When I write my blogs, I often have the television playing sappy movies in the background. The devices are a new frontier we really know very little about and it is changing exponentially faster everyday, so it is tough to know what we need to look out for.

As I was working, I looked up and a commercial, set in an old western town, had a sheriff approach a newcomer, rip open his weathered coat to uncover he secretly ad data one everyone littering his chest. The sheriff threw him out and stated, “AI is not going to steal anyone’s data in this town! Beware of AI.” It was a humorous commercial designed to grab one’s attention, but it’s message is very important. Everything we do, say, and click on provides valuable data to those capturing it.

We need to pay attention when the media is actively alerting viewers about the negatives of using AI APPs. Today, we’ll explore the positive aspects of integrating APPs for advertisers and influencers. Knowing the why behind advertisers and influencers choosing to use AI will prepare us to be wiser users. It will help us know what questions to ask as we view our devices. Educating young users is crucial to keep them safe in the unknown frontier of their devices.

AI From an Advertiser’s Perspective

AI APPs continue to grow in speed and efficiency. Being directed by humans, it is learning more about how to achieve what advertisers and influencers hope to accomplish when using them. There are impressive reasons, from an advertiser or influencer’s perspective, to use AI APPs:

1. Using AI, users can generate ad variations automatically. That means they can take a single ad, give it to an AI tool, and it will spin that ad off into a number of different variations. Those variations could include different ad sizes and formats to adhere to different platforms. Or, they may include different designs and creative ads based on all the various campaigns.
2. APPs will allow advertisers to no longer have to spend a huge amount of time, money, and energy creating breathtaking visuals that capture an audience’s attention, because the APP will do it for them.
3. AI APPs can tailor generic advertising messages in different ways to appeal to each of these users, based on how that consumers responds to the ad.
4. AI can do testing at scale for advertisers. It uses the insights from those tests to create better campaigns that resonate with more humans, with the desired outcome as being more sales. It determines which phrases motivate a user to click the button, ‘add to cart.’
5. APPs use the information it collects to reveal exactly what their competitor is up to—and give the advertiser the insights needed to outmaneuver them.
6. Using employee data and AI-powered ad platform, it can  personalize ad messages to appeal to top candidates for open positions.
7. They also cut marketing costs by 25% thanks to improved efficiency provided by APPs.
8. Highly personalized ads create significant uplift in performance (and revenue), because advertising APPs speak to consumers in the language they prefer—their own.
9. One APP uses proprietary machine learning to accurately measure emotions and attention levels. That means users of AI can determine which ads are most effective based on how people actually feel about them and how they actually pay attention to them. It’s like cracking a secret code that tells you precisely what works and what doesn’t. This targets consumers in a subconscious fashion.
10. Some Apps  literally see exactly what ads competitors are running in real time and get a complete picture of their ad strategy. It gives the advertiser an opportunity to beat them to your ‘shopping cart.’
11. APPs can capture a person’s voice print and replicate it. The ability to capture a voice print and direct the APP what to say makes it possible to mislead people. I recommend trying it and playing it back to carefully analyze what it sounds like. Once we have heard an AI generated video, we will be more critical when they appear on social media. I tried it. It created an ad for one of my books that looked so real, it would have fooled me if I hadn’t known is wasn’t me saying it. Every time I see an ad for a new product being promoted by a celebrity, I question if it was an App generated ad or did the celebrity say what appears in the ad? Kelley Clarkson has gone public about how ads like this have misled people to think she supported a product she did not support.
12. A person lacking creativity can use AI to promote their products.
13. Google CEO, in a 60 Minutes interview, shared that he was most fearful of APPs creating fake news.

Educating Consumers

When consumers are aware that advertisers and influencers are using APPs for the reasons above, they will be wiser consumers.

Teaching advertising specialists and students of propaganda has been a passion of mine since my first years of teaching. At the time, 1972, we only saw ads and political comments in magazines, newspapers, radio ads and programs, and on the 5:00 PM and 10 PM television news channels. The television newscasters were more objective and less subjective in their reporting than today. We weren’t bombarded with 24/7 media imput. It was easier to determine accurate reporting than it is today.

As in the past, I have cautioned by students to question what they see. As my children were growing, we had one television. It gave me an opportunity to pose questions as they viewed commercials and things that were said on the programs we watched that weren’t in line with the morals and values I’d hope they would form.

With the introduction of AI Apps growing daily, as parents and teachers, its becoming more important to train young device users how to effectively question what they are seeing and hearing.

Questions to Ask:

1. How many different ads have I seen for this product?
2. How are are the ads different?
3. What words used by advertisers capture my attention the most?
4. Are these words used often in ads I receive?
5. Are the ads my friends receive the same as mine?
6. How different are the ads my friends receive for the same product?
7. They use our facial responses to ads to change them with the motive of manipulating viewers to convert to buyers. Did I respond positively or negatively to the ad? If it was positive, have I received more ads like it?
8. What are the words ads used to persuade me to purchase?
9. Why am I getting ads for things I have talked to friends about but never searched?
10. How can I verify if person speaking actually said what I hear?
11. What information is omitted from this post? Words taken out of context change the meeting.
12. What information is missing from this post? AI is notorious for creating hallucinations; information that appears real but isn’t.
13. Is this post expressing bias? AI APPs can only give back what was added to the internet. If the internet source is biased, important details will be omitted. Omitted details change the meaning. Anything can be taken out of context to prove a point. When we add the missing information, the meaning is significantly different.
14. Are their other opinions on this topic?
15. Who is backing this post?
16. Is the person biased? Are they selling a product and only showing information that supports the use of their product?
17. Is there data that opposes this?

I am sure, as we begin analyzing what we see, we will come up with more questions to ask.

What questions come to mind? Please share them below in the comment section.