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back to article Upstart AI dreams of 'disrupting' digital marketing – with sex

Silicon Valley machine-learning biz Sentient Technologies promises to bring the power of natural selection to marketing via AI, rather than digital marketers. The constant chopping and changing of web design can be a fiddly process. What’s the best font? What’s the perfect ratio of image to text? Where should the logo be? …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Didn't graphic design go through a lot of darwinian selection already?

    It looks to me the principles of good design already went through centuries if not millennia of selection, although so-called web designer often didn't know. Do we really need such algorithms to identify an ugly website?

    9 0 Reply
    1. Adrian 4
      Reply Icon

      Re: Didn't graphic design go through a lot of darwinian selection already?

      Are designers any more likely to respect an algorithm's opinion than a human user's one ?

      3 0 Reply
  2. Tony Haines

    terminology issue

    "Sentient Ascend uses the same concepts to “breed” together the individual changes in a design layout in a “million potential combinations across multiple pages” to determine which is best. Poor combinations don’t make it through the selection process."

    That's not sexual selection, that's natural selection.

    Sexual selection is specifically where members of one gender compete to be choosen as a mate by the other. It can lead to a positive feedback loop generating outlandish (and usually sexually diamorphic) traits. So it creates things like the peacock's tail - which arn't useful per se, but which are attractive to pea-hens. And Peahens like them because ... well, there are various contributory factors. One is the 'honest signalling' idea that if a peacock can survive in spite of carrying around such a burden then they must be good material. Another is that by mating with a big-tailed male, she can potentially produce sons with similar attractiveness to other peahens.

    In any case, it's probably not what you want, unless you want an attractive but unusable interface... oh hang, on, we're talking web services, right? Carry on.

    16 0 Reply
  3. Mage Silver badge

    Nielsen Group

    I wonder is it any use at all.

    Most of the usually excellent advice here gets ignored.

    https://www.nngroup.com

    Really the only reason it's hard is because websites are being designed purely for "pretty" or the pointy haired boss wanting one button. Most are worse than 10 years ago.

    This is "jargon" speak marketing. It's built by programmers meeting the goals of a marketing department.

    This is nonsense.

    9 0 Reply
    1. Crazy Operations Guy
      Reply Icon

      Re: Nielsen Group

      I've had the best luck just hiring middle-range web developers that have had about 10 years of experience in web design. Cheap and young developers tend to latch onto whatever the flavor-of-the-month technology is, or just play with some templates and slap it on top of WordPress or some other CMS system. The really old or expensive folk over-engineer things where suddenly a small website meant to sell a handful of items and serve up a couple docs is now powered by a globally-redundant Oracle cluster with an in-memory DB to improve performance, the front-end now runs on multiple cloud providers, there are analytic tools everywhere, and now the web management team is twice as big as the remainder of the IT department.

      I've worked with plenty of clients where they used some graphic design intern fresh out college to build their site, then a year later (once the platform they used was abandoned by the author maintaining it) they went with one of those huge design companies that've built sites for most of the Fortune 500. Millions of dollars later, they end up with a byzantine behemoth that only the company that built it could even make sense of how it all works.

      1 0 Reply
  4. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

    "Can I get that icon in cornflower blue?"

    2 0 Reply
  5. Jan 0 Silver badge
    Paris Hilton

    No sex please ...

    > "Sentient Ascend uses the same concepts to “breed” together the individual changes in a design layout in a “million potential combinations across multiple pages” to determine which is best."

    Ok, so they're using genetic algorithms. Been there, done that - the easy bit.

    > "Poor combinations don’t make it through the selection process."

    Ah, now there's the hard bit. Imagine you're using a genetic algorithm to generate a system to control the velocity and course of a payload so that it docks with the ISS in a specified time. It's a finite problem, you can exactly specify the starting conditions* and you can build a simulator that the selected programs can be tested on. After a lot of iterations, you'll start seeing programs emerge that can control the docking procedure. Given long enough, you may find that the selected programs can deal with a larger range of starting conditions, than the human generated programs that the ISS collaboration uses.

    However, in the case of website design, we don't know the right answer. There probably isn't one correct solution and we certainly don't know how to specify it and select for it. I'd guess that they've just coded a system that uses expert recommendations to generate the selection rules. As long as the experts are HCI experts rather than pointy haired bosses, the resulting website may be an improvement.

    So my guess is genetic algorithms selected by an expert system.

    The pointy haired boss will, of course love it, use it to generate a website, then use a team of developers to tweak it so that it "looks and feels right". Oh well, at least we keep our jobs until AI can replace the pointy haired bosses.

    *Newtonian physics and engineering data will suffice.

    Icon: let's leave sex to the experts.

    3 0 Reply
  6. Ole Juul

    They'll never figure it out.

    As usual, this is marketers talking to marketers. The rest of us live in a different world.

    5 0 Reply
    1. Crazy Operations Guy
      Reply Icon

      Re: They'll never figure it out.

      The problem is that while they struggle to figure anything out, we end up suffering.

      I can't even begin to count the number of websites where they changed the whole thing to look more modern, but broke every single one of my bookmarks. Or when websites change design to look cleaner, but actually wipe away all the useful information, especially getting rid of legacy products. Or when they try to be all slick and add unwanted features but end up tacking on dozens and dozens of third-party domains' JavaShit (bonus points for layouts that require some random third-party script so as to not be a blank page).

      1 0 Reply
  7. Colin Millar

    Basic misunderstanding of evolution (again)

    "The strongest and fittest"

    Strongest - definitely not - physical strength as an overriding concern comes with many evolutionary downsides - not the least of which is a relatively high calorific intake requirement.

    Fittest - not in terms of health or physical fitness - merely in terms of reproductive success. It doesn't signify fitness for anything else.

    I beleive the actual Darwinian idea is expressed as "Survival of the form that will leave the most copies of itself in successive generations"

    So - the web will end up full of - porn, gambling and online tat emporiums - ooh - looks like this lot are too late.

    3 0 Reply
  8. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    Megaphone

    "the power of evolutionary algorithms"

    Alert ! We have a new entry in the Bullshit Bingo database !

    All players revise your cards.

    3 0 Reply
    1. ecofeco Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: "the power of evolutionary algorithms"

      Damn! I was one square away from winning that small kitchen appliance I wanted!

      1 0 Reply
    2. Crazy Operations Guy
      Reply Icon

      Re: "the power of evolutionary algorithms"

      What do we win? Is it some kind of IoT-enabled cloud-based augmented-reality wearables I've heard are disrupting the sharing-economy recently?

      2 0 Reply
  9. cortland

    That borders on

    Sects, all right.

    1 1 Reply

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