This is a maker biz article, for people in our industry that do marketing, or as I call it when it’s, well, good… “good information is advertising”. I recently saw a reel on JLCPCB’s Instagram: a fully scripted AI avatar giving advice about SMT assembly. I debated whether to write about it, and then remembered – no one is forcing anyone to read this. If someone does not want to think about what this means for tutorials, how-tos, marketing, and all the other work that goes into running an electronics business in addition to designing hardware….skip this article! Nobody is forcing you to read it!
We get pitched a “virtual Ladyada” every single day by AI companies proposing exactly this kind of thing. The reason we have not done it is not because I have to deal with the same jerks online harassing her, me, or our team for even discussing this stuff in the open. We are not doing this at Adafruit at this time (but not because of said jerks).
Anyway, the first 10 seconds of the reel from JLCPCB is above, and the transcript, I used Trint, is below:
When doing SMT assembly, did you check the orientation of capacitors and inductors? If you think, “just mount them any which way, it’s all the same,” then you’re in for trouble. That board could be headed straight for the scrap pile. Let me teach you an easy way to identify component polarity. Tantalum capacitors. Look for the positive markers on both the PCB and the component. A color band, a plus sign, or a beveled edge. Match the component’s color band to the PCB’s color band. Match the component bevel to the PCB’s plus sign. Match the component’s plus sign to the PCB’s plus sign. 2. Aluminum electrolytic capacitors. These are the opposite of tantalum capacitors. The component’s color band indicates the negative terminal. The PCB’s color band or plus sign indicates the positive terminal. Remember, the orientation is reversed. Don’t mix them up with tantalum capacitors! 3. Multi-pad inductors. A dot or a one on the component marks pin one. A dot or an asterisk on the PCB marks pin 1. Align the component’s dot with the PCB’s dot. Align the component’s one with the PCB’s marking. Have you ever run into other tricky component polarities? Drop your stories in the comments below. Let’s talk.
The full video is on Instagram. It has 106 likes, 9 comments, and 1 share on the reel, and about 9,000 views on their profile page video, both were posted 1 day ago. They also have another video also labeled “Presenter and visuals are AI-generated,” and there is also videos of humans on the page, like Becky Stern, and many others in the maker world. JLCPCB is probably experimenting. Will it work out? We will see. It seems to be one of the more popular videos already, but they might be tracking something else, like the coupon code there.
At Adafruit, we already do live video with actual humans. We also have a real, live-action puppet video series, Circuit Playground. There are plenty of things we could do. But everything has to have goals, metrics, and a return on time spent – and most of all, something that works well with our open-source approach for everything we can. AI avatars, so far, do not appear to have that. We will talk about this on our shows. We already publish articles about the many forms of marketing in the electronics space, and this is yet another one. In 2040 I will probably write about Quantum marketing, and that will cause some guys to melt down because Limor was looking at the wrong qubit or something.
When Limor does talks, videos, or photos, we include a clause that prevents her likeness from being turned into an NFT or whatever hologram nonsense is next. That already happened (being turned into an NFT) and we had the NFT removed. We worked on the language with our lawyers, and it has helped. I also know what is coming next – There will soon be Limor-like and Ladyada-like AI avatars demonstrating electronics, and they will not be from us.
There is a small group of dudes with axes to grind who monitor every post Limor makes, scanning for any hint of “AI.” They do not do this to other companies in the electronics space. Not male founders. Not engineers who run AI companies in hardware, or AI hardware companies. No, they pick on the open-source, VC-free, woman-owned company in Brooklyn, NY. Ask them why, and watch the spin. Today we had to make a video which was just scrolling through one guy’s 2 years worth of tagged posts so we could report it, again, it looks like he’s stopping for a few hours, but I’ll get dragged online for calling him out and piled on. I’ve been dragged online before, and I’ve been piled on. The reality is, I’d rather it be me than Limor, or someone on our team, and I often can direct it to me.
Limor is constantly policed by these guys over what tools she is allowed to try, what operating system she is allowed to use, and what CAD tools she must use. There is always a purity test. This is not new. When I first met Limor, guys on AVR Freaks repeatedly told her to stop doing electronics entirely. That was the tame version. Arduino, in a meeting, at Adafruit, said to Limor, with a straight face “we’d prefer if she did not make hardware” full stop. She was sitting right there, we passed a note to each other that said W_T_F. I still have it.
This current group of trolls is about five people, mostly on Mastodon instances with “18+” splashed on their profiles. Why? I do not know, should I expect something because these guys R-rated themselves? They conflate unrelated issues, create sock puppet accounts, and attempt to dunk on whatever she is doing (and now me, since Limor has had enough). It used to be about licenses or CAD tools. It has never been good-faith critique. These dudes tag, reply-guy, and try to manufacture pile-ons. When we block them, they take screenshots and post those instead. The have folders of images from 7 years ago, or a post where “AI” was maybe used in someone’s project, or on our show and tell. We have full time artists, their stuff is good, these dudes will claim something is AI generated when it’s not. This is the broken lens they can only see through.
So what now, dudes? Are you going to spend years on JLCPCB too? Or are you going to stick to Limor, or me, or Adafruit? Are you going to call for a boycott of JLCPCB? No. Of course not. JLCPCB has been a good service that we have used and that makers enjoy. We have talked about this, and JLC’s use of AI in two videos on Instagram is not going to change things for us (yet): it’s about the service they provide, not 2 marketing videos that might be experiments that only a few people have seen.
I am going to see who I can contact at JLCPCB and ask what metrics they have for something like this, and whether it is working.
For the jerks out there, we have over a decade of maker business articles explaining this exact approach. We test tools to understand how they work, how they fail, and how they can be used against us. Observation and analysis are not endorsement. If you cannot grasp that distinction, if you cannot separate investigation from promotion, skip this. Again, nobody is forcing you to read it.
One of the great things about being an independent company is we can publish what we want here, and on our social media. People have tried to silence Limor since I met her, and unfortunately for them, she is not going to stop. Likewise, I can’t stop, either. I understand that I cause problems for bad people sometimes.
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