Google has been quietly striking deals with some publishers to use new generative AI tools to publish stories, according to a report in Adweek. The deals, reportedly worth tens of thousands of dollars a year, are apparently part of the Google News Initiative (GNI), a six-year-old program that funds media literacy projects, fact-checking tools, and other resources for newsrooms. But the move into generative AI publishing tools would be a new, and likely controversial, step for the company. According to Adweek, the program is currently targeting a "handful" of smaller publishers. "The beta tools let under-resourced publishers create aggregated content more efficiently by indexing recently published reports generated by other organizations, like government agencies and neighboring news outlets, and then summarizing and publishing them as a new article," Adweek reports.

Artificial intelligence is having profound impacts on the media industry, from the way advertisers buy from search and social platforms to speeding up elements of the creative process. Now, programmatic ad buyers are using AI-based algorithms to get more value from the open marketplace. More advertisers have been adopting a programmatic tool called custom algorithms recently, four agency and brand media buying sources told Adweek. Two sources, including brands like The Hershey Company, are currently in the process of making custom algorithms a pillar of their programmatic strategy, while two have been using them for the past couple of years. Of course, the programmatic ecosystem is no stranger to algorithms, they are its raison d'être.

Agencies and marketing departments have long used machine learning algorithms to sift through data, spot trends and steer creative campaigns.

That element of randomness is partially why GPT-3--or its less powerful predecessor, GPT-2--is taking time to gain widespread commercial traction as a tool to power chatbots or auto-generate ads. After nearly a year of experimentation, however, how such a technology might be tamed for marketing purposes is beginning to take shape. Working through OpenAI's closely guarded API program, startups and agency technologists have reined in GPT-3's more eccentric tendencies, which can range from nonsensical prose to inappropriate or explicit content, in order to put it to use for rote performance marketing tasks like A/B testing endless variations of a digital ad, generating product descriptions or assigning email subject lines. Meanwhile, other companies are capitalizing on GPT-3's stranger side for creative tools. While still nascent, projects like these offer a glimpse into a future where humans might work hand in hand with generative AI on creative copywriting and the give-and-take forces that might define such a relationship.

You should attend Adweek's Elevate: AI summit March 6 in New York. Hate speech isn't a new problem, but in the social media age, the rate at which it can be spread has exponentially increased. But can artificial intelligence help stop it? Agency Possible and its longtime partners at social media marketing software company Spredfast wanted to do something to slow the rate at which hate can spread online. That's why they launched WeCounterHate, a campaign which "counters" such messages on Twitter with a donation to a nonprofit organization fighting hate for every retweet.

Yesterday morning, Adweek published my piece on the trends that'll propel marketers forward in 2018. You'll often see many articles like this at the beginning of a new year, but some of them read more like imaginative guesses or wishful speculation rather than insights you can walk away with. We're data-driven and insight-focused at Salesforce, so I'd like to share some of the research that informed my recent article and how we see the future of marketing. As you'll come to find out, many of the trends highlighted in Adweek are supported by marketers who contributed to our Fourth Annual State of Marketing released last summer. Similarly, our Digital Advertising 2020 report, unveiled at the AdExchanger Industry Preview earlier this month, reveals this year's big advertising trends as heard directly from advertising leaders around the world.

One of the most intriguing ecommerce trends to watch in the coming year is "voice shopping." Amazon and Google are accelerating the adoption of home assistants/speakers that let users interact with them and order items they need to purchase by simply uttering a command. Among the major voice technologies that are powering all kinds of devices (including automobiles) are Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple Siri, and Microsoft Cortana. Facebook is also looking to get in on the action with its own hardware device code-named Portal, according to a report from Cheddar. If you're a micro seller that relies on marketplaces to generate sales, you're counting on those platforms to provide state-of-the-art features so you aren't left behind.

Voice AI is emerging as a winner among the many new outlets for brands to express themselves. In the twenty years since Google and Amazon were founded, the physical world has begun to be transformed into a huge voice-activated web fueled by smart speakers, Google Home, and Amazon Echo. Forty-five million voice-assisted devices are currently in use in the U.S., and eMarketer projects that number will rise to 67 million by 2019. Amazon Echo, and its brain, Alexa, own nearly 70 percent of the smart speaker market and Steve Rabuchin, VP Amazon Alexa said, "Our vision is that customers will be able to access Alexa whenever and wherever they want." "That means customers may be able to talk to their cars, refrigerators, thermostats, lamps and all kinds of devices in and outside their homes."

Today's technologies have given us an unprecedented ability to capture, store, exchange, and analyse information. In this article, we will explore how the Internet of Things (IoT), augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will combine to permanently change the native advertising landscape. "There was five exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilisation through 2003, but that much information is now created every 2 days, and the pace is increasing. People aren't ready for the technology revolution that's going to happen to them," said Eric Schmidt, Former Google CEO. As comprehensive as the human imagination may seem, people generally fail to grasp how inadequate it can be with regards to our future.

IBM are not doing "cognitive computing" no matter how many times they say they are. I was chatting with an old friend recently and he reminded me of a conversation we had nearly 50 years ago. I tried to explain to him what I did for living and he was trying to understand why getting computers to understand was more complicated than key word analysis. I explained about concepts underlying sentences and explained that sentences used words but that people really didn't use words in their minds except to get to the underlying ideas and that computers were having a hard time with that. Fifty years later, key words are still dominating the thoughts of people who try to get computers to deal with language.