For example, Meta’s Llama model may perceive your brand as exciting and reliable, whereas OpenAI’s ChatGPT may view it as exciting but not necessarily reliable. Share of Model asks different models many different questions about your brand and then analyzes all the responses, trying to find trends. “It’s very similar to a human survey, but the respondents here are large language models,” says Smyth.
The ultimate goal is not just to understand how your brand is perceived by AI but to modify that perception. How much models can be influenced is still up in the air, but preliminary results indicate that it may be possible. Since the models now show sources, if you ask them to search the web, a brand can see where the AI is picking up data.
“We have a brand called Ballantine’s. It’s the No. 2 Scotch whisky that we sell in the world. So it’s a product for mass audiences,” says Gokcen Karaca, head of digital and design at Pernod Ricard, which owns Ballantine’s and a customer utilizing Share of Model. “However, Llama was identifying it as a premium product.” Ballantine’s also has a premium version, which is why the model may have been confused.
So Karaca’s team created new assets like ad campaigns for Ballantine’s mass product, highlighting its universal appeal to counteract the premium image. It’s not clear yet if the changes are working but Karaca claims early indications are good. “We made tiny changes, and it is taking time. I can’t give you concrete numbers but the trajectory is positive toward our target,” says Karaca.
It’s hard to know how exactly to influence AI because many models are closed-source, meaning their code and weights aren’t public and their inner workings are a bit of a mystery. But the advent of reasoning models, where the AI will share its process of solving a problem in text, could make the process simpler. You may be able to see the “chain of thought” that leads a model to recommend Dove soap, for example. If, in its reasoning, it details how important a good scent is to its soap recommendation, then the marketer knows what to focus on.
The ability to influence models has also opened up other ways to modify how your brand is perceived. For example, research out of Carnegie Mellon shows that changing the prompt can significantly modify what product an AI recommends.
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