No abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is (re)shaping strategy, activities, interactions, and relationships in business and specifically in marketing. The drawback of the substantial opportunities AI systems and applications (will) provide in marketing are ethical controversies. Building on the literature on AI ethics, the authors systematically scrutinize the ethical challenges of deploying AI in marketing from a multi-stakeholder perspective. By revealing interdependencies and tensions between ethical principles, the authors shed light on the applicability of a purely principled, deontological approach to AI ethics in marketing. To reconcile some of these tensions and account for the AI-for-social-good perspective, the authors make suggestions of how AI in marketing can be leveraged to promote societal and environmental well-being.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to apply cultivation theory to social network sites by investigating how Facebook uses cultivates users' ethnic diversity perceptions and attitudes.Design/methodology/approachThe authors’ investigations include an online and offline survey study with 476 Facebook users and a follow-up experiment with 75 individuals.FindingsThe authors provide empirical support that Facebook use cultivates ethnic diversity perceptions and ethnic diversity-related attitudes. They show that Facebook use relates to perceptions of ethnic minorities that resemble the world on Facebook that is characterized by high ethnic diversity. The authors further demonstrate that the cultivation of ethnic diversity-related attitudes is mediated by diversity perceptions related to users' close social environment.Research limitations/implicationsFuture research should consider culturally and educationally diverse samples as well as longitudinal research designs to address external validity and causality issues.Practical implicationsAlgorithms determining the content users are exposed should be thoughtfully curated to avoid attitudinal and ideological polarization.Social implicationsFacebook can play an important role in positively shaping intergroup relations, thereby countering negative outgroup attitudes, social anxieties and radical right-wing parties.Originality/valueThe authors’ studies extend the scope of cultivation research by identifying a new media vehicle as a source of cultivation influences and shed light on the cultivation-based process of attitude change on social network sites.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is (re)shaping communication and contributes to (commercial and informational) need satisfaction by means of mass personalization. However, the substantial personalization and targeting opportunities do not come without ethical challenges. Following an AI-for-social-good perspective, the authors systematically scrutinize the ethical challenges of deploying AI for mass personalization of communication content from a multi-stakeholder perspective. The conceptual analysis reveals interdependencies and tensions between ethical principles, which advocate the need of a basic understanding of AI inputs, functioning, agency, and outcomes. By this form of AI literacy, individuals could be empowered to interact with and treat mass-personalized content in a way that promotes individual and social good while preventing harm.

The increasing humanization and emotional intelligence of AI applications have the potential to induce consumers’ attachment to AI and to transform human-to-AI interactions into human-to-human-like interactions. In turn, consumer behavior as well as consumers’ individual and social lives can be affected in various ways. Following this reasoning, I illustrate the implications and research opportunities related to consumers’ (potential) attachment to humanized AI applications along the stages of the consumption process.