Cautionary Signals

Inspired by a recent Reddit thread that showed how to generate product images in the style of a popular candy company, I thought it might be interesting to use Open AI’s image generator to sort of explore the collective unconscious of wind.

I remember hearing or reading somewhere how laundry detergents are advertised with different fragrances depending on location.¹ Like how in the US, you would be able to buy detergent with fragrances such as “Mountain Rain”, “Botanical Rain”, “Rain Water” or “After the Rain”; scents which you would have a harder time selling in the UK, I think. Obviously, these choices reflect some of the cultural values of the potential customers.

In a similar vein, I have gone ahead and generated four product images for the fictional brand “Noribo”, which just launched a new series of gummy bears that taste like wind. These include:

Noribo Air Dance: Breeze Play

Noribo Wind Symphony: Gust Gusto

Noribo Breezy Sweets: Whirlwind Wonder

Noribo Zephyr Breeze: Wind Whirl

Following a certain perceptual habit, I could not help myself from imagining what each of these might taste like. I sense something between liquorice and mint, but wonder if this has more to do with the shape of the candy, its colour, and the ocean breeze hinted at as opposed to anything about wind itself. The last one for an English audience is more explicitly about fragrances the wind might carry, suggesting different herbal and flowery tastes:

Noribo English Gust: Meadow Breeze

To me, this is an interesting exercise in a sort of phenomenology in practice through (fictional) advertising. Advertisers and phenomenologist face one common problem: How do you draw attention out of or away from everyday habits and direct it towards aspects of experience that are more intangible? I think for both, there needs to be a degree of awareness of how experience and attention function to write convincing ad copy or phenomenology.

AI tools might help lever experience out of its habits, reorienting it towards a reflection on itself in the spirit of the phenomenological epoché. But there would need to be another degree of reflection about the underlying logic of these tools and the cultural repertoire on which they draw. To an extent, this can be achieved just by playing subtly with the wording of each prompt.