Japanese sportswear brand Asics (アシックス) have launched a campaign that’s training AI to create more inclusive and representative images of fitness as an activity beyond über fit athletes.
Asics called these über fit representations exercise airbrushing.
https://youtu.be/eo13_v_Ase8
Generative AI is only as good as the source material that it gets to work from. And this has meant a lot of content that is heavily skewed what is the aggregate image. Think about the kind of content that already creates body dysmorphia across society. This can be corrected by training AI on a wider range of images.
In the words of Asics EMEA communications director Caroline Fisher
We’re training AI to see the real power of exercise.
Ask AI what exercise looks like and it’s likely to generate images of chiselled jaws, muscles on muscles and six-packs. Because AI has been taught that exercise is purely about aesthetic gain … and it’s learnt this from us.
This focus on exercise purely for physical transformation is feeding into unrealistic body standards and impacting our mental wellbeing.
In response, we’ve created an AI Training Programme to help AI learn what exercise really looks like. Our aim is to teach AI that the benefit of exercise is not just on the body, but also on the mind.
Everyone can help change the way AI sees exercise by posting their exercise images online with #TrainingAI and tagging ASICS.
To learn more, see the link in the comments.
We are ASICS. Anima Sana In Corpore Sano, a Sound Mind in a Sound Body.
Another great mid-century chambara film to follow up the 47 Ronin that I shared in an earlier post.
Nissan borrows from YouTube culture
Nissan borrowed from the Lofi Girl YouTube channel to make this four hour advert for their new Ariya electric vehicle. The illustration is wonderfully done and there are Easter eggs buried in the Japanese driving scenes. From Nissan iconic model name drops to mecha and more.
Judi Oyama
Judi Oyama is a Japanese American skateboarder and graphic designer who was there at the beginning of Independent trucks and Santa Cruz boards. At 63 years old she’s still a pro-skater.
WWE on fan engagement
Interesting video having different generations of WWE wrestling stars talk about fan engagement at SXSW. Elements of what we’d call method acting were talked through by The Undertaker. The para-social links of fanbase and stars that has been amplified via social media.
Flow state
I wish I had watched this when I first started DJing. I did my best work when I was in a flow state. It is hard to get in it consistently.
China on war path
China’s rapid militarisation discussed by Singapore public broadcaster CNA (Channel News Asia). There are some interesting points in it.
Elliott Management wrote this opinion piece on Apple and China: Apple is a Chinese company | Financial Times – interesting assessment of risk exposure with a focus on the Apple share price.
The Apple and China relationship started before China joined the WTO. Taiwanese contract manufacturers had built huge industrial sites in Shenzhen, China and later in other parts of China. The best known of which was the Foxconn plant in Shenzhen. Back in 2010, I was driven around the perimeter of the site, which went on for miles.
The only site that I had seen which would be comparable would be the Mercedes-Benz manufacturing site in Sindelfingen which is part of the Stuttgart metropolitan area. I spent part of my childhood and early adult life living next to a General Motors car plant, a shipyard and a couple of oil refineries, so I am used to scale of industry.
As Apple came back from a near demise in the mid-1990s, it needed manufacturing scale so the combination of Apple and China happened due to that. Over time the Apple and China relationship drove manufacturing expertise and new ways of doing business, such as using CNC machines at scale. Prior to Apple and China, smartphones were plastic mainly due to product engineering influenced by Nokia’s work on its feature phones.
Over time, the Apple and China relationship evolved. Chinese developers make up about half of the programmers making iPad and iPhone applications. Chinese component manufacturers replaced US, Korean, Japanese and European suppliers. Apple and China has become tightly entwined as Chinese manufacturers look to dethrone Apple at the same time.
Apple and China national security focus
China’s state and national security focus has spilled into the economic and social aspects of policy which has a high probability of reaching the Apple and China relationship. Apple already compromises on its privacy tenet in the way it handles China’s data. It actively supported China versus Hong Kong protestors – doing everything it could to disrupt the protestors self-organising tools.
China has shown that its ever expanding security considerations trump business so Apple and China may come to a rapid and disruptive break. Apple is trying to de-risk production outside China but it might be too little, too late. Apple and China are due for a relationship reset.
China’s assessments of Soviet Union’s collapse is very interesting as they offer a playbook of Xi Jinping thought
China’s ‘men in black’ step up scrutiny of foreign corporate sleuths | Financial Times – “It’s hard to attract capital if you can’t get a report from a global due diligence firm,” said one international services executive. That could run counter to the government’s efforts to revive animal spirits in China’s economy, consultants and investors said. “Maybe this is the intention,” said the head of one consultancy in Beijing, “to choke off investment and get the state to step back in, to stop the ability of investors to place bets.”
Xi Jinping Can’t Handle an Aging China | Foreign Affairs – less convinced this assertion is true, when we look at natalistic policies in authoritarian regimes such as what happened in Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu with Decree 770 which was one of the strictest anti-abortion law at the time, or Nazi Germany’s breeding programmes
US Companies in China Grow More Pessimistic of Ties: AmCham Survey – Bloomberg – Some 87% of respondents to a flash survey taken last week said they were at least slightly pessimistic about US-China ties, according to the survey published Wednesday by the American Chamber of Commerce in China. That was 14 percentage points higher than the chamber’s previous poll. “Bilateral relations between the United States and China have substantially deteriorated,” said Lester Ross, chair of AmCham China’s Policy Committee. “It’s hard to see at this point when they will begin to improve — and this, of course, affects the ability of business to operate across borders.”
China Ratchets Up Pressure on Foreign Companies – WSJ – Business executives who have consulted with Chinese authorities say a central tenet of the effort is the desire to more tightly control the narrative about China’s governance and development, and limit the information collected by foreign companies such as auditors, management consultants and law firms that could influence how the outside world views China… Some foreign business executives say they worry the rewriting of the espionage law means that many topics, ranging from the status of Taiwan to China’s human rights record to technology such as semiconductors, are now becoming off limits in discussions with their Chinese counterparts. The recent trouble for foreign companies in China is drawing criticism in Washington. Rep. Mike Gallagher, a Republican from Wisconsin who chairs a congressional committee on the Chinese Communist Party, said in a statement Thursday, “Our business leaders need to take off their golden blindfolds and recognize that the recent police raids of American companies Bain and Mintz are not one-offs, but part of a long, proud tradition of exploitation.”.. The push is driven by a deepening conviction within China’s leadership that foreign capital, while important to China’s economic rise, isn’t to be fully trusted – if I was a brand planner in China or Hong Kong I would be very wary at the moment as this will spill over into agency life (paywall)
Longitudinal consumer behaviour change around increased empathy in western markets
A lot of this focus on the expertise in the ‘aspiration economy’ sounds like brands back in the early 1990s again. The kind of expertise exemplified by Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity or the characters Randall Graves and Dante Hicks in Kevin Smith’s movie Clerks.
The new industrial policy, explained – by Noah Smith – the speed and disruptiveness of China’s entry into the global trading system destroyed the career trajectories of large numbers of American workers and hurt the economies of whole regions. Second, U.S. complacency about the trajectory of Chinese politics, combined with a massive campaign of technological espionage, hastened and encouraged the rise of a new, hostile superpower. By the mid-2010s, only economists thought that free trade was still an unquestioned good, and the country wasn’t listening to economists the way it used to
Too Big to Challenge? | danah boyd | apophenia – the tech industry represents 9% of the U.S. GDP and only five Big Tech companies account for 25% of the S&P 500. Prior to Covid, most of the growth in stock market came from Big Tech. Now, as the U.S. economy is all sorts of wacky, Big Tech is what is keeping the stock market’s chin above water. In the process, Big Tech is accounting for more and more of the stock market – edited for brevity
The gender pay gap is not a myth, it’s math – it’s mostly not a discrimination story, it’s a parenting story. But more flexible employment is likely to be more of a discrimination story
Microsoft-branded mice and keyboards are going away after 40 years – this reminds me of when a new exec joined Bill Gates era Microsoft in the late 1980s/1990s. The company had unintentionally had in warehouses 3 years sales worth of Microsoft mice ready to sell. Their hardware with the exception of an ergonomic keyboard haven’t been great products that were superior to other technology companies
Interesting that even state broadcaster Deutsche Welle is complaining about the poor quality of modern German cars. Back in the early 1970s BMWs had a reputation as being clever fragile rust buckets, but the decline of Mercedes is far more dramatic in terms of quality. The decline seems to be in lock step with the globalisation of these companies and an increased focus on shareholder value.
Compare and contrast with older Mercedes cars across the Middle East and Africa.
Project MUSE – China’s Hong Kong Affairs Bureaucracy: Factional Politics and Policy Consistency – “From the perspective of factional politics, this article sheds light on the functions and operations of the Central Liaison Office and the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office (the “two Hong Kong offices”) throughout the history of the Communist Party of China (CPC), focusing on the 2013–22 period. The authors posit that the stronger the factional relationship between the top leader responsible for Hong Kong affairs and the heads of the two Hong Kong offices, the greater the policy consistency between the two offices and the central authorities on Hong Kong issues. This article uses text mining techniques to measure the degree of policy consistency between Chinese President Xi Jinping and the two Hong Kong offices from 2013 to 2022. In 2020, Xi appointed his protégés as directors of the two Hong Kong offices, thus regaining absolute control over Hong Kong affairs. Xi may further tighten his hold on Hong Kong in the future, thereby undermining the region’s autonomous status.” – Interesting aside: The Party and State Institutional Reform Plan (党和国家机构改革方案) unveiled in March established the Hong Kong and Macao Work Office of the Central Committee (中央港澳工作办公室) on the basis of the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office of the State Council. The latter has essentially become a Party body instead of a state body, and the arrangement is now “one organisation, two nameplates” (ie., two identities). – expect even further ratcheting of authoritarian measures in all aspects of Hong Kong life and economy
Culture and technology adoption’s effect on Japanese information design online. It reminds me of the early web portal designs were more like print newspapers.
Interesting that the Korean government is allowing these strikes to go ahead given the central role of Samsung in the country.
Luxury
Alibaba, Partners Fight Fraud and Root Out Counterfeits – Over 730,000 IP rights were under Alibaba protection by the end of 2022. 98% of IP takedown requests by rights holders were handled within 24 hours for the third consecutive year – I wonder what Amazon numbers look like for this?
I didn’t realise that Taiwan’s semiconductor expertise went back this far. DigiTimes has unprecedented access to the elder statesmen and experts on the early Taiwanese semiconductor industry
Amazon have launched a new TV series to stream called Citadel. Citadel seems to be their spring tent pole TV series. The series is produced by the Russo Brothers. The Russo Brothers are responsible for four of the Marvel films up to Avengers Endgame. My favourite work by them is Welcome to Colinwood, a remake of the 1958 Italian comedy caper film I soliti ignoti (known in English speaking markets at Big Deal on Madonna Street or Persons Unknown). Unfortunately Welcome to Collinwood lost money at the box office, but has become a classic since.
It stars Richard Madden and Priyanka Chopra Jonas alongside Stanley Tucci. Madden is famous for his roles in Game of Thrones and BodyguardTV series. Chopra is famous in Bollywood film circles and was the star of the TV series Quantico.
Season one has launched just two episodes at the time of writing. So its too early for me to make a call on if Citadel is worth watching. I can tell you that it isn’t the most cerebral TV series and lags well behind Amazon’s adaption of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan in this regard, but it might offer the escapism of a Bond film. So far it has well choreographed action scenes, a standout performance by Tucci and CGI sequences that are distracting in nature rather than causing you to suspend believe. The story itself seems like an update of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. – where the good guys are pitted against a transnational organisation dedicated to chaos and destruction.
In this respect it probably feels like familiar territory to the Russo Brothers time making Marvel films with The Avengers, SHIELD and an assortment of enemies from Hydra to Thanos.
As seen on TV
Regardless of what I think about Citadel; Amazon are all-in on the series in a way that I hadn’t seen for The Terminal List, The Man in The High Castle or the Jack Ryan series. With Citadel, Amazon has taken a leaf out of Netflix’ book; creating a line of merchandise. The merchandise is less thoughtful than what Netflix came up with for Stranger Things and is more reminiscent of when everyone I knew in the mid-90s had anX-Files logo t-shirt in their wardrobe somewhere.
Amazon marketplace vendors Citadel lookbook
But Amazon didn’t stop there. Amazon also created a ‘look-book’ for each of the main characters, allowing fans to buy the look from Amazon’s eco-system of Chinese manufacturers, who sell on the platform via the platforms Marketplace offering.
This mix of entertainment has been done better before by the likes of GirlWalker in Japan who host the famous Tokyo Girls Collection. A number of companies have experimented with in-show shopping to augment product placement in the past and this looks to be where Amazon is going. This set of pages seem to be the first stage of experiment to link Amazon Prime Video more closely with commerce in the future.
I am curious to know how much of an uplift in sales that the look-book generates and will it inspire an uptake in red bodycon dresses from Aberdeen to Andover?
Interesting talk on how distrust in media skews to more right wing voters in the US. Gallup have tracked distrust in the media over time amongst Americans. The Poynter Institute is a respected media research organisation and has done a lot of work on media bias which affects and partly explains distrust in media. Distrust in media is also fuelled by rumours and conspiracy theories according to research by Louisiana State University. While identifying conspiracy theories is well understood, distrust in media continues.
Consumer behaviour
Interesting podcast by the Wall Street Journal on how retirement is something older people put off due to finance, ennui of retirement and the longer lifespan. It is interesting how technology is enabling avoidance of retirement and it even has its own hashtags #neverretire.
I have touched on earlier posts on the rail origins of the barcode, here’s a great documentary on the Kartrak.
Japan
Early 1940s adaptation of the 47 Ronin story. The 47 Ronin is something that really happened in 1703 and is known in Japan as the Ako incident (赤穂事件). The protagonists were seen as examples to be emulated in terms of dedication, honour, loyalty, persistence and self-sacrifice.
McDonalds CSR activities came up a few times over the past day or so I thought I would visit it. CSR stands for corporate and social responsibility. A few American PR executives that I have come across used not to like the S in the middle, which sounded like socialism. The idea was doing good to enhance brand reputation – generally it was a strategic function.
ESG operates at a higher level. CSR predates ESG as an idea. McDonalds CSR is interesting because of the tactical way it seems to be employed around what a couple of rules that I have noticed.
Children are always a good universal focus of McDonalds CSR, which is the reason why Ronald McDonald House is a common theme throughout the worldwide operations of McDonalds
McDonalds CSR is on the side of authority, hence its support for the Metropolitan Police when dealing with XR protests and Korean national service draftees. There is a risk that this could make its conduct in authoritarian countries more problematic
To be a poem. – from the Web Curios newsletter ‘is a digital poem by Alicia Guo – it’s infinite and self-generating, and I don’t quite know how it works or where it’s pulling the words from, but each time it’s different and each time it’s fragmented and magical and silly and poignant and confusing and beautiful and I would like this to be read forever by a choir of machine voices until the heat death of the universe please thankyou.‘
