City survey, dairy breakfasts, and AI influencers
Hello, all. Hope you are having a pleasant, if rather rainy, week.
First up this week: If you’re a Loyal resident, please consider taking the City of Loyal Comprehensive Planning Survey, which can be found at sur veymonkey.com/ r/Loyal2045 or by scanning the QR code on page 12. There are also hard copy surveys available at city hall or the public library.
The survey will help identify priorities for the city related to economic development, housing, land use, and other topics. Results of the survey will be used in formulating the city’s comprehensive plan. The city is long overdue for an updated comprehensive plan, as the last one was done in 2005. Perhaps most importantly, having an updated plan is a requirement in order to apply for various governmental grants.
Municipalities don’t always get the chance to gather formal feedback from their residents, so this is a great opportunity to make your voice heard and share openly what you think is going well for the city and what could be improved upon. It’s easy to complain, but that doesn’t accomplish anything. This is one way to provide constructive feedback.
Survey responses are due next week Friday, June 27, so don’t delay!
If you have any questions, contact city hall at 715-255-8772.
The city is working with the West Central Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission (WCWRPC), a seven-county planning agency serving western Wisconsin, to craft its comprehensive plan.
-I enjoyed attending the Loyal Dairy Breakfast on Sunday. The food tasted delicious and the soft serve ice cream was a nice change this year. Thank you to all the FFA members, FFA Alumni, 4-H members, other volunteers, and host family for making it a success. Dairy breakfasts tend to showcase the best of what our area has to offer: community, a sense of camaraderie, and hard work for a common goal. Remaining dairy breakfasts include: – Thorp – June 22, Bill and Bridget Ciolkosz Farm, N16329 Koser Ave., freewill donation, 7 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
– Colby – June 22, Verhoef Family Farm, 225703 Pecan Road, $6 per plate, 5 and under free, 7 a.m. to noon – Greenwood – June 29, Phil and Eliza Ruzic Farm, N9031 Sidney Ave., $8 adults, $5 ages 5-12, 4 and under free, 7 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Consider attending one of these if you haven’t yet, and experience farm life in Clark County.
- The march of AI (artificial intelligence) continues on. On Monday, TikTok announced that it had upgraded its AI ads platform called Symphony that it launched last year. Influencers will now have the option of using Symphony to create videos of avatars using products, such as modeling clothes or shoes, applying makeup, or displaying a brand’s app on a phone screen. The software also has the capability to use a photo and/or text prompt to generate a video.
These new AI ads are meant to mimic social media influencers’ sponsored content, also known as “sponcon,” in which an influencer is paid to promote a certain brand or product, but the products are meant to be incorporated naturally into what the influencer is doing. So for example, if they’re an outdoors enthusiast, they might use a certain brand of hiking boots or water bottle in exchange for the brand paying them so much to promote their product. Or the influencer might get a percentage of the profit if a viewer purchases the product through their affiliate link.
As Mia Sato reports for The Verge, AI-generated ads have the potential to radically transform out internet economy: “Some advertisers are moving slowly with AI-generated content or are even outright resistant to it. But the expansion of AI ads tools on TikTok signals that the platform, at least, is taking it seriously: why share TikTok Shop affiliate earnings with a thousand random creators when you could instead farm it out to a few virtual faces and bodies?… If all brands need to promote something is a body, what does it mean for the human influencers that the cheapest, fastest path with the least resistance is being pushed by the platforms they rely on for their income?”
TikTok, for its part, said all such ads will go through “multiple rounds of safety review” and will include a label indicating they are AI-generated. I guess it depends if you trust TikTok and other tech companies to be honest about their use of AI. Case in point: I’ve been browsing Pinterest quite a bit lately and have noticed how many images appear to be AI-generated. They are supposed to have a little note on the bottom indicating they are AI-generated, but there’s been at least a couple that sure look like they’ve been AI-generated without any label. Maybe they have just been Photoshopped really well. It’s hard to tell.
Anyway, there is a need to be cautious about this new technology and just, in general, to have a healthy distrust for anything you see on the internet. On the other hand, AI can have some really cool uses. I sat in on an hour-long meeting the other day that was recorded and an AI assistant generated a three-page summary of what was discussed in the meeting, including bullet-point action items. That could be a game-changer for a person like me who attends a lot of meetings. Don’t worry; I’m not going to have AI start writing my stories now. But it could be helpful to look back at the summary and get a sense of the most important points, bearing in mind that AI is not foolproof.
It will probably be equal parts fascinating and concerning to see how this technology continues to evolve.
- Quote for the week: “Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.” – William James
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