Artificial Intelligence Wants to Sell You Stuff While the World Burns

This is one application for generative technology that could actually be profitable. The advantage of generative software, as Jason Koebler recently explained in a 404 Media report describing the call, is that it can automatically produce reams and reams of images and videos, each slightly different. These plug into Meta’s preexisting trove of user preference data, ushering in a completely unprecedented era of personalised marketing.

This is bad for a collection of reasons you’ll immediately guess. Automated generation of text, images, and videos from a massive database of mostly stolen human-created content frequently spews out results that are nonsensical, racist, or false, and sometimes violent or abusive. In Meta’s case, specifically, Business Insider reports one company that found Meta’s software automatically replaced a top-performing ad for millennial clothing with “an AI-generated photo of a cheerful yet unnatural granny sitting in an armchair.”

Meta’s own terms for its generative AI tools warn that the outputs of its marketing tools could be “inaccurate, incomplete, misleading, offensive and/or inappropriate,” and make no guarantee that “the Ad Creative AIs will be safe, secure or error-free, or will function without disruptions, delays or imperfections,” nor that the outputs will not “infringe third-party rights.”