The Age of AI Advertising
AI is stealing our attention. From ChatGPT to image generators like Stable Diffusion and Lensa, we’re sinking more and more of our time into artificial intelligence apps and products.
And with the coming of Bing’s chatbot and Bard from Google, we’ll be spending even more time asking these large language models to answer our whimsical questions, create recipes or stories, and structure our cover letters.
Sometimes, though, even with the simplest requests, these AI chatbots run into big issues.
The problems baked into them are usually obvious and often times hilarious. Bing’s chatbot tried to get a New York Times reporter to leave his wife and elope with it. ChatGPT frequently fails to do basic math and sometimes makes up facts.
There are more glaring concerns though: take Tay, released by Microsoft in 2016, a Twitter chatbot who was shut down in less than a day because it kept spouting racist, misogynistic, and nonsensical tweets. This happened because Tay was basically a parrot, and it was learning from and repeating what it had been taught.
This example is emblematic of concerns around conversational chatbots like ChatGPT or Bing’s newest chatbot. Pattern-matching parrots with megaphones, that’s what these AI chatbots are. They act as amplifiers, echoing the ocean of information on the internet —…
