AI E9: The End of the Beginning

Transcript of AI E9: The End of the Beginning

Jake:

Everything we’ve talked about this season will come into play because AI will play a huge role in a world in which privacy is paramount and targeting must be reimagined.

Let’s talk AI. Welcome to FIVE, the podcast that breaks down AI for marketers. This is episode nine, The End of the Beginning. I’m Jake Moskowitz.

When we began this season of FIVE, we were in the middle of the pandemic, the advertising industry, really the whole world was in an unfamiliar, uncomfortable place. But we rallied, we kept pushing forward. And some of the adjustments we had to make then kind of feel normal now.

It’s funny, throughout season one, we met at the recording studio and even conducted a few interviews in person. To bring you our second season, we scrambled to set up a makeshift recording studio here at my house, every interview was done remotely, which by the way, was much more challenging than before, because every one of our guests was suddenly having every conversation remotely.

The team that brings you the show, we haven’t seen each other in person throughout the entire season. But we rallied, we kept pushing forward, those adjustments we made them feel normal now. In fact, I don’t think any of us would want to do this any other way. Change is uncomfortable and inevitable. But it’s often essential. This show is all about that. We try to give you a glimpse of what’s coming, what it means, what will change, and how to make those big transformations work for you.

Season one focused on 5G, season two, it’s AI, two huge shifts that are becoming more and more prevalent and central to marketing a little bit more every day. And if you’ve been with us through both seasons, I hope you feel as confident as we do that you’ve been in on the ground floor for these industry changing trends, you knew before most and now you know more than most about the impact of these technologies on the work you’ll do going forward.

This is the last episode in our nine part series on AI and its impact on marketing. I’d like to wrap up this season of FIVE with a focus on change. In the previous episode, we touched on the industry shift around identity, how Apple was moving to a model that requires users to opt in to the tracking options on their phone and in their apps. How Firefox and Safari have taken a similar approach with cookies and Google Chrome is heading that way too. Losing those core identifiers, that’s not a small shift. It’s tectonic, it will change nearly every aspect of ad targeting, it will ripple through every ad campaign strategy and outcome. It will seem small and insignificant at first, then it will likely feel sudden and sizable. That’s a lot of change. And it’s already started, but we’ll rally. We’ll keep pushing forward. And everything we’ve talked about this season will come into play because AI will play a huge role in a world in which privacy is paramount and targeting must be reimagined.

So let’s talk about other key takeaways from this season. And let’s do it in the context of major changes we see in the marketing industry and the role AI will play in each of them. In many cases, AI is the change.

So number one facing bias head on. We’re living in a country in a world that is increasingly recognizing its biases and asking hard questions about how to adjust for them. AI plays right into the middle of that because AI runs the risk of codifying into a black box, not just intentional biases, but subconscious and even accidental ones. According to Pew Research, 58% of Americans feel that computer programs will always reflect some level of human bias. If we’re not careful when creating algorithms, we can systematize bias in a way that’s hard to detect and hard to undo. Rishad Tabaka Wallah gave a good example in episode two.

Rishad:

Every algorithm was written by a human being, every human being has built in biases. And so the best face recognition software in the United States still believes that most African American people look the same, which they don’t. And we know that that’s an issue, because in many ways, they cannot also work in Asia, because they believe all the Asians are the same. However, they work really well in a white community in the United States. Now, that is primarily because people write algorithms and they feed the data by the people and the data that they have around them. So telling the story to people why it sometimes doesn’t work or what they need to do and why they need to do is also important. These two things that I just told you, you can’t do without storytelling, which is how humans behave on nudge and how we can make mistakes because of biases. No machine will come in and say, machine, you have made a problem because this useless human carbon based person does not know how to compute.

Jake:

We’re likely to see AI play a more and more central role in the societal change as the effort to stamp out cultural bias demands that algorithms become more transparent, and the makers of those algorithms take the steps necessary to prove what they’ve done to minimize bias.

Number two, AI is becoming deeper and deeper entwined into our everyday lives, both personally and professionally. And while that’s extremely empowering in many ways, it also carries with it a certain responsibility we have as humans in ensuring we don’t outsource all thought to the algorithm. To achieve that, it’s essential to understand the strengths of people versus AI. In our personal lives, we’re increasingly outsourcing our memories and our curiosities to audio assistants like Google Home and Alexa. E marketer says 128 million people in the US use voice assistants at least monthly.

On episode two, Jeremy Lockhorn and I shared some examples of how voice responses to our questions can’t be taken at face value. Here’s my favorite example, when we asked a question and got the answer, according to Scientology.

Jeremy:

Hey Google, should immigrants learn English?

Google:

On the website governing.com, they say, immigrants come to our country for better lives. Those who learned to speak English are propelled toward the American dream. Those who don’t learn the language are destined to lurch on the periphery of society, subject to the whims of political pandering and government dependence.

Jake:

Ouch! What website was that again? You and I like, we were specifically looking to poke holes in the answer and yet neither of us even picked up on what website Google was referencing. And it turns out, it’s a scientology website. Kind of surprising, huh?