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This article feels a few years too late. Of course, AI is in every aspect of advertising and content recommendations to "help" you make more targeted choices. I

This article feels a few years too late. Of course, AI is in every aspect of advertising and content recommendations to "help" you make more targeted choices. I speak as a former insider who spent many year building advanced systems for increasing conversions. What's worth talking about in 2020 though is: - What is the differential power that companies with advanced AI hold over other smaller players like mom and pop stores or smaller retailers? Is AI sophistication the new "income inequality" since smaller companies that can't wield that power get out-competed by larger players, leading to extreme concentration in the hands of few as time goes on? - Compared to 2000-2010, what is the net increase in 2010-2020 for consumerism for someone making the same salary given online + AI influencing buying behavior? How does that fare for 2020-2030 and is that a sustainable path for the planet? - How is AI influencing our buying habits and consumerism in general? Are we buying new type of things we'd never have considered before? Does it change who we are as people? - Why are we not using AI to weed out bad reviews just like we do for email spam? Is the lack of AI in the right places equally harmful in making us buy more? Does Amazon really not have the resources to score reviews given how obviously fake top reviews tend to be for almost every non-brand item you look up on amazon?

throwaway201103 6y ago
I feel like it's up to the consumer how much he wants to be influenced by ads. I use an ad blocker online. I never see ads. I rarely shop on Amazon because of the counterfeit risk and overall mediocre satisfaction. When I do it's for something specific that I've researched in advance. I don't watch TV and I have Youtube Premium so I don't see ads there. I do most of my shopping at local retailers and buy the brands I've bought for years.
- llamataboot 6y ago
  Don't worry, there's ads for people that think they don't watch or care about ads as well...
  - mikeyouse 6y ago
    Right. It's amusing that people think they can just "opt out" of ads. Sure, you might miss the preroll commercial but just about every car, every cell phone, every drink, and every clothing choice that you see in media is a paid placement now. Some of it is more obvious than others, "I can't believe how great this Ford Fusion handles" but most of it is just a flash of a logo in the broader plot.
    - throwaway201103 6y ago
      Most product placement is pretty obvious. I don't think it influences me. And I don't really watch any popular media. I could not even name one popular sitcom showing today.
      - TFYS 6y ago
        Even if you somehow avoid being influenced by ads directly, you can still get influenced indirectly. You will see the product more, hear people talking about it and maybe a friend recommends it to you. You might not recognize it, but that's still the ad influencing you.
        drdeca 6y ago
        If an ad campaign results in a company not going out of business before I ever hear of them, and I only ever hear about the company because I happen to walk by a store of theirs, and then seeing what they sell, purchase a product from them, then technically if not for the ad campaign I wouldn’t have bought the product from them, but obviously this sort of thing isn’t what people are concerned about when they are concerned about whether ads influenced them to buy a product.
        Super_Jambo 6y ago
        They should be, if product success is determined by the skill and technology of advertisers then product _development_ is irrelevant and the only thing which matters is a companies ability to access advertising. In that world even people who never see an advert will have only a hollow choice of products from the 'market'.
- Ensorceled 6y ago
  As a meta note, I wish people reserved the throwawayXXXX accounts for "I work at <company of interest>, using a throwaway for obvious reasons". It's worse if it's just to brag about how advertising doesn't affect them, especially if the reason is that they have the technical chops to simply dodge the ads while everyone without those skills is deluged in AI targeted, psychologically optimized advertising they are ill equipped to avoid the effects of.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
danielscrubs 6y ago
Classmates did something like op talks about for his thesis a DECADE ago, and already then it was old school. AI as a term just gives many eyeballs right now. I don’t understand how this can be labeled news.
AussieWog93 6y ago
>What is the differential power that companies with advanced AI hold over other smaller players like mom and pop stores or smaller retailers At least at the moment, I don't think this is a huge issue. I run a "mom and pop" business with my wife, and taking advantage of state of the art marketing technology through eBay, Amazon, Facebook etc. is dead simple and at least semi-affordable. As the technology becomes more advanced, I don't see any reason why these massive companies would conspire to deny small businesses access to it. Sure, companies with in-house AI developers will have an advantage, but if it reaches the stage where this is make-or-break, small businesses failing will be the least of society's problems.
- throwaway13337 6y ago
  You became a sharecropper. This is because you no longer own your relationship to your customer. Sharecropping works but over time, you lose any leverage in the situation. You need them but they don't need you. The end game doesn't involve anything good for you. I work with many online stores that are switching from the sharecropper model after seeing the end game. They now have their own shops. This, too, can be tainted by the big tech companies controlling access to customers but it's quite a bit safer. Repeat customers don't need to come again through the big channels and are often the real lifeblood of a retail business.
  - AussieWog93 6y ago
    I don't disagree that relying on a third-party platform for the majority of your income comes with risks (see the Adpocalypse on YouTube), but I think you've made a few assumptions about my business that aren't 100% true. Regardless, owning your own shop doesn't magically solve all of your problems. You still need to bring customers in, be that through PR (which takes time), or advertising (which costs money).
    - throwaway13337 6y ago
      I didn't mean to make an overly broad assumption about your business. I'm sorry if I did. There are indeed ways to combat the platform's influence within it like strong product branding and differentiation backed by a legal monopoly. What I'm really after here is to say that all those tools that the platforms give you come at a very high cost. My point was that platforms are indeed hurting small businesses. We are now forced into a kind of surfdom. That's not a great future.
toomanybeersies 6y ago
> Is AI sophistication the new "income inequality" since smaller companies that can't wield that power get out-competed by larger players, leading to extreme concentration in the hands of few as time goes on? This year it's AI. 10 years ago it was user analytics (well, it still is), and before computers it was having marketing department. Large retailers with money to spend have always had a massive advantage over small retailers, both online and offline. AI is just the next incremental step. That's not to say I endorse AI marketing, or larger companies outcompeting small ones. I just don't think AI is anything new in that regard, and after AI there will be some new technology (pheromones, I bet) that large retailers will be using to extract wealth from us.
Jugurtha 6y ago
>- What is the differential power that companies with advanced AI hold over other smaller players like mom and pop stores or smaller retailers? Is AI sophistication the new "income inequality" since smaller companies that can't wield that power get out-competed by larger players, leading to extreme concentration in the hands of few as time goes on? Our experience as well. We built custom, turn-key, machine learning products for large enterprise for seven years now. One of our biggest frustrations is that our clients are exclusively huge companies because these projects are costly. I've had friends running companies ask me if we could do something for them, and I was embarrassed not to be able to help them build product because they wouldn't be able to afford our services. So what we're doing to address that is to make our machine learning paltform[0] to reduce the time and effort it takes to build machine learning products. We feel that we can pull it off and we aim for 10x reduction in "time to value". Given that our business model was that of an agency with the mythical "engineer.day" unit, dividing that by 10 could make it affordable. Second, amortizing work that was already done into services people could use. For example, we have forecasting functionality where people could forecast time series (say for sales, capacity, etc.) with seasonality, etc. Third, teams such as ours could benefit from not having to make the mistakes we've made over these years and start at that level instead. These lessons cost a lot to learn in term of time and money. All the lost productivity to find out which dataset was used to produce which model, and what parameters produced which metrics. All is embedded in there. There are many other reasons and objectives to do that. - [0]: https://iko.ai https://iko.ai

throwaway201103 6y ago

I feel like it's up to the consumer how much he wants to be influenced by ads. I use an ad blocker online. I never see ads. I rarely shop on Amazon because of the counterfeit risk and overall mediocre satisfaction. When I do it's for something specific that I've researched in advance. I don't watch TV and I have Youtube Premium so I don't see ads there. I do most of my shopping at local retailers and buy the brands I've bought for years.

llamataboot 6y ago
Don't worry, there's ads for people that think they don't watch or care about ads as well...
- mikeyouse 6y ago
  Right. It's amusing that people think they can just "opt out" of ads. Sure, you might miss the preroll commercial but just about every car, every cell phone, every drink, and every clothing choice that you see in media is a paid placement now. Some of it is more obvious than others, "I can't believe how great this Ford Fusion handles" but most of it is just a flash of a logo in the broader plot.
  - throwaway201103 6y ago
    Most product placement is pretty obvious. I don't think it influences me. And I don't really watch any popular media. I could not even name one popular sitcom showing today.
    - TFYS 6y ago
      Even if you somehow avoid being influenced by ads directly, you can still get influenced indirectly. You will see the product more, hear people talking about it and maybe a friend recommends it to you. You might not recognize it, but that's still the ad influencing you.
      - drdeca 6y ago
        If an ad campaign results in a company not going out of business before I ever hear of them, and I only ever hear about the company because I happen to walk by a store of theirs, and then seeing what they sell, purchase a product from them, then technically if not for the ad campaign I wouldn’t have bought the product from them, but obviously this sort of thing isn’t what people are concerned about when they are concerned about whether ads influenced them to buy a product.
        Super_Jambo 6y ago
        They should be, if product success is determined by the skill and technology of advertisers then product _development_ is irrelevant and the only thing which matters is a companies ability to access advertising. In that world even people who never see an advert will have only a hollow choice of products from the 'market'.
Ensorceled 6y ago
As a meta note, I wish people reserved the throwawayXXXX accounts for "I work at <company of interest>, using a throwaway for obvious reasons". It's worse if it's just to brag about how advertising doesn't affect them, especially if the reason is that they have the technical chops to simply dodge the ads while everyone without those skills is deluged in AI targeted, psychologically optimized advertising they are ill equipped to avoid the effects of.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

danielscrubs 6y ago

Classmates did something like op talks about for his thesis a DECADE ago, and already then it was old school. AI as a term just gives many eyeballs right now. I don’t understand how this can be labeled news.

AussieWog93 6y ago

>What is the differential power that companies with advanced AI hold over other smaller players like mom and pop stores or smaller retailers At least at the moment, I don't think this is a huge issue. I run a "mom and pop" business with my wife, and taking advantage of state of the art marketing technology through eBay, Amazon, Facebook etc. is dead simple and at least semi-affordable. As the technology becomes more advanced, I don't see any reason why these massive companies would conspire to deny small businesses access to it. Sure, companies with in-house AI developers will have an advantage, but if it reaches the stage where this is make-or-break, small businesses failing will be the least of society's problems.

throwaway13337 6y ago
You became a sharecropper. This is because you no longer own your relationship to your customer. Sharecropping works but over time, you lose any leverage in the situation. You need them but they don't need you. The end game doesn't involve anything good for you. I work with many online stores that are switching from the sharecropper model after seeing the end game. They now have their own shops. This, too, can be tainted by the big tech companies controlling access to customers but it's quite a bit safer. Repeat customers don't need to come again through the big channels and are often the real lifeblood of a retail business.
- AussieWog93 6y ago
  I don't disagree that relying on a third-party platform for the majority of your income comes with risks (see the Adpocalypse on YouTube), but I think you've made a few assumptions about my business that aren't 100% true. Regardless, owning your own shop doesn't magically solve all of your problems. You still need to bring customers in, be that through PR (which takes time), or advertising (which costs money).
  - throwaway13337 6y ago
    I didn't mean to make an overly broad assumption about your business. I'm sorry if I did. There are indeed ways to combat the platform's influence within it like strong product branding and differentiation backed by a legal monopoly. What I'm really after here is to say that all those tools that the platforms give you come at a very high cost. My point was that platforms are indeed hurting small businesses. We are now forced into a kind of surfdom. That's not a great future.

toomanybeersies 6y ago

> Is AI sophistication the new "income inequality" since smaller companies that can't wield that power get out-competed by larger players, leading to extreme concentration in the hands of few as time goes on? This year it's AI. 10 years ago it was user analytics (well, it still is), and before computers it was having marketing department. Large retailers with money to spend have always had a massive advantage over small retailers, both online and offline. AI is just the next incremental step. That's not to say I endorse AI marketing, or larger companies outcompeting small ones. I just don't think AI is anything new in that regard, and after AI there will be some new technology (pheromones, I bet) that large retailers will be using to extract wealth from us.

Jugurtha 6y ago

>- What is the differential power that companies with advanced AI hold over other smaller players like mom and pop stores or smaller retailers? Is AI sophistication the new "income inequality" since smaller companies that can't wield that power get out-competed by larger players, leading to extreme concentration in the hands of few as time goes on? Our experience as well. We built custom, turn-key, machine learning products for large enterprise for seven years now. One of our biggest frustrations is that our clients are exclusively huge companies because these projects are costly. I've had friends running companies ask me if we could do something for them, and I was embarrassed not to be able to help them build product because they wouldn't be able to afford our services. So what we're doing to address that is to make our machine learning paltform[0] to reduce the time and effort it takes to build machine learning products. We feel that we can pull it off and we aim for 10x reduction in "time to value". Given that our business model was that of an agency with the mythical "engineer.day" unit, dividing that by 10 could make it affordable. Second, amortizing work that was already done into services people could use. For example, we have forecasting functionality where people could forecast time series (say for sales, capacity, etc.) with seasonality, etc. Third, teams such as ours could benefit from not having to make the mistakes we've made over these years and start at that level instead. These lessons cost a lot to learn in term of time and money. All the lost productivity to find out which dataset was used to produce which model, and what parameters produced which metrics. All is embedded in there. There are many other reasons and objectives to do that. - [0]: https://iko.ai https://iko.ai