Users tell Instagram, ‘stop trying to make ‘authenticity’ happen’, we go behind the scenes of Spotify Wrapped 2022 and a new AI chatbot flexes its conversational skills

Instagram tests new authenticity inspired features

Instagram has turned into a caricature of authenticity as it tries harder to be real.

Literally and figuratively.

Back in September, it launched ‘Candid’ - an impromptu notification that gives users two minutes to take a candid photo  that is then shared on their stories. I.e. a not so candid copy of BeReal.

It’s now testing out even more BeReal-like features as it leans into the ‘authentic’ social media shift/tries to jump on BeReal’s popularity.

Here’s what it’s developing:
Roll Call: A feature would enable group chat members to request that all participants add a photo or video of themselves to the chat within 5 minutes.
Glimpse Stories: ‘A new type of story for sharing this moment’, as per Instagram, which lets users take a photo or short video with front and back cameras, that is shared with other people who add a glimpse story.

There’s clearly a demand for this kind of feature. BeReal won App of the Year in both the Apple and Google Users Choice category for 2022, and continues to experience an incredible number of downloads. People want more genuine, honest and raw communication within social media apps.

There’s just *one* elephant in the room. BeReal already fulfils the demand for that feature, having created it. So far from giving the people what they want, Instagram is putting the ‘IN’ ‘inauthentic’ by following traffic over truth and confusing the two in its marketing ploy.

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Spotify Wrapped 2022

Spotify Wrapped is the MET Gala of app events (*slight* exaggeration) and this year, we got a seat at the designer’s table.

To mark the release of this year’s Wrapped, Rasmus Wangelin, the company’s global head of Brand Design, spoke openly about what it takes to create what is now one of the biggest cultural moments of the year.

“Wrapped is a very user-centric campaign. It’s not about Spotify. It’s about the world of audio culture and our users. So the campaign organically becomes bigger the more our users and creators interact with it.”

And this year was dedicated to every single one of us, as individuals.

The brief that Rasmus and his team worked on was all about expressing the multiplicity and plurality of our personalities post-pandemic. The open-armed embrace of our individuality, however wild it looked. Plus as much fun and interactivity as possible.

“Monograms are really the heart of the campaign this year,” said Bruno Borges, the design director at Spotify who was in charge of bringing this year’s Wrapped identity to life.

“The idea here is that each one of these monograms combines layers with different characteristics. These different shapes are a visual reference to the diversity and variety in people’s listening habits. While the generous colour palette was a desire to make original articulations, so that no two would feel the same, but they will feel like they come from the same place.”

And the other important aspect of this year’s design direction was the motion design. All the shapes have their own motion language as well, further reflecting how uniquely every Spotify user was wrapped up and presented this year.

Cute. Read the full article to find out more about the design process.

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Introducing ChatGPT

The world is shooketh after an AI chatbot had surprisingly good chat.

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ChatGPT, created by leading AI research lab OpenAI, is the latest evolution of GPT text-generating AIs from the company. It’s a general purpose language model capable of understanding and generating human-like responses to a wide range of queries.
But unlike traditional search engines, which rely on keyword matching to provide results, ChatGPT uses a combination of advanced algorithms and artificial intelligence to understand the intent behind a user’s query.

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“We’ve trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests,” the company said in a statement on its release.

In the days since it was released, academics have generated responses to exam queries that they say would result in full marks if submitted by an undergraduate, and programmers have used the tool to solve coding challenges in obscure programming languages in a matter of seconds, prompting suggestions that the technology could completely replace jobs dependent upon content production.

CEO Sam Altman said the system was an early demo of what’s possible. “Soon you will be able to have helpful assistants that talk to you, answer questions, and give advice. Later you can have something that goes off and does tasks for you. Eventually you can have something that goes off and discovers new knowledge for you.”