The ad industry's plan to define what counts as AI

"The example was harmless. But it neatly captured the anxiety running through marketing departments right now: where's the boundary between automation that helps and automation that hurts? A made-up RV is one thing. An AI-generated image that shows a soda brand as the cause of rotting teeth is another. Those are the kinds of errors that can erode years of brand building in an instant."

"But the arrival of OpenAI's Sora app, which can turn simple text prompts into photorealistic shareable videos, make them impossible to ignore. The speed and scale of AI content creation have focused marketers to think harder about checks and balances - what gets labeled, who verifies it and how it gets disclosed. At IAB, Giegerich and her team are trying to bring some order to that chaos. They're drafting AI transparency and disclosure guidelines centered on consumer trust for ads across channels."

Marketers are increasingly focused on reputational risk from AI-generated video and imagery that can contain subtle but damaging inaccuracies. Small glitches, like an AI-generated RV with two HVAC units, demonstrate how realistic outputs can mask errors. The emergence of tools like OpenAI's Sora, which turns text prompts into photorealistic videos, accelerates content creation and raises verification challenges. IAB is developing transparency and disclosure guidelines centered on consumer trust to define when AI use should be flagged. The framework aims to avoid over-labeling while ensuring misleading content is disclosed, and it is being developed with brands, agencies and platforms.

Read at Digiday