One of the central fields of application for Artificial Intelligence (AI) is marketing. Amongst others, companies are using AI to target consumers during so-called emotional micro-moments, i.e. brief situations when people are emotionally charged and highly receptive to influence. While these micro-moments offer significant opportunities to influence consumers, ethical concerns are usually ignored.
Most of the AI systems are proprietary, black-box solutions controlled by corporations. This leads to a lack of transparency that makes it hard or almost impossible to understand how the system makes decisions. Ethical aspects can therefore not really be checked, neither by regulators nor by consumers. Not even ethically aware companies that employ the AI tool can check whether their own ethical standards are fulfilled when targeting consumers.
This talk is a call for action: As more and more companies are using AI for micro-moments marketing, we urgently need open-source AI frameworks that enable transparency. I will outline the specific technical, ethical, and psychological challenges involved, and argue why an open-source ecosystem — with open models, transparent data pipelines, and auditable algorithms — is essential to build trustworthy AI in this domain.
