Tech-bro job titles / WTF are baddies / A social feed for games / Microdramas

So many bangers in this superb article. “Narrative engineer,” “UGC engineer,” “media engineer.” All the weird new job titles reflect underlying and underexamined gender dynamics in marketing work. AI is altering the perceived value of marketing. Tech bros used to “build real stuff,” while women typically did the (lower status) marketing. Now that anyone can “build real stuff” with AI? Not so much. Marketing titles are getting more butch in response. And this has happened before. “Software engineer” as a title was created by a woman at NASA, Margaret Hamilton, who wanted her work to be valued.

CharacterAI lets people chat with customized AI avatars. It is now also producing its own microdramas using AI characters that viewers can chat with and roleplay different story lines. Microdramas, minute-long video stories, are exploding and expected to earn billions of dollars this year. They gained popularity in China initially and this is their break-out year in the U.S. app market, according to Tech Crunch.

ResMed makes CPAP machines, and they are leaning into CPAP baddies for content. Baddies are influencers 2.0; they’re just people who use or produce your product. Maybe they only have OK teeth and hair. But the thing is: they are legit and they are what consumers, especially Gen Z consumers want to see in their marketing content.

If AI is making some jobs go away, it’s also increasing demand for other types of jobs. AEO marketing is experiencing robust growth. “AEO is separating from SEO the same way content marketing separated from copywriting a decade ago.” Salary ranges included FTW.

Thanks to AI, we can savor paragraphs like this: “Sanofi … is using its in-house AI agent developed with Claude Code and software from an AI start-up, Elementum, to reduce usage of ServiceNow IT management software.” OK, not too bad, but then Sanofi is also “set to use German software giant SAP more than it did in the past,” by “linking its AI agents to SAP’s own AI agents” to reduce outsourcing to India.

“Now you can search which terms lead people to your Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube content.” This will be rolling out gradually in the coming weeks.

Google has killed the mass production of slop. Their old approach analyzed individual pieces of content (a video). Their new AI-infused approach analyzes the behavior of networks of accounts that boost the content. Added bonus? They kill all of those guilty accounts. The new system avoids punishing individual creators who are experimenting with AI. Coordinated slop is the target here, whether generated or boosted by humans or bots. It reacts to coordination, velocity, and templating of content. It’s already working in the field: sites publishing AI pages at scale saw 50% to 80% drop-offs in their traffic. Nice!

They are also using Muse Image to “power advertiser-specific, image-generation tools,” which enables brands to adjust elements and create variations. Meta claims the tools will work more efficiently because they will be tailored to a specific brand’s creative.

Pocket is a platform to create, share, and discover vibe-coded games and apps, which they are calling “Gizmos.” “Gizmos respond to your touch and the tilt of your phone.” They can play sound effects and use your camera.

Microsoft is starting to use its own AI models in products like Excel and Outlook instead of paying OpenAI and Anthropic to use their models, to reduce costs. Microsoft’s AI models are already processing tens of thousands of AI prompts in its products. It gets a discount on OpenAI tokens thanks to its partnership with them, but that’s winding down. Microsoft unveiled 7 new AI models in June and says that one of them performs as well as Anthropic’s Opus 4.6.

If you have a photograph of a building, and you need a blueprint of that building, this website is worth a look.

OpenAI’s ad manager lets advertisers who want to hijack an organic search do that much more easily. Brands are responding by combining organic search with paid search, to drown out the conquesting competitors. This means the paid search now needs to work alongside the organic search content.

The move aims to improve integration of OpenAI’s products into its customers’ businesses.

“OpenAI wants the work once done by consultants.” Sorry consultants.

Keep the vibecoding alive in a browser or on a phone. An open computer is no longer required. “Scheduled tasks now run with no device online.”

I try to be selective when picking new model releases or model features to write up, because there are so many of them, and I don’t want to go crazy. If you want a much bigger list of new stuff that rolled out last week, this post has you covered.