AI & Advertising: A Consumer Perspective

Digital advertising is a booming industry: worth over $567.49 billion in 2022 alone. It’s also the primary business model sustaining the internet, humanity’s most important communications tool. But as AI-powered advertising grows more pervasive and sophisticated, it is doing so without guardrails. There are few rules to ensure it doesn’t surveil, misinform, or exclude consumers. If the industry doesn’t engage others to build a shared vision for an internet funded by advertising, and proactively deal with issues caused by emergent technologies, these problems will only grow more pronounced.

Advertising underpins the current business model of the internet, bringing access to the web for millions, funding quality journalism, diverse voices and the platforms that connect us. But it is an imperfect funder - excluding some communities, creating business models for hate speech, misinformation and consumer scams, as well as embodying surveillance capitalism. The sheer opacity of the ecosystem and its obsession with performance metrics is allowing it to be exploited by fraudsters, hate preachers and opportunists peddling disinformation.

The use of AI in advertising cannot be allowed to reproduce the mistakes of the past. If consumer and digital rights groups engage with industry to demand more accountability within the system, and legislators create legislation which resets defaults around privacy, environmental harm and human rights, they can shape the internet in ways that are better for the future of consumer experience, society and the environment."