Do you remember the Steven Spielberg movie ‘Minority Report’? The movie features Tom Cruise, who plays a detective that arrests criminals even before they committed a crime. Good stuff! One scene always sits in my mind if I think of the future of advertising. That’s the scene where Tom’s character walks through a hyper modern shopping mall. Cameras on the billboards scan the iris of Tom’s character and immediately, a hyper individualized ad is shown, specifically targeted on Tom’s character. I think of that scene as the near future of advertising. With AI, we’re a step closer to that new reality. Let’s introduce you to Meta’s ‘imagine yourself’ ai.
Imagine yourself… as a space pirate (‘Yarr!’)
At first, the recently announced ‘Imagine Yourself’ technology by Meta looks like an upgraded ai technology in which you can imagine yourself as a… Viking… Unicorn or…. whatever! 馃檪 Meta’s advanced learning tool uses your already available pictures on your feed, so that you can create yourself as whatever you want to be and does it better than lots of other apps that can do more or less the same. For one, it’s already integrated in the tools that you’ll likely use to share the ‘imagine yourself space pirate picture of yourself’. The interesting stuff is a bit more hidden. The research paper also tells us that the ‘imagine’ ai generated pictures will be developed on the background and is sometimes fed to you in your feed. It’s based on the topics you share about on media like Instagram and Facebook. So if you’re posting your holiday adventures in Hawa茂, it could be that Meta will auto-generate a picture of you with traditional Hawaiian clothes on.
So you never asked for this (Hey, Adam Jensen! 馃檪 ), but still…it’s there… but only viewable for you. It’s your choice in what you want to do with the generated picture. Maybe share it on your timeline, send it to the friend that joined you on the trip to Hawa茂, do nothing with it, whatever. Meta will only do this when you ‘opted-in’ on the service, but I expect this will be one out of thousands of conditions in their license agreement that, despite you’ll never read it, agree on. On a superficial note, this seems pretty harmless. Maybe it feels a bit awkward that randomly generated pictures with your face in it, will pop-up on your feed but that’s that. Now, the interesting part…..
…enter advertising 3.0 (or 4.0, I lost count 馃檪 )
There’s a wide discussion, now some Reddit users mention that this ‘imagine yourself’ technique is out in the wild, about the use case and why Meta does this. I can make a prediction, back towards the hyper personalized ads from Minority report. Within a short time period, I think that Meta is going to use this technique for advertising purposes. Imagine Hugo Boss… who wants to sell their suits. Now, instead of showing a sponsored post with a random dude wearing that suit, it is YOU who’s wearing this specific suit… or its is YOU with that Ray Ban glasses.. or imagine YOU enjoying that festival (whilst you were never there). This ai technique gives META the possibility to create those hyper personalized ads that I talked about at the beginning of this blog. Suddenly, there’s no ‘anonymous’ model in the ad, but it is actually you! Combine that with contextual targeting and they can ‘suggest’ these kind of ai generated ‘imagine me’ads of YOU on your timeline. Think of seeing yourself running with the new Adidas shoe in an environment that’s close to your home. Or connect this to the wants / needs of the targeted user (based on their history, likes, connections), to show an ideal setting specifically for that user. YOU sit on the new couch developed by brand ‘X’. So there we go, that’s why this technique is being developed and how it will roll out in the near future on the timeline of their users. One step closer to Minority Report! Scary, right?
Ethics.. always ethics
‘With great power comes great….‘ Yeah, sure big tech 馃檪 So, this raises new and old implications. What about privacy? What about invasive content? Unsought content? What if, let’s say, Red Cross shows you an image of a war torn city with you (and your family) in it?