Advertising

Google, which distributes a large portion of ads on the web, tightened its restrictions on potentially misleading political ads in advance of national elections in the United States, India, and South Africa.

A major political party in the United States used generated imagery in a campaign ad. The Republican Party released a video entirely made up of AI-generated images.

The long-dormant struggle to dominate the web-search business reignited in a display of AI-driven firepower — and hubris. Google and Microsoft announced competing upgrades powered by the latest generation of chatbots. Baidu, too, flexed its natural-language-processing muscles.

AI-driven signs are deciding what to display based on data harvested from passersby. Companies that sell advertising in public spaces use face analysis and personal data to match ads with potential viewers in real time.

Regulators are forcing Meta (formerly Facebook) to display certain advertisements more evenly across its membership. The United States government compelled Meta to revise its ad-placement system to deliver ads for housing to members regardless of their age, gender, or ethnicity.

AI startups are helping writers tailor articles that appear near the top of Google’s search results. At least 14 companies sell access to software that uses GPT-3, the language model from OpenAI, to generate headlines, product descriptions, blog posts, and video scripts.

Facebook’s content moderation algorithms block many advertisements aimed at disabled people. The social media platform’s automated systems regularly reject ads for clothing designed for people with physical disabilities.

The pandemic has radically altered online shopping behavior, throwing a wrench into many AI systems. AI inventory trackers, recommendation algorithms, and fraud detection systems trained on pre-pandemic consumer behavior have been flummoxed by the different ways people now browse, binge, and buy.

Deepfake videos in which one person appears to speak another’s words have appeared in entertainment, advertising, and politics. New research ups the ante for an application that enables new forms of both creative expression and