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An AI Scam Stole 3 Million Site Visitors. Business Clones Are Pirating Services. Here’s How to Prep Yourself for Alarming Trends in AI.

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By BEN ANGEL 

These chilling AI trends aren’t just making waves, they’re flipping the boat entirely.

Key Takeaways

Will consumers clone your services to save money? It’s already happening! In my new book, The Wolf is at The Door: How to Survive and Thrive in an AI-Driven World, and on this podcast episode, I peel back the curtains on AI developments to help prepare entrepreneurs for a future that is already here.

Welcome to a world where AI SEO hijackers plot to seize your web traffic and customers, unauthorized cloning becomes a chilling reality, and massive AI model failures lead to unexpected domino effects like lawsuits and more.

And, to celebrate the release of my brand new book, The Wolf is at The Door, I’m giving away a Free AI Success Kit, featuring a chapter from the book to help get you up to speed on the world of artificial intelligence fast.

If listening to this show lights up your day, please take a moment to rate and review the podcast! This is a great way to support my team’s mission of empowering more individuals like you to supercharge their lives and businesses. What’s more, don’t forget to follow the podcast if you haven’t already. Thanks!

About Beyond Unstoppable

Hosted by bestselling author Ben Angel, Beyond Unstoppable is a transformative exploration of biology, psychology and technology. Learn from world-renowned experts like Jim Kwik, Amy Porterfield, Mari Smith and Jason Feifer. Dive into advanced AI tools, biohacking, and strategies to make you unstoppable.

Subscribe to Beyond Unstoppable: Entrepreneur | Apple | Spotify | Google

By BEN ANGEL 

Tackle AI’s toughest questions with Ben Angel, mapping the business terrain for 20 years. Master the AI landscape and reach peak productivity and profits with insights from his latest work, “The Wolf is at The Door — How to Survive and Thrive in an AI-Driven World.” Click here to download your ‘Free AI Success Kit‘ and get your free chapter from his latest book today.

Sourced from Entrepreneur

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Let’s not make the same mistakes with AI that we made with social media

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Nathan E. Sanders archive page& Bruce Schneier

Social media’s unregulated evolution over the past decade holds a lot of lessons that apply directly to AI companies and technologies.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. A decade ago, social media was celebrated for sparking democratic uprisings in the Arab world and beyond. Now front pages are splashed with stories of social platforms’ role in misinformation, business conspiracy, malfeasance, and risks to mental health. In a 2022 survey, Americans blamed social media for the coarsening of our political discourse, the spread of misinformation, and the increase in partisan polarization.

Today, tech’s darling is artificial intelligence. Like social media, it has the potential to change the world in many ways, some favourable to democracy. But at the same time, it has the potential to do incredible damage to society.

There is a lot we can learn about social media’s unregulated evolution over the past decade that directly applies to AI companies and technologies. These lessons can help us avoid making the same mistakes with AI that we did with social media.

In particular, five fundamental attributes of social media have harmed society. AI also has those attributes. Note that they are not intrinsically evil. They are all double-edged swords, with the potential to do either good or ill. The danger comes from who wields the sword, and in what direction it is swung. This has been true for social media, and it will similarly hold true for AI. In both cases, the solution lies in limits on the technology’s use.

#1: Advertising

The role advertising plays in the internet arose more by accident than anything else. When commercialization first came to the internet, there was no easy way for users to make micropayments to do things like viewing a web page. Moreover, users were accustomed to free access and wouldn’t accept subscription models for services. Advertising was the obvious business model, if never the best one. And it’s the model that social media also relies on, which leads it to prioritize engagement over anything else.

Both Google and Facebook believe that AI will help them keep their stranglehold on an 11-figure online ad market (yep, 11 figures), and the tech giants that are traditionally less dependent on advertising, like Microsoft and Amazon, believe that AI will help them seize a bigger piece of that market.

Big Tech needs something to persuade advertisers to keep spending on their platforms. Despite bombastic claims about the effectiveness of targeted marketing, researchers have long struggled to demonstrate where and when online ads really have an impact. When major brands like Uber and Procter & Gamble recently slashed their digital ad spending by the hundreds of millions, they proclaimed that it made no dent at all in their sales.

AI-powered ads, industry leaders say, will be much better. Google assures you that AI can tweak your ad copy in response to what users search for, and that its AI algorithms will configure your campaigns to maximize success. Amazon wants you to use its image generation AI to make your toaster product pages look cooler. And IBM is confident its Watson AI will make your ads better.

These techniques border on the manipulative, but the biggest risk to users comes from advertising within AI chatbots. Just as Google and Meta embed ads in your search results and feeds, AI companies will be pressured to embed ads in conversations. And because those conversations will be relational and human-like, they could be more damaging. While many of us have gotten pretty good at scrolling past the ads in Amazon and Google results pages, it will be much harder to determine whether an AI chatbot is mentioning a product because it’s a good answer to your question or because the AI developer got a kickback from the manufacturer.

#2: Surveillance

Social media’s reliance on advertising as the primary way to monetize websites led to personalization, which led to ever-increasing surveillance. To convince advertisers that social platforms can tweak ads to be maximally appealing to individual people, the platforms must demonstrate that they can collect as much information about those people as possible.

It’s hard to exaggerate how much spying is going on. A recent analysis by Consumer Reports about Facebook—just Facebook—showed that every user has more than 2,200 different companies spying on their web activities on its behalf.

AI-powered platforms that are supported by advertisers will face all the same perverse and powerful market incentives that social platforms do. It’s easy to imagine that a chatbot operator could charge a premium if it were able to claim that its chatbot could target users on the basis of their location, preference data, or past chat history and persuade them to buy products.

The possibility of manipulation is only going to get greater as we rely on AI for personal services. One of the promises of generative AI is the prospect of creating a personal digital assistant advanced enough to act as your advocate with others and as a butler to you. This requires more intimacy than you have with your search engine, email provider, cloud storage system, or phone. You’re going to want it with you constantly, and to most effectively work on your behalf, it will need to know everything about you. It will act as a friend, and you are likely to treat it as such, mistakenly trusting its discretion.

Even if you choose not to willingly acquaint an AI assistant with your lifestyle and preferences, AI technology may make it easier for companies to learn about you. Early demonstrations illustrate how chatbots can be used to surreptitiously extract personal data by asking you mundane questions. And with chatbots increasingly being integrated with everything from customer service systems to basic search interfaces on websites, exposure to this kind of inferential data harvesting may become unavoidable.

#3: Virality

Social media allows any user to express any idea with the potential for instantaneous global reach. A great public speaker standing on a soapbox can spread ideas to maybe a few hundred people on a good night. A kid with the right amount of snark on Facebook can reach a few hundred million people within a few minutes.

A decade ago, technologists hoped this sort of virality would bring people together and guarantee access to suppressed truths. But as a structural matter, it is in a social network’s interest to show you the things you are most likely to click on and share, and the things that will keep you on the platform.

As it happens, this often means outrageous, lurid, and triggering content. Researchers have found that content expressing maximal animosity toward political opponents gets the most engagement on Facebook and Twitter. And this incentive for outrage drives and rewards misinformation.

As Jonathan Swift once wrote, “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.” Academics seem to have proved this in the case of social media; people are more likely to share false information—perhaps because it seems more novel and surprising. And unfortunately, this kind of viral misinformation has been pervasive.

AI has the potential to supercharge the problem because it makes content production and propagation easier, faster, and more automatic. Generative AI tools can fabricate unending numbers of falsehoods about any individual or theme, some of which go viral. And those lies could be propelled by social accounts controlled by AI bots, which can share and launder the original misinformation at any scale.

Remarkably powerful AI text generators and autonomous agents are already starting to make their presence felt in social media. In July, researchers at Indiana University revealed a botnet of more than 1,100 Twitter accounts that appeared to be operated using ChatGPT.

AI will help reinforce viral content that emerges from social media. It will be able to create websites and web content, user reviews, and smartphone apps. It will be able to simulate thousands, or even millions, of fake personas to give the mistaken impression that an idea, or a political position, or use of a product, is more common than it really is. What we might perceive to be vibrant political debate could be bots talking to bots. And these capabilities won’t be available just to those with money and power; the AI tools necessary for all of this will be easily available to us all.

#4: Lock-in

Social media companies spend a lot of effort making it hard for you to leave their platforms. It’s not just that you’ll miss out on conversations with your friends. They make it hard for you to take your saved data—connections, posts, photos—and port it to another platform. Every moment you invest in sharing a memory, reaching out to an acquaintance, or curating your follows on a social platform adds a brick to the wall you’d have to climb over to go to another platform.

This concept of lock-in isn’t unique to social media. Microsoft cultivated proprietary document formats for years to keep you using its flagship Office product. Your music service or e-book reader makes it hard for you to take the content you purchased to a rival service or reader. And if you switch from an iPhone to an Android device, your friends might mock you for sending text messages in green bubbles. But social media takes this to a new level. No matter how bad it is, it’s very hard to leave Facebook if all your friends are there. Coordinating everyone to leave for a new platform is impossibly hard, so no one does.

Similarly, companies creating AI-powered personal digital assistants will make it hard for users to transfer that personalization to another AI. If AI personal assistants succeed in becoming massively useful time-savers, it will be because they know the ins and outs of your life as well as a good human assistant; would you want to give that up to make a fresh start on another company’s service? In extreme examples, some people have formed close, perhaps even familial, bonds with AI chatbots. If you think of your AI as a friend or therapist, that can be a powerful form of lock-in.

Lock-in is an important concern because it results in products and services that are less responsive to customer demand. The harder it is for you to switch to a competitor, the more poorly a company can treat you. Absent any way to force interoperability, AI companies have less incentive to innovate in features or compete on price, and fewer qualms about engaging in surveillance or other bad behaviours.

#5: Monopolization

Social platforms often start off as great products, truly useful and revelatory for their consumers, before they eventually start monetizing and exploiting those users for the benefit of their business customers. Then the platforms claw back the value for themselves, turning their products into truly miserable experiences for everyone. This is a cycle that Cory Doctorow has powerfully written about and traced through the history of Facebook, Twitter, and more recently TikTok.

The reason for these outcomes is structural. The network effects of tech platforms push a few firms to become dominant, and lock-in ensures their continued dominance. The incentives in the tech sector are so spectacularly, blindingly powerful that they have enabled six megacorporation’s (Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook parent Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia) to command a trillion dollars each of market value—or more. These firms use their wealth to block any meaningful legislation that would curtail their power. And they sometimes collude with each other to grow yet fatter.

This cycle is clearly starting to repeat itself in AI. Look no further than the industry poster child OpenAI, whose leading offering, ChatGPT, continues to set marks for uptake and usage. Within a year of the product’s launch, OpenAI’s valuation had skyrocketed to about $90 billion.

OpenAI once seemed like an “open” alternative to the megacorps—a common carrier for AI services with a socially oriented nonprofit mission. But the Sam Altman firing-and-rehiring debacle at the end of 2023, and Microsoft’s central role in restoring Altman to the CEO seat, simply illustrated how venture funding from the familiar ranks of the tech elite pervades and controls corporate AI. In January 2024, OpenAI took a big step toward monetization of this user base by introducing its GPT Store, wherein one OpenAI customer can charge another for the use of its custom versions of OpenAI software; OpenAI, of course, collects revenue from both parties. This sets in motion the very cycle Doctorow warns about.

In the middle of this spiral of exploitation, little or no regard is paid to externalities visited upon the greater public—people who aren’t even using the platforms. Even after society has wrestled with their ill effects for years, the monopolistic social networks have virtually no incentive to control their products’ environmental impact, tendency to spread misinformation, or pernicious effects on mental health. And the government has applied virtually no regulation toward those ends.

Likewise, few or no guardrails are in place to limit the potential negative impact of AI. Facial recognition software that amounts to racial profiling, simulated public opinions supercharged by chatbots, fake videos in political ads—all of it persists in a legal grey area. Even clear violators of campaign advertising law might, some think, be let off the hook if they simply do it with AI.

Mitigating the risks

The risks that AI poses to society are strikingly familiar, but there is one big difference: it’s not too late. This time, we know it’s all coming. Fresh off our experience with the harms wrought by social media, we have all the warning we should need to avoid the same mistakes.

The biggest mistake we made with social media was leaving it as an unregulated space. Even now—after all the studies and revelations of social media’s negative effects on kids and mental health, after Cambridge Analytica, after the exposure of Russian intervention in our politics, after everything else—social media in the US remains largely an unregulated “weapon of mass destruction.” Congress will take millions of dollars in contributions from Big Tech, and legislators will even invest millions of their own dollars with those firms, but passing laws that limit or penalize their behaviour seems to be a bridge too far.

We can’t afford to do the same thing with AI, because the stakes are even higher. The harm social media can do stems from how it affects our communication. AI will affect us in the same ways and many more besides. If Big Tech’s trajectory is any signal, AI tools will increasingly be involved in how we learn and how we express our thoughts. But these tools will also influence how we schedule our daily activities, how we design products, how we write laws, and even how we diagnose diseases. The expansive role of these technologies in our daily lives gives for-profit corporations opportunities to exert control over more aspects of society, and that exposes us to the risks arising from their incentives and decisions.

The good news is that we have a whole category of tools to modulate the risk that corporate actions pose for our lives, starting with regulation. Regulations can come in the form of restrictions on activity, such as limitations on what kinds of businesses and products are allowed to incorporate AI tools. They can come in the form of transparency rules, requiring disclosure of what data sets are used to train AI models or what new preproduction-phase models are being trained. And they can come in the form of oversight and accountability requirements, allowing for civil penalties in cases where companies disregard the rules.

The single biggest point of leverage governments have when it comes to tech companies is antitrust law. Despite what many lobbyists want you to think, one of the primary roles of regulation is to preserve competition—not to make life harder for businesses. It is not inevitable for OpenAI to become another Meta, an 800-pound gorilla whose user base and reach are several times those of its competitors. In addition to strengthening and enforcing antitrust law, we can introduce regulation that supports competition-enabling standards specific to the technology sector, such as data portability and device interoperability. This is another core strategy for resisting monopoly and corporate control.

Additionally, governments can enforce existing regulations on advertising. Just as the US regulates what media can and cannot host advertisements for sensitive products like cigarettes, and just as many other jurisdictions exercise strict control over the time and manner of politically sensitive advertising, so too could the US limit the engagement between AI providers and advertisers.

Lastly, we should recognize that developing and providing AI tools does not have to be the sovereign domain of corporations. We, the people and our government, can do this too. The proliferation of open-source AI development in 2023, successful to an extent that startled corporate players, is proof of this. And we can go further, calling on our government to build public-option AI tools developed with political oversight and accountability under our democratic system, where the dictatorship of the profit motive does not apply.

Which of these solutions is most practical, most important, or most urgently needed is up for debate. We should have a vibrant societal dialogue about whether and how to use each of these tools. There are lots of paths to a good outcome.

The problem is that this isn’t happening now, particularly in the US. And with a looming presidential election, conflict spreading alarmingly across Asia and Europe, and a global climate crisis, it’s easy to imagine that we won’t get our arms around AI any faster than we have (not) with social media. But it’s not too late. These are still the early years for practical consumer AI applications. We must and can do better.

Feature Image Credit: STEPHANIE ARNETT/MITTR | GETTY, ENVATO

Nathan E. Sanders archive page& Bruce Schneier

Nathan E. Sanders is a data scientist and an affiliate with the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University. Bruce Schneier is a security technologist and a fellow and lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Sourced from MIT Technology Review

 

 

Nathan E. Sanders archive page& Bruce Schneierarchive page

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Affiliate marketing: Top 7 must-know trends for 2024

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By Rob Davinson 

In 2024, affiliate marketing will see brand-creator alliances rise, TikTok vs. Amazon competition, programmatic opportunities, and more, says Awin’s global head of content, Rob Davinson.

Affiliate marketing mirrors the broader digital landscape, with trends at the macro level resonating in our microcosm. In 2024, we’ll see emergent trends (artificial intelligence (AI), social commerce and retail media to name just a few) that will impact affiliate marketers.

Here we breakdown the key changes (and challenges) that affiliate marketing is likely to encounter this year, and what they mean for the industry.

1. Brand-creator affiliation will rise amidst social media slowdown

With global digital ad spend growth slowing (Dentsu predicts only 6.5% growth in 2024, after a historically low-growth year in 2023), and social media facing a similar slowdown as new user growth plateaus, brands can combat this by directly partnering with creators, as influencer marketing proves more resilient than paid social.

Major brands like The Body Shop and Walmart are two examples that launched large-scale creator affiliate programs in the last year, tying social awareness to controlled marketing outcomes. We see this trend further developing in 2024, as it not only counters platform-dependent risks, but benefits influencers seeking stable incomes,

Awin’s platform witnessed a surge of registering influencers in 2023 (over 10,000), foreshadowing continued growth in 2024.

2. TikTok vs. Amazon: Affiliate model’s value amid new competition

As major tech giants mature, Amazon transitions from a shopping marketplace to an ad space, while TikTok evolves from entertainment to a product purchasing platform. This encroachment on each other’s territory is likely to intensify competition, with TikTok employing an affiliate-type model, mirroring Amazon’s commerce flywheel.

Both platforms embracing affiliate strategies validates its efficacy. Brands may channel more ad budgets into these tech giants, necessitating a choice between entering new marketplaces or driving traffic to their e-commerce sites.

Opting for the latter requires enhancing the shopper experience, supported by affiliate tech partners, as exemplified by Nike’s livestream shopping collaboration with Contester, enhancing the Cyber period with engaging content on their site.

3. Programmatic challenges will propel affiliate ad spend growth

In 2023, the programmatic ad industry faced serious challenges, as reported in the ANA’s Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency Study. Among its findings was the fact that there is $22bn of wastage from the $88bn programmatic supply chain.

Advertisers often grapple with misaligned incentives, prioritizing cost over value, resulting in diminished ad quality. In contrast, affiliate marketing’s performance model, linking ad spend to tangible outcomes like sales, proves more valuable.

It says a lot that global spend in affiliate marketing last year is estimated to be around $14bn, a third less than was wasted in programmatic. As senior marketers consider their budgets this year, the data suggests affiliate marketing should garner greater consideration for its effectiveness.

4. News and media publishers will leverage affiliate commerce content

In 2024, with a record number of global elections, including the US presidential election and 40 national elections, political interest will drive traffic to news media sites.

Despite heightened ad spend forecasts, news publishers may not see increased income due to past challenges with programmatic display ads. Affiliate channels offer a solution for publishers facing declining ad monetization and brand block listing.

Additionally, major sporting events like the European Football Championships and the Olympic Games in Paris promise increased traffic, creating opportunities for affiliate efforts to offset ad revenue challenges and enhance the value of journalism amid growing demand.

5. AI revolution in search will pose a threat to affiliate longtail

When it comes to online, the significance of high Google search rankings has been paramount. As the old adage (meme caption) goes: “The best place to hide a dead body is page 2 of Google’s search results.”

Google’s search console, shaping our online information-seeking behaviour for two decades, faces challenges from Google’s monetization motives and emerging AI-powered search consoles, like ChatGPT. These AI consoles provide instant answers, diminishing the reliance on external links and altering the traditional internet ecosystem.

Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) introduces AI-generated responses, potentially reducing organic traffic to publisher websites. Publishers face limited options – allow crawling for SGE or risk exclusion from Google search. SEO adherence to E-E-A-T values becomes crucial for publishers navigating this transformative shift, emphasizing the affiliate industry’s need to adapt and maintain audience-centric effectiveness.

6. Travel resurgence will inspire pop culture-inspired trips and affiliate growth

While some predicted its near-extinction after the 2019 lockdown, the travel industry is booming as we begin 2024.

IATA predicts that this year will exceed 2019’s travel record, with 4.7 billion people expected to board airlines in 2024. Awin observes a surge in affiliate-driven travel bookings, a trend set to continue as consumer confidence rises, airline capacity grows, and major events drive demand.

Expedia and Amadeus foresee a significant year for experience-based tourism (think set-jetting and music festivals). Affiliates play a crucial role in the complex shopper journey, offering inspiration, comparisons, and personalized options.

Brand partnerships, where one advertiser promotes another complementary one as part of the customer’ booking experience, thrived in 2023. Travel brands are well set to capitalise on this growth with lots of potential match-ups from other brands keen to tap into consumers’ resurgent appetite for travel.

7. As cheap fashion challenges sustainability efforts, green affiliates will emerge

Despite Cop28’s pivotal agreement to shift from fossil fuels, inertia persists around climate change. In 2024, the rise of ultra-fast fashion platforms like Shein and Temu, fuelled by the TikTok trend of buying cheap dupes, contributes to growing landfill fashion.

Even impacting Amazon, Teemu users spend nearly double the time compared to Amazon, prompting the e-commerce giant to lower fees for clothes under $20. However, some affiliates continue to promote mindful consumer choices innovatively. Examples include Refoorest, planting trees for site visits, and Axon Mobile incentivizing eco-friendly commuting. And another new promising solution for 2024 is spearheaded by Birl, who are introducing the circular economy to e-commerce through their smart resale system.

By Rob Davinson 

Sourced from The Drum

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A.I. Fuels a New Era of Product Placement

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Realistic-looking shampoo bottles and seltzer cans are popping up on videos from digital creators on TikTok and YouTube in a new form of old advertising.

Melissa Becraft, wearing a pink workout outfit, strikes a dance pose in a kitchen.
A screenshot of a recent TikTok from the dancer Melissa Becraft that used A.I to digitally superimpose a poster for Bubly, the sparkling water brand owned by PepsiCo, onto the wall of her apartment.Credit…via TikTok

Product placement, one of the oldest tricks in advertisers’ toolbox, is getting an A.I. makeover.

New technology has made it easier to insert digital, realistic-looking versions of soda cans and shampoo onto the tables and walls of videos on YouTube and TikTok. And a growing group of creators and advertisers is grabbing at the chance for an additional revenue stream.

A recent TikTok from the dancer Melissa Becraft featured a poster for Bubly, the sparkling-water brand owned by PepsiCo, hanging on the wall of her apartment as she shimmied to a Shakira song. A duo known as HiveMind chatted about bands while an animated can of Starry soda, another brand owned by PepsiCo, landed on a table between them. And a YouTube video of the “AsianBossGirl” podcast recently displayed a table of Garnier hair products.

Virtual product placements have been offered by start-ups and streaming services like Amazon Prime and NBC’s Peacock in recent years. But a recent wave of them on social media, in which brief, animated messages disclosing the sponsorships appear on the videos themselves, is the work of a start-up called Rembrand.

The ads provide a glimpse into one way A.I. might shape advertising in the future, especially as marketers look to reach younger viewers who are apt to skip or ignore standard ads.

Rembrand’s executives say their technology could transform product placements, which have often been used to cut production costs on bigger projects and can take weeks, months or sometimes years to negotiate.

For creators, it’s a way to make money from advertisers without physically handling products or discussing them.

“This feels like I’m making my own genuine content, but it doesn’t scream that I’m making an ad,” said Ms. Becraft, 28, who has made two TikTok videos that featured Bubly. “There’s no obligation for me to talk about it.”

Product placements in the United States are estimated to be a nearly $23 billion industry, according to PQ Media, a research firm. It has become increasingly appealing to advertisers, which have grown worried about consumers skipping commercials or the ads before YouTube videos.

The shifting viewership to social platforms and advances in technology have opened a new frontier for this work, moving it beyond getting Coca-Cola cups on the “American Idol” judges’ table or cereal brands into WB shows.

Our business reporters. Times journalists are not allowed to have any direct financial stake in companies they cover.

Rembrand, which has 42 employees and is based in Palo Alto, Calif., believes it’s on the forefront of these changes. It raised $14 million in seed funding from the likes of Greycroft and the venture arms of UTA Ventures and L’Oreal since it was created in 2022. One of its founders, Omar Tawakol, 55, spent years in programmatic advertising and is best known for founding and selling BlueKai — which helped marketers track users’ online behaviour for ad targeting — to Oracle in 2014.

Mr. Tawakol said he saw an opportunity to use A.I. to insert virtual products in influencer videos and make it a fast and easy ad buy.

Rembrand uses a form of generative A.I. that can “take an existing scene and figure out how to put a product in it,” Mr. Tawakol said. “The product has to look exactly right — Pepsi is not going to be forgiving if you screw with their logo,” he added.

The company “had to train the laws of physics into the network,” Mr. Tawakol said, so that objects would properly respond to things like light, camera distance and motion. Rembrand started placements with podcasts on YouTube because “they tended to be indoors, they tended to have fixed cameras, and they tended to have a table and a wall,” he said.

It then expanded to LinkedIn and TikTok; Instagram is next. (The company said it went with the name Rembrand — an allusion to the Dutch artist, who spelled it Rembrandt — because it wanted an artistic bent while also sounding like shorthand for “remember the brand.”)

Rembrand is still asking creators like Ms. Becraft to film indoors as they improve the technology. “The things I’m more famous for are dancing outside in the rain and dancing in Times Square,” she said. “They told me that if you do that our technology might have a heart attack.”

The placements are not as subtle as the ones in TV shows. Starry and Bubly cans wiggle before entering videos, and logos hover above them. The company shared a demo in which a digitized Tide Pen danced onto a podcast host’s shirt and wiped away a stain before vanishing, “Fantasia” style. The company experimented with “what animations were acceptable,” after realizing they could spike attention on the products, said Cory Treffiletti, 50, Rembrand’s chief marketing officer.

 

Madison Luscombe, chief marketing officer of the Creator Society, an agency that works with Ms. Becraft, said that while the use of A.I.-generated product placement was in its early days, the deals could be valuable for “entertainment creators” who are focused on performing, podcasting or playing games, and aren’t necessarily approached by brands as often to extol mascara or new snacks to their fans.

Advertisers use Rembrand’s marketplace to connect with more than 1,000 creators from agencies it works with. Creators upload their videos to its platform and receive them within 24 hours with the product placements. Rembrand has someone check for quality and someone else for how the brand appears. Then creators upload the clips and eventually get paid from the brands based on video views. Rembrand declined to share specific figures around payouts.

The company said it expected to turn into a “self-service platform” by the middle of this year, where any creator or brand could connect and run digital product placement campaigns without Rembrand’s involvement.

When asked why YouTube, TikTok and Instagram wouldn’t just offer this option directly to creators on their platforms, Mr. Tawakol said he would “love” if they wanted to work with him. “I designed my business to integrate it with platforms,” he said. “We want to be the world’s best at this one very specific problem.”

By Sapna Maheshwari

Sourced from The New York Times

 

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Giving a name to AI: cautionary tales and advice for brands

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By Webb Wright 

If you’re considering launching a new AI-centered brand or product, you may want to go beyond simply adding ‘AI’ to the end of the name.

The AI Gold Rush is in full swing and brands of all stripes are rushing to establish their particular niches in this hugely profitable and increasingly crowded industry. New AI-centered brands, departments and products are cropping up by the day, each requiring a name that is, ideally, both memorable and unique.

“Every single company, whether a candy bar manufacturer or a software company, seemingly has to show that it is doing something to leverage AI,” says Jonathan Bell, founder and CEO of Want Branding. “And that often requires some kind of adjacent brand, which, of course, then needs a name.”

Several brands, as you may have noticed, have simply taken to adding ‘AI’ (or ‘.AI’) to the ends of their names. Think Stability AI, Spot AI, Mistral AI, Shield AI, People.ai, Otter.ai, Arize AI, Crowd AI, Toggle AI and so on. And, of course, there’s OpenAI, the company that has become something of a flagship for the entire wave of AI innovation that’s currently underway following its hugely successful launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 and that has probably helped to establish the ‘AI‘ suffix as the name du jour for up-and-coming brands looking to make a name for themselves in the industry.

Adding ‘AI‘ to the end of a brand or product name “is an easy but often perhaps a cheap way of doing it without much thought,” says Bell.

A parallel can be drawn between this naming phenomenon and a similar one that followed in the wake of the dawn of the internet in the late 90s when scores of new brands with ‘.com‘ at the ends of their names began to emerge. In those early days of the world wide web, it made practical sense for companies to make unambiguously clear that they were technologically savvy enough to have an online presence. (Remember, this was back when ‘online‘ was itself a new, hip word.)

Over the slow process of many years, however, the internet became so deeply embedded into most of our day-to-day lives, into the very fabric of popular culture and commerce, that it became more or less superfluous to add ‘.com‘ to the end of a brand name. Most people these days automatically assume that any given brand – unless it‘s incompetent beyond belief or run by a group of Luddites – has a website and probably some degree of social media presence.

The ‘.com‘ naming trend, in other words, began as a worthwhile marketing tactic, but “at a certain point that was eroded and it became meaningless,” says David Placek, founder and CEO of Lexicon Branding. There are still, of course, some brands (Hotels.com, for example) that have chosen to use their domain names as their official names, but such a strategy is far less common today than it was when the internet had the shiny-new-toy factor.

AI could follow a similar trajectory of cultural adoption as that of the internet: today, it’s all anyone can talk about; tomorrow, it’s basically taken for granted. Just as people today assume that brands today have an online presence – even when they don’t have ‘.com‘ in their names – we could soon reach a point as a society in which AI is so ubiquitous, so deeply integrated into our devices and our modes of working and communicating with one another, that adding ‘AI‘ to a brand or product name becomes passé. Placek says he’s “absolutely positive” that we’ll cross that threshold sometime within the next two years, after which point “everybody will assume that there’s something AI-related” built into most brands and products.

Given that forecast, adding ‘AI‘ to the end of a name “can be a disservice for building brand strength over time, because [the market] becomes crowded,” says marketing agency Tenet Partners CEO Hampton Bridwell. “There are a lot of names with a similar sound or styling and that creates a situation where you don’t have differentiation or memorability within the name.”

Anthropomorphic names and the sad tale of Clippy

There have, of course, been other naming trends that have recently emerged around AI. For example, many AI-centered products have been given human-sounding names, apparently in an effort to make the underlying technology – which could potentially come across as a bit threatening to a culture that’s been weaned on films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Matrix – feel a bit less alien and intimidating.

Consider IBM’s Watson, an AI model originally designed to answer questions that gained global fame when it won Jeopardy! in 2011. There are also more recent examples, including Siri (Apple), Alexa (Amazon) and Einstein (Salesforce).

As the journalist Charles Duhigg points out in a recent article in The New Yorker, Microsoft (which became a leader in the burgeoning AI industry following its recent multi-billion-dollar investments in OpenAI) has had to learn the hard way about the risks involved with trying to anthropomorphize AI. In 1996, the company introduced Clippy, a smiling virtual assistant with big eyes and a paperclip for a body, who could answer simple user questions on Microsoft Office platforms. The character became widely loathed by users. The Smithsonian called Clippy “one of the worst software design blunders in the annals of computing,” as Duhigg quotes in his article. Microsoft killed Clippy off in 2001.

The company once again tried its hand at anthropomorphizing algorithms in 2016 with the launch of Tay, an AI-powered chatbot whose conversational style reflected that of a typical teenage girl. Tay rather quickly descended into a fit of hate speech and was deactivated less than 24 hours after its launch.

Apparently wiser after the Clippy and Tay debacles, Microsoft is now naming its AI products in a manner that suggests utility and even a touch of fallibility. Copilot, the name of the company’s recently launched suite of AI-powered productivity tools, insinuates something that can be reasonably relied upon to provide a measure of assistance, not something into which one should invest one’s whole trust.

The curious case of ChatGPT

Perhaps the biggest irony in the realm of AI names is the fact that ChatGPT, the product that, more than any other, catalyzed the burgeoning AI Revolution, has such a widely disliked name.

For one thing, says Bridwell, the word ‘chat‘ in a brand name “is pretty limiting – it really doesn’t embody what the whole thing is about in terms of [how] it delivers value. It’s a terrible name. Over time, [OpenAI] should really think about rebranding it.”

Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman agrees that it’s not an ideal name. During a recent podcast hosted by comedian Trevor Noah, Altman said that ChatGPT is “a horrible name, but it may be too ubiquitous to ever change.”

ChatGPT’s suboptimal name could stem in part from the fact that the OpenAI team that built it did not initially have high hopes for its prospects as an uber popular app. It was referred to internally as a “low-key research preview” in the period leading up to its launch and it was intended as a means through which the public could begin to interact with OpenAI’s GPT large language model more broadly so that the company could then collect feedback and fine-tune the technology accordingly.

Many within the OpenAI team were surprised when ChatGPT attracted its first million users in just five days, becoming the fastest-growing app in history.

Advice for marketers

According to Want Branding’s Jonathan Bell, brands that are looking to promote their use of AI through an optimized name should take their time. “It needs to be well thought-out,” he says. “It shouldn’t be something that’s done casually over a quick meeting, where you just simply add ‘AI’ to [the name]. Companies need to think about: What are they specifically doing? Can they deploy AI in a way that is really effective, or is this something that’s been done that could come across as bandwagon-jumping?”

Placek, who’s prone to referencing cognitive science and linguistics when discussing the psychology of brand- and product-naming, highlights the importance of sound symbolism – that is, the associations between particular sounds and the concepts that they evoke in the mind of the hearer. “You don’t want something too soft and you don’t want something too clever,” he says. “[You want something that’s] a little bit on the more serious side that [suggests] intelligence … sound symbolism should play a role in selecting and developing your names.”

When prompted to describe the qualities of a great name for an AI brand or product in fewer than 10 words, ChatGPT wrote: “Memorable, clear, unique, relevant, easy to pronounce, globally appealing, scalable.”

Feature Image Credit: Adobe Stock

By Webb Wright 

Sourced from The Drum

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Starting Small: How To Successfully Experiment With Generative AI

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By Alon Goren

At this point, most enterprises are dabbling in generative AI or planning to leverage the technology soon.

According to an October 2023 Gartner, Inc. survey, 45% of organizations are currently piloting generative AI, while 10% have deployed it in full production. Companies are eager to move from pilot to production and start seeing some real business results.

However, enterprises getting started with generative AI often run into a common stumbling block right out of the gate: They suffer analysis paralysis before they can even begin using the technology. There are tons of generative AI tools available today, both broad and highly specialized. Moreover, these tools can be leveraged for all sorts of professions and business purposes—sales, product development, finance, etc.

With so many choices and possibilities, enterprises often get stuck in the planning phase—debating where they should deploy generative AI first. Every business unit (and all of the business’s key stakeholders) wants to own a part of the company’s generative AI initiatives.

Things can get messy. To stay on track, businesses should follow these guidelines when experimenting with generative AI.

Focus On Specific Use Cases With Measurable Goals

Enterprises need to recognize that every part of the organization can benefit from generative AI—eventually. To get there, however, they need to get off the ground with a pilot project.

How do you decide where to get started? Keep it simple and identify a small, specific problem that exists today that can be improved with generative AI. Be practical. Choose an issue that’s been challenging the business for a while, has been difficult to fix in the past and will make a visibly positive impact once resolved. Next, enterprises need to agree upon metrics and goals. The problem can’t be too nebulous or vague; the impact of AI (success or failure) has to be easily measurable.

With that in mind, the pilot project should have a contained scope. The purpose is to demonstrate the real-world value of the technology, build support for it across the organization and then broaden adoption from there.

If organizations try to leverage AI in too many different ways and solve multiple problems, it’ll cause the scope to grow out of control and make it impossible to complete the pilot within a reasonable timeframe. Ambition has to be balanced with practicality. Launching a massive pilot project that requires extensive resources and long timelines is a recipe for failure.

What’s a good timeline for the pilot? It depends on the circumstances, of course. Generally speaking, however, it should only take a few weeks or a couple of months to execute, not multiple quarters or an entire year.

Start small, get something functional quickly and then iterate on it. This iterative approach allows for continuous learning and improvement, which is essential given the nascent state of generative AI technology.

Organizations must also be sure to keep humans in the loop from the very beginning of the experimentation phase. The rise of AI doesn’t render human expertise obsolete; it amplifies it. As productivity and business benefits increase with generative AI, human employees become even more valuable as supervisors and validators of AI output. This is essential for maintaining control and building trust in AI. In addition, the pool of early participants will also help champion the technology throughout the organization once the enterprise is ready to deploy it widely.

Finally, once the project has begun, organizations have to stick with it until it’s complete. Don’t waste time starting over or shifting to other use cases prematurely. Just get going and stay the course. After that’s been completed successfully, companies can expand their use of generative AI more broadly across the organization.

Choosing The Right Technology

The other major component of the experimentation phase is selecting the right vendor. With the generative AI market booming, it can seem impossible to tell the differences between one solution and another. Lots of noisy marketing only makes things more confusing.

The best way to cut through the noise is to identify the requirements that are most important to the organization (e.g., data security, governance, scalability, compatibility with existing infrastructure) and look for the vendor that best meets those needs.

It’s extremely important to understand where vendors stand on each of these things early on to avoid the headache of discovering that they don’t really check those boxes later. The only way to do that is by talking to the vendor (especially its sales engineering team) and seeing these capabilities demoed first-hand.

Get Ahead Of The Competition With A Strong Start

Within the next couple of years, I expect almost every enterprise will employ generative AI in production. Those wielding it effectively will get a leg up on their competition, while those struggling will be at risk of falling behind. Though the road may be uncharted, enterprises can succeed by focusing on contained, valuable projects, leveraging human expertise and selecting strategic technology partners.

Don’t wait. Embrace this unique opportunity to innovate and take that crucial first step now.

Feature Image Credit: GETTY

By Alon Goren

Follow me on LinkedIn. Check out my website.

CEO and Cofounder of AnswerRocket. Read Alon Goren’s full executive profile here.

Sourced from Forbes

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The Amazon app on your phone just got a cool AI feature

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By Nadeem Sarwar

Last year, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that every business division at the company was experimenting with AI. Today, Amazon has announced its most ambitious AI product yet: a chatbot named Rufus to assist with your online shopping.

Imagine ChatGPT, but one that knows every detail about all the products in Amazon’s vast catalog. Plus, it is also connected to the web, which means it can pull information from the internet to answer your questions. For example, if you plan to buy a microSD card, Rufus can tell you which speed class is the best for your photography needs.

Amazon says you can type all your questions in the search box, and Rufus will handle the rest. The generative AI chatbot is trained on “product catalogue, customer reviews, community Q&As, and information from across the web.”

In a nutshell, Amazon wants to decouple the hassle of looking up articles on the web before you make up your mind and then arrive on Amazon to put an item in your cart. Another benefit of Rufus is that instead of reading through a product page for a certain tiny detail, you can ask the question directly and get the appropriate responses.

An AI nudge to informed shopping

Amazon app’s Rufus AI.
Amazon

Amazon says Rufus is capable of answering generic queries such as “What to look for before buying a pair of running shoes” or simply telling it, “I need to deck up my workstation,” and it will automatically recommend the relevant products. In a nutshell, it’s a web-crawling recommendation machine that will also answer your questions, product-specific or otherwise.

“Customers can expand the chat dialog box to see answers to their questions, tap on suggested questions, and ask follow-up questions in the chat dialog box,” says the company’s official blog post.

For queries such as “Is this phone case reliable,” the AI bot will summarize an answer based on product reviews, Q&As, and information on the product page. At the end of the day, it’s all about making informed purchasing decisions with some help from an AI chatbot.

Rufus AI answering Amazon product questions.
Amazon

Rufus is currently limited to a small selection of Amazon mobile app users in the U.S. as part of a beta test. However, this is an early version of the product, and Amazon also warns that Rufus “won’t always get it exactly right.” In the coming weeks, the AI chatbot will be made available to a broader set of users in its home market.

Rufus seems to be one of the more thoughtful and practical implementations of generative AI I’ve seen recently, and far away from the hype machinery built around the tech with hidden caveats. Plus, it seems to be free, without any Prime mandates.

Feature Image Credit: Amazon

By Nadeem Sarwar

Sourced from digitaltrends

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Most organizations fear AI failure, but those that implement AI do report benefits

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By Sabrina Ortiz

Implementing AI is only half the battle, but a new report suggests it’s risky not to try. Just make sure you prep your employees first.

When generative artificial intelligence first burst upon the scene, the technology showed potential for making people’s everyday lives easier. Now, AI solutions have been developed to help enterprises optimize their operations, and here’s why you might want to consider using them in your business.

Pluralsight’s AI skills report surveyed 1,200 executives and IT professionals across the US and the UK to better understand how organizations deploy AI and its effects on businesses and their employees.

The report found that implementing AI in organizations had promising results, with 97% of organizations that have already deployed AI technologies benefiting. Moreover, 18% reported experiencing increased productivity and efficiency, 13% reported improved customer service and repetitive task reduction, and 11% said AI reduced business costs.

Pluralsights chart
Pluralsights 

Despite the benefits, 25% of these organizations said they don’t have plans to deploy AI, while 20% already have and 55% plan to. The hesitation stems from inadequate budget or talent required to use the new tools properly.

A majority of the professionals acknowledged that hesitation could be disastrous in the long run, with 94% of executives and 92% of IT professionals sharing that organizations investing in AI in the near future will be better able to compete, according to the report.

However, the lack of talent to properly use the new tools is an obstacle to the successful implementation of AI, and the report finds that the answer may lie in organizations helping upskill employees.

The report cites IDC research that found investments in skills and digital training of employees will be organizations’ most enduring technology investments in 2023 and 2024, even over investments in generative AI solutions.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images/Andriy Onufriyenko

By Sabrina Ortiz

Sourced from ZDNET

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10 Ways Human Influencers Can Outperform Virtual Influencers

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Human influencers can still thrive amid their AI virtual counterparts. Employ these strategies to stay relevant on social media.

The proliferation of virtual influencers is changing the way brands approach digital marketing. They could make AI-generated personas go viral while simultaneously cutting their ad spend—buying AI tools costs less than hiring social influencers.

You might consider dropping your rates to win back clients, but it’s merely a band-aid solution. Develop more long-term plans instead. Here are simple yet effective strategies to attract brand deals and sponsorships as a human influencer despite the expanding virtual influencer market.

You might consider dropping your rates to win back clients, but it’s merely a band-aid solution. Develop more long-term plans instead. Here are simple yet effective strategies to attract brand deals and sponsorships as a human influencer despite the expanding virtual influencer market.

1. Zero In on Your Target Market

The Lifetime YouTube Studio Insights of Animetorific Channel

Your relevance as an internet personality depends on your impact on market trends and consumer behaviour. Hence, the term “influencer.” Brands will still prioritize your services over AI-generated campaigns and virtual influencers if you have healthy conversion rates.

Go beyond follower counts; study industry data and objectively list the demographics of virtual influencer subscribers. Some markets prefer AI content nowadays, so you might need to overhaul your content strategies if you’re slowly losing subscribers, fans, or engagement.

If market statistics are too generalized, narrow down your research to specific buyer personas. Ensure you understand your target market.

2. Build an Audience Across Various Platforms

TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat Logos on Influencer Girl

Human influencers have an edge over AI-generated personas in executing cross-platform marketing tactics. Virtual influencers perform limited functions made for specific sites. For instance, VTubers gain thousands of views on YouTube and Twitch, but only a few rank on image-based apps like Snapchat and Instagram.

Alternatively, human influencers are versatile enough to maximize various social networks. You could share random activities on Snapchat, post aesthetic shots on Instagram, and upload vlogs on YouTube.

3. Establish Yourself as an Industry Authority

Trendjacking won’t help you beat virtual influencers. Yes, capitalizing on popular topics boosts visibility, but establishing yourself as an industry authority leads to stable long-term growth. Earn the trust and respect of your audience, otherwise, people will quickly forget about you if your content revolves around recent controversies and viral topics.

Let’s say you review Apple products on YouTube. Parroting Apple’s press releases provides zero value to readers—they’ll find the same information on hundreds of other sites. Some AI platforms even scrape and summarize news reports in real-time. The best approach is to provide unique, first-hand insights. Rather than listing new features, walk your readers through them with actual screenshots and demonstrations.

4. Collaborate With Other Industry Experts

Charli and Dixie D'Amelio Talking on Unicef Interview
Image Credit: Priyanka Pruthi/Wikimedia Commons

AI-generated avatars generally publish solo content. Collaboration is almost impossible because they can’t interact as humans do, and this lack of engagement makes them look inauthentic and robotic, which viewers can dislike.

Human influencers can maximize this advantage by regularly collaborating with relevant personalities. Establish yourself as an industry authority among peers and fans alike. Your audience would also appreciate seeing you with their favourite personalities—think of it as fan service.

5. Leverage Your Personal Experiences

Blonde Influencer Wearing Pink Jacket Posing in front of Kia Stinger
Image Credit: Do The Daniel/Wikimedia Commons

 

As an influencer, you can leverage your daily experiences by documenting and sharing them with an interested audience. Virtual personas will never replicate your real-life stories and relatable struggles despite advancements in AI. They’re merely pre-programmed avatars with made-up backstories.

Your viewers would love to see your real side. Talk about your most notable triumphs, share how you overcame your worst challenges, and ensure you thank your loyal supporters.

6. Try to Empathize With Your Audience

AI-driven virtual influencers use natural language processing (NLP) technologies and language models to engage in conversation. While impressive, they only execute patterns. As a result, talking to AI feels inauthentic because it can’t empathize with users or show feelings.

Human influencers can set themselves apart by connecting with viewers on an emotional level. Demonstrate a deeper understanding of your audience by resonating with their struggles and sharing how you overcame them.

Set disclaimers saying that your advice and personal experiences don’t replace professional consultations.

7. Analyse Why Brands Prefer Virtual Influencers

Several Influencers at Party With a Show Host
Image Credit: Juice Krate/Wikimedia Commons

A growing number of companies are offloading their marketing needs to AI. Forbes reports that 61% of businesses use AI for email optimization, while 55% generate user-targeted ads. Going by these trends, some might start replacing their influencers too.

While AI has significantly advanced over the years, it still has shortcomings—understanding them will help you retain projects. Offer what virtual influencers can’t guarantee, like lasting partnerships and collaboration skills.

8. Frequently Engage With Your Audience

We know how nasty some people act online. They use anonymous profiles to leave hurtful comments on various platforms. Even if you understand that these insults are baseless, they could still make you feel bad. You might even stop reading comments sections to avoid haters.

Although your feelings are valid, ignoring your audience will impede your growth and reach as an influencer; people prefer personalities that interact with them. You must answer questions, consider the type of content they want, and work on constructive criticisms.

If you can’t ignore your haters, block them or delete their comments. Just make sure you engage with your audience.

9. Participate in Social Movements

Group of People Wearing Blue Picking Up Trash at the Beach

Joining social movements humanizes social media influencers. Viewers generally see you doing the same things online—participating in new activities emphasizes your individuality. Show that you’re more than your on-screen persona.

However, this isn’t to say you should just take photos of feeding programs and clean up drives. Putting up a façade for attention will only hurt your image. Support social movements that align with your principles and prioritize making a real-world impact over announcing your contributions.

You can also use these social events to expand your network and connect with like-minded individuals.

10. Explore Generative AI Tools Yourself

Influencer Feeding Prompts to ChatGPT for Content Creation

Embrace AI instead of fearing it. AI-driven platforms are here to stay regardless of your opinion—you’d do well to incorporate them into your career. Start with simple, accessible tools. For instance, you could ask ChatGPT to write a short script, generate images on Midjourney, then stitch them together using text-to-video generators.

You can’t claim ownership of your output because copyright laws don’t apply to AI art.

And even if you don’t plan on using AI tools, exploring them helps you understand how virtual influencers work. Remember: you can’t surpass something you barely comprehend. Study the functions and scope of AI before overhauling your content strategies.

Create New Strategies to Beat AI Virtual Influencers

AI platforms and virtual influencers will continue impacting the content industry as they become more accessible. And brands won’t just stop exploring AI suddenly; you must level up your overall marketing strategy as an influencer or risk losing clients to AI.

Also, closely study the most popular virtual influencers to understand how you can beat them. Try looking for issues in their marketing campaigns. You’ll keep attracting new clients if you focus on providing results that virtual influencers and AI tools don’t.

By Jose Luansing Jr.

Jose Luansing Jr. is a staff writer at MUO. He has written thousands of articles on tech, freelance tools, career advancement, business, AI, and finance since 2017

Sourced from MUO Make Use Of

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How to Use AI to Get Your Next Job, According to Career Experts

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By Jaime Stathis

Using AI job search tools can help optimize the hunt—and get you hired. Here’s how to make artificial intelligence work for you.

Sometimes, things seem to escalate quickly, and this was certainly the case with artificial intelligence (AI), which very swiftly transformed from a cool, futuristic idea to a tool that has infiltrated our daily lives. In fact, many of us use AI and don’t even realize it. When you use facial recognition to unlock your iPhone, Google Maps to navigate to your next destination or ask Alexa to play a song, that’s all AI. You might have mixed feelings about robots operating among us, but the future of AI is here—and there’s no going back. The latest technology can even help you level up your career with an AI job search.

Despite concerns about privacy and cybersecurity or whether ChatGPT will eliminate jobs, the benefits are real, and many job seekers are using AI tools to their advantage. Whether you’re considering changing careers or career cushioning, tap into the power of AI to help land your next big job.

How AI can offer opportunity in the job market

“Navigating the job market with AI remains a topic of considerable uncertainty, but also immense opportunity,” says Ozden Onder, chief people officer at Stability AI, a leading open generative AI company. “It’s true that we don’t fully know yet how AI will affect the types of jobs available in the future. But by learning and using the tools we have available now, you can set yourself apart from other candidates and find the right next step for your career.”

There’s no doubt that some jobs will become more automated and potentially disappear, but Ozden says to take advantage of the technology. “If history is our guide, then I believe it’s more accurate to say that in the future, it won’t be AI that replaces people. Instead, people who are enabled by AI will find more ways of doing interesting and creative work. AI is a net positive for the workplace and helping people achieve their fullest potential.” Here’s how to use AI to your advantage, according to our career experts.

Update your LinkedIn profile

Many hiring managers and recruiters look at your LinkedIn profile before they even look at your résumé, so it’s essential that your profile is in tip-top shape—that includes fixing common misspelled words on LinkedIn. “You really want to be sure to make a good first impression,” says Andrew McCaskill, LinkedIn career expert and creator of The Black Guy in Marketing newsletter. Use your profile to highlight every skill that can make you more discoverable to hiring managers, and if you hit mental roadblocks when trying to write about yourself, turn to AI to develop attractive headlines and “About Me” sections that you can then customize to your expertise. “Consider AI to provide a helping hand in helping you stand out,” McCaskill says.

Best AI tool: Get your creativity flowing during your AI job search with LinkedIn’s new AI-powered writing tools. To use the feature, simply open your “About” section and click “Get AI-Powered Suggestions” at the bottom of the text field.

Optimize your résumé for AI filters

Boris SV/Getty Images

Are résumé mistakes the reason why you’re not getting hired? Potentially. “Remember that many résumés are either machine-read or only glanced at for 10 seconds by a recruiter,” says Onder, which means learning how to optimize your résumé for AI is essential.

Bridget Lohrius, founder and CEO of career coaching company Sandwina, says that 98% of Fortune 500 companies use an applicant tracking system (ATS), which means if the key skills aren’t included in your résumé, you don’t make it through the system. “[That means] never getting the chance to dazzle a human being,” she says, adding that it’s estimated these systems reject 75% of résumés before a recruiter ever sees them.

Don’t use intricate Canva templates to build your résumé (they tend to be riddled with unique graphics, icons and fonts), and never include a photo, because ATS programs can’t read them, Lohrius says. “A clean, basic text-only design is best.”

Best AI tool: Lohrius recommends Jobscan for résumé optimization. Their proprietary AI technology analyzes your résumé and compares it with the job listing.

Find the right fit

It’s not just about finding a great job with a terrific compensation package, it’s about finding the right job that suits your skill set and your personality. “Landing a job that makes you miserable is often worse than not getting the job in the first place,” says William Vanderbloemen, founder and CEO of executive staffing company Vanderbloemen Search Group. “If you know a bit about yourself, then you can match yourself with the right job using AI.”

For example, Vanderbloemen knows he’s an Enneagram 7, so he asked an AI assistance bot, such as ChatGPT, “What are ideal jobs for an Enneagram 7?” He learned that career paths that may align well with the traits of an Enneagram 7 include photographer, event planner and sales representative. Your AI job search is only as good as your curiosity about yourself.

Best AI tool: Vanderbloemen recommends ChatGPT to help find the right fit. Simply type in your question or prompt in the message box on the ChatGPT home page. Once you receive a response, you can ask it to elaborate, regenerate a new response or more responses, or take it as it is.

Learn about company culture

There’s finding the right job, and then there’s finding a workplace culture to match your needs. Use AI job search tools to learn more about the company you’re interested in. For example, Vanderbloemen asked ChatGPT about the company culture at Google and which personality types might thrive there. He found out that Google, like many large tech companies, values a diverse workforce with a wide range of skills and personalities.

“There is no single personality type that thrives at Google, as they look for individuals who can contribute to a collaborative and innovative work environment,” Vanderbloemen says. “However, some common traits and characteristics that may be well suited for working at Google include creativity, adaptability and analytical thinking. Google is known for its data-driven approach to decision making, so individuals who are comfortable with analysing data and drawing insights from it can be successful,” he says.

Best AI tool: Vanderbloemen recommends ChatGPT to help with researching company culture.

Personalize cover letters

The job search process can be tedious and repetitive, but personalizing cover letters and creating industry-specific résumés is vital. To help your time management during the job search, tap AI to create an outline for your cover letters. “AI can save you time during that process by creating first drafts or formatting templates, so you don’t have to worry about the busywork,” says Akhila Satish, an award-winning career expert, scientist and CEO of Meseekna. Just make sure you’re personalizing and reviewing any content before submitting an application—not only will hiring managers notice AI-generated cover letters, AI can make some funny mistakes.

Lohrius points out that the cover letter is an opportunity to showcase your personality, your legitimate interest in a role or company, your understanding of their business and above all, how you—and only you—are the best fit. “AI can do the heavy lifting for you, but the most important thing to remember when using AI is that the technology generates a basic letter, so you don’t have to start from scratch, but you still need to dedicate time and energy into the content and voice to make your letter an interview-grabbing magnet,” she says.

Best AI tool: Satish recommends ChatGPT to help organize cover letter structure before you personalize it with your own voice. Lohrius likes the cover letter feature on ResumeGenius. “It takes the user through a series of questions to customize the cover letter, making the process simple and straightforward,” she says. “Once the questionnaire is completed, you add some personal information and a bit about the job you’re applying for, and the cover letter builder gets to work, creating a solid letter that you can then customize to sound like you.”

Identify the best interview questions

Guillaume/getty images

It’s important to remember that when interviewing, you have the best chance to ask questions about the job and the company, and you can use AI to identify the best inverview questions to ask. “After interviewing over 30,000 top candidates at Vanderbloemen, we are convinced that candidates who ask the best questions often gain the winning advantage in landing the job,” Vanderbloemen says.

As an experiment, he asked ChatGPT “What are the best questions to ask when interviewing for an ER nursing job?” A list popped up right away, he says, and included questions about the nurse-to-patient ratio in the ER and how it changes during peak times; how the hospital supports continuing education and professional development for ER nurses; what team dynamics and collaboration among ER staff looks like; and how the hospital manages the influx of patients during its busiest times.

Best AI tool: ChatGPT is a good choice here for your AI job search, but McCaskill also suggests LinkedIn’s Interview Prep tools that help prepare you for commonly asked interview questions with videos of tips and sample responses from real hiring managers and recruiters. “You can also get instant AI-powered feedback to your recorded interview practice session on pacing, how many times you’re using filler words and sensitive phrases to avoid,” McCaskill says.

Stay ahead of the AI curve

No matter your industry, staying ahead of emerging technology can help you stand out. Currently, that’s voice technology. “Voice technology is a rapidly growing field that focuses on natural interactions between humans and machines, requiring employees with highly specialized skills,” says Tobias Dengel, author of The Sound of the Future: The Coming Age of Voice Technology.

“As popularity increases in many industries, such as health care, customer service, e-commerce, financial services, education and automotive, employees with voice technology experience can stand out from other candidates, position themselves as valuable assets and demonstrate the ability to learn and adapt to emerging technologies and industry trends.”

Best AI tool: Ozden recommends Ben’s Bites, which is an excellent daily summary and essential reading on what’s trending in AI.

Create a website

Satish recommends supplementing your résumé and job application with a personal website to boost your AI job search success. “Your résumé is only a snapshot of you as a candidate, so showcasing examples of your best work and sharing more details on your bio can help you stand out in a pool of applications,” she says. Because building a website can take a lot of time and experience, she recommends AI website-building tools to help streamline the process. “That technology will help you navigate the nuances of website building so that you can focus on fine-tuning and polishing before sending it off to a potential job lead.”

Best AI tool: SquareSpace, Wix and web.com are all user-friendly website builders that use AI.

Show that you’ve done your research

Tailor your interview answers based on knowledge about the company. To get that information, use AI for research. “Interviewers love to see that candidates have done their homework,” Vanderbloemen says. He asked ChatGPT, “What are the traits of the best young analysts at Deloitte?” and he learned that strong analytical skills, technical proficiency and problem-solving ability are all traits that Deloitte looks for in its analysts. With this info, alter your answers accordingly.

Interviewing for a job in a new city? “AI can give you a trove of local knowledge you can drop in your interview to show your interest in the job,” says Vanderbloemen. Doing this shows your interest in relocating and that you’re already looking for ways to fit into the local culture. You might even reference local universities, sports teams or museums.

Best AI tool: ChatGPT is a great AI tool for this research. If you’re not sure it works on a local level, use the town you’re in now and see how accurate it is.

Experiment with AI tools

Unless you’re fresh out of college, most of us are just now learning to implement AI job search strategies. But Ozden recommends familiarizing yourself with the tools, even job search. “Experimentation is the best way to get comfortable with AI tools,” he says. Learning by doing is the best way to pick up any new skill, after all.

“We are just getting started with this new world of AI, and you should take time to learn every modality of AI—there is a lot more to AI than language models like ChatGPT,” Ozden says. We now have image, video, audio and so many other areas for experimentation.

Best AI tool: If you want to move beyond ChatGPT, Dengel suggests expanding your skill set to SDXL, which is AI image generation, especially if you’re in the creative fields or you ever need to present.

About the experts

Sources:

  • New York Times: “The New ChatGPT Can ‘See’ and ‘Talk.’ Here’s What It’s Like.”
  • LinkedIn: “LinkedIn’s new AI tool will help you write posts: ChatGPT Impact”
  • Jobscan: “Optimize your resume to get more interviews”
  • Resume Genius: “Make Your Professional Resume in Minutes”
  • Ben’s Bites: “What’s trending in AI”

Feature Image Credit: roberthyrons/getty images

By Jaime Stathis

Jaime Alexis Stathis writes about health, wellness, technology, nutrition, careers and everything related to being a human being on a constantly evolving planet. In addition to Reader’s Digest and The Healthy, her work has been published in Self, Wired, Parade, Bon Appétit, The Independent, Women’s Health, HuffPost and more. She is also a licensed massage therapist. Jaime is working on a novel about a heroine who saves herself and a memoir about caring for her grandmother through the dark stages of dementia.

Sourced from Reader’s Digest

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