?? Wiser! #137: Virtual Shopping | AI Jobs | AI Ads | AI Moderation

TL;DR: Consumer brands are going to where the next generation of customer's are, ie, virtual worlds. Everyone needs AI skills as they will be as expected as Word and Excel. Ad copywriting is being replaced by cheaper AI. OpenAI is taking on the thorny issue of content moderation ??.

Whats In Wiser! This Week

Have a guess who said this?

“The media headlines have moved on, but the consumer has not. We are investing in the metaverse. We want to be where our consumer is. That’s where the younger population is. That’s where they want to engage with brands like us.”

It was Patrice Louvet, the CEO of Ralph Lauren, talking last week to Bloomberg. Readers of Wiser! know that I’ve been saying the exact same thing for over a year. It’s why I built the Emerging Tech Index and analysed the activities and projects of over 250 consumer brands.

Regardless of the technology they’re using, they all have the same goal in mind: customer engagement. They’re skating to where the puck is. So, for this week’s member’s column I take a closer look at virtual shopping and the consumer brands investing in immersive brand engagement.

Also, the top three stories you need to know are:

• "AI Won’t Replace People—But People Who Use AI Will Replace People Who Don’t" (IBM’s latest research)
• Consumer brands are switching to generative AI to replace advertising copywriters
• And OpenAI’s approach to content moderation, the achilles heel of social media.

Chart of the week looks at ChatGPT’s usage and, as always, there’s a roundup of the top stories in emerging tech.

ATB, Rick

P.S. Insight and Information Gives You Leverage!

WiserPLUS!

Consumer Brands Turn To Virtual Shopping Experiences For Personalised Brand Experiences

Forget the "Metaverse is over" babble, there's plenty of life in the virtual experience for global consumer brands. This is not a pursuit of new technology for the sake of it, there are solid and demonstrable business reasons motivating consumer brands to invest in emerging technologies.

It’s because that’s where tomorrow’s customers are hanging out. The younger the demographic, the less their watching TV or reading magazines. Which means they’re not seeing the ads. Instead, they’re attention is elsewhere, and that’s where brands like Ralph Lauren, Nike, Johnson & Johnson, Maybelline, Crocs, and so on, are laying down the foundations of brand awareness with a digital generation who can’t be reached by traditional means.

For this week’s member’s column, I’ve taken a closer look at the “how” and “why” behind consumer brands building virtual shopping experiences. I include six use-cases from J&J, Maybelline, Alo Yoga, Corona, Crocs & Dyson, all of whom have virtual shopping experiences that create an immersive brand engagement.

Continue reading here.??

w/ArtificialIntelligence

AI Won’t Replace People—But People Who Use AI Will Replace People Who Don’t

New research from IBM estimates that 40% of the workforce will need to re-skill as a result of implementing AI and automation over the next three years. That translates to 1.4 billion of the 3.4 billion people in the global workforce, according to World Bank statistics.

This is the key conclusion of the research from the IBM Institute for Business Value after they interviewed 3,000 executives and 21,000 workers. A whopping 87% of these execs reported viewing AI as?enhancing?rather than replacing roles, leveraging AI boosted revenues by 15% for tech adopters

Here’s The Thing You Need To Know: If you're in any kind of knowledge worker role and you're not using AI today, then you need to start. Seriously, even that just means using free AI tools like ChatGPT or Pi when you’re at home and thinking about what to make for dinner. There’s going to be a massive increase in the demand for basic AI capabilities on job applications even if you’re not applying for an "AI role." Being able to navigate prompts and the AI tools landscape is now as expected as being able to use word, excel or powerpoint was a decade ago. AI is table stakes, you just gotta know how to use it! Read the IBM Research…

w/BrandStrategy

Consumer Brands Use AI-Generated Ads Because They’re Cheap

Here’s an example of how AI will disrupt large parts of the workforce. Reuters reported this week how big consumer advertisers, like Nestle, Mars, Colgate-Palmolive, Coca-Cola and Unilever are experimenting with generative AI software to cut costs and increase productivity in advertising. Nestle has worked with ChatGPT to generate ad copy while WPP client Mondelez, makers of Oreo and Cadbury, used OpenAI's DALL-E 2 to make ads. WPP's CEO has claimed savings in the "10 to 20x" order of magnitude. Unilever, which owns more than 400 brands including Dove soap and Ben & Jerry's ice cream, has its own generative AI technology that can write product descriptions for retailers' websites and digital commerce sites. The company's TRESemmé haircare brand has?used its AI content generator?for written content and its automation tool for visual content on Amazon.co.uk.

Here’s The Thing You Need To Know: Whilst the upsides of this strategy is material, it also comes with huge risks. The current gold rush in AI technology is moving at pace and it’s an industry that’s still new and raw. The very real threat of bias in written text, misinformation, hallucinations (making stuff up) and copyright infringement are all genuine and material risks for the risk officers in global consumer brands to worry about. Just like you wouldn’t leave an inexperienced new starter in charge of advertising, any business would be foolish to jump in with both feet on AI. That’s why the biggest challenge for corporations right now is defining the policies for “how” to implement AI. It’s the question I get asked the most about. Reuters

w/SocialMedia

Content Moderation is Essential to the Healthy Functioning of Social Media Platforms and Online Discourse

I'm not a fan of the "free speech" narrative of Elon Musk et al that claims it's ok for anyone to say anything to anyone, regardless of the harm and consequences of what they're saying. Which is why I'm curiously interested in what OpenAI has just announced about using GPT4 for content moderation.

Rather than take the Constitutional AI approach, as adopted by Anthropic for Claude, OpenAI are going down the reinforced learning approach. This approach relies on humans to train the AI based on a constantly evolving content moderation policy. This is closer to how the likes of Meta and TikTok handle content moderation today.

Here’s The Thing You Need To Know: Content moderation is really really hard. It's subjective for starters, which is a tough enough nut to crack. But then add in the sheer scale of the conversations going on online and it's more than really really hard, it's impossible. The only solution is an automated one. Personally, my money is on the Constitutional approach but that's irrelevant. The important objective is to build a scalable and reliable system that can keep up with the growing volume of conversations being held online. Read OpenAI’s blogpost.

w/Chart of the week

ChatGPT Usage Falls, Worried?

Data from?Similar Web reveals that total users had been growing every month until May, when visitors to?chat.openai.com ?hit?97 million, but they fell for the first time in June. Indeed, traffic to the site dropped more than?7%, and new users fell by almost a third, a sign that ChatGPT may have lost some of its novelty as the tech’s developed and more AI has come to the?public fore. Chart provided by Chartr .

What Else Is Interesting In Emerging Tech?

• If you ever wanted a single indicator of the demand for AI, check out Nvidia’s latest quarterly earnings. The AI chip market leader’s revenue has doubled to $13.5 billion from the same period a year ago. Chip revenue, the part of the business focused on powering AI, made up 76% of revenue, and the company’s sales in China, where the U.S. government has restricted the sale of Nvidia’s most advanced chips, made up 20% to 25% of sales. Significantly, the company projected 170% revenue growth in the current quarter!
• After releasing Llama 2 last month, Meta is reported to be releasing a specialised computer code-generating large language model . Code-generation is one of the strongest early use-cases for AI and Meta’s approach of making their LLM’s open-source, i.e., free to use, will stifle and frustrate all those software platforms who want to charge for their AI code generators. It’s an interesting strategy from Zuckerberg that’s worth watching.?LINK
• Consulting firm McKinsey has followed in Bloomberg’s footsteps and developed its own generative AI tool, named Lilli, which serves up information, insights, data, plans, and even recommends the most applicable internal experts for consulting projects, all based on more than 100,000 documents and interview transcripts. Lilli is already being in use by and has cut down the time spent on research and planning work from weeks to hours, and in other cases, hours to minutes.
• A US judge in Washington, D.C. has ruled that artwork created by artificial intelligence without human input cannot be copyrighted under US law . The decision follows the Copyright Office's rejection of an application filed by computer scientist Stephen Thaler who argued that allowing AI copyrights would be in line with the US constitution to "promote the progress of science and useful arts." However, the court agreed with the Copyright Office that “human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright" based on "centuries of settled understanding."
• AI bots are so good at mimicking the human brain and vision that CAPTCHAs are useless. The bots’ accuracy is up to 15% higher than that of humans.
• One of Musk’s many changes at TwitterX is the introduction of Community Notes, a neutral, self governing mechanism that identifies polarising content (misinformation) and adds notes to provide context and alternative perspectives. The machine learning algorithm is complex and has many arbitrary coefficients, but it appears to work well in practice. Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has written this interesting explanation and likened Musk’s distributed content markup model to crypto.
• YouTube has announced a new Music AI Incubator to collaborate with artists to develop generative AI technologies in the music industry. The incubator kickstarts a huge partnership between YouTube and Universal Music Group. With nearly?three billion monthly users, YouTube’s embrace of AI could chart a completely new course for emerging tech in the music industry.
• The UK Government will reportedly spend ￡100 million of taxpayer’s money on AI chips. It’s not entirely clear what this is expected to achieve given that the UK accounts for less than 0.5% of global spend on computer chips and substantially less than the investments into homegrown chip manufacturing from the EU, America and China.
• Meta's Threads has started rolling out on the web. The web version will be improved to look more like the mobile app over the coming weeks. Meta is currently working on a search feature to improve functionality on Threads and make it more of a competitor to X. The company has no plans to monetise the service until it is more established.

Further Reading

About The Author

Rick Huckstep is a writer, podcaster and YouTuber with a passion for emerging technologies and the way they will shape tomorrow’s digital world.

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