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Honda says its refreshed H logo represents a second founding for the company. Honda 2.0, then, is designed to look like it’s from the future. The Japanese automaker announced on January 13 that it’s adopting a new logo across its automobile business. The company has had some sort of an H mark since 1963, and its new mark is wider than its last, with stems that slant outward as they move upward. The logo is now freed from being inside a frame, and Honda compares it to “two outstretched hands.” It’s meant to evoke a shape, not just a letter. From left: Hondas previous logo; the new version [Images: Honda] As the automotive industry electrifies and upgrades its tech, automakers including Audi, Kia, and Tesla have turned to design tropes from 1980s science fiction to make their logos look futuristic, with stenciled, wide letters that evoke the typography of films like Bladerunner and Back to the Future II. Other brands, such as BMW, Mazda, and VW, have gone flat. All in all, these changes signal a great rebranding during a pivotal moment for the industry. [Photo: Honda] Honda now joins the sweep of rebrands with a logo that wouldn’t look out of place on the outside of a spaceship or worn as a communication badge by an alien admiral in a sci-fi film. It’s a clean, simple mark that’s versatile enough to work well at small scales, on digital screens, in a single color, or as a car badge. Honda first unveiled the mark in 2024 in dramatic fashion. It launched at that year’s Consumer Electronics Show on a pair of Honda 0 Series concept carsthe Saloon and Space-Hubthat look like they were built for the 2025 movie Tron: Ares and NASA’s Artemis mission to the moon, respectively. [Image: Honda] The company announced on January 13 that the mark seen on those concept cars will now be used as the symbol to represent the business. It will appear across touchpoints such as dealership locations, communication initiatives, and motorsports events. Next year, it will finally begin appearing on Honda EVs and hybrid-electric vehicles. This is a future-forward rebrand that’s years in the making. “The automobile market is currently undergoing a major transformation with electrification and application of intelligent technologies,” Honda said in a statement. “The new H mark will represent the ‘second founding,’ which Honda is pursuing with strong determination to lead the way.” Known for models like the Accord, Civic, and CR-V, Honda is a brand associated with affordability and value. With its sci-fi-ready new logo, though, the company is aiming for a brand identity that drivers will soon associate with traits like transformation and advancement.
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E-Commerce
A new mandatory safety feature requires Roblox users in the U.S. to submit to facial age estimation via the app to access its chat feature. The online gaming platform announced it was implementing the system to prevent children younger than 16 from communicating with adults. About 42% of Roblox users are younger than 13. But a cursory scroll on eBay found that various listings of age-verified Roblox accounts are available for purchase, some for as little as $2.99. This allows the purchaser to sign in to the account without having to use any ID or facial scan, voiding the new safety feature Roblox has implemented. The description of one listing (since removed) read: The product is an Age Verified Roblox account for users between the ages of 13-15. This account comes with chat unlocked, allowing users to communicate with other players aged 9-17. After Wired flagged the listings in a recent report, eBay said the company was removing them for violating the site’s policies. At the time of this writing, Fast Company found 27 results when searching for Roblox age verified account. Thats not the only problem Roblox is contending with. The system has also had trouble correctly estimating users ages, mislabeling some adults as children and vice versa. One X user wrote that their 10-year-old brother was misidentified as a 16- to 17-year-old. The replies are full of others sharing similar stories. I have a full ass beard and it put my alt on a 13-16 age range, one responded to the post. I’m 23 (nearly 24) and it’s forced me as a 16-17 year old, another wrote. Another X user posted a video of them circumventing the age verification using a 3D animated avatar, which Roblox’s system identified as over 18. Another user, somewhat unbelievably, fooled the system into thinking he was over the age of 21 by drawing on facial hair with a marker. At present, nearly 80 active lawsuits accuse Roblox of enabling child exploitation, with some parents alleging their children encountered predators on the app. A Roblox spokesperson told Fast Company: Were excited to see that tens of millions of users have already completed the process, proving that the vast majority of our community values a safer, more age-appropriate environment. To roll this out to a global community of over 150 million daily active users is a huge undertaking and were working to smooth out the transition.” Roblox has previously put out statements saying the company is constantly evaluating user behavior to determine if someone is significantly older or younger than expected. In these situations, we will soon begin asking users to repeat the age-check process. Last week the company also became aware of instances where parents age check on behalf of their children, leading to kids being aged to 21+.
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E-Commerce
Imagine youre talking to someone and they suddenly start to add advertising to the exchange. What might that look like? In a 1965 episode of the classic sitcom I Dream of Jeannie, the protagonist uses her magical powers to create fake parents for herself in order to impress a date. She crafts them to be just like the people on television commercials, making them speak using sentences from commercials. Her synthetic parents appear friendly and normaluntil they start talking, reciting ads verbatim for products like streak-away for gray hair, dish soap, Grippo denture adhesive, and deodorant. They have so much to say, yet communicate nothing at all. Something similar might happen if OpenAI goes forward with its rumored plans to add advertising to ChatGPT. Last December, an article in Futurism, citing internal sources at OpenAI, suggested ad adoption could be near. Recently, The Information reported that the company is hiring digital advertising veterans and that it will install a secondary model capable of evaluating if a conversation has commercial intent, before offering up relevant ads in the chat responses. Annoying ads within ChatGPT could be for things as banal as a grocery product, a local destination to visit, or a handyman service. But they could also be a lot of something elsesomething dangerous. Given ChatGPTs track record, some poor soul might be pouring their heart out to the chatbot, only to be advised of a special on rope at their local hardware store. Im not making light of the latterIt could happen. There cant be true oversight with LLMs. And thats only one of their problems. Context is the Holy Grail OpenAIs advertising move is a bold and brilliant, but potentially terrible, crude attempt to automate contextual understanding, a missing link with the push toward combining big data and surveillance. For a long time, newspapers and radio stations were local and distributed. As transportation connected us and technology improved, the opportunity to distribute more centralized news from single, larger sources became possible. Television began with a few channels and concentrated programming that was the same across broad regions. This ushered in a heyday for advertisers who sponsored TV content and could show single ads to millions of viewers. As a distributed technology, the internet disrupted many forms of traditional media, and advertisers have been scrambling to try to reach us in new ways. While technology has enabled advertisers to benefit from our location in an attempt to hone in on what might appeal to us, internet ads are often not contextually relevant to what we want or need. What OpenAI intends to do with advertising, via ChatGPTs self-reported 900 million weekly users, will synthesize the local distributed model. This will enable the platform to reach into our homes in the same way that mass television once possessed. Its an attempt to unify and bypass the interfaces of phones and computers that we currentlyuse. In the process, OpenAI willbe creating a super platform for informational use and processing. The algorithms dont know us Within its current platform, ChatGPT offers a conversational medium of interaction and query; each chat captures how we use language, more detailed descriptions of the problems we seek to solve, and many of our needs. Thus, the opportunity for OpenAI to have platform control, along with access to our inner thoughts, all with the surveillance capability to compile these into targeted individual ads, is the ultimate goal for advertisers: to really reach us, deep inside our thoughts. However, this outcome is unlikely. The problem with this model is that it still relies on computational compiling and sorting. The algorithms wont know us, or form relationships with us. Because of that, they cant actually recommend true advertising solutions to our problemsjust like these algorithms cant solve our problems now. But their results can mimic helpfulness, just like Jeannies synthetic parents. While collecting and compiling our online data has brought advertisers closer to knowing what they think we need, what has been missing is an understanding of the context of what these actions mean to us. Qualitative research, which helps to discover the how, why, and what of interaction, has been pushed aside through the rush to embrace big data. The LLMs that feed chatbots are not magical: They are algorithms that statistically match words and rank them from sources that the model was trained on. An LLM listening to our conversations will not “understand” context as human qualitative researchers can. Thus, the ads that ChatGPT will suggest from our conversations may seem like a match, but they’re unlikely to offer anything contextually substantial.Another idea OpenAI suggests is that sponsored results could get preferential treatment. Subscribers might get better matching ads, but, again, because this is all based on word matching, it may not matter much. (It hasnt been revealed if there will be an option to avoid such advertising completely.) The trust is an illusion An OpenAI spokesperson told The Information: People have a trusted relationship with ChatGPT, and any approach would be designed to respect that trust. But theres a big difference between having a social relationship with someone and having a trusted social relationship. Many of us are trained to fill in social gaps when we interact with others who are trying to communicate with us. In that context, we may project sociabilityand, thus, trustonto them. By seeming to respond to us with a point of view and a chat style that feels personal, ChatGPT perpetuates that illusion of sociability and trust. By leveraging our innate social behaviors, ChatGPT also leverages that behavioral goodwill. But that sociability and trust is in our heads. It isnt realits just an algorithm. ChatGPT is merely a way for OpenAIs LLM outcomes to be presented to us. Is it trusted and social to siphon peoples knowledge and work to train a model? If OpenAI were a person, wed say no, pointing out how thats akin to a sociopath stealing our ideas and work and presenting them to others. But because we converse with ChatGPT, we project a trust upon it that it cant earn because it is not human. OpenAI adding advertising to ChatGPT seems like an inevitability. If we use this tool, we need to remember that we cannot form bonds to it, that it cannot have a relationship with us, and that all it can do is word atch. Any ad it serves us will be based on what we tell it, but it can’t “think” about all we tell it and propose an ad that speaks explicitly to us as a trusted friend who knows us would do. It is best to keep that in mind as these tools evolve to seemingly understand us. OpenAI as a company could try to earn its customers’ trust by discovering what its customers want and need using qualitative research rather than foisting its advertising decisions upon us. Even so, the idea that this advertising model will scale and deliver contextually relevant advertising to 900 million weekly users seems unrealistic. Context, especially driven through LLMs that already have issues with slop, hallucinations, and outright lies, can be a challenging match for advertisers, who need reliable recommendations to keep the integrity of their brands and reputations. Without trust formed between entities, were all at risk of being played: OpenAI, who believes their algorithms will deliver what they promise, the advertisers who trust that their ads will accurately match the users context and interest, and those who use ChatGPT, a service they trust that, in fact, seems intent upon using them for revenue instead.
Category:
E-Commerce
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