YouTube’s AI success may be Alphabet’s saving grace.Alphabet, YouTube and Google’s parent company, have been experimenting with AI models, which should be launched later this year, through the video platform to help advertisers and creators generate relevant content, according to YouTube’s blog. This is the result of PaLM 2, their generative AI large language model, which comes up with human-like responses to queries and commands.

Advertisers and YouTube creators can expect to find video ideas on topics that are relevant to users — down to the title and descriptions for each video — to ensure successful viewership. Other AI-powered features would include the ability to remix videos and create ones in multiple languages.

Despite AI being a big hit with advertisers, investors are still skeptical. Alphabet showed heavy spending on AI infrastructure, sparking concerns regarding ROIs during their third quarter earnings meeting on Tuesday, reports CNBC. Philipp Schindler, Alphabet’s Chief Business Officer, stated that AI is expected to help advertisers find “their ideal audience for the lowest possible price,” backing up this assumption with early tests on YouTube, which showed 54% more reach at 42% of the usual cost, and that 80% of advertisers are using one of the AI-powered search features…

…but, investors weren’t sold on YouTube’s ad success being a reliable KPI for the success of its AI experiments—and Alphabet’s executives’ vague responses to investors’ concerns added more fuel to the fire. Their worries? Alphabet spent USD 8 bn in Q3, some of which went to AI tech that costs a king’s ransom because of the data sets that have to be integrated into it. Not only that, they feel that it is too soon for Google to jump on to the AI wagon as the technology still hasn’t reached fruition. Particularly since the Search Generative Experience (SGE), an experiment launched in August by Google, which offers a rehearsal of what conducting a search using generative AI would look like, is yet to be rolled out, despite being positively received in trials.

Is the display of human remains in museums ethical? The Museum of Natural History isn’t so sure, tells us Bloomberg. The bones of our ancestors have always had a story to tell, and to tell them in an environment where history is preserved on display didn’t seem so bad. But the vast collection of thousands of ancestral bodies tell a darker story — of looted graves, violated burial sites, and viewing ancient persons as objects. Accordingly, the New York museum has decided to remove all human remains from public display.

The bones were collected as a part of the colonial project: The museum holds the remains of 12k individuals, including Indigenous and enslaved people of African origin whose bodies were obtained by eugenicists to “prove” European racial superiority. Sean Decatur, president of the museum, empathizes that none of these individuals could have imagined that their final resting place would be in a collection. “In most of these cases,” he said, “ there was [a power imbalance] between those who were collecting [the remains] and those who were collected.”

This isn’t a new sentiment. Groups across the world have been petitioning for human remains and stolen artifacts to be returned to their relevant communities for decades. In fact, many countries have pressed the issue further after the British Museum finally admitted that over 2k artifacts were stolen from their establishment. A US law passed in 1990 paved the way for Native American tribes to recover ancestral remains from museums, and Decatur believes that 2.2k remains at the Museum of Natural History can be claimed by their tribes. Chris Patrello, curator of anthropology at the museum, asserted that they have a responsibility to do more than acknowledge the harm caused by practices that treated people and cultures as objects of scientific study.

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