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When OpenAI announced earlier this week that image generation was now directly available within ChatGPT, a lot of the initial examples used advertising to show how it works. Powered by OpenAIs flagship multimodal model GPT-4o, the updated chatbot can now create visuals straight from its chat interface. Turbo Design founder Shane Devine posted an image of his prompt asking the platform to turn a generic office scene into a McDonalds ad. His reaction to the results: Were cooked. We are cooked pic.twitter.com/LfWizvSEoh— Shane Levine (@theShaneLevine) March 26, 2025 Other examples floating around in reaction hypothesized how the new tool would replace traditional photoshoots. Much like Levines comment, the mood appeared to be yet another sign of death at the door of traditional advertising creatives. Is it the future of all banner ads and bus shelter posters? If that McDonalds spec ad is any indication, weve still got a long way to go. For Fast Companys Brand New World podcast, Ive been talking to creatives, ad agency execs, and CMOs about the impacts of, and strategies around Gen AI tools. They all focus on the utility of these tools to help humans, not replace them. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Evolving AI (@evolving.ai) Even for its own Super Bowl ad, OpenAI only used Sora as a concepting tool. CMO Kate Rouch told me at the time, Because we made this on a pretty compressed timeline, it really helped the creatives prototype, experiment with camera angles, and things like that, all to speed up the process. Deepthi Prakash, Omnicom Advertising Group COO, says this latest update is a really valuable integration, allowing for a more conversational experience, and a more natural sparring partner to help identify insights and translate them to visual ideas. The quality of the visuals isnt at par with the best specialized technologies out there, she says. But its certainly good enough for a strategist or a business leader to help develop and communicate concepts and ideas. Omnicom-owned agency network TBWA announced its CollectiveAI platform last June. Integrating platforms like ChatGPT, as well as others from Google, Adobe, Microsoft, and more. Its tools are trained on the company’s past work to create social content and brand materials for clients, among other things. For Prakash, this new update simply improves their existing quiver. This doesnt really change things for us, she says. But hopefully, it accelerates the development of tools that are designed not just for specific tasks, but for entire workflows so that AI moves from being a set of tools to being a real partner in the creative process. Omid Farhang is the founder and CEO of award-winning independent ad agency Majority. He says this new update feels like the first time he ever watched Netflix on his phone. A moment that I knew for sure was coming yet still couldnt help feeling utterly dazzled that its here, says Farhang. Far from the existential dread expressed in some of the social media reactions to the new update, Farhang sees profound opportunity especially for smaller creative firms. It feels like for the first time ever, being a small, young company is a competitive advantage, he says. Because we have no legacy departments and antiquated processes to undo; we can harness AI with less fear, more nimbleness. More malleability. More playfulness. More audacity. Farhang advises any creative professional to embrace any and all the new AI tools. Since the dawn of man, every generation operates under the delusion that theyve hit the height of human potential, until an innovation emerges that reminds us we are perpetually the chrysalis, never the butterfly, says Farhang. All this chatter, speculation, daydreaming and resistance about AI are shrieks from the cocoon.
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Donald Trumps return to office has bolstered a wave of apps. Bluesky spiked in November; Signal is seeing renewed attention. Niche dating apps are also raking in new usersboth from the right and left. Americans are dating across party lines less and less. In 2020, 71% of Democrats told the Pew Research Center they wouldnt date a Trump voter. Most also agree that cross-party dating is getting harder. App developers have seized the moment, creating new spaces for singles to connect within their political circles. But those efforts look different depending on which side of the aisle you gravitate toward. The MAGA movement has long flirted with its own dating appsnow one is gaining traction with hundreds of thousands of downloads and backing from Peter Thiel. On the left, attempts to build a liberal-only space havent taken off. Instead, progressive dating apps often feel more like a reaction born of resistance or fear. The right-wing dating apps resurgence Leading the pack among right-wing apps is Date Right Stuff, cofounded by former Trump staffer John McEntee and backed by $1.5 billion from Thiel. The apps 2022 launch was rocky, marked by few downloads and plenty of controversyincluding allegations that the FBI visited users who answered a prompt about the January 6 insurrection. One user, 18-year-old Grace Carter, told Wired that McEntee sent her uncomfortable messages via the apps Instagram. But since Trumps inauguration, interest has surged. In a recent interview with Andrew Zucker on the Golden Age podcast, chief marketing officer Raquel Debono said the app has now surpassed 400,000 downloads. Like Tinder and Hinge, Date Right Stuff is expanding into live eventsit recently hosted a Make America Hot Again party at Trump Towerand into platonic matchmaking. Sort of like a Bumble BFF, but with your right-wing BFF, your person to talk politics with, Debono explained. Security is also top of mind. Face ID verification is coming soon to make sure everyone is exactly who they say they are, Debono wrote in an email to Fast Company. Its all about meeting people who share your values, get your sense of humor, and let you be unapologetically yourself. Whether Date Right Stuff has staying power is another question. Back in 2018, Gaby Del Valle wrote about the rise of right-wing dating apps for Vox. Every app mentionedRighter, Conservatives Only, Donald Daters, Patriohas since disappeared. Where do all the liberals go? Sex and dating quickly became political flashpoints after Trumps first election. Some liberals refused to match with anyone who identified as Moderate on Hinge. Others looked to Koreas 4B movement, where women pledged to abstain from dating and sex altogether. But unlike the right, the left hasnt coalesced around a dating enclave, despite the fact that dating apps, in general, have long skewed liberal. According to a 2006 Pew study, online daters were more likely to express liberal social beliefs. But platforms explicitly designated for progressive users like Lefty and TruuBlue haven’t gained traction. Then theres the rise of fake dating. Lavender marriages (unions between LGBTQ+ individuals to mask their identities) have gone viral on TikTok in the wake of Trumps return to the White House. More queer daters are now seeking relationships rooted in political safety over attraction. In a grim twist, theres an app for that. Jeremy Del Zotto created Gen We, and recently launched a Lavender Marriages community on the app. The announcement video has racked up more than 500,000 views. In a recent update, Del Zotto said Gen We had thousands of downloads within weeks.
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E-Commerce
When Michael White struck out on his own after stints at DoorDash and Square, his plan was to help tech employees access the value of their equity while their companies were still private. But as White and his cofounder Gautam Gupta enabled workers to get a line of credit, they found that most people were using it to finance a home purchase. It makes sense, White says. That’s a big reason people seek liquidityor that’s one of the first things that people do if they have an exit. So it really led us to dive deeper into that and ultimately pivot. In 2024, White and Gupta relaunched their company Multiply Mortgage as an employee benefit that helps aspiring homeowners secure a mortgage. The company is licensed to originate mortgage loans in 19 states and works with mortgage brokers in nearly every other state. Through Multiply, workers can access expert advisors and discounted mortgage interest ratesand more recently, the company has also expanded to include more comprehensive education resources about financial wellness. For now, the benefit will remain a free service for employers, owing to Multiplys business model in which the company earns a commission on mortgage origination from all of its lender partners. (White does, however, note that the company might start charging companies down the road, as we build out more of the value that we’re providing companies.) Working with employers also gives Multiply a built-in pool of potential customers and lowers the steep cost of customer acquisition across the mortgage industry. Beyond that, building an AI-powered platform has enabled Multiply to reduce its labor costs while continuing to bolster crucial elements of the business; the company recently closed a $23.5 million Series A round led by Kleiner Perkins that will go toward getting its product in front of more workers and improving on its personalized services. We’re not building a self-serve mortgage, White says. For as complicated and stressful as this transaction can be, having a really high level of client service can make it go a lot more smoothly. So we’re really investing heavily in our team of mortgage advisors. In the past decade, companies have started offering workplace benefits that help support employees through various personal experiences, from fertility treatments to mental health support and menopause-related care. At the moment, many benefits managers and HR teams are daunted by the rising costs of healthcare, not to mention the overwhelming number of niche employee benefits now on the market. If medical insurance is going to consume basically all of your budget, companies have to make some pretty hard choices in other places, White says. Multiplys pitch to companies like Rampthe booming fintech startup that is one of its customersis certainly appealing from a financial perspective, but the return-to-office movement has also created an environment in which some employers are looking for ways to lure their workers back to the office or court prospective employees. Another buzzy tech startup is currently using Multiply in part because its employees are expected to relocate to cities that are not traditional tech hubs. “They are in the process of building out those teams with engineers that wouldn’t typically live in those places,” White says. “So what we’ve seen them doing with us is including us in their recruiting materials and really highlighting how this might not have been where you were otherwise going to livebut look at the quality of life that you can have. Look at what you’re able to afford from a home perspective; you can buy a home here, and here’s a resource that you can use to make that even more attainable. Some fully remote employers, on the other hand, are offering Multiplys services because of the geographic range the platform promises. The fact that we can help their employees in Michigan just as well as we can help their employees in California makes a big difference for them, White says. Companies have also found that providing Multiply as an employee benefit has encouraged some people to consider buying a home even if they previously assumed it was out of reachor, at a minimum, use the service to evaluate their options. “One thing that’s been really cool is how much employees are just exploring what homeownership could look like for them, evaluating how much they could afford [and] renting versus buying,” White says. “They’re able to take advantage of this resource, as well. They have unlimited access to those advisors.” For some clients, the lower interest rates they secured through Multiplywhich can be discounted by up to 0.75% and save them an average of $5,100 annuallyhave made all the difference in terms of being able to afford home ownership. Like other players in the workplace-benefits space, White also makes the case that may be most appealing to companies and HR teams who are sifting through a dizzying array of potential offerings. Going through a divorce or buying a home can be a lengthy, emotionally taxing experience, one that inevitably bleeds into the workplace. “If you know what to expect and you know how to adequately prepare for it, you can take a lot of the stress out of the processwhich is great from the company’s perspective,” White says. “If you have this big thing happening outside of work that’s stressful and distracting, then that’s going to degrade performance at work.”
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