The Demise of April Fool's Day, Italy Bans English and a Journey Inside a Brazilian Favela

Discovering the Future Normal in a Favela and Museum in Rio

I spent last weekend on a memorable tour through Rio having two experiences that I didn't expect would have much in common. One was a visit to the first and most successful program teaching kids about gaming and development inside a favela. The other was to the world renowned Museu do Amanha (Museum of Tomorrow) in Rio. Read my recap of the experience in this LinkedIn article >>

The Death of the Branded April Fool's Day Joke Tradition

This past week included April Fools Day, which is usually my second favorite marketing day of the year after the Super Bowl. In past years, there have been so many delightful pranks from brands and I can recall spending hours just browsing through them all. This year was different. At least one publication suggests that the press is now avoiding covering pranks, and people in general are getting more skeptical of every slightly fantastical story thanks to the current explosion of AI generated content.

The truth is, branded pranks have been suffering from consumer skepticism for years. There is a thin line between a viral joke and fake news. Every hoax, even when intended as humor, has the potential to erode even more faith in the truth. So we may indeed see an erosion of this particular tradition ... at least in the short term.

This German Tattoo Can Save Lives, By Indicating You're An Organ Donor

How do you ensure the right people know you're willing to donate organs if the unthinkable happens? Organ donation awareness organization Junge Helden worked with ad agency McCann in Germany to imagine a novel way to let people know your intentions with a tattoo that officially recognizes someone as an organ and tissue donor. The design was created to be easy for tattoo parlors to ink, and participating shops have agreed to do it for free.

The idea is perfectly suited for Germany, a country where an estimated quarter of the population already has tattoos. It also has the potentially powerful side effect of creating more conversation around this difficult and sometimes morbid topic. Not to mention a source of pride among those who make this choice to help someone else even after their death.

After Banning Chat GPT, Italy Goes On To Ban the English Language

According to the Italian political party led by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the spread of English "demeans and mortifies the Italian language and has negative repercussions for society as a whole." So just a day after they became the first Western nation to ban the usage of Chat GPT, the government is also considering a ban on English in all formal communications as a way to protect the Italian cultural identity and language. The proposal has attracted a wide share of criticism, but here's a non-obvious question: what if it works?

The spread of English has undeniably had a negative impact on the survival of languages across the globe. While Italian isn't considered a an endangered language, the desire to protect it by any means necessary isn't hard to understand. Requiring formal communications from the government and corporations to be in Italian could help to do that. Or perhaps it's just another short-sighted and fear-based policy from small-minded politicians. What do you think? Just hit reply and let me know.

Wikipedia May Soon Be Written By AI ... and No One Is Sure If It's A Good Idea

Five years ago Google launched an experimental project to have artificial intelligence write new articles for Wikipedia. As one reviewer noted, the results were "not even comparable to those written by people." It was perhaps inevitable that this idea would come back around and according to new reports, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is now thinking about how AI could help the online encyclopedia to continue to grow and evolve.

If AI does help build humanity's knowledge base, we will have to find a way to solve the current "AI hallucination" problem where generative AI tools tend to just make up plausible sounding sources or fabricate "facts" that are completely wrong. Logically, it makes sense. If you ask a tool built for making up sentences on the spot to cite it's sources, of course those sources would be made up as well. I would, however, love to read the edit history of a debate between a grouchy self-important "Wikipedian" editor and an AI tool trying to get its page updates approved.