The first day of festivities at Advertising Week APAC wrapped up with a fiery debate about whether AI will cause the public to mistrust advertising.

Lead image L-R: Arushi Srivastava, manager, client services, Cashrewards; Rebecca Reid
activations manager, Admatic; Courtney Mitchell, sales executive, FlashTalking by Mediaocean; Orsolya Toth-Pal, founder, Debate Club; Sophie Gallagher, senior strategist, Slingshot; Andrew Mo, digital producer, Yahoo; Aimee Jenkins, senior platform strategy lead, Yahoo.

“The affirmative has missed one very key point today and that is the question itself… I’m sorry to say that this question we’re debating today is fundamentally incorrect because there already is endemic mistrust in advertising and there has been for a very long before AI was in the picture,” said Sophie Gallagher, creative strategy director at Slingshot.

However, Courtney Mitchell, sales executive at FlashTalking by Mediaocean, speaking for the affirmative team set the terms of the debate clearly.

“We’re here to talk about what will happen when the line becomes blurred between us using AI as a tool and AI using us as its tool. Think about the endless possibilities of AI in advertising as it continues to advance,” she said.

“You can see yourself, your friends and your families CGI-ed [sic] into an ad which is showing a product or service that you have never heard of or seen. How could you trust that?”

She went on to explain how it was “so daunting” that McDonald’s is “reportedly working on a new AI tech” that will pump ads “into your dreams when you’re at your most vulnerable.”

“It will cause us as consumers to continually question everything we see,” she said.

However, Andrew Mo, digital producer at Yahoo, said that the concerns expressed by the affirmative team were not only irrelevant but unoriginal.

“They’re arguing that there is an invasion of privacy with AI, there are new kinds of advertising practices with AI and there is a lack of transparency with AI, he said.

“I expected these arguments because these are also the arguments put forward when I typed the debate topic into ChatGPT!”

He continued by saying that in order to prevent invasions of privacy, a “comprehensive policy” that outlines what data is collected, how it’s used and who has access to it. A consent model could also be created to allow users to opt in, as could ethical guidelines.

The Opposing team were performing brilliantly but Arushi Srivastava, manager, client services at Cashrewards, took to the stage and stole the show.

“My wonderful opponents shared with you this beautiful example of Nestle leveraging blockchain technology to create this product that demonstrated sustainability and build trust,” she said.

“But are we talking about product development or advertising? Nestle is going to need to tell their consumers that they have solved sustainability.”

Then, Srivastava took aim at Google, explaining how its Performance Max product allowed advertisers to create a landing page for a website while it generates keywords, descriptions, and content and it instructs the company where it should advertise its products.

“Wait, hold on, what’s actually happening with Google? They’re in the news because there was fraud in 80 per cent of YouTube ads that leveraged AI technology. It’s reaching incorrect consumers,” she explained.

“They have ads for Johnson & Johnson — would that be Nestle? — and American Express on sites that spread misinformation… How will that cause mistrust? Because machines and AI are built on the datasets that you give them today. Trust doesn’t have a fundamental framework that you can build into AI.”

Gallagher took to the stage again to show that, actually, AI can do good for the world. She explained how the “Unfair” campaign from Samsung Spain used AI to help people on the autism spectrum feel comfortable in loud spaces by creating an app that works with its earbuds to dampen the volume of triggering sounds.

“AI, backed by humanity, helps to facilitate connection and connection generates trust,” she explained.

“We know that every single day, we use AI with humanity it is incredibly powerful. We have shown that AI won’t lead to mistrust in advertising because there already is. But it does have the potential to build greater trust in advertising by elevating our humanity.”

The judging panel, which consisted of Colin Barnard, MD at Criteo; Denny Handlin, head of global business marketing at TikTok; Gai Le Roy, CEO of IAB Australia; Greg ‘Sparrow’ Graham; and Paul Conyngham, co-founder, Core Intelligence Technologies found that the Opposing team and its arguments around mistrust already existing in advertising more convincing.

The audience, meanwhile, was not quite so taken with the Opposing team’s focus on semantics and named the Affirmative team as the winner.