Dec. 15 | What Stole My Attention This Week
What Stole My Attention This Week. A distillation of the most interesting things that happened in creativity, culture & commerce.
This week, we focus on developments in AI as it relates to advertising.
A lot of developments in AI this week that have a direct impact on our industry.
OpenAI Strikes Deal To Bring Current News To AI Tools
OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT, has struck a deal with Axel Springer, which operates a number of German and U.S. media outlets. The large majority of what you get out of ChatGPT is drawn from a knowledge base that wrapped in 2021, due to its training process.
This relationship means using vetted journalistic data to train the intelligence model and ChatGPT will also provide attribution to news publishers and links to full articles in its responses.
In a statement, the two firms said the new arrangement "explicitly values the publisher's role in contributing to OpenAI's products" and marks a “significant step” in both firms‘ commitment to “creating new financial opportunities that support a sustainable future for journalism."
Court Dismisses Sarah Silverman IP Case, Favoring AI Firms
Comedian and actress Sarah Silverman brought a case against Meta arguing that its AI systems are an infringement that is only made possible by information extracted from copyrighted material.
“This is nonsensical,” the U.S. District Judge wrote in the order. “There is no way to understand the LLaMA models themselves as a recasting or adaptation of any of the plaintiffs’ books.”
This ruling, together with a federal judge ruling against artists who argued that AI tools using the billions of images on the internet as training material constitute copyright infringement, creates a major precedent for our industry. Without being able to produce evidence of AI-created material being identical to copyrighted work, courts seem to be seeing the cases as insufficient.
What has yet to be decided is the impact this has on AI generated content being used commercially.
3 Execs Fired From Sports Illustrated After AI Scandal
Sports Illustrated was found to be publishing content “created by” AI but passed off as real human authors. Staffers and readers were outraged. Sports Illustrated pass the blame onto a third party content provider. Now, a majority investor will step in as interim CEO.
Trivago Uses AI to Halve Global Transcreation Time
Trivago is launching a new global campaign this week with a 30-sec spot, using AI to adjust visuals and vocals for 10 diff”erent markets including the U.S., Denmark, Canada and Mexico.
While I am a big proponent of our industry using AI for efficiency purposes, Trivago seems to be dancing on a thin line of using AI in place of making progress on representation. This quote from their CEO in particular made me cringe a bit; “The AI makes it more authentic, where you suddenly have a spokesperson you can relate to much better without huge effort,” said Johannes Thomas.”
“Without much effort” - at what point does not hiring an actor from a different culture cross the line from efficiency to inappropriate? It’s reminiscent of the backlash Levi’s received when they said they would be using AI models to promote diversity.