The 5 biggest unresolved issues surrounding the use of AI in marketing

"Marketers are scrambling to give themselves crash courses in AI and to integrate the technology into their workflows. At the same time, many across the ad industry have come to recognize the need to impose guardrails around the technology - the advancement of which is continuing at a breakneck pace, despite a call from experts earlier this year to impose a six-month moratorium on the development of AI models more powerful than OpenAI's GPT-4. (Elon Musk, one of the signatories of the open letter calling for the pause, quickly went on to launch his own AI company with a stated goal to compete with OpenAI.)"

"Last week, the Advertising Association - a UK-based trade association - announced the launch of an AI task force aimed at helping the UK's ad industry to navigate both the promise and perils presented by AI. Co-chaired by representatives from Google and VCCP, the task force held its first meeting on September 25 and will continue to gather every six weeks over the next year. Following the launch of the association's AI task force, we wanted to find out: what are the most urgent, unresolved issues surrounding AI in marketing? Here are five that stand out."

"The ability of generative AI models like ChatGPT and Midjourney to create content that is nearly indistinguishable from that created by human beings is both their most impressive and their most potentially dangerous feature. Some major tech companies have taken some early steps towards ensuring that AI-generated content is clearly labeled as such, but this is likely only to become a trickier goal to achieve as generative AI becomes more sophisticated and commonplace."

Marketers are rapidly adopting AI and embedding generative models into workflows, creating urgency for skills and operational integration. The pace of model development remains fast despite calls for pauses and competing commercial moves. Industry bodies are forming task forces to balance AI's opportunities and risks, with the Advertising Association launching a UK ad-industry AI task force co-chaired by Google and VCCP meeting regularly. Key unresolved issues include transparency around AI-generated content, labeling challenges as generative outputs become more human-like, and broader governance, ethical, and practical guardrails needed for responsible marketing use.

Read at The Drum