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Faintly obsessed with these ads I keep getting on Facebook. It's AI, but you have to watch a lot of the ad to be *convinced* it's AI - not just because it's visually convincing, but because the effort here is so out of proportion to the product it's hard to believe anyone would bother

Somebody has written a whole script about things being bad for bee colonies and a sad backstory ("Bev" could not save her husband "Col's" bees) and generated alarmingly lifelike scenes. You can just about believe it's real - until 'Bev' suddenly starts randomly speaking in an American accent.

The website tells us this is all being done by a company called Ecomcloud Trading LLP, which is registered in the UK but operates out of China. It is notorious online for selling stuff with these fake artisan stories.

Now, none of that is surprising in itself. What I do find bewildering is going to this much trouble just to sell some crappy ceramic flowers. At some point the economics has all gone to hell if producing AI ads this long and this elaborate is actually profitable.

There's a lot of obvious scam craft in these ads, sure, from the sad story to the appeal to save bees (who apparently drown in puddles of water?!) to the fake artisan angle. But it feels like an awfully long way to go for moving some crappy ceramic flowers you could get at the Reject Shop for $4.