Notably the false positive rates and the fact that the method used is basically spam, except Twitch got paid to allow it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LivestreamFail/comments/188of4y/com...
Any other bots doing what the mtn dew bot is doing would likely catch a sitewide ban..
E: There's a more structured argument on X, with screenshots of the bot's messaging too https://twitter.com/zachbussey/status/1730742056899805377
The AI scanning as part of this campaign is happening whether someone opts in or not. And what the streamer opts into is nothing more than being used as an advertising vessel for bad sugar water for free.
Pepsico is free to issue Twitch bounties for certain things or buy normal ad slots for pre-rolls or mid-stream ads if they want to remind everyone that their neon green slop exists.
The reason the rule exists is because you don't get to advertise on Twitch without paying them, but they're paying them so :/
While this particular usage is less about a specific AI act and yes buying increased access on social media (where most users naively assume fair access) isnt new - I personally and fucking terrified of where we’ll be at just a year from now.
[1]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/economy/sports-illustrated-...
[2]: https://www.jsonline.com/story/sports/nba/bucks/2023/10/28/e...
Imagine Google was taking payments to allow mail to bypass Gmail's spam filters, along those lines.
Twitch already has adverts and banners, which are closer to what you're comparing to. This would be injecting text ads into the middle of your emails if we're correcting our analogies
E: Unless you mean Google actually does allow companies to pay to bypass spam filters? That's probably something that needs posting to HN itself if so lol
> They don't accumulate in your inbox like unfilted spam does. They are not serviced if you use other systems to interact with your inbox.
These are interesting observations, but it's all still ads.
Remember to grab a nice refreshing coke when you're in the store today! Mmmhmm, can't get enough of an ice cold coke!
between emails!
Same way that people keep forgetting youtube videos aren't free or public, or that social media have no obligation to be impartial or protect freedom of spreech.
Interesting or noteworthy is up to the observer.
Like I'm way more fascinated by the corporate structure - presumably it's not someone working at Pepsi that comes up with this. So did some third party build it then pitch Pepsi's marketing?
How did this come about?
https://adage.com/article/digital-marketing-ad-tech-news/mtn...
(Archive: https://archive.ph/NGrwn)
Also notable is that Doritos recently did an AI advert that removes the crunch sounds in streams and voice comms. Maybe someone in PepsiCo marketing is on a bit of an AI kick :)
Entirely different kind of company that I've never thought about before.
https://twitter.com/_Yarts_/status/1731083331893391683?ref=t...
>Definitely! Participating streamers will have the chance to be featured on the MTN DEW Gaming Twitch Channel, the MTN DEW RAID branded shelf on the Twitch home page, and the Twitch homepage hero carousel. Streamers will also have a chance to receive a 1:1 coaching session with a professional streamer/content creator
If you volunteer to advertise their product, you have a chance to win exposure on mountain dew's twitch gaming channel, which nobody should care about. They're not even paying you. This is for people who sell out before they even see a dollar.
Would it be good to get paid for it? Sure. Can streamers with no audience demand payment? Of course not.
Also, selling out isn’t a thing. It doesn’t exist. All streamers work with brands as that’s the core of the job. You’re arguing that streamers should throw away a free-to-them opportunity for your lofty ideals of How Things Should Be.
Selling out is a thing. You put the value on your own product. If a week of advertising for them is valued at $0 and 15 minutes of promotion on a low view count channel, you've sold out for basically nothing.
Streamers should not do things that immediately devalue their channel such that their promotion is worth $0. Literally giving away the value for a chance to win promotion. Its not a lofty ideal its setting your own value above $0.
Even if a person does win a slot they'll have to be live to use it during the prize portion of the campaign. Factoring in timezones this brings the slots available down a fair bit unless the streamer decides to do a 36 hour stream.
Even if they win one it'll bring concurrent viewers aye, but these are viewers that just happen to be visiting the homepage, not looking to watch streams from the carousel. They're mostly empty embedded views.
Of the people looking at the homepage almost none of them will click through to the stream as they're doing something else like looking for their favourite streamer or en-route to their settings or something like that. Of those people that do click through, a lot of them are going to be trolls looking to wind streamers up or otherwise harass them.
There may still be a handful of viewers left that do click through to the stream, who don't speedrun getting banned from the stream, who do watch the stream. Chances are though even those people will be leaving for the next thing to watch quickly unless the streamer has something super entertaining going on. In that very specific scenario, aye this might be an ok deal.
For anyone else this is a tiny chance at 15 minutes of stress before dropping back to their usual view count.
tl;dr nah it's pretty much the meme
I'll happily eat my words if I turn out to be wrong. I should probably eat a hearty breakfast though.
Is it paid product placement if no one is getting paid?
Sounds like the only benefit is a chance at being featured in a "MTN DEW official" ad.
Unless exposure counts as payment, it doesn't seem like this would count as paid product placement. But I'm not a lawyer.
Paying with exposure Wow. and wtf does "supe" even mean here?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/soup%20up#word-hi...
Perhaps it's a common expression in "Puerta Rico":
> While MTN DEW RAID is live, anyone streaming under the “Games” category on Twitch that is +18 years old (19+ in AL & NE), actively live streaming, based in the USA, Puerta Rico, or Guam, and has MTN DEW visible on camera is eligible to participate.
Is anyone here thinking, "you know what, I need to hop onto the official Mountain Dew Twitch channel so I can see exactly 10 minutes of a 6 simultaneous streams, chosen randomly with the only similarity between them being that a beverage is visible in each stream. That is definitely the way I'm going to find my new favorite streamer."?
I can't imagine that this is an effective way for a streamer to get discovered by an audience.
My suspicion is that after a certain threshold of recognition, I think it starts to matter whether the people talking about a company are talking positively or are trashing it.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/soup%20up
> These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'soup up.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors
If you trust AI.
All the ads on Twitch had pushed me into paying for Turbo.. and now they're advertising in chat and embedded in people's streams
Or just use SponsorBlock?
Is it? Why?
(this is sarcastic, but it's also the next logical step for this kind of marketing)
I suppose life really does imitate art!
What’s stopping me from having a “MTN DEW makes you obese” banner on my channel?
> The MTN DEW RAID AI will begin crawling all concurrent Gaming livestreams from December 1 - December 8, but that doesn’t mean the AI is watching your streams or keeping any data.
What the #$&@X are you talking about? If an image-recognition algorithm is crawling livestreams and verifying objects inside of them, that does mean you are watching the streams and keeping data. This is not how words work, you can't just change definitions like this, you are writing a FAQ not a post-modernist art essay.
Mountain Dew is watching the stream and is keeping data: at the very least it's storing data about which streams had Mountain Dew in them and which streamers have opted in and out. And all of that data processing is happening serverside so I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say there's probably other metadata being preserved too. And sure, streams are public and Mountain Dew can crawl them and they could have given an answer of "yes, we are, they're public". But how little do you have to think of your target audience to instead decide to give an answer that is this blatantly a lie and to think that it will fool people?
I am going to sneak into the house of whatever advertiser wrote this and put spiders in their bed. But that doesn't mean I'll be trespassing, because apparently words mean nothing at all and I can say anything I want.
I have a bag of Brown Recluse spiders I was going to throw at the ceiling fan during Christmas dinner to liven things up a bit, but I think you're idea is a better use case.
You're assuming this FAQ wasn't written by an AI also.
Of course you can, don’t be obtuse. Words can literally mean anything the speaker wants them to, language evolves.
This whole conversation is weird and unhinged. We’re talking about streams which are deliberately created to be public. From that perspective, if they’re not storing it the details about the stream then their target audience would agree that they’re not watching and storing data. This question is asking if the AI (ugh) is skynet (ugh) and is learning about streaming, and then saying “nope, just looking for a logo”.
Nobody cares about this “well actually” about metadata. English is a terrible medium for communicating technical information, and it’s doubly bad when the target audience neither knows nor cares about technical details.
Language evolves organically through public usage, not via soda FAQs. If you asked pretty much anyone on the street in any context "an AI is going to scan a video and locate on object, is it 'watching' the video" -- they would say yes. This is not a niche interpretation of what it means to watch a video. The visual data from the video output is being piped into an image recognition engine; the vast majority of the general public would call that "watching".
Maybe in the future that will change, but unless Mountain Dew has a time machine hidden in their office, "language evolves" is not an excuse.
> if they’re not storing it the details about the stream then their target audience would agree that they’re not watching and storing data.
They are storing details about the stream, they have to or else the system doesn't work. They have to store information about which streams they've checked, haven't checked, which streams have opted in, which streams have opted out, when they last messaged the stream or spammed in chat. The FAQ also implies that they are storing frequency information about how often the logo appears, so it's not even accurate to say they're not storing data that relates to the actual contents of the stream.
That's not nitpicking, it's not a technicality, we're not debating whether or not a proxy service counts as storage or talking about where data is at rest. They are just straight up lying -- there is stream and content metadata being stored on their servers and being used for the project.
> and it’s doubly bad when the target audience neither knows nor cares about technical details.
"Are you storing information about me"
"None that you would understand"
is a terrible answer for a FAQ and belittles the reader. The streams are intended to be public, they could just say, "yes we are scanning public streams and collecting metadata." People know what metadata is, it's not that complicated. There are so many simple answers they could give to this question that would be honest to what they're doing without risking confusion.
"The public would be confused" is not an excuse to outright lie about what information a company is and isn't storing. Obviously it's not an excuse, this is Facebook levels of weirdness to suggest, to say "the public doesn't understand what we're storing so we don't have to inform them about it."
You should be aware that is very much up for debate. I have seen lots of market research on words around AI, and there is a large group of people who think that it is impossible to use human verbs like “watch” in the context of AI. Computer programs can’t watch things any more than you can be overclocked; the word simply doesn’t apply.
Your examples of storing data about streams are similarly confused about how people use language. That’s not data on streams, it’s data on channels. There’s no reason for them to store data on streams.
Whether the can appeared has nothing to do with the content of the stream. The content is whatever activity is happening, not some irrelevant prop detail that has nothing to do with the content.
Save your outrage for something that’s worth it, this is a nothing burger.
Oh come on, you're reaching here. If the intention was to make a commentary on the personhood of AI, the FAQ would not have said, "the AI isn't watching your video", it would have said, "the AI lacks the ability to perceive reality in human terms."
I think we both know that an advertiser was not sitting down to write this thinking, "wait, holy crud the AI isn't watching the video... because it can't watch anything". Keep in mind the context that this is a corporate FAQ about an advertising campaign, not a philosophical essay about AI personhood.
> That’s not data on streams, it’s data on channels. [...] Whether the can appeared has nothing to do with the content of the stream.
What on earth are you talking about?
The visible content in the video stream is not the content in the stream because it's not important enough to the overall content of the stream, so that means this is all data on channels, even though the data is specifically relevant to individual streams and not to channels and even though all of the communication between the bot and the streamer is happening through the individual stream and not through the channel, and even though all of the policies are per-stream and not per-channel. Do I understand that correctly?
This is absurd.
> Save your outrage
I guess speaking of ambiguity of language on HN I should clarify that I'm not outraged at Mountain Dew, I'm mocking the company. I agree this is not a big issue largely because the advertising campaign itself is pathetic and meaningless and is probably going to be largely ignored by actual streamers.
This is a campaign that in the absence of compensation is offering streamers the ability to "supe" their followers via randomly selected 10-minute clips on the Mountain Dew Twitch channel. So agreed, this is not worth taking seriously.
But while it's not worth getting outraged over the Mountain Dew company debasing itself, attempts to excuse deceptive or outright inaccurate messaging about corporate data usage based on technicalities and strained excuses about what people "understand" about privacy is all too common in the current tech landscape and it's generally good to mock the companies that try to pull that crap and to call them out as scummy.
They could certainly be more clear about it.
But that would be the sensible way to do it.
In actuality the way they determine the participants is by doing object recognition on everyone's streams to try and figure out if a stream is already displaying Mountain Dew, and if it is then the bot sends spam messages to the streamers to ask them if they want to participate, and the only way streamers can opt out of all of that is "don't stream in the games category."
This has to be directly inspired by that "drink verification can" 4chan post.
https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/b4/2e/a1/779dd8d...
Flashback to the time I was getting approximately 50 Microsoft 2FA SMS's a day. The place I worked then had forced Chrome's homepage to be some crappy SharePoint page. Getting into that required logging into our Microsoft account, and the checkbox to remember our login for five days literally never worked.
So every time I opened a new tab in Chrome, I'd get a SMS. Truly, we are living in the future.
It’s not clear what the best security plan for that is (safety deposit box or fireproof safe seem like the best options).
And most people aren't even using a free password manager, there's no chance they're going to buy and configure a Yubikey.
Yes but, usually you are logged into your PC with the same account. So with SSO in Edge and Firefox, it would just log you in.
-wake up feeling sick after a late night of playing video games
-excited to play some halo 2k19
-"xbox on"
-...
-"XBOX ON"
-"Please verify that you are "annon332" by saying "Doritos™ Dew™ it right!"
-"Doritos™ Dew™ it right"
-"ERROR! Please drink a verification can"
-reach into my Doritos™ Mountain Dew™ Halo 2k19™ War Chest
-only a few cans left, needed to verify 14 times last night
-still feeling sick from the 14
-force it down and grumble out "mmmm that really hit the spot"
-xbox does nothing
-i attempt to smile
-"Connecting to verification server"
-...
-"Verification complete!"
-finally
-boot up halo 2k19
-finding multiplayer match...
-"ERROR! User attempting to steal online gameplay!"
-my mother just walked in the room
-"Adding another user to your pass, this will be charged to your credit card. Do you accept?"
-"NO!"
-"Console entering lock state!"
-"to unlock drink verification can"
-last can
-"WARNING, OUT OF VERIFICATION CANS, an order has been shipped and charged to your credit card"
-drink half the can, oh god im going to be sick
-pour the last half out the window
-"PIRACY DETECTED! PLEASE COMPLETE THIS ADVERTISEMENT TO CONTINUE"
-the mountain dew ad plays
-i have to dance for it
-feeling so sick
-makes me sing along
-dancing and singing
-"mountain dew is for me and you"
-throw up on my self
-throw up on my tv and entertainment system
-router shorts
-"ERROR NO CONNECTION! XBOX SHUTTING OFF"
-"PLEASE DRINK VERIFICATION CAN TO CONTINUE"
They do have your permission to run it, as soon as you start live streaming yourself you are giving anyone with the internet permission to access that data.
It's difficult to simply live life and never, ever be in a public space.
No one has to publicly stream on Twitch or other services. If someone wants to broadcast video but do it privately, there are ways to do that.
It might be a small stage for a small streamer, but turning that stream on still means you're getting up on a stage, and you are implicitly accepting that you'll be watched. It's a choice to put yourself out there.
There's 44 million US Twitch users, so basically you can show a message to 1/10th of the entire youth population of America. In 10 years there is probably some minor difference in society between whether that message was "go drink mountain dew" or "here's how DNA works" or something simpler, or more useful, or different things tailored by age, etc. Now if Amazon makes like 3 cents per ad (a number I made up) * 44 million users compounded by 7% annual interest over 10 years then that's 2.5 million dollars of profit. But money is a tiny slice of the entire pie of what is possible in an economy. If instead Amazon "donated" that 2.5 million dollars (actually more if 3 cents per ad is profit not revenue) by using its ad infrastructure to forcefully cram useful knowledge into the children instead of knowledge about a sugar drink brand, it's possible that everything that is possible in society 10 years from now would essentially make all the other money Amazon makes more valuable, because, for example, doctors that Amazon shareholders would want to go to would charge less because they indoctrinated a few more children into an interest in biology instead of Mountain Dew consumption so there was more doctors and less diabetics.
Will it be enough to offset 2.5+ million dollars? Probably not, but we don't have the technology to express that cost/benefit calculation, because the best we have is spreadsheets and demand/supply curves (if you will permit my derisive oversimplification of what economic tools business people use). We have developed computers and mathematics, as well as a system of assigning token counts to people and groups of people (money) that when people and groups of people work hard on increasing their respective token counts seems to correlate quite well with generally improving things and getting things we want. Numbers (bits really) are highly physically stable states and mathematics is operations we can perform of those states that are themselves very stable in time and predictable. We can measure things in the world and record those measurements into bits and then apply operations on those bits and we find that sometimes we're able to build computations that result in a strong correlation between the resulting state and physical reality. We're able to predict the future. However there's still a pretty huge mismatch with what we're able to easily express with simple mathematics on collections of bits and whatever our brains can do, which we experience as intuition/common sense and empathy.
Basically I'm saying it would take a strong willed person with the intuition to see that "if we use our mass population programming tools to increase the competence of our youth we will be better off than if we increase the consumption of Mountain Dew by 13% (or whatever they estimate)" because it's very difficult to truly express that comparison as a spreadsheet of dollar amounts, which is the primary technology businesses have for making decisions. Because a spreadsheet is a Turing machine and typing in data and programs into it is really time consuming whereas a human brain is a very different type of computer that processes input much more efficiently but is more fallible because other brains can't inspect its thought process, which is why we usually prefer spreadsheets.
I wouldn't be surprised if they kill it in part because it's asynch injection/infestation into what's part of the competitive differentiation of streaming vs recorded videos - live chat.
Too bad it's never going to happen, because selling healthy things to children is a lot harder than selling sugar water.
https://amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-do-you-do-fellow-kids
I am seeing more potential for downside than for upside for this campaign.