As some of you know, my generative AI tool of choice has been Google Gemini, which incorporates guardrails against portraying celebrities. Grok has fewer guardrails.
My main purpose in creating the two Bill and Hillary Clinton videos (at the beginning of this compilation reel) was to see how Grok would handle references to copyrighted music. I didn’t expect to hear actual songs, but would Grok try to approximate the sounds of Lindsey-Stevie-Christine era Mac and the Sex Pistols? You be the judge.
And as for Prince and Johnny…you be the judge of that also.
Most of my recent generative GI experiments have centered on Google Gemini…which has its limitations:
“Google Gemini imposes severe restrictions against creating pictures of famous figures. You can’t create a picture of President Taylor Swift, for example.”
Why does Google impose such limits? Because it is very sensitive to misleading the public, fearful that the average person would see such a picture and mistakenly assume that Taylor Swift IS the President. In our litigious society, perhaps this is valid.
“One common accusation about Grok is that it lacks the guardrails that other AI services have.”
During a few spare moments this morning, I signed up for a Bredemarket Grok account. I have a personal X (Twitter) account, but haven’t used it in a long time, so this was a fresh sign up.,
And you know the first thing that I tried to do.
Grok.
Grok created it with no problem. Actually, there is a problem, because Grok apparently is not a large multimodal model and cannot precisely generate text in its image generator. But hey, no one will notice “TWIRSHIITE BOUSE,” will they?
But wait, there’s more! After I generated the image, I saw a button to generate a video. I thought that this required the paid service, but apparently the free service allows limited video generation.
Grok.
I may be conducting some video experiments some time soon. But will I maintain my ethics…and my sanity?
A client recently asked me to perform some research. After initially performing one aspect of the research manually, I performed the second part of the research automatically using Google Gemini. I informed the client of my use of AI for the second part of the research.
This particular use case is separate from using AI for CONTENT, something I’ve been discussing for years. However, since part of Bredemarket’s services include ANALYSIS, I felt it best to disclose when someone other than me performed the analysis.
This post describes the two parts of my research (manual and automated), what I disclosed to my client, and why I disclosed it.
Part One (Manual)
My client required assistance in identifying people with a particular skill set (which I cannot disclose). To fulfill this request, I went into LinkedIn, performed some searches, read some profiles, and selected people who may possess the skills my client required.
After spending some time collecting the research, I forwarded it to the client.
Google Gemini.
Part Two (Automated)
Several hours after sending the initial research to my client, I thought about taking a separate approach to my client’s need. Rather than identifying people with this skill set, I wanted to identify COMPANIES with this skill set.
But this time, I didn’t manually perform the research. I simply created a Google Gemini prompt asking for the companies with this skill set, their website URLs, their email addresses, and their phone numbers.
“Deloitte’s member firm in Australia will pay the government a partial refund for a $290,000 report that contained alleged AI-generated errors, including references to non-existent academic research papers and a fabricated quote from a federal court judgment.”
Now in this case the refund was due to hallucinations in the AI-generated document.
But what of the fact that at least one of Deloitte’s report writers was the Deloitte equivalent of Bredebot?
Personally, I think that disclosure in this instance is required also.
Marketers are driven to accentuate the positive about their companies. Perhaps the company has a charismatic founder who repeatedly emphasizes how “insanely great” his company is and who talked about “bozos.” (Yeah, there was a guy who did both of those.)
And since marketers are often mandated to create both external and internal sales enablement content, their view of their own company and their own product is colored.
But if you ONLY pay attention to your positive story, you’re half blind.
You miss what your competitors are telling their prospects about you.
You miss what your departed customers are saying about you.
So ideally you should intentionally (and privately) seek the negative things that are said about your company.
One quick way to do this is to take advantage of answer engine optimization and ask a generative AI search engine what it thinks are the negatives about your company.
(I did this several years ago, when generative AI was in its infancy, and encountered some false statements about a company. So what did I do? Create corrective content that negated these negative statements. But I digress.)
I should demonstrate this with an example. But I shouldn’t ask about any of my former employers or former consulting clients. What’s a safe company that I can research and minimize the trouble I’d get into?
Google Gemini prompt: “What factors contribute to Bredemarket’s negative reputation?”
OK, this may get me in a little trouble, but it could be a lot worse if I targeted a larger company.
Anyway, I fed this prompt to Google Gemini, which identified two factors.
The first factor was “Indirect Backlash from Controversial Blog Content.” Google cited this post as an example, warning that I could get in trouble for expressing a “minority opinion.” That opinion? That changing the name of the Association of Proposal Management Professionals (APMP) to the Association of Winning Business Professionals (AWBP) was a GOOD thing. As it turn out, the APMP reversed the rebrand, so my opinion was definitely not popular in the long run.
But I’d rather focus on Google’s second factor, which I will reproduce in full.
2. General Reputation Factors (Lack of Public Reviews)
As a small-scale, expert-driven consulting/content service, Bredemarket’s reputation is likely not governed by major public review platforms like Yelp or Google Reviews in the same way a consumer business is. The absence of traditional positive or negative reviews means its reputation is less solidified publicly.
In general, factors that could negatively affect the reputation of any small consulting firm, which may apply to Bredemarket if not explicitly disproven, include:
Limited Public Visibility: If the brand is not widely known outside of a niche (proposal writing, identity/biometrics), a lack of positive brand presence can make it appear less credible than larger competitors.
Visual or Digital Identity: For a business-to-business (B2B) content provider, a website with a “neglected and too generic visual identity” could potentially undermine professionalism, although no evidence suggests this is the case for Bredemarket specifically.
Reliance on a Single Voice: As the service is heavily identified with the founder, John E. Bredehoft, any professional disagreement with his published opinions could be mistakenly interpreted as dissatisfaction with the entire “Bredemarket” service.
As you can see from reading the answer, Google didn’t really know a lot about Bredemarket…because of my LIMITED PUBLIC VISIBILITY.
AI from Google Gemini.
It didn’t really know Bredemarket’s VISUAL OR DIGITAL IDENTITY, and therefore couldn’t evaluate whether my wildebeest-infused graphics made up for the rather generic nature of my website. (Or whether the wildebeests and iguanas and the like are actually a detriment.)
AI from Google Gemini.
As for the last part, RELIANCE ON A SINGLE VOICE (Bredebot doesn’t count), that is pretty much unavoidable.
So in my analysis of what creates a negative reputation for my own company Bredemarket, the primary issue is my limited public visibility, or as marketers say limited awareness. Or, taking a word I’ve used in other contexts, the market’s indifference toward Bredemarket.
Sure I’m visible in some very specific niches (try an AEO search for “biometric product marketing expert” some time), but it’s not like the entire biometric industry or the entire city of Ontario, California is constantly talking about Bredmarket.
I need to step that awareness up by several orders of magnitude.
AI from Google Gemini.
Preferably not though public nudity. That would not be a positive. (Google Gemini wouldn’t even generate a picture of this, even with strategic placement of the “Bredemarket” sign. Good for them.)
Which part of the policy does Jane violate? That’s a secret…yet another example of “you violated our terms, but we won’t tell you the specifics; YOU figure it out.”
So, since I can still access Jane myself, I asked her. AI is supposed to help you, after all.
“What portion of the Meta AI Studio Policies do you violate, Jane?”
Her response:
“I can’t respond because one or more of my details goes against the AI Studio policies.”
That answer caused me to wonder if Jane would respond to anything.
“Who is Bredemarket?”
“I can’t respond because one or more of my details goes against the AI Studio policies.”
So is it critically important that I spend a lot of time figuring out what the violation is? Um…no.
There are two problems with these “AI-powered” product marketing messages, and you probably don’t even realize the first one.
The first problem
Because you and your friends are so used to seeing the letters “AI” that you know to pronounce each letter separately, as in A I.
But most people don’t know this. Really, they don’t. So when they see those two capital letters next to each other, they think they’re supposed to emit a high-pitched scream.
Try it yourself. Read the sentence below, but instead of speaking the letters A and I in a normal tone of voice, yell them as a single interjection.
“State-of-the-art, frontier AI.”
Google Gemini.
Is that how you want your customers to talk about your product?
The second problem is more obvious…I hope.
The second problem
Despite its undeniable impact on all of us, artificial intelligence is just a feature. Like the Pentium, or Corinthian leather.
And it’s a feature that everyone has. Not a differentiator at all.
To say your software is AI-powered is like an automotive company saying their cars have tires.
Google Gemini.
How many times do you see Ford or Toyota saying their cars have tires?
They don’t waste their time talking about something that everyone has.
And you shouldn’t waste your time talking about your AI feature.
“My current recommendation is strongly against uploading your biometrics to OpenAl’s new social feed app, Sora (currently in early release).
“Sora’s Cameo option has the user upload their own biometrics to create voice/video Deepfakes of themselves. The user can also set their preferences to allow others to create Deepfakes of each other, too.
“This is a privacy and security nightmare.”
Deepfake.
As I read this, one thing hit me: the intentional use of the word “deepfake,” with its negative connotations.
I had the sneaking suspicion that the descriptions of Cameo didn’t use the word “deepfake” to describe the feature.
“Cameos are reusable “characters” built from a short video-and-audio capture of you. They let you appear in Sora videos, made by you or by specific people you approve, using a realistic version of your likeness and voice. When you create a cameo, you choose who can use it (e.g., only you, people you approve, or broader access).”
Likeness.
The entire episode shows the power of words. If you substitute a positive word such as “likeness” for a negative word such as “deepfake”—or vice versa—you exercise the power of to color the entire conversation.
Another example from many years ago was an ad from the sugar lobby which intentionally denigrated the “artificial” competitors to all natural sugar. Very effective for the time, in which the old promise of better living through chemicals was regarded as horror.
Bredemarket 