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Yet another friend with a child turning 16 next week. Hasn’t gotten a learner’s permit. Zero interest in a driver’s license. I keep hearing this same story. What’s WRONG with these kids?!?! On my 16th birthday, my mom took me out of school to take my driving test. Same for everyone I knew. Even if you couldn’t afford your own car, you could beg the use of the family station wagon occasionally. Freedom. Independence. Heck, privacy on a date! Are these kids giving all that up for scrolling TikTok and an occasional Uber?

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Something have been noticing a lot in Latin America recently is the proliferation of AI-generated advertising, specifically ChatGPT-aesthetic style posters. Lots of people using these. Low effort to create and they look ‘Good Enough’. Explanation is probably that now the average person in these countries knows how to use AI at a basic level it just makes more sense to produce advertising like this then to spend the time and money creating more professional and / or creative marketing You might say “well it looks a bit tacky aren’t you embarrassed why would you use them?” My intuition is that to most people - and especially if you’re from a poorer background living adjacent a favela all your life - it probably looks fine. Called this the ‘Coca Cola Effect’ before - ie that most people will opt for the most easily accessible, nice or ‘Good Enough’ ‘thing’ in a given context. ‘Coca Cola Effect’ so-called since people in the third world drink a lot of Coca Cola because it ‘tastes nicer’ than water and healthier drinks are generally both an effort to procure and ‘taste worse’, if people are even conceptually at a point where they care about their health like that - or here, ‘good taste’ Feel like AI posters in general are not something that has been around much longer than a year in LATAM and anecdotally it seems like both this specific ChatGPT-style poster and AI poster proliferation in general have increased in recent months. Your mileage may vary. Qualification is on the older AI posters you would see eg more ‘Studio Ghibli’-style imagery. Suspicion is specific AI poster aesthetic trends will be downstream of online trends by about three - six months in this way Effect is most jarring when you pass by a part of a town or a city that is visibly poorer, you know where the building facades have peeling paint and cracked plaster and unfinished brick and electric wire fences. You head into a shop that smells of rotting fruit to buy a drink and there’s a poster of Erling Haaland in ‘Oil Painting Style’ chugging a Coca Cola and a little ChatGPT tickbox below him that says ‘Refresh. Hydrate. Energise’ AI proliferation isn’t just in advertising either. In terms of public spaces have talked before about how you hear a lot of AI music here (have heard it across multiple countries), frequently in English too. Just the most AI-written sounding lyrics being pumped out, again, in dilapidated corner shops at the edge of a favela: “You’re the password to my heart, The charging cable from the start, The Wi-Fi signal of my soul, The thing that makes my spirit whole. Sometimes I think about your hair, And then I think about it more. And when I am not thinking about your hair, I wonder what I was thinking for. Imagine the smell. Yeah. Imagine the smell. The moon is round, the Earth is too, At least from certain points of view. And every scientific fact I know Somehow reminds me of you.” Nonsense like that when you enter a shop, right after you walk past the big ChatGPT poster at the entrance of the cheating ‘brainrot’ reel strawberry woman advertising condoms My sense is this does represent a genuine evolution of classic Third World aesthetics. So before you might see a ramshackle old local shop with a red Coca Cola board on it that said ‘Very Reliable Shop’, and there were some posters on the side of the drinks and food they sold, oreos or fanta or whatever. If you went very local they might also have painted pictures of their products on their walls. Or just of a cute dog or something. Now you maybe instead see that all switched out for ChatGPT posters I will say I don’t even think this is an invalid new cultural expression, it is a very authentic kind of inauthenticity in a way

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