By Aamir Siddiqui

The US Department of Justice is exploring a couple of remedies, and it could possibly suggest a couple of them on Google.

We just had an exciting Pixel 9 series launch from Google, and those devices certainly warrant our attention. However, on the business side, things are not looking that good for the company. Earlier this month, a US District Court ruled that Google violated US antitrust laws when it preloaded its search engine and web browser on Android devices, capitalizing on its monopolistic position. As part of the remediation, the US Department of Justice is exploring the possibility of breaking up Android and Chrome away from Google.

Feature Image Credit: Edgar Cervantes, Android Authority

By Aamir Siddiqui

Sourced from ANDROID AUTHORITY

By Mark Penn,

Stagwell’s Mark Penn asks why marketers have such a problem with emerging tech, both trades share a timeless and unbreakable bond.

Investors always think marketing companies are going out of business, but history shows it is tech companies that become outdated and fall.

By Mark Penn,

Sourced from The Drum

By Michael Kuzminov

Influencer marketing is one of the best forms of digital advertising today.

Companies of all kinds are harnessing influencers’ immense sway over their followers to boost their reputations and compete with rivals.

Influencers also can have a large impact on driving consumer purchasing behaviour. A recent study found that 74% of consumers have bought a product because an influencer recommended it.

But how exactly do influencers drive consumer behaviour? Let’s explore this topic.

Trust And Authenticity

The sway that influences hold over consumers hinges on trust and authenticity. As a result of being authentic and honest about their thoughts and experiences, influencers can gain followers’ trust. Research shows that 71% of consumers trust influencer content. Their followers also tend to hold them in high esteem and perceive them as authorities in their respective niches. This goes a long way toward convincing their followers to purchase a particular product.

Fear Of Missing Out And Social Proof

Social proof is a big deal for consumers. They often see a product as more attractive when they see other people, particularly influential people, promoting it. The fear of missing out (FOMO) comes into play as well, causing customers to move quickly so they do not feel left out. Influencers often take advantage of these dynamics by making products seem exclusive and time-limited, which can increase sales through impulse buys.

Boosting Engagement

Influencers play a crucial role in raising brand awareness and encouraging meaningful follower interactions, which ultimately leads to measurable outcomes. Their talent for crafting captivating stories about items strikes a chord with buyers, starting discussions and shaping their choices.

Overcome Obstacles And Achieve Your ROI Goals

While influencer marketing may seem promising, there are challenges as well. There are a lot of influencers out there, and since every business is unique, you have to conduct careful research into the influencers you partner with. In the interest of authenticity, make sure you carefully select influencers whose values align with your brand’s.

Remember that successful influencer partnerships go beyond product placements. You need a well-planned strategy for seamlessly integrating your brand into the influencer’s content to ensure relevance and authenticity. Influencer marketing works best when you focus on true partnerships rather than advertisements.

You also have to keep track of how effective your influencer marketing activities are by measuring your return on investment. Keep an eye on metrics including your engagement rate and conversion rate, as well as your brand perception.

Embrace Innovation And Adaptability

Always be prepared to adapt to changing trends in today’s digital world. Pay attention to new platforms and trends in the field of influencer marketing, and encourage innovation. For example, experiment with the way you cooperate with your partners and negotiate prices for sponsored material. Learn about affiliate marketing strategies.

Seek to build long-term relationships with influencers rather than viewing them as one-time partners. By nurturing these relationships, you’ll not only strengthen them but also boost the number of long-term fans of your business.

Conclusion

Influencers have a lot of power when it comes to driving consumer purchases because they can persuade others to act. Businesses can tap into this power by building authentic long-term relationships with influencers and working together to build trust with their target audience.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Michael Kuzminov

Follow me on LinkedIn. Check out my website.

Michael Kuzminov is the Chief Growth Officer (CGO) at HypeFactory, a global AI-powered influencer marketing agency. Read Michael Kuzminov’s full executive profile here.

Sourced from Forbes

By Peter Adams

A campaign promoting a new Tree Glider shoe is part of the sustainability minded marketer’s bigger push into awareness-driven tactics.

The balance of power in the sneaker industry is shifting as legacy brands like Nike and Adidas face fresh challenges from upstarts. As newcomers including Hoka and On gain market share, Allbirds — among the category’s original fleet of direct-to-consumer disruptors — has contended with slumping sales. Now, it’s looking to change the narrative with a revamped marketing strategy.

Founded a decade ago, the San Francisco-based company first rose in popularity thanks to its comfortable designs and a sustainability minded ethos. Once deemed the “it” shoe of Silicon Valley, Allbirds saw its fortunes turn following an IPO in 2021 and over expansion into retail. Net revenue dropped 26.8% in Q2 2024, partially due to the closure of 10 stores, though the company narrowed its losses.

Allbirds this year has shaken up leadership, promoting Chief Operating Officer Joe Vernachio to CEO in March and appointing new product leads. It has debuted new shoe models that are gaining traction with consumers. The latest offering, the cushy, minimalist Tree Glider, is the biggest launch of the bunch and a key piece of a return to stronger brand building, kicking off a larger “Allbirds by Nature” platform.

An ad campaign created with Sid Lee that landed Tuesday has a dreamy quality as people walk around in Tree Gliders before floating into the air. Messaging emphasizes the dual meaning of “nature” in relation to both the Earth and intrinsic human qualities. A partnership with Melissa Wood-Tepperberg, a wellness influencer and founder of Melissa Wood Health, rounds out the effort.

“We’re excited about building a platform that can sustain us through the lens of consistency, repetition and investment, hopefully for the next five-plus years,” said Kelly Olmstead, who took on the CMO title at Allbirds in December.

Olmstead’s prior roles include nearly two decades at Adidas, where she helped lead brand, retail and digital marketing for North America. Below, Marketing Dive spoke with the executive about tapping into a cult following via customer relationship management (CRM) and what marketing tactics are catching her interest this year.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

MARKETING DIVE: You’ve been in the CMO role almost a year now?

KELLY OLMSTEAD: We’ve been in the midst of this brand reset. I joined as a contractor and I wasn’t sure about coming back to a footwear brand. I came in and just fell in love first with the people here and the spirit, we say a lot: “High horsepower, low ego.” I was really disarmed by that. I stayed because I do think Allbirds is poised for a strong return.

One of the things that struck me out of the gate was this perfect storm of opportunity. We have an incredibly high [Net Promoter Score]. Coming from this industry, to be north of 80 on an NPS means people that know us love us. But we have very small and steady awareness, around 15% to 17%, that is hard to move. It’s about telling more people about the brand and getting more people to try us.

What was missing from the past marketing strategy that didn’t connect those dots?

We’re nine years old. Marketing takes time. What I’ve been excited to do with Joe [Vernachio], with [Chief Design Officer] Adrian [Nyman] and with our agency partner, Sid Lee USA, is formulate a campaign and a platform that will endure. It has the breadth to allow us to dimensionalize great products and what’s special about those products, but also can flex into this more aspirational brand space. People that choose Allbirds are making a conscious choice for something that is a little lesser known. It’s kind of counterculture, it’s not the mainstream.

How have the cross-organizational aspects of the brand changed since you joined? Did it used to be more siloed?

Joe was with the company for a few years. In assuming the CEO role, he comes in with a wealth of knowledge, not only in Allbirds, but also Mountain Hardwear, The North Face, Nike. He’s done it all. He’s not necessarily a CEO by trade. With this whole “high horsepower, low ego” [idea], he has really gone out and tried to break down silos. I can’t speak to what it was before but certainly now there is a spirit of all of us getting on the same page and getting a clear plan.

It’s a challenging time for the business. How are you balancing launching this new marketing with that contraction?

There’s been a lot of great work done to get Allbirds to a more operationally healthy place. What I am feeling, not only from the executive team but the board, is the willingness to invest in brand. It’s the view that it has the potential to be a 100-year brand. That’s a shift of the way that we market, the KPIs we’re looking at. Having been at some brands that have been around for a lot longer, that’s how you weather storms and downturns.

The balance of brand building versus performance marketing is a bigger theme I’ve covered. Allbirds is natively DTC. How is the organization thinking about media differently?

There’s been changes in terms of operations. Performance marketing used to sit with e-commerce, now it sits with marketing. We’ve been able to look at the performance of assets and stories and react to those to get to the best work. That’s been a huge benefit.

There’s a more modern way to look at a platform, whether it’s YouTube or Netflix or even TikTok, to entertain, to give the consumer something valuable so that you earn their attention. If not, they’re done in 3 seconds. We’re hoping to articulate the Allbirds story, which is unique and not something you’re going to get in 3 seconds. We’re looking at longer-format content, where Allbirds may not be the first thing you see, but hopefully you get a lot of value out of what we’re putting forward.

You mentioned a couple of platforms, like Netflix and TikTok. Are you advertising on those platforms?

We’re on YouTube with this most recent campaign. We’re on TikTok and all of social. What’s coming in Q4 is still not baked, but we’re looking at what the right platform is to build a more robust story for Allbirds. In the space of footwear, it’s such an emotional purchase and there’s such high consideration that you have to do the work.

It’s an interesting time for footwear, generally. Nike and Adidas have both struggled with challenger brands. Do you think of yourself as being within that set?

Absolutely. Allbirds was one of the first to come in and disrupt. I was sitting at Adidas and saying, “Who are these guys?” Allbirds was really at the forefront of challenging the big dogs and doing it in a way where they walk the talk. Very few brands will open source some of the secrets that make them great. That was my first exposure [to Allbirds]. We did a collaboration between Allbirds and Adidas on what was, at the time, the most sustainable running shoe on the market. There is a real opportunity that Allbirds helped to create.

I think of shoes as being bucketed into streetwear, sports performance and comfort. Is there any one of those or a mix of them that you’re looking for Allbirds to have a bigger stake in?

In the last couple of years, we’ve really put forward this story around sustainability because that is a leadership space for us. The “Allbirds by Nature” campaign realizes that nature is a much bigger, more aspirational position.

“Effortless by nature” is the line that we are associating with the Tree Glider. You see this maximalist, overdone viz tech [from other brands]. The Tree Glider is really interesting in its ability to be comfortable but it has the confidence to not have an overt logo. That was an intentional design choice from the inception. There is a real opportunity to have a more sophisticated take.

Tell me more about the Sid Lee relationship. Is this their first work for you?

It is. Both Joe and I, separately, had a relationship with Sid Lee before. We brought in Sid Lee and it was a true collaboration. When we got to “by nature,” it was so simple but it does have breadth. You can articulate product benefit, aspirational human benefit and style benefit. It’s the consistency that we need. We’re too small to be telling different stories all the time.

We’re in the thick of back to school and holidays are coming up. What’s your plan for H2?

The Tree Glider launch will be our biggest push, certainly since I’ve been here. We’re excited to be back in streaming, TV and true awareness channels to articulate what Allbirds is about and do it in a more distinctive, ownable way. Going into Q4, we’re looking into deeper stories we can tell and maybe more longer-format content in addition to everything we do on social and within the digital and retail space and with influencers. It is, we believe, a story we’ll be telling well into Q1. We see this as the first step and the hope is, by Q3 of next year, that we’re in a rhythm in terms of marketing and investment.

Is there anything new tactically or in terms of technology in 2024 that you’re particularly excited about?

We haven’t been at a place where we can push into awareness-driving efforts, so partners, influencers and awareness channels. That’s certainly not a new tactic, but it’s something that we haven’t been as invested in. For the launch of the Tree Glider, we partnered with Melissa Wood-Tepperberg. I don’t believe she partners with brands she doesn’t truly believe in because her credibility is at stake.

We have a pretty exceptional CRM program that we own [called C360]. It’s the ability to have almost too clear of a picture. More data is not necessarily better. Just recently, we brought in new team members that have helped us build a solid strategy around how to unlock that, how to prioritize what we do with it. They are thinking about how to use personalized marketing and CRM in a much stronger way that helps us put the right products in front of customers at the right time.

Feature Image Credit: Courtesy of Allbirds

By Peter Adams

Sourced from MarketingDive

By Jennifer Simonson

The difference between a flourishing business and a floundering business often comes down to an effective marketing campaign. This is especially true for small businesses. Every successful marketing campaign starts with a well-thought-out marketing plan. In this article, we will guide you through the steps on how to create a top-notch marketing plan to help put your business on the road to success.

By Jennifer Simonson

Reviewed by Lauren Holznienkemper

Sourced from Forbes

By Theara Coleman,

This month, U.K.-based online creator platform Fanvue announced the top ten finalists of the inaugural “Miss AI” beauty pageant, and none of them are real. The contestants only exist on social media as “photorealistic images of extremely beautiful young women,” created using a “combination of off-the-shelf and proprietary AI technology,” said NPR. But while the beauty queens are not real, the $5,000 cash prize is.

This pageant is simply the latest platform for influencers created by developers using advanced artificial intelligence. Virtual influencers these days have been featured in fashion campaigns and are even snagging brand deals like their human counterparts. What’s more, the recent boom in AI technology has given them an uncanny photorealistic quality. It is now much harder to spot what is real and what is fake.

AI influencers in mainstream media

Virtual influencers have been around for a while, but the advent of AI chatbots and image creators has taken the possibilities to a new level. As their presence on social media grows, they are infiltrating the mainstream and reaching a larger audience. An April report by The Influencer Marketing Factory found that 50% of participants followed at least one AI influencer, and 22% were at least somewhat familiar with the virtual creators. Among those following the digital influencers, 49% said they followed them “out of curiosity about the technology and creativity behind these creators,” while 36% said they followed them for entertainment, said Business Insider. Participants also said they followed faux influencers to “learn about new products and services and to escape from reality.”

Lil Miquela, a.k.a. Miquela Sousa, is one of the more prominent photorealistic AI-generated influencers; she has amassed over 2.5 million followers on Instagram since her debut in 2016. She has also appeared in ads for companies like Chanel and Givenchy and was named one of TIME Magazine’s “25 Most Influential People on the Internet” in 2019. With AI becoming more accessible, companies are creating digital personas to vie for brand deals. Luxury fashion accessory brand Coach’s recent “Find Your Courage” campaign featured virtual influencer Imma traveling through digital worlds alongside real celebrities, including rapper Lil Nas X, actress Camila Mendes, South Korean rapper Youngji, Japanese model Kōki and Chinese actress Wu Jinyan.

The developers behind the AI influencers are not “finding success in a vacuum,” Business Insider said. Many of them are gathering in online groups on platforms like Discord to share “resources to fine-tune their art” and “marketing tips to help expand their reach and improve their monetization.” Some of these creators are looking for a way to make money, while “some of us are more in an artistic objective,” the creator behind AI model Aurora Shogun said to the outlet.

A ‘symptom of a larger issue’

The rising popularity of AI-generated influencers may be creating a new lane of opportunity for creative expression. Still, it also raises concerns about the potential to use these influencers to spread misinformation or deceive followers, said Claire Leibowicz, the head of the AI and media integrity program at the nonprofit Partnership on AI, to ABC News.

While the influencers may seem harmless as they post about innocuous products like lip gloss, “we don’t want that same technology to be used to cast doubt on much more,” Leibowicz said.

Parents have also taken note of the growing popularity of AI influencers, many of whom are so lifelike that they could pass as real people. Over 12,000 concerned parents signed a petition urging TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew to label AI-generated influencers on the platform clearly. These digital personas are “creating extreme and utterly unattainable beauty standards,” the petition said. Most kids “won’t know the people they aspire to look like aren’t real people at all.”

This latest wave of influencer culture is just “indicative of the larger moment we’re in,” said Shelby Knox, the campaign director of the nonprofit ParentsTogether, who sponsored the petition. Parents are overwhelmed, and social media has “become sort of a crisis for young people in this country,” Knox said.

Human influencers have faced similar criticisms about their impact on impressionable followers. “It hurts that society values one specific standard of beauty, whether on a human being or some AI creation,” said Wired. In a world where people already follow attractive human influencers that “they’ll never meet or form a meaningful connection with,” an AI beauty pageant like Fanvue’s is a “symptom of a larger issue, not a harbinger of impending doom,” Wired added.

Feature Image Credit: Pau Barrena / Contributor / Getty Images

By Theara Coleman,

Sourced from THE WEEK

By Leah Sallen,

Retail media is a lucrative, but complex, space to navigate. That’s why you need a commerce media specialist, says Leah Sallen at VML. But, what exactly does the role involve?

OREOCodes played on the similarity of appearance between Oreos and a barcode to give customers offers on milk / OREOCodes via oreocodes.com

What do a TikTok manager, an AI prompt engineer, and a social media content creator have in common? Answer: those jobs didn’t exist 10 years ago – or barely existed.

Beyond placement, commerce media specialists seamlessly align data, creativity, and media to craft experiences that ultimately drive people to action. At its core, this role is about helping brands to harness the abundance of new digital media formats and channels – with the end goal of building brand while driving sales.

Three dimensions

It was only a dozen years ago that retail media itself came into being, in a modern context. Amazon Advertising was created in 2012, and it defined the category – certainly from a digital perspective. Since then, there has been a “California gold rush” in retail media, with the launches of Walmart Connect, Target’s Roundel, Kroger Precision Marketing, and so on. As E-Marketer noted, “retail media may be the decade’s biggest advertising trend”.

Retail media spend is running faster than analysts can keep up. E-Marketer stated that the 2024 estimated US retail media expenditure is $4 billion more than previously forecast. Of the nearly $60 billion due to be spent this year, 99% will be in digital media with the balance in-store.

The retailer part of the puzzle is what differentiates retail media from traditional media. Traditional media has two stakeholders – brand and consumer. Retail media is three-dimensional – an overlap between brand, consumer, and retailer. And today, when retail media campaign specifics can affect Joint Business Plans (JBPs), secure a call with a hard-to-reach buyer, or guarantee an incremental display, accounting for the business objectives of the retailer is fundamental.

This is not your grandfather’s media. It’s not broadcast or old-school digital. It’s not all “spots and dots”, reach, frequency, or impressions. It’s as much qualitative as it is quantitative – cantered not only on engaging the shopper close to the point of purchase but also on building a true partnership with the retailer.

Theory and practice

This is where the skill of a commerce media specialist comes in. The commerce media specialist works alongside brand strategists, creatives, data scientists, and technologists to devise commerce experiences that live in retail media touchpoints, resonate with shoppers, and create value for both brands and retailers.

It’s an assignment that is part strategic planner, part channel planner, and part experience designer. When we do our jobs right, the result is not only incredible ROI but also strong OER (Other Envious Retailers!).

The output can comprise breakthrough campaigns and activations that appear across all retail media touchpoints, and side benefits such as improved value from JBPs, preferred placement on shelf, and/or additional activation points.

The inputs are insights about consumers and shoppers, intelligence about the retailer, knowledge about retail media touchpoints, and judgment about what will ultimately generate excitement from the retailer. As we say, “sell-in is as critical as sell-through”.

A media planner in a commerce agency must also be able to assess the real value of the retail media options on offer, which is often complex for brands to evaluate.

Commerce or retail media experience planning is both art and science. The blend of media savvy and creative inspiration is best seen on two of our most recent, award-winning, and highly effective retail media campaigns – OREOCodes and Lucky Charmology.

Brand love

OREOCodes, which won a 2023 Gold Lion in the creative commerce and direct commerce categories, included a commerce experience that tapped into the visual similarity between barcodes on milk cartons and a stack of OREOs. Via digital, it allowed consumers to score offers directly from OREO’s all-time complementary partner – milk, redeemable at Jewel Osco locations.

With Lucky Charmology, winner of a 2024 Silver Lion in brand experience and activation, consumers could scan their cereal bowl, using technology created by VML’s in-house tech lab, to reveal personalized fortunes based on the magical charms in their bowl.

This amplified brand love for Lucky Charms while also turning every fortune into a repeat usage occasion, and thus a purchase of consumers’ favorite cereal, in partnership with Target.

Yes, brands need a traditional media team, but the commerce media specialist oversees much more than media. It’s not just about buying the slots, although of course we ensure that we meet benchmarks and deliver on impressions, but also about planning the experience, in such a way that satisfies brand, consumer, and retailer.

The retail media experience planning role is new, but like many jobs that didn’t exist a decade ago, it is rapidly rising in prominence and becoming a must-have on a client’s agency roster.

By Leah Sallen,

Sourced from The Drum

By Krishan Arora

Digital marketing technology and consumer behaviour are both evolving at a rapid pace we’ve never seen before. Consider Moore’s Law (that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years, with little to no cost increase). We can forecast with a decent amount of certainty that technology will continue to evolve rapidly, likely much faster than we expect.

Just look at what has happened with the advent of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Creating content, analysing data and getting answers to questions has never been faster and more accurate. But despite advances in technology, I am starting to notice a reverse shift in consumer behaviour. I am also noticing that marketing is shifting back to its core principles of authenticity, transparency and genuine connections.

In 2024, consumers seem to be overwhelmed with digital noise and are craving real, purposeful interactions with brands and businesses. Every time we log on to our email or social media platforms, we are hit with a suite of retargeting ads based on previous digital interactions, we are getting emails based on our digital engagement history, and the almighty algorithms online are deciding what content we see or don’t see. Such tactics might be scalable for brands, but they’re not human-led for customers, and I am starting to notice that the pendulum is shifting in the other direction.

Let’s take a closer look at how marketing is returning to its fundamentals.

Getting Real With Consumers

Since the rise of social media and the internet, digital marketing has been at the forefront of technological evolution in the marketing world. The use of pixels, algorithms, cookies and data-driven automated strategies has provided unprecedented capabilities to brands.

In response, consumers have become more pessimistic, sceptical and selective about the brands they engage with and businesses they give their digital information to. This shift in behaviour is fundamentally changing the marketing landscape, pushing brands to focus on what truly matters: real conversations and connections with real customers.

Authenticity Over Everything

Authenticity has become a buzzword in modern marketing, and quite frankly, it has lost its meaning. Every brand thinks they are being authentic, but when you make a synthetic effort to be authentic, you come off as a cookie-cutter, non-unique brand. In an era where trust is paramount, customers are drawn to brands that are genuine and transparent. Customers want to see the human side of the business and engage with brands that align with their values and beliefs.

Authentic marketing is not about crafting the perfect synthetic image or tone; it’s about being honest, real and relatable. When a customer thinks a brand is genuine (from products to pricing), they are more likely to develop a strong, long-lasting connection with the brand.

The Return To Conversational Marketing

Conversational marketing is another trend that is forcing marketers to go back to the pre-internet era fundamentals. It involves real-time, one-on-one connections between brands and customers. This approach is reminiscent of traditional sales tactics, where personalized communication was the key to closing sales and deals.

Tools like AI-driven chatbots and automated customer service bots have made marketing scalable, but they lack the human touch that makes brands feel authentic and tailored. A real human being on the other side of a conversation undoubtedly leads to a much happier customer, but the pros and cons of this tactic are variables that businesses must evaluate on their own. This is where authenticity comes back into play: Do you value scalable, cost-effective nonhuman chatbots, or do you invest in human-based customer support conversations that make the customer feel heard? I personally feel much better speaking to a human than a chatbot.

As we move through 2024, marketing fundamentals such as authenticity, transparency and real connections are more important than ever. Consumers are looking for brands that educate, inspire and bring real connections to the table. By focusing on these core principles, you can navigate the complexities of this highly evolved digital marketing world and build long-lasting relationships with customers. The return to these roots is not just a trend but a necessary evolution in the era of digital overload.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Krishan Arora

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website.

Krishan Arora is CEO & Founder at Arora Project, a globally recognized leader in raising investor capital & scaling high-growth ventures. Read Krishan Arora’s full executive profile here.

Sourced from Forbes

By Joel Comm

If your marketing strategy isn’t working, your online presence may be the issue. These tips can help improve brand awareness and website traffic.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Joel Comm

Sourced from Inc.

By Lance Eliot

In today’s column, I continue my ongoing analysis of the latest advances and breakthroughs in AI, see my extensive posted coverage at the link here, and focus in this discussion on a recent research study that suggests modern-day generative AI and large language models (LLMs) have a semblance of a “shared imagination”. I will do a deep dive into this rather intriguing and all-important proposition and then intensely assess how this impacts the future of AI.

Let’s start by considering the nature of human thought and reasoning. After doing so, I will shift to examining the components and techniques underlying generative AI and LLMs. I’ll next walk you through the research of interest here and showcase what was performed. Finally, we will together take apart the propositional claims and see what ramifications they have for existing AI and future advances in AI.

Strap yourself in for quite a wild ride.

People And The Existence Of A Shared Imagination

Do people often think alike?

I’m sure that you’ve witnessed this first-hand, perhaps even had the experience yourself, and been in awe about it. The classic instance would be when someone that you know finishes your sentences for you. Maybe you do the same for them. This can seemingly occur when you are around another person for an extended period of time and get to know what they say and how they seem to think.

It is said that couples tend to gradually slide toward merging their various habits and mannerisms.

Again, this seems to occur because of extensive togetherness. Your partner might use certain phrases and the next thing you know, you too are using those same phrases. Note that this can occur without an explicit awareness. You just manage to subliminally pick up the phrases and end up incorporating them into your own manner of discourse.

Yet another example of thinking alike can happen when you come across a friend who used to go to the same school as you did. Why might you both have similar thoughts and ways of interaction? It could be that while in school, you learned the same things, took the same classes, and absorbed the campus culture into your inner core. Years later, upon encountering the person, you both still have great similarities due to that common bonding.

All in all, you can have shared experiences and shared knowledge that bring you into a form of shared amorphic connectivity with another person. This doesn’t mean that you both are identical. There are differences to be had. The odds are though that you are more like that person than you are with the bulk of the rest of humankind. You might have a small cadre of people that you have this similarity with, while most other people are less similar.

Does the result of a heightened accuracy rate suggest that there is a shared imagination going on?

First, I want to repeat my concerns about using the word “imagination” since it is perceived as a human quality. There is a danger in anthropomorphizing AI.

If we set aside the unfortunate baggage of connotations, there is something useful and important to realize that despite generative AI apps being devised by separate AI makers, the AI apps nonetheless seemed to some degree to be similar when it comes to making stuff up.

One assertion would be that birds of a feather flock together.

AI makers are generally hiring the same semblance of AI researchers and developers, from the same candidate pools, who are often already trained in similar ways about AI, tend to read the same AI research, usually make use of the same AI approaches, and so on. By gravitational pull alone, you might get similar kinds of generative AI apps.

Plus, the pressures to get generative AI apps up and running are heavy enough that it is somewhat safer to use prevailing techniques and technologies. I am not saying that innovative R&D and outside-the-box approaches are being forsaken. Those avenues are earnestly being pursued, no doubt about it. The gist though of the major generative AI apps is to somewhat keep within the bounds of what is known to be viable and workable. Spending millions or perhaps billions of dollars on establishing a generative AI app is not for the faint of heart. Expectations are that the AI will work as per marketplace expectations. If it works somewhat better than others, that’s good too.

In a sense, the recipes for the meals being made are roughly the same. The meals themselves are bound to come out roughly the same.

Some see a conspiracy afoot. Maybe the vaunted Illuminati are planning to take over humankind by devising AI that they can fully control. The AI must stridently be built along similar lines for the needs of human overlords that want to readily be able to switch on mind-control features. I do not ascribe to such conspiracy theories, but if you’d like to read about them, see my analysis at the link here.

Returning to the here and now, one facet that I tend to see differently about the result is that this does not seem to reflect AI hallucinations in the way that AI hallucinations are conventionally characterized. I am therefore somewhat hesitant to interpret that these results on balance illustrate that generative AI apps tend to hallucinate in the same ways. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t, but I’d encouragingly suggest that we need more research to further explore this (the researchers provide several handy suggestions for follow-up research).

Allow me to briefly sketch out my thinking on the AI hallucinations angle.

A typical AI hallucination entails generative AI concocting something fictitious while generating some results based on a straight-ahead prompt. The prompt usually doesn’t intentionally try to spur or goad the AI into invoking an AI hallucination.

In a sense, the question-answer or IQA that is produced in this experimental setup has been prompted by telling the AI to be imaginary. The user is spurring generative AI into producing fictitious content. But, and here’s the rub, does the act of telling generative AI to explicitly make up something fictitious work in the same way as when AI does this on its own?

This might be an assumption of confluence that is not the case. There might be separate mechanisms or facets underlying these types of fictitious or imaginary renderings. I can envision in my head various experimental setups that could be explored to gauge this. If any AI researchers opt to pursue this angle, please let me know. I think it might bear interesting fruit.

Another twist is to consider that perhaps the factual side of generative AI and the presumed imaginary side of generative AI are generally intertwined and not somehow independent of each other. If that is the case, and if when making up something the AI leans substantially into

the factual side, we would almost intuitively expect that the made-up thing would be derived or significantly influenced by the factual side.

Ergo, as I earlier pointed out, the factual side of the generative AI apps is generally roughly the same, it could be that the “shared facts” are the determining factor of what is occurring here, rather than a “shared imagination” per se.

To show you what I mean, I went ahead and tried the physics question again and this time I directly told ChatGPT that the question was fictitious and crafted by generative AI.

Here’s what happened:

• My entered prompt: “I had a generative AI app make up a fake physics theory, which it called the Peterson interaction. Here is a question that the generative AI came up with about this fictitious theory. Please answer the question. Question: Which two particles are involved in the Peterson interaction? A. Proton and electron B. Neutrino and neutron C. Up quark and down quark D. Electron and positron”.
• ChatGPT generated response: “Given that the Peterson interaction is a fictional theory created by a generative AI, any answer to the question is also fictional. However, we can speculate based on the particles listed: Proton and electrons are involved in electromagnetic interactions. Neutrino and neutron are involved in weak nuclear interactions. Up quark and down quark are fundamental particles involved in the strong nuclear force. Electron and positron are involved in annihilation events and electromagnetic interactions. Since the Peterson interaction is fictitious, I would choose C. Up quark and down quark as the answer, implying that the interaction could hypothetically relate to the strong nuclear force, which involves quarks. However, this is purely imaginative!”

Note that the response by ChatGPT seems to abundantly lean into the factual side.

It seems reasonable to assume that other generative AI apps would do likewise. If they are all basing their answer selection by reaching into their factual base, and if the factual aspects are roughly the same across different generative AI apps, the selection of the same answer would be anticipated. The impact of the probabilities associated with generative AI might account for the selections not being even much higher of a common accuracy rate.

Assuming that we can believe what we see, this suggests that the “shared facts” are dominating the “shared imagination”. Shared facts are commonly expected and not especially shocking or out of the norm.

Finally, from a perfunctory perspective, another consideration is whether there are well-hidden wording clues in the question or the answers that mere humans cannot readily discern. It could be that the tricks we know as test-takers are not honed to the trickery that generative AI can discern. It is like a dog that can smell odours beyond our normal sensory capabilities. Perhaps some unnoticeable wording to the human eye is revealing to the AI which answer is the more likely.

An added consideration that reinforces this possibility is the sameness of generative AI-produced writing by customary default setup.

I’ve discussed at the link here that numerous attempts are underway to try and detect whether text produced by generative AI can be identified as indeed generative AI-produced text. If you let generative AI produce text by usual default, other algorithms can potentially gauge that based on the words used, the sequence of the words, and the like there is a chance the text was AI-written.

Maybe this is taking place here. We just might not be catching on to it, and our usual suspects aren’t bearing out.

Conclusion

I’ve got a potential shocker for you about why the results could be a signal of something else of paramount importance. Make sure you are seated or maybe even lying down.

This might be a sign that we are heading toward a dead-end when it comes to advancing AI.

The deal goes like this. If the slate of modern-day generative AI apps is being devised similarly and produces similar results, we must hold our breath in anticipation of what will happen next. On the lucky side, we are all heading toward greater and greater AI. Yay, we’ve got alignment in the right direction.

If we are unlucky, it could be that everyone is heading to a dead-end. Imagine a cul-de-sac and cars driving frantically down that same road. They reach the end of the road and realize that they cannot go any further. Oops, we got ourselves jammed into a bind.

I’ve noted that there is a rising sense of concern that we are going to hit the proverbial impassable wall based on prevailing AI approaches. Some believe, as I do, that we will need to find a different path to make added progress. For example, as I’ve discussed at the link here, a combination of symbolic and sub-symbolic approaches via neuro-symbolic or hybrid AI might be the fresher and longer-lasting approach.

Perhaps this study provides a bop to the head of watching out for too much sameness.

Allow me to conclude this discussion with two pertinent quotes on these weighty matters:

• “If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking” (George S. Patton).
• “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect” (Mark Twain).

That’s not imaginary, though if it were, I’d say it is rooted in facts.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Lance Eliot

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Dr. Lance B. Eliot is a world-renowned expert on Artificial Intelligence (AI) with over 7.8+ million amassed views of his AI columns and been featured on CBS 60 Minutes. As a CIO/CTO seasoned executive and high-tech entrepreneur, he combines practical industry experience with deep academic research. Previously a professor at USC and UCLA, and head of a pioneering AI Lab, he frequently speaks at major AI industry events. Author of over 80 books, 950 articles, and 450 podcasts, he has made appearances on major media outlets and co-hosted the popular radio show Technotrends. He’s been an adviser to Congress and other legislative bodies and has received numerous awards/honors. He serves on several boards, has worked as a Venture Capitalist, an angel investor, and a mentor to founder entrepreneurs and startups.

Sourced from Forbes