For all its world-changing potential, there remain important questions to be answered about AI. Will the robots take over? Probably not. Will AI take our jobs? Some jobs, probably, but hopefully the jobs humans shouldn’t be doing. Can we trust AI to be ethical?

The last question may be the most interesting, especially given the high profile stumbles we’ve already seen, like Microsoft’s unfortunate racist chatbot. The operational problem, of course, is that AI depends on ingesting very large quantities of data in order to learn what it needs to do, as well as to optimize its own performance. Data in quantities not susceptible to prior human review. If the data is biased, then the models produced will reflect that bias: and AI learning from the internet is undoubtedly learning from biased inputs.

The problems were highlighted recently by the departure of AI researcher Timnit Gebru from Google following a dispute with the company over a paper she co-authored discussing the possible risks associated with training language models on large datasets. Finding a solution to teaching AI with large language datasets that may potentially have bias baked in won’t be simple. Acknowledging the problem would be a good start.

Read more here.

Join us online, February 23 at SMX Report: a deep dive into everything you need to know about analytics for search marketing. Book now for just $99!

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In a MarTech Live episode broadcast on the final day of the MarTech conference, we asked Chris Penn whether he saw the operational side of marketing aligning more closely with the campaign/creative side, simply because marketing ops and the marketing stack create opportunities (and place constraints) on what the marketing team can do.

Penn is co-founder and Chief Data Scientist at TrustInsights.ai, and this was his reaction: “Absolutely it’s a real thing. The thing we always say when it comes to data, is that data without decisions is just a distraction. Data is your ingredients. What’s the point of buying more and more ingredients from the store if you never cook anything? We’ve bought 500 lbs of flour, perhaps we should try baking something with it. So you can see the logical progression: after operations comes deployment, is monetization.”

Get more of Chris Penn’s insights on MarTech here.

Privacy laws may not always top of mind for marketers, but the start of the new year is the perfect time to make sure you are up to date with new global privacy regulations. Don’t let your 2021 marketing strategy break the law! Build a customer-centric, privacy-first strategy that avoids harmful business impacts. Join us for this live webinar with OneTrust and discover how marketers can comply with regulations while remaining on-brand and delivering new and engaging user experiences.

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On what was, for many, the first working day of 2021, Slack, the collaboration tool which — again, for many — is critical to remote working, reported widespread outages. Slack was acquired by Salesforce before the holidays for $27.7 billion.

The reasons for the outage were unclear at the end of Monday, January 4, but the main downtime seemed to last from shortly after 7am ET to around 1pm. Later in the afternoon, Slack continued to report issues with Google and Outlook calendars and email notifications.

Why we care. For one thing, we are Slack users. For another, this is a reminder — too early in the year — of how reliant we’ve become on digital collaboration in this remote work environment, and how quickly things can go wrong.

Read more here.

Inbound marketing has become a strategy small businesses must invest in — but you probably already knew that. What’s more compelling is how the results show that call-tracking software is one of the best tools available for measuring attribution and optimizing the effectiveness of your inbound marketing and phone calls.

We analyzed more than 129 million calls across 12 industries to understand inbound marketing’s impact on generating calls from leads.

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Data for drawl requests, crawl errors, and indexed pages have been added to the search performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools.

These new metrics aren’t directly related to the performance of your search results in Bing, but Bing has placed crawling and indexing reports in other areas before, like the sitemaps report, crawl control and URL inspection tool. This isn’t just data for the sake of more data — it’ll enable you to see if a surge in crawl errors resulted in lost organic traffic, for example.

Tip of the hat to longtime Search Engine Land reader and frequent tipster Frank Sandtmann for spotting this unannounced addition to the BWT search performance report.

Read more here.

“2021 promises to be a return to normality. Spring will see a re-awakening for these sectors of the economy most affected by the pandemic. However, the new normal will not be the same as the old normal. The new digital ways of working and the old in-person methods will continue to co-exist. The most successful marketers in 2021, will be those best able to combine them.” Alan Chatfield, Digital Marketing Consultant, CRMT Digital.