| Good morning, Marketer, and are you more ethical than a robot? “You’ve got to be taught/To hate and fear/You’ve got to be taught from year to year.” A lyric by Oscar Hammerstein II, of course, from the show South Pacific. And one thing we’re doing right now is teaching AI models bad behavior, including racial and other forms of bias. The thing is we’re not — I hope — doing it deliberately. Powerful AI models are being fed very large data-sets, including from the internet, with bias baked in (see below). The AI will reflect the bias because it has no perspective independent of the data on which it’s fed. In a sense, humans are in the same boat: our brains have nothing to work on but the data we’re fed, in the form of experiences and perceptions. The difference is that we can reflect on that data, and accept or reject it based on our chosen goals — one of which might be, behaving decently to our fellow human beings. AI too can self-optimize by making data choices, but only in the service of a preset goal. The ability to choose and prioritize our projects is one reason we are, so far at least, more sophisticated than AI — and why we can, if we choose, be ethical. Kim Davis
Editorial Director | 