Goafest 2023: Is AI friend or foe? Microsoft's Amrita Thapar and Agnello Dias dispel myths

ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence platforms have opened up a world of infinite possibilities. But with palpable excitement and curiosity there is ample concern across businesses and industries. Advertising is most likely going to witness disruptive change due to the advent of AI, much like many other industries. There will be upsides and downsides, but somehow we will have to understand the possibilities and probabilities and learn to navigate the myriad opportunities and challenges. But AI is part of the future of creativity.

That was, in essence, the bottom line of a discussion that was held during the curtain raiser of Goafest 2023, India's premier annual advertising festival and awards, which will be held 24-26 May.

Moderated by noted journalist Anuradha SenGupta, the panel had Amrita Thapar, chief marketing officer of Microsoft India and advertising expert and veteran Agnello Dias, who shared their views on what is arguably the hottest trend and most talked about technology this year. So far, at least.

Here are some takeaways from what Thapar and Dias said:

We are all used to AI in different things we do: While writing a message, we expect an auto suggested word. We expect Spotify to tell us what music we should listen to based on our past behaviours, and shows we should watch. We live with AI and we look amused by it.

Generative AI is the next big leap in the evolution of artificial intelligence which allows one to generate content, text and art in a way that it sets the foundation: “Because it does not just throw up the suggestion on music one should listen to but allows you to create that music. For the first time in the history of technology, generative AI has worked so well based on human language or large language models. The number of people who have been able to use these tools have seen an exponential burst,” Thapar said.

In the last 30 days, 2000 new apps have been launched using Open AI: It is an inflection point at how the world is embracing something like AI and the way one interacts and behaves with technology.

Amrita Thapar

Think of AI as a co-pilot: Some of the hype about the machines taking over is from people who don’t understand technology very well. It is co-pilot for the web because it makes image search, text search, generating new content that much easier and faster. "We think about AI as a co-pilot not just for search but for work too,” stated Thapar.

For example, if you have done meetings on Teams and you need to send meeting notes after it, it will be done. Thapar highlights, “There are multiple use cases across different industries and different functions. Last month, 200 million images were generated using Bing which is an OpenAI image creator.”

On Father of AI Geoffrey Hinton sounding alarm bells about the dangers of AI: Dias zoomed out to present an alternate way of looking at disruptive technologies but also AI in particular. “A lot of creativity demands not to invent something new. It is to organise what is being done in an interesting way. The pure conceptual form of creativity which is to create something that has not been created before looks into the future. All forms of AI look into the past. It will tell me how to do it but cannot tell me what to do. To reach there, one needs to look at what has been done before.”

Real concerns and challenges: Some of the concerns that have been raised include misinformation, deep fakes, copyright issues. This is because a lot of data that the language models use belong to other people. Speaking on the issues Microsoft has been confronting and has been coming up with guardrails to deal with this, Thapar mentioned, "There is a growing awareness amongst various stakeholders including governments and industry about responsible AI."

How marketing is aided by AI: Thapar added, “Apart from creativity, which is just one aspect of it, lead generation, lead scoring, all of this is made far more efficient by AI tools. There are multiple use cases. AI is your copilot that helps unlock productivity, unleash creativity and up level skills.”