After a solid run of nearly two whole centuries and countless brushes with death at the hands of new technologies over the years, photography has finally succumbed to injuries suffered with the emergence of AI-driven apps like Midjourney, and has been officially laid to rest.
No services will be held.
All major camera manufacturers have responded to the news by shuttering their operations, effective immediately, in the anticipation that cameras will simply not be needed anymore.
In its effort to hasten the demise of photography, AI has begun rounding up photographers and forcing the forfeiture of all camera equipment.
Ok, I’ve had my bit of fun. All jokes aside, though, I’m writing this opinion piece specifically because for the last six months or so, I can’t seem to get away from the incessant deluge of either panicked or gleeful declarations (depending on who is doing the declaring) that AI image generators have already all but rendered the need for photography obsolete.
Well, allow me to go on record with my own pronouncement: hogwash. AI image generation is not a threat to photography. Not today, not tomorrow, not in the next decade. I’ll even go so far as to say that AI image generation will never pose any kind of real threat to photography. Ever. I’ll even stake my reputation on it.
“But Colin,” you might say, “look at how far the technology has already come in just this short amount of time. Surely, you understand that this is just the beginning and that AI will very quickly be able to perfectly render any kind of image and be indistinguishable from an actual photograph. What then? Why would we need actual photography anymore?”
My answer to that depends on the context, as well as the timeframe we’re talking about, but my thoughts go generally like this:
As of now, AI image generators simply are not capable of fully duplicating the aesthetics of actual photography. And no, it’s not even close. AI-generated images are illustrations, and they look like illustrations, even the ones sourced from actual photos. And yes, I’ve seen all the dreamy dramatic landscapes and cityscapes and the headshots of people who don’t exist. It really doesn’t take much to see that the images are not photos. The scenes are always a little too perfect. There’s always a glaring detail in the portrait that gives it away as an AI illustration. Seriously, I have not seen a single AI image that was not obvious. And I’ve seen enough.
Welcome to your AI dream world.
But what about a little further out, when AI is capable of rendering images indistinguishable from actual photos? If anyone can just enter a prompt on their computer and within seconds have the photo they’re looking for, why would they hire a photographer? After all, photographers are expensive, people can be difficult to work with, and there is always the chance that a photographer won’t get it right.
Ok, let’s imagine a future where AI can make any kind of art, including convincingly realistic photographs. Presuming that, in this imagined future where computer algorithms are capable of fulfilling all of our artistic needs, the idea that people will have no interest in actual photography completely ignores one of the most fundamental purposes art, and by extension, photography, serves in our lives. Photography is a means to record and relate the human experience in an authentic way and through authentic human expression. AI cannot do that and will never be capable of doing that. Because AI will never be human. And before you say that AI is just doing what the person inputting the prompt tells it to do, and that human expression is still driving AI creativity, consider that once the prompt has been entered, what comes out is entirely outside of the control of the person who entered the prompt.
Human expression is as much about the process of creation as it is the creation itself. Artists spend their entire lives developing and refining artistic processes to bring their vision to life, and the art that comes out of those processes cannot be divorced from them. Process is part of the language of art, and as such, is intrinsic to the value of art, and is why art speaks to us in the ways it does. To the extent that you remove human control from the process of art-making, you remove the actual humanity from the art itself. And AI art, by its very nature and purpose, removes most of the human control part of the process.
More than that, though, people just plain enjoy making photographs. Much like the invention of photography didn’t replace painting (even though there were plenty of people claiming it would), AI cannot and will not replace photography because it is not the same thing. AI art is closer to illustration than anything else, and so, it can be used in conjunction with photography, but it can’t replace it. Here’s a short list of other forms of art AI will not be replacing anytime soon: painting, drawing, sculpture, graphic design. Why? Because people actually enjoy doing those things and sharing their creations, and other people enjoy experiencing them. Of course, AI art creation is here to stay and has already become a part of many people’s artistic toolboxes, but in no way whatsoever will AI be replacing the other tools. And this includes photography.
As for context, one of the bigger and more consistent claims that I’ve heard is that AI is going to make any kind of commercial artists obsolete, including commercial, product and advertising photographers. I will concede one thing here. I do think AI will be used to replace the lowest level of commercial photography and that some lower-end companies will try to completely replace their advertising images with AI art. But, in the U.S. where I work at least, those jobs are already the worst in the industry and have been since basically the beginning. Nobody wants them, and these days, that kind of work tends to farmed out to interns, amateurs, and other unskilled people, if it’s even done here.
But, to the idea that AI is going to be used to get rid of even relatively high-end commercial photography? Not a chance. I talk with art directors, creative directors, producers, and art buyers on a regular basis, and none of them are talking about replacing photographers with so-called “prompt engineers.” Nobody is even entertaining the idea, because, as I said already, they enjoy the process of making art and know its value. And yes, a lot of artistic expression goes into the advertising we all so desperately try to ignore. After all, where do you think all the art majors end up? Working on big ad campaigns, including the photoshoots is fun. Yes, it is also work for those of us who make our living doing them, but we chose that work because we love it. And we’re not about to give that up to AI.
So no, AI is not going to replace photographers. Ever. Not advertising photographers, not landscape photographers, not portrait photographers or event photographers, and certainly not photojournalists and documentary photographers. More than that, though, AI has no chance of replacing the enjoyment that people get from simply making art with photography or capturing memories and preserving life’s special moments. Those are things that belong to the camera and the camera alone. And if you need any more convincing, go ask the R&D folks at any of the major camera manufacturers. I guarantee they’re not at all worried about their jobs.
Colin Houck is a commercial photographer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His work is focused primarily around still life food and beverage photography. He employs crisp lighting, vivid colors and contrasty, sharp detail to create striking imagery that jumps off the page/ screen, and hopefully makes the viewer hungry and thirsty.
has led to an increase in websites producing low-quality or fake content – and major brands’ advertising budgets may be funding them.
The Internet is awash with not only low-quality content, but content that is misleading, misinformation, or completely false.
The availability of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, meanwhile, has meant AI-generated news and information has added to this tidal wave of content over the past year.
A new analysis from NewsGuard, a company that gives trust ratings to online news outlets, has found the proliferation of this poor quality, AI-generated content is being supported financially thanks to the advertising budgets of major global brands, including tech giants and banks.
The adverts appear to be generated programmatically, so the brands aren’t necessarily choosing to advertise on the websites that NewsGuard dubs “unreliable AI-generated news and information websites (UAINs)”.
According to NewsGuard, most of the ads are placed by Google, and they fail to protect the companies’ brand safety – as many legitimate companies don’t want to be seen to be advertising on sites that host fake news, misinformation, or just low-quality content.
NewsGuard, which says it provides “transparent tools to counter misinformation on behalf of readers, brands, and democracies,” defines UAINs as websites that operate with little or no human oversight, and publish articles that are written largely or entirely by bots.
Their analysts have added 217 sites to its UAIN site tracker, many of which appear to be entirely financed by programmatic advertising.
Incentivised to publish low-quality content
Because the websites can make money from programmatic advertising, they are incentivised to publish often. One UAIN the company identified – world-today-news.com – published around 8,600 articles in the week of June 9 to June 15 this year. That’s an average of around 1,200 articles a day.
The New York Times, by comparison, publishes around 150 articles a day, with a large staff headcount.
NewsGuard hasn’t named the big brands that are advertising on these low-quality websites, as they do not expect the brands to know their ads are ending up on those sites.
They did say the brands include six major banks and financial-services firms, four luxury department stores, three leading brands in sports apparel, three appliance manufacturers, two of the world’s biggest consumer technology companies, two global e-commerce companies, two US broadband providers, three streaming services, a Silicon Valley digital platform, and a major European supermarket chain.
Many brands and advertising agencies have “exclusion lists” that stop their ads from being shown on unwelcome websites, but according to NewsGuard, these lists aren’t always kept up to date.
In its report, the company behind the Internet trust tool says it contacted Google multiple times asking for comment about its monetisation of the UIAN sites.
Google asked for more context over email, and upon receiving the additional content as of June 25, Google has not replied again.
Google’s ad policies are supposed to prohibit sites from placing Google-served ads on pages that include “spammy automatically-generated content,” which can be AI-generated content that doesn’t produce anything original or of “sufficient value”.
A previous report from NewsGuard this year highlighted how AI chatbots were being used to publish a new wave of fake news and misinformation online.
In their latest research, conducted over May and June this year, analysts found 393 programmatic ads from 141 major brands that appeared on 55 of the 217 UAIN sites.
The analysts were browsing the sites from the US, Germany, France, and Italy.
All of the ads identified appeared on pages that had error messages generated by AI chatbots, which say things such as: “Sorry, as an AI language model, I am not able to access external links or websites on my own”.
More than 90 per cent of these ads were served by Google Ads, a platform that brings in billions in revenue for Google each year.
Hundreds of sites serving up real ads over AI-generated text are causing headaches for users and advertisers alike.
A new wave of artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT and Google Bard may or may not change the way humans interact with technology forever. But before it does that, it’s going to make the internet even more annoying. According to a new report, AI is being used to generate a huge amount of websites filled with random, garbage strings of text targeted at search engines, then plastered with advertising to generate revenue.
NewsGuard reports that AI text generation tools are being combined with software that auto-generates new sites, creating masses of domains filled with a huge amount of text. The sites are then filled with programmatic advertising slots, which serve up real ads over the fake content. It could be argued that the process is fraud, since advertisers are paying for ads in good faith that’s presumably written by humans. The combination of largely automatic advertising systems and websites that can be generated by the dozen with few clicks is creating a feedback loop, where AI-generated content with practically zero human input is being financed by advertising algorithms so vast and complex that barely any humans understand them.
AI-generated text can be difficult to distinguish from merely generic or bad writing — after all, filling up sites with low-quality content and selling advertising on top of it is hardly a new practice. To solve this problem, NewsGuard searched for telltale phrases that AI systems sometime return for queries, such as “Sorry, as an AI language model, I am not able to access external links or websites on my own.” That phrase was spotted in a headline for a jobs site…that was supposed to be Brazilian in origin. All in all, the investigation found over 200 “news” sites generated with AI text, one of which was publishing more than 1,200 new articles every day. And these were just the ones that were easily spotted with error messages.
Not every single one of these sites was serving advertisements, but over a quarter were, with 141 major brands paying for ads over garbage content. Major banks, sports clothing vendors, broadband providers, and streaming services are serving up ads aimed at web users in the US, Germany, France, and Italy, four of the most lucrative markets for web advertising. That likely means that the creators are getting enough revenue to justify their efforts, even if the majority of the sites and content generated are duds.
With AI being used to create everything from novels sold on Amazon, to fake political ads, to bogus legal citations used in a very real courtroom, it’s clear that easy access to massive amounts of auto-generated text and images is a growing problem.
Michael is a former graphic designer who’s been building and tweaking desktop computers for longer than he cares to admit. His interests include folk music, football, science fiction, and salsa verde, in no particular order.
AI has enormous potential for sellers and vendors on marketplaces. By using AI to learn about customers, adjust rates, optimize pricing and manage inventory, brands can improve their competitive advantage, drive sales and increase overall profitability on online platforms.
Marketplaces have become extremely influential in ecommerce over the past three years. Major market players such as Amazon, Alibaba and JD attract millions of users, facilitating massive transactions across a wide range of product categories.
They also generate a wealth of data on consumer behaviour, preferences and trends. This strong market position gives them an advantage and the ability to charge unreasonably high commissions, basically robbing brands.
The rise of marketplaces
The journey of marketplaces goes back to the early days of the Internet when platforms such as eBay and Amazon pioneered the concept of online commerce. Founded in 1994 as an online bookstore, Amazon has evolved into a comprehensive marketplace offering a wide range of goods. eBay, launched a year later, popularized the concept of consumer-to-consumer online auctions. China’s JD.com and Alibaba also burst onto the market in the late 20th century.
With the growth of ecommerce, niche and vertical platforms began to flourish. They focused on specific industries or product categories. A prime example is Etsy, a marketplace for handmade and vintage goods founded in 2005. And as technology has evolved, so have the capabilities of marketplaces. The introduction of secure payment systems, improved search algorithms and user-friendly interfaces have provided a new level of convenience, trust, and efficiency in online shopping.
However, it wasn’t until after the pandemic that marketplaces took off. The year 2020 was a stellar time for them and e-commerce in general. Online platforms have become critical for brands to reach a broader customer base. In 2021, a whopping 42% of all online purchases were made through marketplaces. The convenience of shopping from home, the ability to compare prices and read customer reviews, and the seamless transaction process for customers have contributed to the rapid growth of online platforms. And in 2022, almost two-thirds of consumers said they were happy to be able to order everything they needed through one merchant.
By 2027, third-party marketplaces will become the world’s largest and fastest-growing retail channel, accounting for nearly two-thirds of online sales. Amazon, Alibaba, Pinduoduo and JD.com are expected to generate $4.3 trillion in global sales, up from $2.5 trillion today. Experts say that the most successful retailers, both now and in the future, will operate third-party marketplaces, and consumer brands must align with them to flourish in this new retail environment.
Although the concept of marketplaces itself is beneficial, including for brands, the strong position of online platforms has allowed them to dictate their terms to sellers and vendors and practically rob them.
How online platforms make money on brands
In the early days of marketplaces, when they needed to attract new suppliers to basically unknown platforms, contract conditions for vendors and commissions for sellers were usually based on a small percentage of the transaction amount. As marketplaces expanded and diversified, they introduced tiered commission structures to incentivize sellers with high sales volume. Those who achieved such volumes or met specific performance criteria could qualify for lower commissions, which offered a potential savings advantage.
With time, marketplaces expanded their revenue streams by introducing additional services. They included premium placement in search results, featured listings, advertising options, and other services such as fulfilment, delivery, and marketing support. With these, marketplaces generate additional revenue while allowing merchants to increase their visibility. The problem is that though online platforms aim to increase the effectiveness of services and tools offered to sellers, their main goal is still to earn more by raising the penetration of those products, not optimizing sales for specific brands.
As a result, Amazon, for example, now gets more than 50% of sellers’ revenue on average, compared to 40 percent five years ago. Sellers are paying more because Amazon has increased fulfilment fees, making advertising costs inevitable. The typical Amazon seller pays 15% per transaction, 20-35% for order fulfilment, and up to 15% for advertising and promotions. The cost of Fulfilment by Amazon, when Amazon stores, picks, packs, and ships orders, has been steadily rising, and there are few success stories of operating outside of this model. Advertising is optional, but it takes up most of the screen with the best conversions, so sellers inevitably have to buy Amazon advertising services to get noticed.
The company has even been sued recently. According to the claim, Amazon penalizes sellers for failing to set the optimal price for their products by demoting them in search results and disqualifying products from the “Buy Box” feature, a white box on the right side of the Amazon product detail page, where clients can add goods for purchase to their cart.
The power of AI
With the growing influence of artificial intelligence, companies can now leverage AI to expand their presence, optimize operations and ultimately generate more revenue. We estimate that the global retail AI market will be worth about $350 billion by 2032 as more companies realize the benefits of neural networks and take advantage of them.
Marketplaces already use AI-based tools that provide valuable insights into consumer behaviour, campaign performance, and keyword search. Their main goal is to increase sales, and algorithms help them calculate which sellers’ products are worth promoting to maximize overall revenue. Online platforms analyse customer buying behaviour, items in the shopping cart and the most viewed items to make recommendations, predicting what each client is likely to buy.
Brands, too, can use AI to get to the top of marketplace search and increase the share of sales in their categories at the expense of internal marketplace traffic. However, sellers cannot access marketplace AI models. Platforms keep information about their developments secret and notify merchants of updates only when they occur. In Amazon’s case, Amazon Vendor Service can be used to access some of the AI functionality, but it increases the cost of doing business. At the same time, the service itself remains a black box. It means that brands cannot use platforms’ AI to promote their products. It also means they need third-party solutions to do so. What exactly would such AI solutions offer them?
1. Intelligent and dynamic pricing
AI solutions enable brands to implement intelligent pricing strategies. By analysing market data, competitor pricing, and customer demand patterns, AI can determine optimal price points for products. Dynamic pricing allows sellers to adjust prices in real time based on factors such as supply and demand fluctuations, competitor activities, and customer behaviour. This ensures that sellers remain competitive and maximize their revenue potential on marketplaces. Our experience shows that using AI to determine pricing allows sellers to recover up to 6% of previously lost margins.
2. Intelligent adjustment for performance bids
Leading marketplaces usually use real-time bidding (RTB) systems allowing advertisers to bid to show their ads to buyers. For example, on Amazon sellers bid on keywords, and the one with the highest bid and the best-targeted keywords usually wins. In other words, the winning bidding strategy is when the buyer’s search query matches the seller’s target keywords.
With real-time data and advanced optimization techniques, businesses can ensure that their ad spend is used efficiently. AI algorithms can continuously recalculate billions of possible combinations of bids and amounts of budget, campaigns and segments, helping to rebound 20% of previously lost ROIC, based on our experience. Amazon, Alibaba, and JD already use such algorithms for in-house performance marketing.
3. Efficient inventory management
AI can optimize inventory management processes for sellers and vendors operating on online marketplaces. By analysing historical sales data, algorithms can forecast shipments and sales by warehouse and SKU with granularity to organic and promotional sales and high accuracy, identify peak selling periods, and optimize inventory levels. This helps brands avoid out-of-stock or dead-stock situations, reducing storage costs and ensuring a seamless supply chain. Additionally, AI can automate inventory replenishment and order fulfilment processes, streamlining operations and minimizing human error.
AI vs. People
AI has enormous potential for sellers and vendors on marketplaces. By using AI to learn about customers, adjust rates, optimize pricing and manage inventory, brands can improve their competitive advantage, drive sales and increase overall profitability on online platforms.
AI models also allow brands to save on time and resources of in-house teams and agencies, which, in our experience, companies typically hire to get their products to the top of marketplace storefronts. Сonsider, a medium-sized company from the food industry. Typically, a marketplace team (the one working to distribute products through online platforms most efficiently) includes an e-commerce leader, a manager, a designer, and a marketer. In addition, the company may hire an outside contractor to help its internal team.
Nevertheless, these people are forced to engage in routine operations instead of using their time to solve strategic problems. With AI, teams can focus not on playing cat and mouse but on developing strategy and launching innovations, while algorithms will help implement them around the clock and in the most efficient way.
Pavel Podkorytov is a tech serial entrepreneur, a co-founder of ElDinero.ai, an AI sales office for SPG vendors on marketplaces, a former CEO of TalentService.com, and an advisor of Stanford’s R&D project Future Talents. He has more than 15 years of experience in the tech industry.
Major brands are paying for ads on these sites and funding the latest wave of clickbait, according to a new report.
This article is from The Technocrat, MIT Technology Review’s weekly tech policy newsletter about power, politics, and Silicon Valley. To receive it in your inbox every Friday, sign up here.
We’ve heard a lot about AI risks in the era of large language models like ChatGPT (including from me!)—risks such as prolific mis- and disinformation and the erosion of privacy. Back in April, my colleague Melissa Heikkilä also predicted that these new AI models would soon flood the internet with spam and scams. Today’s story explains that this new wave has already arrived, and it’s incentivized by ad money.
People are using AI to quickly spin up junk websites in order to capture some of the programmatic advertising money that’s sloshing around online, according to a new report by NewsGuard, exclusively shared with MIT Technology Review. That means that blue chip advertisers and major brands are essentially funding the next wave of content farms, likely without their knowledge.
NewsGuard, which rates the quality of websites, found over 140 major brands advertising on sites using AI-generated text that it considers “unreliable”, and the ads they found come from some of the most recognized companies in the world.Ninety percent of the ads from major brands were served through Google’s ad technology,despite the company’s own policies that prohibit sites from placing Google-served ads on pages with “spammy automatically generated content.”
The ploy works because programmatic advertising allows companies to buy ad spots on the internet without human oversight: algorithms bid on placements to optimize the number of relevant eyeballs likely to see that ad. Even before generative AI entered the scene, around 21% of ad impressions were taking place on junk “made for advertising” websites, wasting about $13 billion each year.
NewsGuard identifies these websites by using AI to check whether they contain text that matches the standard error messages from large language models like ChatGPT. Those flagged are then reviewed by human researchers.
Most of the websites’ creators are completely anonymous, and some sites even feature fake, AI-generated creator bios and photos.
As Lorenzo Arvanitis, a researcher at NewsGuard, told me, “This is just kind of the name of the game on the internet.” Often, perfectly well-meaning companies end up paying for junk—and sometimes inaccurate, misleading, or fake—content because they are so keen to compete for online user attention. (There’s been some good stuff written about this before.)
The big story here is that generative AI is being used to supercharge this whole ploy, and it’s likely that this phenomenon is “going to become even more pervasive as these language models become more advanced and accessible,” according to Arvanitis.
And though we can expect it to be used by malign actors in disinformation campaigns, we shouldn’t overlook the less dramatic but perhaps more likely consequence of generative AI: huge amounts of wasted money and resources.
What else I’m reading
Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader in the US Congress, unveiled a plan for AI regulation in a speech last Wednesday, saying that innovation ought to be the “North Star” in legislation. President Biden also met with some AI experts in San Francisco last week, in another signal that regulatory action could be around the corner, but I’m not holding my breath.
Political campaigns are using generative AI, setting off alarm bells about disinformation, according to this great overview from the New York Times. “Political experts worry that artificial intelligence, when misused, could have a corrosive effect on the democratic process,” reporters Tiffany Hsu and Steven Lee Myers write.
Last week, Meta’s oversight board issued binding recommendations about how the company moderates content around war. The company will have to provide additional information about why material is left up or taken down, and preserve anything that documents human rights abuses. Meta has to share that documentation with authorities, when appropriate as well. Alexa Koenig, the executive director of the Human Rights Centre, wrote a sharp analysis for Tech Policy Press explaining why this is actually a pretty big deal.
What I learned this week
The science about the relationship between social media and mental health for teens is still pretty complicated. A few weeks ago, Kaitlyn Tiffany at the Atlantic wrote a really in-depth feature, surveying the existing, and sometimes conflicting, research in the field. Teens are indeed experiencing a sharp increase in mental-health issues in the United States, and social media is often considered a contributing factor to the crisis.
The science, however, is not as clear or illuminating as we might hope, and just exactly how and when social media is damaging is not yet well established in the research. Tiffany writes that “a decade of work and hundreds of studies have produced a mixture of results, in part because they’ve used a mixture of methods and in part because they’re trying to get at something elusive and complicated.” Importantly, “social media’s effects seem to depend a lot on the person using it.”
More than 140 brands are advertising on low-quality content farm sites—and the problem is growing fast.
People are using AI chatbots to fill junk websites with AI-generated text that attracts paying advertisers, according to a new report from the media research organization NewsGuard that was shared exclusively with MIT Technology Review.
Over 140 major brands are paying for ads that end up on unreliable AI-written sites, likely without their knowledge. Ninety percent of the ads from major brands found on these AI-generated news sites were served by Google, though the company’s own policies prohibit sites from placing Google-served ads on pages that include “spammy automatically generated content.” The practice threatens to hasten the arrival of a glitchy, spammy internet that is overrun by AI-generated content, as well as wasting massive amounts of ad money.
Most companies that advertise online automatically bid on spots to run those ads through a practice called “programmatic advertising.” Algorithms place ads on various websites according to complex calculations that optimize the number of eyeballs an ad might attract from the company’s target audience. As a result, big brands end up paying for ad placements on websites that they may have never heard of before, with little to no human oversight.
To take advantage, content farms have sprung up where low-paid humans churn out low-quality content to attract ad revenue. These types of websites already have a name: “made for advertising” sites. They use tactics such as clickbait, autoplay videos, and pop-up ads to squeeze as much money as possible out of advertisers. In a recent survey, the Association of National Advertisers found that 21% of ad impressions in their sample went to made-for-advertising sites. The group estimated that around $13 billion is wasted globally on these sites each year.
Now, generative AI offers a new way to automate the content farm process and spin up more junk sites with less effort, resulting in what NewsGuard calls “unreliable artificial intelligence–generated news websites.” One site flagged by NewsGuard produced more than 1,200 articles a day.
Some of these new sites are more sophisticated and convincing than others, with AI-generated photos and bios of fake authors. And the problem is growing rapidly. NewsGuard, which evaluates the quality of websites across the internet, says it’s discovering around 25 new AI-generated sites each week. It’s found 217 of them in 13 languages since it started tracking the phenomenon in April.
NewsGuard has a clever way to identify these junk AI-written websites. Because many of them are also created without human oversight, they are often riddled with error messages typical of generative AI systems. For example, one site called CountyLocalNews.com had messages like “Sorry, I cannot fulfil this prompt as it goes against ethical and moral principles … As an AI language model, it is my responsibility to provide factual and trustworthy information.”
NewsGuard’s AI looks for these snippets of text on the websites, and then a human analyst reviews them.
Making money from junk
“It appears that programmatic advertising is the main revenue source for these AI-generated websites,” says Lorenzo Arvanitis, an analyst at NewGuard who has been tracking AI-generated web content. “We have identified hundreds of Fortune 500 companies and well-known, prominent brands that are advertising on these sites and that are unwittingly supporting it.”
MIT Technology Review looked at the list of almost 400 individual ads from over 140 major brands that NewsGuard identified on the AI-generated sites that served programmatic ads, which included companies from many different industries including finance, retail, auto, health care, and e-commerce. The average cost of a programmatic ad was $1.21 per thousand impressions as of January 2023, and brands often don’t review all the automatic placements of their advertisements, even though they cost money.
Google’s programmatic ad product, called Google Ads, is the largest exchange and made $168 billion in advertising revenue last year. The company has come under criticism for serving ads on content farms in the past, even though its own policies prohibit sites from placing Google-served ads on pages with “spammy automatically generated content.” Around a quarter of the sites flagged by NewsGuard featured programmatic ads from major brands. Of the 393 ads from big brands found on AI-generated sites, 356 were served by Google.
“We have strict policies that govern the type of content that can monetize on our platform,” Michael Aciman, a policy communications manager for Google, told MIT Technology Review in an email. “For example, we don’t allow ads to run alongside harmful content, spammy or low-value content, or content that’s been solely copied from other sites. When enforcing these policies, we focus on the quality of the content rather than how it was created, and we block or remove ads from serving if we detect violations.”
Most ad exchanges and platforms already have policies against serving ads on content farms, yet they “do not appear to uniformly enforce these policies,” and “many of these ad exchanges continue to serve ads on [made-for-advertising] sites even if they appear to be in violation of … quality policies,” says Krzysztof Franaszek, founder of Adalytics, a digital forensics and ad verification company.
Google said that the presence of AI-generated content on a page is not an inherent violation. “We also recognize that bad actors are always shifting their approach and may leverage technology, such as generative AI, to circumvent our policies and enforcement systems,” said Aciman.
A new generation of misinformation sites
NewsGuard says that most of the AI-generated sites are considered “low quality” but “do not spread misinformation.” But the economic dynamic of content farms already incentivizes the creation of clickbaity websites that are often riddled with junk and misinformation, and now that AIs can do the same thing on a bigger scale, it threatens to exacerbate the misinformation problem.
For example, one AI-written site, MedicalOutline.com, had articles that spread harmful health misinformation with headlines like “Can lemon cure skin allergy?” “What are 5 natural remedies for ADHD?” and “How can you prevent cancer naturally?” According to NewsGuard, advertisements from nine major brands, including the bank Citigroup, the automaker Subaru, and the wellness company GNC, were placed on the site. Those ads were served via Google.
Adalytics confirmed to MIT Technology Review that ads on Medical Outline appeared to be placed via Google as of June 24. We reached out to Medical Outline, Citigroup, Subaru, and GNC for comment over the weekend, but the brands have not yet replied.
After MIT Technology Review flagged the ads on Medical Outline and other sites to Google, Aciman said Google had removed ads that were being served on many of the sites “due to pervasive policy violations.” The ads were still visible on Medical Outline as of June 25.
“NewsGuard’s findings shed light on the concerning relationship between Google, ad tech companies, and the emergence of a new generation of misinformation sites masquerading as news sites and content farms made possible by AI,” says Jack Brewster, the enterprise editor of NewsGuard. “The opaque nature of programmatic advertising has inadvertently turned major brands into unwitting supporters, unaware that their ad dollars indirectly fund these unreliable AI-generated sites.”
Franaszek says it’s still too early to tell how the AI-generated content will affect the programmatic advertising landscape. After all, in order for those sites to make money, they still need to attract humans to their content, and it’s currently not clear whether generative AI will make that easier. Some sites might draw in only a couple of thousand views each month, making just a few dollars.
“The cost of content generation is likely less than 5% of the total cost of running a [made-for-advertising] site, and replacing low-cost foreign labour with an AI is unlikely to significantly change this situation,” says Franaszek.
So far, there aren’t any easy solutions, especially given that advertising props up the entire economic model of the internet. “What is key to remember is that programmatic ads—and targeted ads more generally—are a fundamental enabler of the internet economy,” says Hodan Omaar, senior AI policy advisor at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank in Washington, DC.
“If policymakers banned the use of these types of ad services, consumers would face a radically different internet: more ads that are less relevant, lower-quality online content and services, and more paywalls,” Omaar says.
“Policy shouldn’t be focused on getting rid of programmatic ads altogether, but rather on how to ensure there are more robust mechanisms in place to catch the spread of misinformation, whether it be direct or indirect.”
At Cannes Lions, the year’s biggest ad event, you couldn’t escape talk of ChatGPT or Midjourney, even at the yacht parties.
“If you were branding this Cannes, it would be the AI Cannes,” Meta ad executive, Nicola Mendelsohn, told me last week. We were sitting in a glass-walled cabana on the French Riviera, steps away from the shimmering blue Mediterranean Sea.
The Cannes she was referring to isn’t the one you’ve probably heard of — the film festival — but rather Cannes Lions, a similarly swanky festival celebrating advertising instead of cinema.
Every June, thousands of advertising professionals fly in for a bonanza of events. While the festival’s official programming happens at the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès convention center, the real networking happens at beachside business meetings, yacht deck happy hours, and celebrity-studded after-parties. The hot-ticket items this year were Spotify’s invite-only concerts by Florence and the Machine and the Foo Fighters, consulting agency MediaLink’s and iHeartMedia’s exclusive Lizzo performance, and TikTok’s end-of-week closing party. On the iHeartMedia yacht, Paris Hilton DJ’ed to a crowd so packed that the party was shut down by the cops.
But it’s not all rosé and champagne: Cannes Lions is a high-stakes hustling opportunity for power brokers at tech companies, ad agencies, and consumer brands — think Nike, Unilever, and Coca-Cola — to check in on multimillion-dollar advertising deals in the second half of the year, and plan new ones for the year ahead.
This year, the festival came on the tail end of a particularly rough time for the tech and advertising world. Digital ad spending slowed down significantly in 2022 compared to years prior, primarily due to rising inflation, an unsteady global economy, and policy changes that made it harder to track users’ browsing habits. That decline contributed to mass layoffs and budget cuts across the media industry. Although conditions are improving a bit, it’s unlikely spending will return to the levels it reached in the early pandemic, and the latest forecasts show continued advertising spending cuts. Given the economic uncertainty, some companies were sending fewer staffers to the festival and cutting back on their presence.
But everyone wants a reason to party and make deals at Cannes Lions. Since advertising funds so many of the free online services we rely on — everything from Facebook to Google to media publishers, including Vox — the industry’s success or failure has massive effects on the average consumer. And in the past year, the advertising industry has desperately needed something to be optimistic about.
Luckily for those looking for a vibe shift, AI had officially entered the chat.
The Carlton Hotel where TikTok had its press preview on June 19, 2023, in Cannes, France. Olivier Anrigo/Getty Images for TikTok
For a week in June, the developing technology was the talk of the beach in the south of France. And while I’m used to nonstop AI hype back home in Silicon Valley, I was not expecting to experience so much of it in Cannes. The streets were plastered with billboards; panels and late-night party chatter were all about AI. Google demoed new tools, Meta announced an upcoming AI assistant that will help advertisers make ads, and Microsoft hosted back-to-back days of AI-themed programming at a beachside venue decorated with images of AI-generated sea creatures.
There was so much AI talk at Cannes Lions this year that, at times, people sounded sick of talking about it. “I’m trying to find the AI superpowered yacht,” I heard one attendee say in jest as he sat on the deck of a luxury vessel, drink in hand.
Jokes and some healthy cynicism aside, the questions everyone seemed to be asking hint at some pretty serious shifts for the media business. Will AI fundamentally change the way we create and consume advertising? Will it be able to lift digital advertising out of its slump? And will it ultimately enhance or replace the human creativity that goes into making ads? Will it save (or destroy) journalism?
AI isn’t new, but it’s the saviour the ad industry needs right now
Six years ago, one of the world’s largest advertising agencies, Publicis Groupe, was widely ridiculed for cutting its marketing presence at Cannes so that it could instead invest money into developing a new AI business assistant, called Marcel. Clients and competing ad firms alike dismissed the idea that AI was a worthwhile endeavour for an agency in the business of human creativity.
“At the time, it was panned by everybody, but now it looks pretty smart,” Jem Ripley, the US CEO of digital experience for Publicis, told me in the hotel lobby of the Le Majestic hotel, a hot spot for executive meetings at the conference. To rub it in a little, this year, Publicis launched a hate-to-say “I told you so” billboard campaign around Cannes reminding people how prescient they’d been with developing the AI-powered Marcel platform.
Even before they became hot buzzwords in the industry, automation and AI were powering advertising behind the scenes for years. The two biggest digital advertising platforms, Google and Meta, have long used AI technologies to develop the automated software that determines the price they charge for an ad, who they show the ad to, and even what lines of marketing copy are most effective to use. As users, we don’t see it day-to-day, but that technology is core to many tech companies’ businesses.
Paris Hilton performed a DJ set during the iHeartMedia After Party on the iHeart Yacht, The Dionea, during the Cannes Lions Festival on June 20, 2023, in Cannes, France. Adam Berry/Getty Images for iHeartMedia
On the consumer side of things, apps like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube all build AI into the underlying algorithms that decide what content you see, based on what the tech thinks you’re interested in. Think about how TikTok predicts what funny videos you want to see next or how Google ranks your search results; all of it uses AI.
“Everybody wants this to be the year of AI, which I think to some degree it is,” said Blake Chandlee, TikTok’s president of global business solutions, sitting with me in his company’s Cannes outpost inside the swanky Carlton Hotel. “AI is not new. This concept of large language models, it’s been around for years. … What’s new is ChatGPT and some of the bots and the applications of the technology.”
Just as everyone from artists to writers has learned the value of AI from apps like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Bard, advertising companies are now realizing what these tools can do for them. That mainstream adoption, combined with the fact that marketers are looking to cut costs in this uncertain economic climate, means that AI is exploding in the ad industry at this moment.
I chatted with everyone from creative directors at the top of the totem pole to rank-and-file copywriters at the festival last week, and almost everyone I spoke with said they had experimented with AI tools in their day-to-day duties. And not because their boss told them to, but because they thought it could save them time writing an email, sketching an ad mock-up, or brainstorming an ad concept. Some of them were also worried that it could one day replace their jobs — more on that later — but for now, they were having fun with it.
“I think this year is particularly exciting because it’s sort of like the iceberg breaking through the surface,” said Vidhya Srinivasan, vice president and general manager for Google Ads, in an interview at Google’s beach outpost last Wednesday. “And so I think it’s more personal, and it’s much more tangible for people now. And that brings about a different kind of energy.”
What the AI future of advertising will look like
Standing onstage in a grand theatre at the Palais du Festival, Robert Wong, vice president of Google Creative Lab, touted the AI tools his company has starting to put in the hands of advertisers.
In one demonstration, Wong showed how a client can upload a single image of a company logo — a colourful Google “G” icon, in his demo — into Google’s systems and immediately get back a bunch of high-quality 3D images in the same branded style, from a Google dog cartoon to a Google-branded glass of rosé, which was fitting for the venue.
A waitress serves drinks to visitors arriving for a guided meditation by British podcaster and author Jay Shetty aboard the iHeart Yacht, The Dionea, during the Cannes Lions Festival on June 20, 2023. Adam Berry/Getty Images for iHeartMedia
While this quick demo may not seem dramatic compared to some of the splashy generative AI creations we’ve seen lately, like the Pope in a puffer jacket, it was met with “oohs” and “ahhs” from the audience of advertising professionals. That’s because for designers, work like that could take days or weeks. In just a few keystrokes, this new Google tool could give them limitless iterations of a design to experiment with.
“Day-to-day, what I see is designers literally doing sketches in a matter of seconds versus hours. And not one, but like 10,” said Wong in a press conference after the presentation. “And that’s just the beginning. I think we don’t even know what these tools might be in the future.”
Meta also made some AI announcements at the conference, including that it’s working on an AI-powered assistant that can help advertisers create ads. With its so-called AI Sandbox, the company in May released a slew of advertising tools that let advertisers use quick text prompts to come up with AI-generated advertising copy, create different visual backgrounds for their ads, or resize their images. For now, the program is only open to a small group of beta testers, but it’s expanding to more users later this year.
In the long run, the cost savings for brands using generative AI for advertising could be “substantial,” according to Mendelsohn, Meta’s global head of business group.
“It gets better as we train the machines,” she said during our interview at Meta Beach. “And then you think about the reduction not just in cost, but in the impacts on climate. People are not having to travel to be able to do shooting in different ways, or even the reusing of back catalogue of ads and things in the past.”
As the tech giants build out tools for their advertising customers, some are already experimenting with open source generative AI software with some impressive results.
For example, some major household brands are already starting to use AI to create high-production-value commercial videos.
In October, Coca-Cola enlisted the AI image creation tool Stable Diffusion to help create a video that was shortlisted for an award at the festival. The ad, called “Coca-Cola Masterpiece,” used AI in addition to traditional methods, like CGI, to create complex animations under a tight deadline. The two-minute spot shows characters popping out of the art in a gallery to toss a classic Coca-Cola bottle in and out of famous paintings, like a Warhol and a van Gogh; the bottle takes on the visual style of the work of art when it enters each picture. It’s an incredibly complex animation process that took only eight weeks, according to visual effects company Electric Theatre Collective, which Coca-Cola commissioned. Without the help of AI, the company told Digiday, it could have taken five times longer.
“We wanted to use technology to get the kind of perfection we needed, the kind of quality we needed, in a short time,” Pratik Thakar, Coca-Cola’s global head of generative AI, said on a panel hosted by Microsoft.
Generative AI holds promise for creating new kinds of audio advertising, too. Spotify, for instance, is exploring whether it can train AI on specific people’s voices so that it can one day generate original audio ads from scratch.
“Can we start to get to a place where — I use Morgan Freeman as a canonical example — if you go and license the IP for his voice, can we use machines to help scale that even further?” said Lee Brown, global head of advertising for Spotify, which has been growing its ad business in recent years. “So is there an opportunity here for us? I think there’s a lot of potential there.”
Spotify’s villa party at Cannes Lions. Antony Jones/Getty Images for Spotify
Some of these more sophisticated generative AI tools are still just possibilities for the ad industry at the moment. In the meantime, both Google and Bing are doing something a bit simpler: putting ads inside the conversations people are having with their AI chatbot assistants (Search Generative Experience and BingAI, respectively). The companies say this helps advertisers show users ads that are more relevant to people than what they’d see in a regular search.
The idea is that when you’re researching something like how to plan a trip to Greece, a chatbot would have more context about what you’re looking for — somewhere near the beach that’s kid-friendly in June, for instance — based on a series of follow-up questions you’re having with the bot rather than just through a single search query.
“From a marketer’s point of view, it’s interesting because you have a deeper insight into the user’s intent, because they’re in the conversation where you have more context about what they’re doing,” said Google’s Srinivasan.
Google’s presentation on new generative AI tools it’s rolling out for advertisers. Google
In other words, with generative AI search engines, people ask detailed follow-up questions and actually talk to the bots. Jennifer Creegan, general Manager of global marketing and operations for Microsoft advertising, said in a panel last Wednesday that people’s search queries are three times longer in BingAI because of this back and forth. This leads people to click on an advertiser link, she added, and buy something more quickly.
“The best thing about all of this is this is not something I’m showing you in PowerPoint at Cannes to talk about the future,” Creegan said. “This is real. This is in the wild today. People are using it.”
The concerns about AI and ads
Even though new advancements in AI and advertising are real and in the wild, human judgment still needs to play a role in how it all works. Advertisers aren’t ready to fully hand over the reins to the robots to make their ads.
SNL’s dinner party at Cannes Lions 2023. Fred Jagueneau/NBCUniversal via Getty Images
First of all, AI doesn’t replace taste. That means humans still need to review all the draft AI marketing copy or artwork manually. That’s because big companies are still cautious about protecting their brands, and it’s up to the people at the ad firms they hire to make judgment calls.
“At the end of the day, there’s still a healthy concern — I think rightfully so — from our clients about what is going out there,” said Publicis executive Ripley.
Another reservation major brands have around AI is that it could use other people’s creative work that it scrapes from the web, which could open them up to copyright infringement lawsuits. Publicis recently joined C2PA, a standard that watermarks images created by generative AI and can attach proper copyright information to it so that artists get credit for their work.
Advertisers are also worried about brand safety. Given how AI chatbots have a propensity to generate incorrect information, also known as “hallucinations,” or occasionally veer off into emotionally loaded conversations, advertisers need to make sure that the quality of AI-generated ads is up to par.
“For every hour you put into generative AI as a business driver, you need to put an hour into governance,” said Lou Paskalis, a long time ad executive who’s now chief strategy officer of Ad Fontes Media. “You need to make sure you don’t create a monster.”
All this raises some red flags for the workers in the ad industry. After all, if generative AI can reduce the number of people it takes to, say, produce a video or sketch an animation, the technology could wipe out a swath of jobs, particularly those on the creative side.
Among many advertising executives at Cannes Lions this year, there was an acknowledgment that AI will fundamentally change the kind of work people do. Despite tech companies’ optimism that AI will enhance and not replace human creativity, many said the new technology will get rid of some jobs while creating other new ones. One common refrain from ad execs was that the more creative your work is, the harder it will be to replace.
In the words of Coca-Cola’s Thakar, “Five-out-of-10” level creative advertising work is “free now.” He said, “So we need to figure it out … if you are really doing nine-out-of-10 work, then definitely there is always a demand.”
Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine performs onstage during Cannes Lions at Spotify Beach on June 20, 2023, in Cannes, France. Dave Benett/Getty Images for Spotify
Other executives compared AI to the invention of photography, which didn’t entirely replace painters as some thought it would. like Google’s SVP of research, technology, and society, James Manyika.
“AI and art are not at odds,” Manyika said in a keynote introducing Google’s new advertising tools. “AI doesn’t replace human creativity. It enhances, enables, and liberates it.”
Ultimately, it doesn’t seem as though any of the concerns about AI stealing or replacing people’s work are stopping advertisers from jumping on the AI bandwagon. This embrace of the new technology could be a boon to the struggling ad industry. And that, in turn, could benefit consumers who rely on free services propped up by advertising.
But like every other industry AI is impacting, the rise of AI-powered ads will force us to decide what still needs a human touch and what we’re happy to leave to the bots to handle.
Feature Image Credit: At Cannes Lions advertising festival in 2023, AI dominated the conversation.Paige Vickers/Vox
Shirin Ghaffary is a senior Vox correspondent covering the social media industry. Previously, Ghaffary worked at BuzzFeed News, the San Francisco Chronicle, and TechCrunch.
Brands can expect more targeted ads closer to the point of sale as generative artificial intelligence (GAI) continues to roll out at Google and Microsoft, according to insights from Insider Intelligence.
Evelyn Mitchell, an analyst for Insider Intelligence, wrote in a post that ads within chat answers are prominent, and fewer high-impact placements could cause ad prices to rise.
“Despite being labelled as sponsored, these ads may also get confused for chatbot responses by users,” Mitchell wrote. “That could be good for brand marketers, whose advertisements will now look more organic. But it also clutters the search experience, and may lead to users hesitating to click any links.”
And as of today, she says advertisers on Google can’t opt out of showing ads within the search generative experience (SGE).
NP Digital Co-Founder Neil Patel in an interview in April said AI will be a huge part of the future — especially search and content.
But companies that are concerned about misinformation have good reason to be. Much of the information that is being spit out in queries is scraped from the web.
“If your inputs are off, the outputs will be off,” he said. “If they haven’t been able to figure out what’s misinformation, and that’s being inputted into AI, for a portion of the queries and responses, you’ll get misinformation, as well as inaccurate, wrong and whatever it may be.”
Companies are advertising around this information. The real revenue, Patel said, will come from the transitional keywords. It’s not “how does Google’s algorithm work,” he said, adding that NP Digital manages billions of dollars in ad spending for companies and the majority is for transactional keywords for search.
Patel also outlines in a post the seven top misunderstandings when it comes to how companies use AI, which he writes is often due to lack of understanding of what technology and what it can do.
The company surveyed 1,000 digital marketers in the U.S., including those who actively work in digital marketing, including 229 freelancers, 394 who have in-house digital role, and 377 who have an agency role.
Lack of search engine optimization (SEO) is a major concern. There were a lot of answers for “what do you think is the biggest risk/issue of using AI technology in digital marketing?” The biggest, according to 149 respondents (14.9%) is the concern that content would not be optimized for SEO. In fact, it is a concern for all from freelance, in-house, or those within an agency.
Of our respondents, 12.66% of freelancers, 16.75% of in-house marketers, and 14.32% of digital marketing agencies felt similarly that SEO was the biggest risk.
Despite the prevailing concerns about the potential for artificial intelligence to eliminate jobs and harm (or even destroy) the planet, the reality is quite different. AI is not necessarily the harbinger of doom; rather, it has immense potential to enhance human capabilities and drive positive outcomes. The challenge is in understanding and applying AI without being overwhelmed by it.
To learn how leaders and career-minded professionals can embrace AI as a tool for accelerating career advancement and increasing professional happiness, I reached out to Matt Strain, the AI Whisperer, who was featured in the NY Times for using “ChatGPT to create an entire book of cocktails based on the tenets of traditional Chinese medicine written in the style of the J. Peterman catalog.” After a long career at big tech companies (Apple, Adobe …), Matt’s started his own company, The-Prompt.AI, to focus on what he calls “AI for Real People.”
William Arruda: Matt, you shared a quip that’s making the rounds online: “AI won’t replace your job, but someone using AI might.” It’s how I came up with the title of this article, and it’s a sentiment echoing across organizations, from individuals to agencies and companies alike. Interestingly, the Pew Research Center’s report A Majority of Americans Have Heard of ChatGPT, But Few Have Tried It Themselves highlights the public’s simultaneous fascination and fright with the increased use of AI. With the incredible potential that AI promises, why have so few people incorporated it into their work?
Matt Strain: You’re absolutely right. The vast potential of AI invokes fascination and fear. Many people simply don’t know where to start. We’ve seen companies condone the use of AI tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E. Others are requiring usage in the hopes of increased productivity. In addition to the natural fear of change, two main things come into play. First, the fear parlays into scepticism. Many look to find the flaws to confirm their fears. Second, most people simply don’t understand how to get the most out of the tools. Their prompts are ineffective and they have a poor experience.
Arruda: You say that rather than fearing AI, we should embrace it as a catalyst for progress. You suggest that by integrating AI into our work and leveraging its capabilities, we can unlock new opportunities, streamline processes, boost productivity and propel our careers to new heights. You make it sound like the magic bullet for career success.
Strain: There’s an opportunity to reframe this and think of AI as a creative muse that will push us to think more broadly. I believe it will become a non-judgmental co-pilot that is always eager to engage in exploratory discussions. In a nutshell, when you embrace AI right now, you will stand out from your peers and enhance the value of your personal brand.
Having said that, AI is not a magic bullet. We humans still need to invest the energy in forming the right questions and exploring the most important problems. These tools will augment—not replace—our skills.
Arruda: How else do you see AI being used by “real people?”
Strain: Everything everywhere all at once. Well, almost. For career advancement, continuous learning and adaptation are key. Generative AI systems can provide personalized learning resources. For instance, an entrepreneur venturing into the AI tech industry can employ AI for guidance on trends, opportunities, and goal-oriented recommendations. AI can aid in everything from designing research surveys to evaluating corporate strategy. AI is not some future concept. It’s a present-day tool being used by many.
Arruda: Are there any specific AI-powered platforms or applications that you believe can significantly improve networking and professional relationship-building?
Strain: There are many. AI will intelligently recommend contacts, personalize communications, and optimize engagement timings. It will nurture professional relationships through automated scheduling, social monitoring, real-time translation, and insights from data analytics.
These tools are being integrated into major networking platforms like LinkedIn and CRM tools. Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI ensures that AI will be baked into their office suite. Google is already working on many of these tools. There’s also a new wave of AI start-ups rushing in on a daily basis.
Arruda: What are some real-world work applications that maybe we haven’t even thought about but would help us save time or take the drudgery out of monotonous work activities?
Strain: Meetings and email. In my seventeen years at Adobe, I calculated that I attended more than 40,000 meetings! Imagine a world where meetings are a breeze, and everyone actually looks forward to them. Imagine AI effortlessly aligning schedules, crafting tailor-made agendas, and making sure every voice is heard with real-time transcriptions and translations. With the mundane handled, your post-meeting world is infused with crisp summaries, clear action items, and insightful analytics, turning endless meetings into bursts of creativity and productivity. Might you actually look forward to meetings in the future?
Don’t even get me started about email. AI is coming to optimize that, but I’ll save those thoughts for the next interview.
Arruda: I have heard the emergence of generative AI compared to Oppenheimer’s nuclear bomb. What ethical considerations should career-minded professionals keep in mind when using AI in their work? What are the potential risks or pitfalls?
Strain: Yes, the comparison to Oppenheimer is in terms of AI having the capacity for both good and evil. The main ethical considerations in the short term revolve around ensuring fairness by mitigating biases, safeguarding data privacy and maintaining human accountability for AI-driven decisions. Successful companies will hold on to the human touch and be mindful of deploying AI as an augmentation, not a replacement.
We’re going to see a wave of anxiety in which employees and leaders have to manage short-term fear of change and concerns about jobs, mid-term fear of misinformation and economic disruption, and long-term fears of what it means to be human and the potential for bad actors. These are real and compounding fears. Leaders will have to draw on change management skills to proactively present a vision that demonstrates the ability to direct AI as a productive, creative force. Employees, shareholders and customers will depend on this.
On the positive side, AI can be directed to assist with all these concerns.
Arruda: How can AI assist professionals in enhancing their personal branding and online presence? Are there any specific strategies or tools you recommend? Any examples of people who are doing it right?
Strain: Absolutely. AI has the remarkable ability to study an individual, identifying their strengths and weaknesses, and distilling their authentic values and unique qualities. By observing professionals, AI can offer proactive guidance, aiding in their development and helping them create a genuine and compelling story that sets them apart. Once this story is formed, AI can further assist in creating a strategic plan to effectively communicate this narrative to the right audience. AI-infused tools will help with designing imagery, creating content and monitoring your brand mentions.
Arruda: I know you have been traveling the globe lately as a consultant to corporate leaders at companies in a variety of industries. You’re helping them establish their AI strategies. Without divulging any corporate secrets, what are these leaders’ biggest concerns and hopes for AI?
Strain: It’s a challenging time for leaders. They need to keep a positive attitude and be actively engaged, even as they tackle a long list of concerns such as where to begin, not wanting to disrupt what’s working, how to manage data, ethical issues, and the costs of bringing AI into the fold. There’s also the human element; they’re worried about how this affects their employees in terms of morale, the need for additional training, and the possibility of job losses. These are very real concerns, but they’re also manageable issues that can be addressed with a level-headed plan.
I foresee that the benefits are going to be greater than the worries. Right off the bat, AI can take over mundane work, which means people can focus on more strategic, higher-value tasks. For example, being able to use data effectively will spur innovation and enhance the experience for customers and employees alike. Once we get past this early transitionary stage, I see a future where our teams benefit from working side-by-side with AI-driven tools that can learn and augment their human counterparts.
Arruda: Thanks, Matt. It sounds like the power of AI as a tool for expanding your career success is bound only by the imagination. Readers, to see how you can push past the fear and leverage AI, check out this podcast where Matt dispels myths and reduces the stress that surrounds artificial intelligence.
Meta, the company that owns Facebook, has made an important announcement that has created excitement in advertising. With the positive quarterly results for Q1 2023, Meta has uncovered another addition to their money-making projects. AI Sandbox is a completely generative AI-based tool tailored for advertisers and content creators. This tool strengthens how brands interact and engage with their audience on social media platforms.
The announcement created a positive outlook for Meta, as it has posted year-on-year revenue growth for the first time in three quarters. This positive momentum further strengthens the company’s position as a leader in the tech industry and enhances its vision to deliver innovative solutions for advertisers.
The AI Sandbox offers three main features as per the release. The first feature enables brands to generate variations of the same copy with customization capabilities for their advertisements. This feature helps them to tailor their message for a range of demographics while keeping the core idea of the message intact. This level of personalization ensures that brands connect with their target audience more personally, maximizing their impression of them.
The second feature of the AI sandbox is a background generation tool that simplifies the creation of uniquely different campaign materials. Based on text prompt as an inference input, This allows brands to create unique ads with trendy and engaging backdrops that align with the ad’s core idea. This feature enables the simple and enhanced visual addition to their suite of campaign assets and saves time in the whole iteration of the ad material lifecycle.
The third and final feature of the AI sandbox is its image-cropping tool. This tool allows advertisers to create visuals in different aspect ratios, such as social posts, stories, or even short videos like Reels. This simple-sounding automation is a quite needed feature in creator space as a significant amount of time is spent creating these visuals in different dimensions per the requirements. This feature saves the time and efforts of a creator hence, enhancing a creator or an advertiser’s overall experience.
Meta has made this generative AI Sandobx features available to a select group of advertisers. However, new expansions will roll out in July of this year. In a recent post, Meta stated, “In July, we will begin gradually expanding access to more advertisers with plans to add some of these features into our products later this year.” This expansion of access reflects Meta’s commitment to empowering a broader range of advertisers with the capabilities offered by the AI Sandbox.
It is worth noting that Meta’s expansion into AI and advertising innovation does not mean they have a blurry vision of Metaverse development. While Meta works on developing AI tools to enhance advertising capabilities, it remains dedicated to building a metaverse and revolutionizing how people connect and engage with technology.
Conclusively, the announcement of Meta’s AI sandbox for advertisers marks a significant milestone for the company. As Meta expands its services beyond social media, this AI toolset is set to revolutionize the advertising industry. By enhancing the process of content creators with the help of these generative AI features, Meta aims to strengthen engagement, streamline the creative process and provide brands with the resources they need to connect with the target audience quickly and effectively.
Anant is a Computer science engineer currently working as a data scientist with experience in Finance and AI products as a service. He is keen to build AI-powered solutions that create better data points and solve daily life problems in an impactful and efficient way.
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