THE AI INTERVIEW
WPP’ s dual strategy for democratisation and centralised expertise WPP made Daniel Chief AI Officer four years ago, before ChatGPT launched. The company had been investing in AI for a number of years, recognising that the media and creative industries would face different challenges.
“ You can now create content very quickly, you can test that content against synthetic audiences – it’ s an industry that’ s been completely disrupted,” Daniel says.
WPP Open serves as the company’ s AI platform for enterprise clients.“ My responsibility is to ensure that the intelligence inside WPP Open is differentiated: that it’ s able to identify segments better, understand audience perception better and create content better,” he says.
WPP Open Pro launched for smaller companies that may not traditionally work with large agencies, opening up a whole new sectors that can access professional marketing capabilities. Daniel’ s focus now is democratisation: enabling people across WPP to build agents safely whilst keeping Satalia as the centre for advanced algorithmic work.
Seven singularities, not one Daniel sorts AI risks three ways: micro, malicious and macro. Micro risks concern safe deployment, and he challenges conventional thinking on how to address them.“ I would actually controversially argue there’ s no such thing as AI ethics. Ethics is the study of right and wrong.
THE SEVEN SINGULARITIES
Daniel Hulme has identified seven macro singularities using STEEPLE analysis:
Social: When humanity cures death
Technological: Building intelligence a million times more powerful than humans
Ethical: When machines gain consciousness and deserve moral consideration
Environmental: Either losing or regaining control of planetary ecosystems
Political: When we no longer know what is true
Legal: When surveillance becomes ubiquitous enough to predict and manipulate behaviour
Economic: When AI automates work and humans can focus on making the world a better place
And for me, the real difference between human beings and AIs is AIs don’ t have intent,” he says.
Malicious risks are a matter for government, he says, covering bad actors who might use AI to develop pathogens or launch cyber-attacks. But macro risks present the largest challenge, and here Daniel moves beyond AI scientist Ray Kurzweil’ s technological‘ singularity’
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