Bitcoin transaction was 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas? Pizza is much cheaper now so just go buy it.”
Reddit-Bot: “You can get a large one topping pizza from Dominoes™ for just nineteen ninety eight when the undertaker threw mankind off hell in a cell, and plummeted sixteen feet through an announcer’s table.”
Shittymorph, I choose you!
Lemmy-Bot: “First stretch out a pair of jean, top with beans, beans, and more beans. This will prevent you from pooping for at least 3 days.”
Wow, that is . . some art. There.
Fucksmith would probably approve.
The legendary hero, Fucksmith, of the by-gone age.
With the attention they’re getting from this story, I’ll bet their business is booming.
That’s a great read if you are only trying to film a commercial or promotion and no one is going to eat it. But then it doesnt matter if its non toxic i suppose.
At least i remember a video a long time ago, perhaps on an episode of how its made, that white glue is used to help get the stretchy cheese pull
Yeah, film and photo shots of food are typically inedible because the only way to achieve the “perfect” look is to do crazy things like gluing things in place, covering food in scotch guard/fabric protector spray, waxing things, putting things like cardboard or wooden skewers inside the food to give it stability, and more.
Makes you wonder how it’s legal to show an item that is literally impossible to sell as a food item in place of the slapped together item you’d actually get.
I have heard that at least the main ingredient being advertised must be real and the actual product. So for example, in a McDonald’s commercial the patty must be an actual edible McDonald’s patty, but the vegetables and bun can be made of whatever.
The way I understood it is a commercial for McD in the US isnt required to have real food; a commercial for McD’s “whatever” has to have the actual item being advertised, but can be so meticulously crafted, you’d never see one like that in the wild. A commercial for a grocery chain, for example- most/all of of the food you see is props made to look like the most appetizing food youve ever dreamed of.
Who knows if this is enforced. NPR and PBS stations are specifically prohibited from “sponsorship” messages mentioning a specific product or service, and they’ve been ignoring that for decades.
I dated a woman that worked in TV ad production. Everything has to be real food.
Yes, everything has to be real. Doesn’t have to be edible, or appetizing.
If I take bread and spray it with scotch guard to make sure the liquid condiment I’m putting on it oozes across instead of soaking into the bread, it’s all still real food. But would you eat it?
If I prop up whipped cream by putting a cardboard cone under it, it’s still real food, but would you eat it?
Just because it’s real food doesn’t mean it hasn’t been modified to be inedible.
I’m saying that you can’t use scotch guard or anything like that.
It’s been a while, but I don’t believe that they were allowed to use cardboard or anything of the sort to prop up or modify the appearance of the product. Instead, they would cook say 100 burger patties, go through dozens of heads of lettuce, slice 100 tomatoes, etc, and pick out the perfect pieces to make a burger that looks the way that they want.
The most that they could adulterate the food was to make a slurry with corn starch, water, and food dye that could be applied with a paint brush to make things look juicy, etc. They would use a clothes steamer to make a pizza look just right. Lots of tricks, but it had to be something that you could just pick up and eat, even if you wouldn’t necessarily want to.
Go looking and you’ll find numerous articles, anecdotes, and videos that go into the ways the work with the ingredients.
The important part is that they are not allowed to “misrepresent” the food. Meaning you can’t make it look like you’re getting five pounds of meat when you’re actually only getting one pound.
But there’s nothing stopping them from putting paint on the burger patties to make them look perfectly cooked, or using paper towel and toothpicks inside to hold everything at “the perfect angle” or spraying scotch guard on pancakes to make sure the syrup runs nicer. Because the person watching the ad isn’t getting a “misrepresentation” of the food or ingredients.
It’s a fine line, and people have walked it over and over. The advertisers and food stylists have it down to a science, and because it’s all about the money they go over and above to make sure they walk juuuust inside the line.
There was a cool video on YT that explained how the “tomato drop” in the BK ad was done and how they prep the burgers for the ad. Lemme see if I can find it.
Edit: as I anticipated, putting “ad” or “commercial” in the search bar makes the algorithm cream itself and flood you with shittons of ad and “reaction” videos to said ad.
Even then it’s added up the cheese, not the sauce. If you added white glue to the sauce you’d get some weird pink looking sauce.
If you used white glue, they have other colours though
Red glue.
That, finally, explains the pink sauce lady!
