Christopher Mims

to create advertisements.

Now, these are really simple advertisements.

This is like, you know, the little square ads that pop up on web pages that you're looking at.

And they just allow them to generate many more variants of, you know, snack foods that you would pair with ranch dressing because, believe it or not, Clorox owns Hidden Valley Ranch, which actually sells more every year than bottled ketchup.

Yeah, America's number one condiment.

Ads for it now powered by AI.

Yeah, they were early adopters of... I think they were using...

Microsoft's co-pilot system, which of course underneath is just ChatGPT, to be another voice in their brainstorming session.

So there's actually a fair amount of research on this.

If you ask business school students to come up with new business ideas, an individual paired with a chatbot is going to come up with more and better ideas than an individual on their own.

A team with a chatbot on the team, same thing.

So they were kind of just...

humans were brainstorming alongside the AI and the AI gave them this sort of unconventional idea by connecting a bunch of other data points they had of like, well, why don't we like bomb the toilet?

And they're just like, what?

This doesn't make any sense.

We're going to blow up the toilet.

But, you know, there had been a lot of chatter online.

People were playing with other similar products where it's like you drop a, it's like a bath bomb really is where the inspiration, you drop a thing in your toilet and it fizzes up and it feels like it's doing more work than just a conventional cleaning tablet.

Um,

So they attribute, you know, basically they're like, this is the first thing that we've ever made where AI really was a part of the genesis of this idea.