Tech giant Meta is increasing investment into artificial intelligence to boost its advertising revenue streams and improve the relevancy of commercials in an individual’s feed.
Science and communication are rapidly changing and Meta is trying to adapt to the ever-growing technological environment, says Meta Australia Group Industry Director Naomi Shepherd. “AI is fuelling a lot of those things … and it’s going into the way that we’re investing in AI technologies,” Ms Shepherd told Sky News Business Editor Ross Greenwood. “It’s changing the way that consumers are experiencing our platforms … the content that they’re being entertained by is far more relevant now. “There’s been a bit of a shift really in the use case for social media, which was really once about who you already knew … and now it’s much more about the content that you’re served.” According to Ms Shepherd, around 20 per cent of the content that you’re seeing in your feed today has been put there by artificial intelligence.
Meta Australia’s group industry director Naomi Shepherd said the company — which owns Facebook — was focusing heavily on “ways to make advertising far more relevant to people on our platform”.
“This is something we’ve been investing in for many, many years now, it’s why my Facebook feed would look totally different to yours,” she told Sky News business editor Ross Greenwood on Sunday.
“We’re finding ways to make advertising far more relevant to people on our platform so they’re really experiencing a very personalised ads ecosystem.”
Ms Shepherd said the fast-moving speed of AI was something tech companies had to keep pace with otherwise they would suffer the consequences, including damage to their advertising streams.
“We continue to invest in AI and make heavy investments in it because we see it driving up conversions for advertisers,” she said.
“It’s based on things that they (consumers) want to buy or are interested in.”
Ms Shepherd said social media users on their platform would see about 20 per cent of content on the feed due to artificial intelligence and an increase to targeted advertising was a huge gain for businesses.
“We are … really encouraging them to hand over much more control around their campaigns on our platforms,” she said.
She said this included advertisers placing their specific messages and campaigns in front of the “most valuable customer”.
But the risk AI poses the media industry remains great and News Corp global chief Robert Thomson has spoken about this many times publicly, including at the company’s third-quarter results on Friday.
He also warned it should be stopped from becoming “degenerative AI”.
“As those who have experimented with ChatGPT will be aware, the answers are only as insightful and factual as the source material and are more retrospective than contemporary,” he said.
The AI chat services allow a user to type in a question or statement and it produces an answer that is aggregated from many sources, but it is not known exactly from where the information is obtained.
Mr Thomson said News Corp (publisher of The Australian) should be compensated for the use of any of its journalism that is implemented into the AI chatbot services.
“Firstly, our content will inevitably be used, and has already been exploited, to train AI engines; secondly, specific examples of our content will be surfaced in response to users’ AI queries,” he said. “Thirdly and crucially, our content will certainly be aggregated and synthesised, and those answers monetised by other parties. We expect our fair share of that monetisation.”
Last week The Australian revealed that Google’s new AI chatbot called Bard backed the Indigenous voice to parliament as a “positive step”, only to later be changed after accusations of political bias.
The chatbot was amended to tell users that it could not assist when Bard was asked what it thought about the voice.