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If AI-powered ad blocking becomes ubiquitous, it will mean the end of high-quality free services like Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Translate and Yo

If AI-powered ad blocking becomes ubiquitous, it will mean the end of high-quality free services like Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Translate and YouTube, for all of which I much prefer to pay with my attention rather than cold, hard cash. I have no doubt that current AI is capable of this (in fact I'm sure it would be trivial for GPT-3.5 and well within reach of even locally-run LLMs), the question is what fraction of users can be bothered -- and I don't see any reason why AI would lead to an increase there.

matheusmoreira 3y ago
> it will mean the end of high-quality free services So be it. If those services can't survive without ads and surveillance capitalism, they don't deserve to exist.
- akoboldfrying 3y ago
  I guess we disagree on whether advertising goods and services to people should be considered a crime.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    Advertising no. Tracking individuals and building profiles about them across the web, much less clear, probably yes.
    - akoboldfrying 3y ago
      I feel similarly, though I also think that, provided the intent to track and profile-build is made clear to users up-front before they opt in to using something, the onus shifts to them (the user). (OTOH if that intention is conveyed in p. 37 of an EULA in dense legalese, it seems clearly designed to swamp the user. I'd like to see a lot more attention paid to this in legal circles.)
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    We do. I think advertising of all kinds should be illegal. I consider it to be a form of mind rape when they forcibly insert their brands and products into my mind without my consent.
    - akoboldfrying 3y ago
      > mind rape I'll bite. Is hearing or seeing any idea that you have not previously consented to likewise mind rape? If not, where do you personally draw the line? And, just as importantly, who do you feel should get to decide in the general case?
      - civilitty 3y ago
        > Is hearing or seeing any idea that you have not previously consented to likewise mind rape? I'll bite: yes. If you show me images of goatse or mutilated bodies in a war zone without my consent that’s mind rape. Same with bring politics forcibly into the workplace, showing Fox News (or MSNBC or whatever) at the bbq joint while I’m trying to eat or at the gym while I’m trying to exercise, or screaming at me in protest while I’m trying to access family planning services. Just like women have the right to walk down the street in whatever clothing they want without getting raped, I have the right to experience the world without constantly being bombarded by commercial and political mind rape. > If not, where do you personally draw the line? Consent is implicit via set and setting. If you want to challenge peoples viewpoints go to college or start a poker night with a bunch of philosophically diverse neighbors who like to argue politics. If you want to shove ads down everyone's throat, go join an influencer support group. Everyone else deserves to live free from constant mental assault. > And, just as importantly, who do you feel should get to decide in the general case? Judges, the people who interpret laws.
        matheusmoreira 3y ago
        > I have the right to experience the world without constantly being bombarded by commercial and political mind rape. Exactly. Our minds are sacred.
        3y ago
- BoiledCabbage 3y ago
  An argument I read that has merit is that ad supported services does democratize the web for developing countries. If for example youtube with all of its information or even Google search required a subscription, suddenly a lot of people who make significantly less than the average for the developed world would no longer be able to access those resources. I still hate the ad surveillance everywhere, but it was a point I hadn't considered before.
  - mistercheph 3y ago
    Wikipedia
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    I am from a developing country. One which banned advertising in its biggest city. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secrets-sao-paulo-uncovered-outdoor-advertising-ban/ https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret... There are plenty of online resources which don't require ads. Sibling comment mentions Wikipedia, Open Street Map also comes to mind. We need more of these in this world. Not this ad-supported nonsense.
    - seabass-labrax 3y ago
      I love the concept of advertising-free cities! It's actually the advertising situation with public transport that I have found particularly frustrating where I am. For instance, some bus seats have transport maps on the ceiling above them, but others have private advertisements. Likewise, some stations have dozens of electronic advertising boards where they could have timetables. Perhaps they could at least have a button on them to switch them momentarily to a map or timetable. I wonder how many millions of people have missed their train/bus connection because they couldn't find a departure board among the billboards.
    - akoboldfrying 3y ago
      Those were really interesting reads, thanks. I'm not aware of any similar step-change. It would be interesting to learn more about the aftermath, especially the effect on business overall. >There are plenty of online resources which don't require ads So you claim, but one of the two links you provided contains an ad. Which did not bother me at all, of course -- I'm happy to provide a couple of seconds of my attention in return for the interesting and useful information someone spent time preparing. If everyone blocks that ad, though, the site will make less money, unless they start charging a fee to view some or all of it. I'm interested enough to read for "free" (paying with a couple of seconds of my attention), but not interested enough to pay cash -- and the world is full of people like me. What do you think will happen to sites like this if everyone blocks ads? Is that what you want? Yes, there is Wikipedia, which is excellent and free. I think Wikipedia is an outlier, though. It's high-profile enough that people actually donate money to it, which is exceedingly rare. In some countries, the government donates only a small amount to well-known charities like the Blind Foundation or the Red Cross because they are known to be high-profile and trusted enough that large numbers of the public will give to them directly -- but there is a long, long tail of deserving charities that almost no one has ever even heard of, which the government has to subsidise fully. What do you propose to do about the long tail of websites that no one cares enough to donate to, once you shut off their main (and possibly only) source of income?
scarface_74 3y ago
There is no such thing as a high quality ad supported service. Ads make the user experience worse in every single circumstance. I forget how bad Google Search is until I get a new computer/phone without ad blocking enabled
- akoboldfrying 3y ago
  All of the services I mentioned are either directly (Search) or indirectly ad-supported, the latter insofar as Google pays for their development and upkeep somehow, and most of Google's revenue comes from ads. And I think they are all of excellent quality. Ads are irritating, and Google is not supplying these services out of the goodness of their heart, but I think there's no question that the world is a better place with these ad-supported services in it.
  - mistercheph 3y ago
    I’ll raise the question.
  - TheMode 3y ago
    I mean, if Google gets its revenue solely from ads. Doesn't it mean that you are paying for the ads you see? I would rather have all google products be paid, and lessen the incentive for business to spend a large share of their revenue on advertisement.
    - akoboldfrying 3y ago
      >Doesn't it mean that you are paying for the ads you see? I don't follow, sorry. By "you", do you mean the end-user, sitting in front of their browser? I'd agree that that person is paying Google with their attention (hopefully in exchange for other valuable content nearby in time or space). But it's the companies trying to advertise stuff that pay Google cash (in exchange for that attention). Google then pays a cut to the site hosting the ad. >I would rather have all google products be paid, and lessen the incentive for business to spend a large share of their revenue on advertisement. I don't think Google would have ever gotten off the ground if you had to pay cash to search for stuff -- do you? How many people do you know who watch YouTube? How many of them have YouTube Premium?
hotnfresh 3y ago
The end of ad-supported services makes room for open protocols, open source, and regular old commercial software. All of which have suffered from lack of interest—from developers and users—in this environment where they have to compete with “free”.
- akoboldfrying 3y ago
  I agree that that there would be an upswing in those things, but I'm not at all certain that the resulting environment would be any better for the average user -- certainly not in the short term, while people's expectation (which has by now become built into our culture) to get almost anything they want online "for free" remains.
leventonportera 3y ago
I don't use google search (most of the time) as it's inferior - it ignores what I'm searching for, and substitutes what it thinks I should be searching for - and it's been doing that for years. There were free search engines before there were ads. I don't use gmail because why would anyone want to use gmail for anything but temporary throwaways that'll get spammed. I don't use google maps. nokia heremaps and openstreetmap (I use magic earth) are better in most ways, worse in others. When I go to a different country, I click "download country" and have a fully searchable map. No, I don't want a map that needs a data connection. No, I don't want to have to visually search the map for the thing I'm looking for, because someone barfed up a salad of dots that are place ads for things unrelated to my search. Google maps is not usable to anyone who has used something else. People who always use google maps don't know any better. I do use google translate. This does not support your argument, because that's a service that is free, and does not display ads. You saying that the current ad-free service will disappear if ads were blocked from it... Can't make the comment on here that I want to make, so I'll let you imagine <words> Youtube... Who give a crap. There were sites with videos before, there are other sites now. No, no one can host a huge expensive platform like that for free. So how about the people posting stuff, pay for their stuff being hosted. Then those people can inline talking ads or put a coke can on their desk, in their videos. You know, how ads in videos have been done since the existence of the video format, in 1920 all the way up to right now. Google products, google customer service, and google the company, are inferior to the competition in almost every way. Except for google translate. Which again - has no ads.
- akoboldfrying 3y ago
  >No, I don't want a map that needs a data connection. Google Maps has had the ability to download maps for offline use as long as I can remember -- at least since 2013. >This does not support your argument, because that's a service that is free, and does not display ads. All Google services are ad-supported, at least indirectly. That's because Google pays for their development and upkeep, and Google's primary income stream is ads.
  - leventonportera 3y ago
lelanthran 3y ago
> If AI-powered ad blocking becomes ubiquitous, it will mean the end of high-quality free services like Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Translate and YouTube, for all of which I much prefer to pay with my attention rather than cold, hard cash. That is true, but what is also true is that a few products are currently sucking all of the air out of the system, preventing new entrants from encroaching on the incumbents territory. Maps, Search and Youtube all serve the Google Search business. Any new ad-supported entrant, by necessity, also has to serve the Google Search business. If the Google Search Business is crippled, there are only good things that can result from that. I don't see a downside to making Google Search unprofitable due to smart ad-blockers. (I welcome hypothetical scenarios in which the Search Business being limited due to ad-blockers has bad unintended consequences). Unrelated: I don't understand why this comment is modded so low that I can barely see it? It is not in any way controversial and can be (and is, above) rationally debated.
- akoboldfrying 3y ago
  >I welcome hypothetical scenarios in which the Search Business being limited due to ad-blockers has bad unintended consequences A big increase in the use of ad blockers (AI-enhanced or not) would not only cripple Google, but also hurt the multitudes of small business and hobbyist sites that scrape by on what Google pays them to host ads. If users could somehow culturally readjust en masse to the idea of actually paying for online stuff, this would not be a problem -- but I think that's unlikely to happen immediately, and even in the long term, unlikely to happen to the same extent. So there would be a net loss of free (i.e., paid-for-by-Google-ad-money) content and services available to people. Also, it's not like a new wave of smaller, more democratised ad-sellers would arise in Google's wake, since ad-blocking works on them too. >It is not in any way controversial and can be (and is, above) rationally debated. Thanks, I appreciate that. Every society has things that are true but which you aren't supposed to say, and it's amusing to me that "Google provides some high quality free services" seems to be one of ours.
  - lelanthran 3y ago
    > So there would be a net loss of free (i.e., paid-for-by-Google-ad-money) content and services available to people. Also, it's not like a new wave of smaller, more democratised ad-sellers would arise in Google's wake, since ad-blocking works on them too. You're correct, but I don't know how bad a thing that is. To my mind (i.e. my opinion), there's no such thing as a power vacuum that remains a power vacuum. Something is going to arise that replaces (for example) youtube. It is inconceivable that those content producers on youtube are simply going to give up the ghost and die. It has to be a self-sustaining something(s) that isn't driven by ads (I agree with you on the point that a replacement can't be ad-supported), and I am arguing that whatever it(them) is will be better than the current ad-driven youtube. The whole TLDR of my argument is that, even if the ad-driven sites go away, the content-producers and the content-consumers aren't going away! Right now, the arbitrage is performed by ad-driven middlemen, so the motivation for abuse, control and censorship is incredibly high. I think that whatever arbitrage process or middlemen arise is going to be a lot better for society as a whole than the obnoxious ads with which I am bombarded with whenever I turn off the ad-blocker. Maybe I'm wrong, but this is one of those things we'll only see when we see it.

matheusmoreira 3y ago

> it will mean the end of high-quality free services So be it. If those services can't survive without ads and surveillance capitalism, they don't deserve to exist.

akoboldfrying 3y ago
I guess we disagree on whether advertising goods and services to people should be considered a crime.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  Advertising no. Tracking individuals and building profiles about them across the web, much less clear, probably yes.
  - akoboldfrying 3y ago
    I feel similarly, though I also think that, provided the intent to track and profile-build is made clear to users up-front before they opt in to using something, the onus shifts to them (the user). (OTOH if that intention is conveyed in p. 37 of an EULA in dense legalese, it seems clearly designed to swamp the user. I'd like to see a lot more attention paid to this in legal circles.)
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  We do. I think advertising of all kinds should be illegal. I consider it to be a form of mind rape when they forcibly insert their brands and products into my mind without my consent.
  - akoboldfrying 3y ago
    > mind rape I'll bite. Is hearing or seeing any idea that you have not previously consented to likewise mind rape? If not, where do you personally draw the line? And, just as importantly, who do you feel should get to decide in the general case?
    - civilitty 3y ago
      > Is hearing or seeing any idea that you have not previously consented to likewise mind rape? I'll bite: yes. If you show me images of goatse or mutilated bodies in a war zone without my consent that’s mind rape. Same with bring politics forcibly into the workplace, showing Fox News (or MSNBC or whatever) at the bbq joint while I’m trying to eat or at the gym while I’m trying to exercise, or screaming at me in protest while I’m trying to access family planning services. Just like women have the right to walk down the street in whatever clothing they want without getting raped, I have the right to experience the world without constantly being bombarded by commercial and political mind rape. > If not, where do you personally draw the line? Consent is implicit via set and setting. If you want to challenge peoples viewpoints go to college or start a poker night with a bunch of philosophically diverse neighbors who like to argue politics. If you want to shove ads down everyone's throat, go join an influencer support group. Everyone else deserves to live free from constant mental assault. > And, just as importantly, who do you feel should get to decide in the general case? Judges, the people who interpret laws.
      - matheusmoreira 3y ago
        > I have the right to experience the world without constantly being bombarded by commercial and political mind rape. Exactly. Our minds are sacred.
      - 3y ago
BoiledCabbage 3y ago
An argument I read that has merit is that ad supported services does democratize the web for developing countries. If for example youtube with all of its information or even Google search required a subscription, suddenly a lot of people who make significantly less than the average for the developed world would no longer be able to access those resources. I still hate the ad surveillance everywhere, but it was a point I hadn't considered before.
- mistercheph 3y ago
  Wikipedia
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  I am from a developing country. One which banned advertising in its biggest city. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secrets-sao-paulo-uncovered-outdoor-advertising-ban/ https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret... There are plenty of online resources which don't require ads. Sibling comment mentions Wikipedia, Open Street Map also comes to mind. We need more of these in this world. Not this ad-supported nonsense.
  - seabass-labrax 3y ago
    I love the concept of advertising-free cities! It's actually the advertising situation with public transport that I have found particularly frustrating where I am. For instance, some bus seats have transport maps on the ceiling above them, but others have private advertisements. Likewise, some stations have dozens of electronic advertising boards where they could have timetables. Perhaps they could at least have a button on them to switch them momentarily to a map or timetable. I wonder how many millions of people have missed their train/bus connection because they couldn't find a departure board among the billboards.
  - akoboldfrying 3y ago
    Those were really interesting reads, thanks. I'm not aware of any similar step-change. It would be interesting to learn more about the aftermath, especially the effect on business overall. >There are plenty of online resources which don't require ads So you claim, but one of the two links you provided contains an ad. Which did not bother me at all, of course -- I'm happy to provide a couple of seconds of my attention in return for the interesting and useful information someone spent time preparing. If everyone blocks that ad, though, the site will make less money, unless they start charging a fee to view some or all of it. I'm interested enough to read for "free" (paying with a couple of seconds of my attention), but not interested enough to pay cash -- and the world is full of people like me. What do you think will happen to sites like this if everyone blocks ads? Is that what you want? Yes, there is Wikipedia, which is excellent and free. I think Wikipedia is an outlier, though. It's high-profile enough that people actually donate money to it, which is exceedingly rare. In some countries, the government donates only a small amount to well-known charities like the Blind Foundation or the Red Cross because they are known to be high-profile and trusted enough that large numbers of the public will give to them directly -- but there is a long, long tail of deserving charities that almost no one has ever even heard of, which the government has to subsidise fully. What do you propose to do about the long tail of websites that no one cares enough to donate to, once you shut off their main (and possibly only) source of income?

scarface_74 3y ago

There is no such thing as a high quality ad supported service. Ads make the user experience worse in every single circumstance. I forget how bad Google Search is until I get a new computer/phone without ad blocking enabled

akoboldfrying 3y ago
All of the services I mentioned are either directly (Search) or indirectly ad-supported, the latter insofar as Google pays for their development and upkeep somehow, and most of Google's revenue comes from ads. And I think they are all of excellent quality. Ads are irritating, and Google is not supplying these services out of the goodness of their heart, but I think there's no question that the world is a better place with these ad-supported services in it.
- mistercheph 3y ago
  I’ll raise the question.
- TheMode 3y ago
  I mean, if Google gets its revenue solely from ads. Doesn't it mean that you are paying for the ads you see? I would rather have all google products be paid, and lessen the incentive for business to spend a large share of their revenue on advertisement.
  - akoboldfrying 3y ago
    >Doesn't it mean that you are paying for the ads you see? I don't follow, sorry. By "you", do you mean the end-user, sitting in front of their browser? I'd agree that that person is paying Google with their attention (hopefully in exchange for other valuable content nearby in time or space). But it's the companies trying to advertise stuff that pay Google cash (in exchange for that attention). Google then pays a cut to the site hosting the ad. >I would rather have all google products be paid, and lessen the incentive for business to spend a large share of their revenue on advertisement. I don't think Google would have ever gotten off the ground if you had to pay cash to search for stuff -- do you? How many people do you know who watch YouTube? How many of them have YouTube Premium?

hotnfresh 3y ago

The end of ad-supported services makes room for open protocols, open source, and regular old commercial software. All of which have suffered from lack of interest—from developers and users—in this environment where they have to compete with “free”.

akoboldfrying 3y ago
I agree that that there would be an upswing in those things, but I'm not at all certain that the resulting environment would be any better for the average user -- certainly not in the short term, while people's expectation (which has by now become built into our culture) to get almost anything they want online "for free" remains.

leventonportera 3y ago

I don't use google search (most of the time) as it's inferior - it ignores what I'm searching for, and substitutes what it thinks I should be searching for - and it's been doing that for years. There were free search engines before there were ads. I don't use gmail because why would anyone want to use gmail for anything but temporary throwaways that'll get spammed. I don't use google maps. nokia heremaps and openstreetmap (I use magic earth) are better in most ways, worse in others. When I go to a different country, I click "download country" and have a fully searchable map. No, I don't want a map that needs a data connection. No, I don't want to have to visually search the map for the thing I'm looking for, because someone barfed up a salad of dots that are place ads for things unrelated to my search. Google maps is not usable to anyone who has used something else. People who always use google maps don't know any better. I do use google translate. This does not support your argument, because that's a service that is free, and does not display ads. You saying that the current ad-free service will disappear if ads were blocked from it... Can't make the comment on here that I want to make, so I'll let you imagine <words> Youtube... Who give a crap. There were sites with videos before, there are other sites now. No, no one can host a huge expensive platform like that for free. So how about the people posting stuff, pay for their stuff being hosted. Then those people can inline talking ads or put a coke can on their desk, in their videos. You know, how ads in videos have been done since the existence of the video format, in 1920 all the way up to right now. Google products, google customer service, and google the company, are inferior to the competition in almost every way. Except for google translate. Which again - has no ads.

akoboldfrying 3y ago
>No, I don't want a map that needs a data connection. Google Maps has had the ability to download maps for offline use as long as I can remember -- at least since 2013. >This does not support your argument, because that's a service that is free, and does not display ads. All Google services are ad-supported, at least indirectly. That's because Google pays for their development and upkeep, and Google's primary income stream is ads.
- leventonportera 3y ago

lelanthran 3y ago

> If AI-powered ad blocking becomes ubiquitous, it will mean the end of high-quality free services like Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Translate and YouTube, for all of which I much prefer to pay with my attention rather than cold, hard cash. That is true, but what is also true is that a few products are currently sucking all of the air out of the system, preventing new entrants from encroaching on the incumbents territory. Maps, Search and Youtube all serve the Google Search business. Any new ad-supported entrant, by necessity, also has to serve the Google Search business. If the Google Search Business is crippled, there are only good things that can result from that. I don't see a downside to making Google Search unprofitable due to smart ad-blockers. (I welcome hypothetical scenarios in which the Search Business being limited due to ad-blockers has bad unintended consequences). Unrelated: I don't understand why this comment is modded so low that I can barely see it? It is not in any way controversial and can be (and is, above) rationally debated.

akoboldfrying 3y ago
>I welcome hypothetical scenarios in which the Search Business being limited due to ad-blockers has bad unintended consequences A big increase in the use of ad blockers (AI-enhanced or not) would not only cripple Google, but also hurt the multitudes of small business and hobbyist sites that scrape by on what Google pays them to host ads. If users could somehow culturally readjust en masse to the idea of actually paying for online stuff, this would not be a problem -- but I think that's unlikely to happen immediately, and even in the long term, unlikely to happen to the same extent. So there would be a net loss of free (i.e., paid-for-by-Google-ad-money) content and services available to people. Also, it's not like a new wave of smaller, more democratised ad-sellers would arise in Google's wake, since ad-blocking works on them too. >It is not in any way controversial and can be (and is, above) rationally debated. Thanks, I appreciate that. Every society has things that are true but which you aren't supposed to say, and it's amusing to me that "Google provides some high quality free services" seems to be one of ours.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > So there would be a net loss of free (i.e., paid-for-by-Google-ad-money) content and services available to people. Also, it's not like a new wave of smaller, more democratised ad-sellers would arise in Google's wake, since ad-blocking works on them too. You're correct, but I don't know how bad a thing that is. To my mind (i.e. my opinion), there's no such thing as a power vacuum that remains a power vacuum. Something is going to arise that replaces (for example) youtube. It is inconceivable that those content producers on youtube are simply going to give up the ghost and die. It has to be a self-sustaining something(s) that isn't driven by ads (I agree with you on the point that a replacement can't be ad-supported), and I am arguing that whatever it(them) is will be better than the current ad-driven youtube. The whole TLDR of my argument is that, even if the ad-driven sites go away, the content-producers and the content-consumers aren't going away! Right now, the arbitrage is performed by ad-driven middlemen, so the motivation for abuse, control and censorship is incredibly high. I think that whatever arbitrage process or middlemen arise is going to be a lot better for society as a whole than the obnoxious ads with which I am bombarded with whenever I turn off the ad-blocker. Maybe I'm wrong, but this is one of those things we'll only see when we see it.