Not Wieden+Kennedy embraces humblebragging with AI-powered ‘Brag Bot’
The braggadocious chatbot was unveiled today as part of a campaign for the One Club for Creativity.
The Brag Bot is based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model. / Not Wieden+Kennedy
It’s a rare thing to scroll through social media these days and not encounter, in one form or another, a ‘humblebrag’: that is, a seemingly unpretentious and modest statement that’s actually celebrating – rather immodestly – one’s own qualities or achievements.
Most of us reflexively roll our eyes when we come across this kind of thinly disguised egotism. But now, Not Wieden+Kennedy – the marketing agency’s London-based design studio – is embracing the humblebrag phenomenon while simultaneously capitalizing on the cultural buzz that’s been rapidly growing around AI. This morning, the studio unveiled ’The One to Brag About,’ a campaign launched in partnership with the One Club for Creativity, the nonprofit that produces the annual One Show awards, encouraging shameless self-promotion from the award show’s winners, nominees, and everyone else.
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The campaign began when the One Show awards turned to Not W+K last year to “curate a fresh and creative visual identity for the upcoming One Show award season that went beyond design aesthetics,” according to a press release. “To do so, Not W+K leaned into the truth around awards: we aren’t comfortable bragging about them, but they’re certainly worth bragging about.”
The new campaign is centered on the ‘Brag Bot,’ a GPT-4-based chatbot whose sole function is to generate humblebrags. (They’re perhaps a little more dramatic than the ones that you’d typically encounter on Instagram, but they nonetheless capture the basic spirit.) There are two steps to generating a humblebrag using Brag Bot: first, choose a category of brag (such as ‘Rise-n-grind’ or ‘Dream job’), and second, select up to three styles of delivery (which include ‘Existential’ and ‘Pirate’).
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For example, I prompted Brag Bot to generate a ‘So busy’ humblebrag in the style of ‘Boomer’ and ‘Sarcastic.’ “I must say, I am simply swamped at the moment [embarrassed smiley face emoji],” it replied a few seconds later in a flat and robotic female voice. “The hustle and bustle of this modern world is quite overwhelming for an old-timer like myself. So many things to juggle. But fear not, my dear friend, I shall manage somehow.”
The Brag Bot can also be accessed by anyone who’s not involved with the upcoming One Show awards.
“We’ve all been guilty of humblebragging,” said Anika Ramani, director of branding and design at Not Wieden+Kennedy. “Everywhere we looked, people were posting about their achievements but doing their best to make it seem nonchalant. We wanted to flip this norm on its head, have people own the brag, help people who don’t know how to brag and give our industry a reason to celebrate.”
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