The Best Part of Possibilities: Advertising Made by a Bot

Allison Crank

Advertising seeks to transform products from virtual possibilities into physical reality. In that sense, the goal of advertising is to produce consumers rather than products. Marketing campaigns strategise to make certain goods real and competing products virtual, constantly changing the design landscape. But in recent years, the quantity and variety of products, vendors, and consumers on Alibaba has led to a specific demand—for engaging, intuitive, and user-specific advertising generated through artificial intelligence. Scientists at Alibaba’s research centre are developing AI tools, including neural networks, to achieve that goal. In that sense, Alibaba is becoming both designer and producer—a consumption machine, blurring the boundaries between virtual and real.

But what lies behind these artificial campaigns, and how does this virtual tool create demand in a physical world? The Best Part of Possibilities is a self-named neural network bot that has been trained on thousands of American advertising slogans from the past 100 years. These amusing, nonsensical, and cliché phrases, assembled into new phrases using machine learning, reveal the uncanny yet irrational pattern and syntax of advertising which we have assimilated in the era of broadcast and interactive media.