On Tuesday night, Chevrolet rolled out a new ad campaign called “Fuel Possibilities” that uses IBM Watson’s AI software to give people positive tests. The campaign’s “good feed” looks at your Twitter and Facebook accounts in order to assess how good your posts are.
Chevrolet’s parent company, GM, said it will be bringing travel positivity pumps to gas stations around the world for the rest of the year. Customers will be able to enter their social media account names and receive free gas based on their positivity score (more positive gets you more free gas).
The pump positivity has already stopped in Buenos Aires, Cape Town, and New Orleans, and Chevy has it released an advertisement using images from all three locations.
Even if the pump isn’t coming to a Gas Station Near You, Chevy and IBM partnered to create the “Chevrolet Global Stop Program.” Users can access the settings through a website and enter their social media nicknames to see their positivity score, which is based on a scale of 0 to 200. The score is calculated by IBM’s Watson platform, which analyzes social media posts and identifies positive topics. . Watson then employs IBM’s Personality Insights API “to gather personality traits and users’ ‘highest characteristics’ based on the content they post and share,” as a post from Chevy Chief Marketing Officer Tim Mahoney notes.
The platform also runs the AlchemyLanguage API to perform sentiment analysis, which returns a “social personality profile based on text indexed by Watson. (AlchemyLanguage) is also responsible for showing users the most positive and least positive posts. “
When I just linked to my Twitter account, I got a 97 out of 200. Chevy’s website says I’m “on the road to good.” Hmm. Still less than the average, which appears to be 121. Who are these 121 people? What kind of sun were they born under? When I connected my Twitter and Facebook accounts, I got a 92 out of 100. Sorry, Mom-Facebook is letting me down.
But when you look at the tweets and Facebook posts that are categorized as “most positive” and “least positive,” some light-hearted insults seem to have gone unnoticed by Watson, while negative but tongue-in-cheek posts in-cheek is rated as very sweet. (Here’s a sample of the negative and positive tweets he brought me. Warning: I tweeted a curse word to Ars tech editor Lee Hutchinson in a joke tweet about Breaking Bad and Watson thought it was very negative.)
Global Positioning System also creates a personality rating based on your social media posts. Watson called me “skeptical, introspective, and irrational.” I’m sorry Watson, I’m already married.
For all its intelligent software appeal, however, Watson is still the only software reading complex human language. Chevy and IBM’s Personality Insights Engine also say I’m pure. “Be serious in general and don’t joke too much,” he said, which was funny, because I thought it was every my tweets are hysterical. Maybe I should throw in a gratuitous “LOL” here and there. HAHA. (That’s a deterrent in case of a dark future in which Condé Nast hires IBM to review my Ars Technica articles for good.)
GM spokesman Craig Daitch said the company doesn’t store any personal information, and you won’t see a bunch of Chevy ads on Twitter and Facebook after you use the Global Rewards Program. GM will usually collect things that other websites often collect—unique visitors, amount of time they spend on the site, etc. “The goal of the Fueling Possibilities campaign is to create awareness in global markets for our brand and what we stand for,” Daitch wrote to Ars in an email. “Chevrolet has different levels of brand awareness around the world and a global campaign like Fuel Options helps us create consistency as to who we are as Chevrolet.”
All in all, the Fuel Possibilities campaign places little emphasis on the merits of Chevy vehicles. It’s a game for brand recognition, grabbing users’ eyeballs by copying them into getting a cultured version of those personality tests we used to take in pre-teen magazines when we bored 10-year-olds on vacation. summer.
For IBM, this advertising campaign is another way to show Watson, which the company has used to force a robot concierge, to work. Sadnessand calculate water use efficiency.
According to a statement from Stephen Gold, vice president of IBM’s Watson division:
One of the key pillars of intelligent computing is the ability to reveal valuable insights… What Chevy is doing with Watson is improving not only personal engagement, but also helping customers deliver value. to others through positivity. It is a creative way of using technology to enhance a unique personality.