Duolingo Peacock Wins April Fools; Musk AI Pause, Microsoft Bing Ads Not As Funny

Although April Fools’ isn’t until Saturday, brands are already yukking it up with the funniest day of the year.

Duolingo, the language app, which recently announced a GPT-4 Duolingo Max subscription, just released its April Fools’ ad.

The company is promoting a co-branded series with the streaming network Peacock called “Love Language,” a reality dating show where ten of the “hottest singles in the world” meet up in paradise to find true love. The catch: none of them speak the same language.

“I don’t understand a word he’s saying, but it’s so hot!,” says Love is Blind’s Francesca Farago in the hilarious trailer.

Contestants are challenged to do daily language lessons or face the consequences of a merciless Duolingo Owl who is knocking off contestants one-by-one.

“Not a real show,” a company spokesperson said, at least not yet.

The car insurance-loan app, Jerry, has also released its own fake ad hyping CarSmell, an AI-powered feature that delivers new car smell to users throughout their ride.

“If there’s one thing America can agree on, is that the new car smell is totally intoxicating. There’s just nothing like it. And sure, after the smell fades away, you can buy those little trees that hang from your rear-view mirror in some sort of desperate attempt to keep the magic alive. But we all know it’s not the same. At Jerry we decided to do something about that,” the fake ad hypes. “That’s why today we’re proud to announce our app’s newest feature: CarSmell. Now when you open the Jerry app, you’ll get a strong whiff of that new car smell that drives us all crazy.”

More fake ads from Tinder, Tic Tac, Welch’s Fruit Snacks, Pizza Hut and Little Caesars Pizza.

Not funny

The jokes come amid a week in which more than 1300 AI luminaries, including Tesla’s Elon Musk and Apple’s Steve Wozniak, have signed a Future of Life Institute petition asking for a six-month pause in generative AI development — basically to give them a chance to catch up. Not a joke.

“We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4,” the blog post said, citing the danger of “AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control.”

Anyone who has seen the Pope in a puffer jacket would know the genie is already out of the bottle. And thanks to generative AI tools like Midjourney, it’s getting harder to tell what’s real and not – but there’s no stopping technology.

Having spent billions on OpenAI’s development of tools, Microsoft is charging full speed ahead adding Bing ads onto its GPT-4 chat search. Bing chat now has more than 100 million daily active users and 100 million chats, according to the company. Former Google search engineer Debarghya “Deedy” Das tweeted a Bing ad he saw while searching for the cheapest Honda car. I’ll miss these early beta days of ChatGPT and Google Bard innocently making recommendations without shilling products that they were paid to sell.

But Musk is one to talk. Setting Twitter users up for a wild April Fools day, he plans to delete legacy verifications on Saturday. Brace for chaos. The last time this was attempted in November, fake accounts ran amok including one with a fake Eli Lilly tweeting about free insulin which caused the stock to crash. Stay tuned.