ABSTRACT
On June 17, 2020, civil rights groups including the NAACP, the Anti-Defamation League, and Color of Change launched the “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign. The campaign sought to pressure major corporate advertisers to cease advertising on Facebook for July 2020. Over 1,000 significant advertisers joined the boycott, including Target, Starbucks, and Microsoft. AI is being used to fundamentally revamp how ads are created, targeted, and positioned in the marketplace. Retailers are adopting AI almost twice as fast as any other industry. From the smallest online retailers to Walmart and Amazon, AI is a fundamental tool in determining what clients want and don’t want. Enhancements in machine learning and AI make personalization more relevant, less intrusive, and less annoying to consumers. Bias increases exponentially when marketers and advertisers rely on their own internal data to train their models. Some industries are riddled with historical references, so it’s not an abnormal expectation that AI use in those industries might mimic those preferences.
