Mediaboss Marketing

The advertising industry is in a love-hate relationship with artificial intelligence.

In the past few months, the technology has made ads easier to generate and track. It is writing marketing emails with subject lines and delivery times tailored to specific subscribers. It gave an optician the means to set a fashion shoot on an alien planet and helped Denmarks tourism bureau animate famous tourist sites. Heinz turned to it to generate recognizable images of its ketchup bottle, then paired them with the symphonic theme that charts human evolution in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

A.I., however, has also plunged the marketing world into a crisis. Much has been made about the technologys potential to limit the need for human workers in fields such as law and financial services. Advertising, already racked by inflation and other economic pressures as well as a talent drain due to layoffs and increased automation, is especially at risk of an overhaul-by-A.I., marketing executives said.

The conflicting attitudes suffused a co-working space in downtown San Francisco where more than 200 people gathered last week for an A.I. for marketers event. Copywriters expressed worry and skepticism about chatbots capable of writing ad campaigns, while start-up founders pitched A.I. tools for automating the creative process.

It really doesnt matter if you are fearful or not: The tools are here, so what do we do? said Jackson Beaman, whose AI User Group organized the event. We could stand here and not do anything, or we can learn how to apply them.

Machine learning, a subset of artificial intelligence that uses data and algorithms to imitate how humans learn, has quietly powered advertising for years. Madison Avenue has used it to target specific audiences, sell and buy ad space, offer user support, create logos and streamline its operations. (One ad agency has a specialized A.I. tool called the Big Lebotski to help clients compose ad copy and boost their profile on search engines).

Enthusiasm came gradually. In 2017, when the advertising group Publicis introduced Marcel, an A.I. business assistant, its peers responded with what it described as outrage, jest and negativity.

At last months Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the glittering apex of the advertising industry calendar, Publicis got its I told you so moment. Around the festival, where the agenda was stuffed with panels about A.I.s being unleashed and affecting the future of creativity, the company plastered artificially generated posters that mocked the original reactions to Marcel.

Is it OK to talk about A.I. at Cannes now? the ads joked.

The answer is clear. The industry has wanted to discuss little else since late last year, when OpenAI released its ChatGPT chatbot and set off a global arms race around generative artificial intelligence.

McDonalds asked the chatbot to name the most iconic burger in the world and splashed the answer the Big Mac across videos and billboards, drawing A.I.-generated retorts from fast food rivals. Coca-Cola recruited digital artists to generate 120,000 riffs on its brand imagery, including its curved bottle and swoopy logo, using an A.I. platform built in part by OpenAI.

The surge of A.I. experimentation has brought to the fore a host of legal and logistical challenges, including the need to protect reputations and avoid misleading consumers.

A recent campaign from Virgin Voyages allowed users to prompt a digital avatar of Jennifer Lopez to issue customized video invitations to a cruise, including the names of potential guests. But, to prevent Ms. Lopez from appearing to use inappropriate language, the avatar could say only names from a preapproved list and otherwise defaulted to terms like friend and sailor.

Its still in the early stages there were challenges to get the models right, to get the look right, to get the sound right and there are very much humans in the loop throughout, said Brian Yamada, the chief innovation officer of VMLY&R, the agency that produced the campaign for Virgin.

Elaborate interactive campaigns like Virgins make up a minority of advertising; 30-second video clips and captioned images, often with variations lightly adjusted for different demographics, are much more common. In recent months, several large tech companies, including Meta, Google and Adobe, have announced artificial intelligence tools to handle that sort of work.

Major advertising companies say the technology could streamline a bloated business model. The ad group WPP is working with the chip maker Nvidia on an A.I. platform that could, for example, allow car companies to easily incorporate footage of a vehicle into scenes customized for local markets without laboriously filming different commercials around the world.

To many of the people who work on such commercials, A.I.s advance feels like looming obsolescence, especially in the face of several years of slowing growth and a shift in advertising budgets from television and other legacy media to programmatic ads and social platforms. The media agency GroupM predicted last month that artificial intelligence was likely to influence at least half of all advertising revenue by the end of 2023.

Theres little doubt that the future of creativity and A.I. will be increasingly intertwined, said Philippe Krakowsky, the chief executive of the Interpublic Group of Companies, an ad giant.

IPG, which was hiring chief A.I. officers and similar executives years before ChatGPTs debut, now hopes to use the technology to deliver highly personalized experiences.

That said, we need to apply a very high level of diligence and discipline, and collaborate across industries, to mitigate bias, misinformation and security risk in order for the pace of advancement to be sustained, Mr. Krakowsky added.

A.I.s ability to copy and deceive, which has already found widespread public expression in political marketing from Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and others, has alarmed many advertising executives. They are also concerned about intellectual property issues and the direction and speed of A.I. development. Several ad agencies joined organizations such as the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, which wants to trace content from its origins, and the Partnership on AI, which aims to keep the technology ethically sound.

Amid the doom and gloom, the agency Wunderman Thompson decided this spring to take A.I. down a peg.

In an Australian campaign for Kit Kat candy bars, the agency used text and image generators from OpenAI to create intentionally awkward ads with the tagline AI made this ad so we could have a break. In one, warped figures chomped on blurry chocolate bars over a script narrated in a mechanical monotone: Someone hands them a Kit Kat bar. They take a bite.

The campaign would be trickier to pull off now, in part because the fast-improving technology has erased many of the flaws present just a few months ago, said Annabelle Barnum, the general manager for Wunderman Thompson in Australia. Still, she said, humans will always be key to the advertising process.

Creativity comes from real human insight A.I. is always going to struggle with that because it relies purely on data to make decisions, she said. So while it can enhance the process, ultimately it will never be able to take away anything that creators can really do because that humanistic element is required.

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A Blessing and a Boogeyman: Advertisers Warily Embrace A.I. - The New York Times

The largest companies in the tech industry have spent the year warning that development of artificial intelligence technology is outpacing their wildest expectations and that they need to limit who has access to it.

Mark Zuckerberg is doubling down on a different tack: Hes giving it away.

Mr. Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, said on Tuesday that he planned to provide the code behind the companys latest and most advanced A.I. technology to developers and software enthusiasts around the world free of charge.

The decision, similar to one that Meta made in February, could help the company reel in competitors like Google and Microsoft. Those companies have moved more quickly to incorporate generative artificial intelligence the technology behind OpenAIs popular ChatGPT chatbot into their products.

When software is open, more people can scrutinize it to identify and fix potential issues, Mr. Zuckerberg said in a post to his personal Facebook page.

The latest version of Metas A.I. was created with 40 percent more data than what the company released just a few months ago and is believed to be considerably more powerful. And Meta is providing a detailed road map that shows how developers can work with the vast amount of data it has collected.

Researchers worry that generative A.I. can supercharge the amount of disinformation and spam on the internet, and presents dangers that even some of its creators do not entirely understand.

Meta is sticking to a long-held belief that allowing all sorts of programmers to tinker with technology is the best way to improve it. Until recently, most A.I. researchers agreed with that. But in the past year, companies like Google and OpenAI, a San Francisco start-up that is working closely with Microsoft, have set limits on who has access to their latest technology and placed controls around what can be done with it.

The companies say they are limiting access because of safety concerns, but critics say they are also trying to stifle competition. Meta argues that it is in everyones best interest to share what it is working on.

Meta has historically been a big proponent of open platforms, and it has really worked well for us as a company, said Ahmad Al-Dahle, vice president of generative A.I. at Meta, in an interview.

The move will make the software open source, which is computer code that can be freely copied, modified and reused. The technology, called LLaMA 2, provides everything anyone would need to build online chatbots like ChatGPT. LLaMA 2 will be released under a commercial license, which means developers can build their own businesses using Metas underlying A.I. to power them all for free.

By open-sourcing LLaMA 2, Meta can capitalize on improvements made by programmers from outside the company while Meta executives hope spurring A.I. experimentation.

Metas open-source approach is not new. Companies often open-source technologies in an effort to catch up with rivals. Fifteen years ago, Google open-sourced its Android mobile operating system to better compete with Apples iPhone. While the iPhone had an early lead, Android eventually became the dominant software used in smartphones.

But researchers argue that someone could deploy Metas A.I. without the safeguards that tech giants like Google and Microsoft often use to suppress toxic content. Newly created open-source models could be used, for instance, to flood the internet with even more spam, financial scams and disinformation.

LLaMA 2, short for Large Language Model Meta AI, is what scientists call a large language model, or L.L.M. Chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Bard are built with large language models.

The models are systems that learn skills by analyzing enormous volumes of digital text, including Wikipedia articles, books, online forum conversations and chat logs. By pinpointing patterns in the text, these systems learn to generate text of their own, including term papers, poetry and computer code. They can even carry on a conversation.

Meta is teaming up with Microsoft to open-source LLaMA 2, which will run on Microsofts Azure cloud services. LLaMA 2 will also be available through other providers, including Amazon Web Services and the company HuggingFace.

Dozens of Silicon Valley technologists signed a statement of support for the initiative, including the venture capitalist Reid Hoffman and executives from Nvidia, Palo Alto Networks, Zoom and Dropbox.

Meta is not the only company to push for open-source A.I. projects. The Technology Innovation Institute produced Falcon LLM and published the code freely this year. Mosaic ML also offers open-source software for training L.L.M.s.

Meta executives argue that their strategy is not as risky as many believe. They say that people can already generate large amounts of disinformation and hate speech without using A.I., and that such toxic material can be tightly restricted by Metas social networks such as Facebook. They maintain that releasing the technology can eventually strengthen the ability of Meta and other companies to fight back against abuses of the software.

Meta did additional Red Team testing of LLaMA 2 before releasing it, Mr. Al-Dahle said. That is a term for testing software for potential misuse and figuring out ways to protect against such abuse. The company will also release a responsible-use guide containing best practices and guidelines for developers who wish to build programs using the code.

But these tests and guidelines apply to only one of the models that Meta is releasing, which will be trained and fine-tuned in a way that contains guardrails and inhibits misuse. Developers will also be able to use the code to create chatbots and programs without guardrails, a move that skeptics see as a risk.

In February, Meta released the first version of LLaMA to academics, government researchers and others. The company also allowed academics to download LLaMA after it had been trained on vast amounts of digital text. Scientists call this process releasing the weights.

It was a notable move because analyzing all that digital data requires vast computing and financial resources. With the weights, anyone can build a chatbot far more cheaply and easily than from scratch.

Many in the tech industry believed Meta set a dangerous precedent, and after Meta shared its A.I. technology with a small group of academics in February, one of the researchers leaked the technology onto the public internet.

In a recent opinion piece in The Financial Times, Nick Clegg, Metas president of global public policy, argued that it was not sustainable to keep foundational technology in the hands of just a few large corporations, and that historically companies that released open source software had been served strategically as well.

Im looking forward to seeing what you all build! Mr. Zuckerberg said in his post.

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Meta Unveils a More Powerful A.I. and Isn't Fretting Over Who Uses It - The New York Times

Theres a lot of talk about machine learning and large language models, but one related challenge thats just now getting attention is machine unlearning the process of removing data from a trained AI.

Its not simply enough to delete the data. Its a complex problem, as this Google post explains.

Fully erasing the influence of the data requested to be deleted is challenging since, aside from simply deleting it from databases where its stored, it also requires erasing the influence of that data on other artifacts such as trained machine learning models, Google Research Scientists Fabian Pedregosa and Eleni Triantafillou wrote in a June 29 blog post. Moreover, recent research has shown that in some cases it may be possible to infer with high accuracy whether an example was used to train a machine learning model using membership inference attacks (MIAs).

This creates privacy concerns since it indicates that it may be possible to infer that an individuals data trained the model even when its deleted, they added.

To help dress the problem, Google is running a competition that started in mid-July and will continue through September 2023. Theyve also published a starting kit to provide a foundation for participants to build and test their unlearning models on a toy dataset.

The contest is part of the NeurIPS 2023 Competition Track Program, but theres no mention of what the prize will be. Developers can contact unlearning-challenge@googlegroups.com for more information.

The Fresh team plans to release new minor versions of its full-stack JavaScript web framework each month but this months release Fresh 1.3 includes quite a few changes, including expanded and improved documentation, bug fixes and new features.

Among the changes is a merged Get handler and component feature. The two were already highly coupled but required a bit of annoying boilerplate.

To ensure type-safety, youd always have to create an interface for the components props, pass that to the Handlers type as a generic and use that in the component definition. Thats quite a lot of steps! noted frontend developer and Fresh maintainer Marvin Hagemeister. This led to a similar snippet of code needed to pass data between the two. The change is simpler but doesnt require developers to rewrite their routes.

Also, Fresh 1.3 plugins can now inject virtual routes and middleware, which is useful for plugins adding development-specific routes or admin dashboards, he wrote.

Another change: Fresh will now automatically render the _500.tsx template as a fallback when an error is thrown in a route handler.

Previously, Fresh required every island to live in its own file and be exported via a default export. That meant every island file was treated as its own entry point and shipped in a separate JavaScript file to the browser. Fresh 1.3 removes that requirement so that many islands can be exported in a single file.

Theres also support for Deno.serve.

With the recent Deno 1.35.0 release, the Deno.serve API was marked stable, wrote Hagemeister. We followed suit in Fresh and with version 1.3 well use Deno.serve when its available. This new API is not just faster, but also a lot simpler than the previous serve API from std/http.

Website builder Wix plans to introduce a suite of new AI-powered tools, including an automated tool to create websites using natural language prompts.

The tool, called AI Site Generator, will allow users to describe their intent and instantly it will generate a website. However, in an unusual move, Mondays press release did not indicate when these AI capabilities will be available. A request for a timeline by The New Stack had not been answered by the time this post was published.

The tailor-made website is complete with a homepage and all inner pages with text, images, and any business solution including Stores, Bookings, Restaurants, Events and more, the release stated. Users can continue to customize the site and edit based on their needs with integrated AI tools.

Wix is a web hosting solution that competes with the likes of Squarespace, GoDaddy and WordPress.

Other promised tools in the AI suite are:

Currently, Wix offers a number of AI-powered features, such as AI Text Creator, which leverages ChatGPT to create content for particular sections of a site, such as titles, taglines and paragraphs; AI Template Text Creator, which generates the homepage and inner pages of a site after choosing a ready-made template; and AI Domain Generator, which helps users choose a unique domain name.

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Dev News: Google Unlearns, Fresh 1.3 and Wix's AI Plan - The New Stack

Collaboration is a key component of Microsofts success. Our partner ecosystem consists of more than 400,000 partners worldwide, and they play a key role in making new technology available to customers, especially in todays AI-focused world. Microsoft Inspire is a chance to acknowledge the role our partners play in customer success and to share new opportunities and ways to engage with Microsoft products.

To recognize the impressive achievements of our collaborators, we kicked off Microsoft Inspire by celebrating the finalists and winners in the 2023 Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards, which were announced in late June. The awards highlight partner success and innovation in an array of categories, across solution areas, industries, business transformation and social impact.

This years Microsoft Inspire continues our push to make AI a transformative tool for our customers and partners. Were excited to share even more AI-powered solutions and show how Microsoft partners can apply these AI innovations across their organizations in a variety of ways, from expansion of AI skilling to new products and services that drive customer success. Read on for some of the top announcements at this years event.

Introducing Bing Chat Enterprise Since launching the new Bing in February, weve heard from many corporate customers who are excited to empower their organizations with powerful new AI tools but are concerned that their companies data will not be protected. Thats why today were announcing Bing Chat Enterprise, which gives organizations AI-powered chat for work with commercial data protection. What goes in and comes out remains protected, giving commercial customers managed access to better answers, greater efficiency and new ways to be creative.

Bing Chat Enterprise will start rolling out today in preview to organizations licensed for Microsoft 365 E5, E3, Business Premium and Business Standard at no additional cost. We will also make Bing Chat Enterprise available as a stand-alone subscription in the future for $5 per user, per month. Learn more and find out how to get started with Bing Chat Enterprise.

Announcing Microsoft 365 Copilot Pricing Today, were also pleased to announce pricing for Microsoft 365 Copilot. It will be available for $30 per user per month for Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium customers when generally available.

While some generative AI apps focus on a single capability, like real-time transcription or copywriting, Microsoft 365 Copilot puts thousands of skills at your command. By grounding answers in business data like your documents, emails, calendar, chats, meetings and contacts, and combining them with your working context the meeting youre in now, the emails youve exchanged on a topic, the chats you had last week Copilot delivers richer, more relevant and more actionable responses to your questions.

And, Microsoft 365 Copilot is integrated into the apps millions of people use every day. Copilot jump-starts your creativity in Word, analyzes data in Excel, designs presentations in PowerPoint, triages your Outlook inbox, summarizes meetings in Teams whether you attended or not and so much more.

Empowering sellers and customer service agents with AI Sellers need to have as many options in their toolboxes as possible. So, were adding more functionality to Microsoft Sales Copilot directly within Dynamics 365 Sales, such as AI-generated opportunity summary, contextualized email drafts and meeting preparations. This empowers sellers to improve productivity and close more deals with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) task automation (including Salesforce), actionable real-time insights and AI-assisted content and recommendations to personalize customer interactions at scale. These add to AI capabilities already available in Microsoft Sales Copilot such as Teams calls summaries and email thread summaries. Viva Sales, announced in June 2022, kickstarted our work of transforming seller experiences, and these capabilities are now part of Sales Copilot. Read more about Microsoft Sales Copilot.

At Microsoft Inspire, were also highlighting how customers like Virgin Money are empowering their customer service departments with tailored chatbots built with Copilot in Power Virtual Agents. Within minutes, businesses can train a chatbot using natural language to reference internal and external knowledge sources, customer service applications and web data via Bing Search. Virgin Moneys chatbot addresses more than 195,000 customer interactions a month, helping their service agents focus on more complex customer inquiries.

Process Mining in Power Automate Organizations often have a difficult time identifying blockages in their workflows and how to clear them. To help, Microsoft is announcing the general availability of next-generation AI features within Power Automate Process Mining, providing customers with AI-powered insights to optimize existing processes and drive efficiencies through low-code automation. With Process Mining, users can understand what is happening across their business, use AI that generates insights, app and automation suggestions, anduse Power Platform to quickly build the solutions they need. Learn more about Process Mining in Power Automate.

Azure OpenAI expanded availability Weve been thrilled to see the enthusiasm and business adoption of Azure OpenAI Service, with more than 4,500 customers using the product. Witnessing customers do amazing things, like building chatbots using organizational data, summarizing text and generating content, is exciting to watch develop.

Now, were bringing the service to more organizations around the world. Last week, we expanded access to Azure OpenAI Service, increasing its availability in North America and Western Europe, while making it available for Asia for the first time.

New Azure capabilities and investments We are also going to announce a substantial investment to increase the scale and availability of Azure Migrate & Modernize, and to launch Azure Innovate, an all-new dedicated investment we are making in response to the heightened demands for analytics and AI.These new offerings have expanded scenario coverage and offer richer incentives and support for everything from fast, frictionless migrations to building new AI-powered apps.

Meta and Microsoft partnership Meta and Microsoft have announced support for the Llama family of large language models on Azure and Windows. As part of this announcement, Microsoft will be Metas preferred partner as they release their new version of Llama 2 to commercial customers for the first time. This announcement means that Azure customers will be able to easily fine-tune and deploy the 7B-parameter, 13B-parameter, and 70B-parameter Llama 2 models easily and safely on Azure, In addition, Llama 2 will be optimized to run locally on Windows enabling Windows developers to take advantage of Llama 2 by targeting the Direct ML execution provider through the ONNX runtime. More on this announcement can be found here.

Expanded strategic collaboration with Epic We are excited to highlight an expansion of our strategic collaboration with Epic, a leading healthcare software company, where we are using the power of AI to help clinicians spend less time on administrative functions and more time on providing quality care. Epic has integrated Azure OpenAI Service into its electronic health record (EHR) software to provide multiple solutions, from helping clinicians explore clinical data in a conversational and intuitive way to helping them more efficiently reply to patient messages. And with Nuance DAX Express, we are embedding our AI-powered clinical documentation capabilities directly into Epic workflows to help providers further lessen the administrative workloads that lead to burnout, expand access to care for patients and enhance healthcare outcomes.

Additionally, Epic customers are now utilizing Azure Large Instances to achieve the scale needed to run large Epic EHR databases up to 50 million database accesses per second. This allows Epic customers to scale beyond the previous limits of shared public cloud infrastructure solutions.

The new Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program In another milestone, Microsoft Inspire marks the launch of the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, the next generation of our partner program, which empowers every partner to deliver customer value while leveraging Microsoft AI and the Microsoft Cloud. Through the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, were providing partners with a comprehensive portfolio of investments for all partner business models, at every stage of maturity.

The Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program utilizes the entire partner lifecycle, including onboarding, skilling, go-to-market, incentives and co-selling. Partners get the value and benefits of the previous program plus access to new offerings and benefits specific to AI. And there is no action for a partner to take to move to the new program weve moved all existing partners into the new program effective immediately and partners maintain their existing benefits and designations. Read more about the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program.

Additional partner updates We have several updates with new opportunities for partners to go-to-market and scale their businesses, including:

We are excited about todays announcements and our commitment to accelerating AI transformation, driving customer success, and fueling partner business growth and profitability. This is just a snapshot of the updates being announced at Microsoft Inspire for a more comprehensive review, please see the additional resources at the end of this post.

And for more information on todays announcements, be sure to register for Microsoft Inspire and tune into the Day 1 keynotes from Satya Nadella, Judson Althoff and Nicole Dezen, or watch them on demand.

Related links:

Join us at Microsoft Inspire

Microsoft 2023 Partner of the Year Awards winners and finalists

Furthering our AI Ambitions Announcing Bing Chat Enterprise and Updates to Microsoft 365 Copilot

Find out how to get started with Bing Chat Enterprise

How Microsoft Sales Copilot will empower sellers and customer service agents

Learn more about Power Mining in Power Automate

New Azure capabilities and investments

Find more out about the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program

Tags: AI, Azure, Bing Chat Enterprise, Cloud, healthcare, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Inspire, Power Automate

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Microsoft Inspire: Accelerating AI transformation through partnership ... - Microsoft

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is guiding the company through one of the most important years in its history. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop)

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Microsoft staked its financial claim in the AI gold rush this week, announcing pricing for its upcoming Microsoft 365 Copilot technology: a whopping $30/user per month on top of its existing license fees.

Wall Street loved it. One analyst called it eye popping. Investors sent the companys shares to a new record on the day the news was announced.

The upcoming product, fueled by Microsoft and OpenAI technologies, is designed to integrate with Microsoft productivity apps and work with internal business data, going beyond the capabilities of web-based generative AI technologies.

But will companies see that much value in what Microsoft has to offer? Microsoft 365 Copilot is still in private preview, for now, but the pricing suggests that the company likes what its seeing and hearing from early users.

Its part of a big week that also saw the company clear a major hurdle in its $69 billion Activision-Blizzard acquisition, winning a key court ruling and giving itself an extra three months of breathing room to complete the blockbuster gaming deal.

But behind the scenes, Microsoft is grappling with shaky morale amid ongoing cutbacks, and growing questions about the gap between employee and executive compensation.

Meanwhile, a high-profile U.S. government breach by a Chinese hacking group is raising new questions about the security of Microsoft products, and threatening to undermine a growing source of revenue for the company.

Its shaping up as one of the biggest years in Microsoft history, and this was perhaps the biggest week of the year so far for the company.

Next up: Microsoft will report its quarterly earnings Tuesday.

Stories discussed on this weeks show:

Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

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GeekWire Podcast: Microsoft's big bet on the AI economy, and the ... - GeekWire