Open AI’s Sam Altman has admitted his agentic bots keep escaping and he doesn’t know what to do about it while Anthropic’s Dario Amodei admits AI poses an “existential threat” for the whole world. Both companies are preparing $1 trillian IPOs (Anthropic currently loses $8 billion on a $4bn turmnover.) Well follow the money..
Would you trust an ad agency or media buying company to unleash these little devils on a previously unsuspecting world. Even WPP’s Cindy Rose remarked the other day that she had reservations about the way some of her staff used AI.
Apart from enabling more and cheaper production (that is, even more terrible ads and social media posts) it’s hard to see what AI brings to the ad party. Nobody has so far really managed to explain its benefits.
Yet the dangers are obvious. You unleash a bot for, say, Dove, one of WPP’s bigger clients, and it decides it wants to promote something else: AK-47s for example. How do you rein it in?
It’s superficially reassuring for agencies and other to say they’ll keep a tight hold on what they do with the technology but who’s to prevent some over-eager idiot keen for advancement going too far? And nobody really knows yet where that will end up.
Every week we read about about some client, usually in the US, having to make grovelling apologies about, usually, a social media ad that’s offended somebody in that easily offended country. (See McDonald’s below.) As its most damaging this can damage a brand beyond repair.
With AI it won’t just be a reputation that ends in ruins.
