Some members of the automotive press had been bamboozled by a Toyota press launch and accompanying convention final week. The story was that, so as to promote the corporate’s electrified choices, Toyota had launched an AI companion named Electra — an AI that instantly went off the rails and started speaking about Toyota’s hesitancy to embrace electrical automobiles.
The press launch, after all, was faux. The convention featured actual media members watching as actors performed out a script. The AI assistant was a ruse, however the message it delivered was very actual: Regardless of how a lot Toyota makes use of the time period “electrified,” its hybrids nonetheless burn fuel. However who, if not Toyota, was delivering that message?
That reply got here this previous weekend, when actors and activists The Sure Males posted a full video of the Toyota convention to their YouTube channel. The group later added the undertaking as a case examine on its web site, confirming that it was their very own creation.
Different teams have criticized Toyota’s “electrified” branding as deceptive, from EV homeowners teams to the Federal Commerce Fee. But, after I reached out to The Sure Males, the group claimed that no different events had been concerned on this effort:
I developed the thought for this undertaking after mates instructed me concerning the “electrified diversified” marketing campaign Toyota was operating. It felt like such a sick “newspeaky” advert technique, to actually redefine phrases, it was simply ripe for a brandalism takedown.
I requested concerning the social shares as effectively — posts that sprang up on Twitter and Reddit from person PersianCowboy — and was instructed that they had been utterly natural unfold. The person behind the account, Hooman Hedayati, was known as “a pal of a pal who works in labor organizing … Hooman posted a vid of it, not coordinated by us.”
It appears The Sure Males pulled off their stunt efficiently, convincing people each out and in of the media that this AI was really constructed by Toyota. Maybe a few of that believability comes from the stunt’s messaging — on some stage, everyone knows there’s an actual hole between “electrified” and “electrical.”
