Does AI mean better advertising or “scary crap”?

Imagine scrolling through social media on your phone one night and the ads look surprisingly familiar. They’re designed in your favorite colors, feature your favorite music, and the wording sounds like phrases you use regularly.

Welcome to the future of advertising, which is already here thanks to AI.

Advertising company Cheil UK, for example, has worked with startup Spotlight to use large-language AI models to understand people’s online activities and tailor that content based on what the AI ​​interprets as an individual’s personality.

The technology can then mirror the way someone speaks in terms of tone, sentence and tempo to change an ad’s text accordingly, and insert music and colors that match, for example, whether the AI ​​classifies someone as introverted or extroverted, or has particular preferences for loud or quiet music or light or dark colors.

The goal is…