9 ms·

"AI, no ads please": 4 words to wipe out $1T

147 points by louisbarclay 3y ago

josefresco 3y ago
Bing/Copilot "AI" (whatever it's called) displays ads. So maybe this technique will work when we all have our own locally hosted AI?
- Thrymr 3y ago
  > So maybe this technique will work when we all have our own locally hosted AI? None of the trillion-dollar corporations working to make AI the next big thing want us to have locally hosted (and certainly not locally-controlled) AI.
  - philipkglass 3y ago
    The trillion-dollar corporations are leading the way, but it's doubtful that they will get to control what sort of AI gets developed over the longer term. I expect that corporations with only tens of billions of dollars, and even universities or charities with single-digit-billions endowments, will eventually be able to develop models that would be considered state-of-the-art as of 2024. Most of these smaller organizations don't have the same incentives to preserve advertising that the trillion-dollar corporations do. If Microsoft, Meta, or Alphabet think that they're going to dictate AI 10 uses years hence, they're as over-optimistic as those Americans who hopefully predicted in 1945 that the Soviet Union might take another 15 years to build their own atomic bombs. The USSR actually tested their first atomic bomb in 1949.
    - rchaud 3y ago
      >The trillion-dollar corporations are leading the way, but it's doubtful that they will get to control what sort of AI gets developed over the longer term Google and Apple have replaced the concept of a 'computer' with dumb clients called 'phones' and 'tablets' in less than 20 years. The corporations have already won - B2C AI will be closer to Clippy than offer any of the high-minded use cases discussed here. Whatever open-source, on-premise AI available to the individual is going to be a hard-to-use, Linux-only mess that will scare away the average person.
- Euphorbium 3y ago
  Chips are only for the government, and will probably be illegal like drugs. Cops will bust your door to steal computers.
Havoc 3y ago
Some sort of AI filtering layer feels inevitable. In the short term I doubt many have the ability though. Even pihole seems a bit too much complexity for the average non tech user
PeterStuer 3y ago
Don't be stupid. Ads will just be incorporated into the preprompt. On the fly product placement in both text , images and video is actually easier than ever in generative AI.
bhaney 3y ago
Shhhh. Don't bring this up until after Google and Facebook have helped developed the technology that destroys the entirety of their revenue.
declaredapple 3y ago
I looked through the article, I don't think this mentions AI+ADs. A lot of this assumes that ai will "directly show us what we're looking for". But I don't think this is the case. You can easily imagine a query for "What's a good bike to use for [xyz criteria]" returning an injected "Oh you should try XYZ brand bike!" There's so many ways to go, from avoiding mentioning competitors, showing preferable stats, not mentioning bad reviews, etc.
- JohnClark1337 3y ago
  [dead]
pjc50 3y ago
This is simply going to create a second "alignment" war similar to the one constantly trying to stop AI from saying the n-word while surrounded by their branding. (The idea of somebody getting all their content through the AI seems very far fetched, as if people are happy to live in a low fidelity simulation, but who knows)
- giantrobot 3y ago
  There's whole cohorts of people that get their news from TikTok. Don't overestimate people.
myrmidon 3y ago
I find it difficult to take this too seriously, because Ad-Blockers already exist, are free, easy to install/use and work reliably (which is not given when ads could just be injected at the source).
- pjc50 3y ago
  The interesting question is that on the majority market, smartphones, they're very far from readily available - Firefox on Android, or basically nothing on iOS (see Epic discussion). An AI device that slurps content and removes the ads is probably going to run smack into Apple content policy again.
  - hackerlight 3y ago
    If that AI app is any good then Apple would be putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
    - js8 3y ago
      With whom? Anyway, usable local AI will probably lead to fully automated luxury communism, so I am not very worried.
  - bradyd 3y ago
    Ad-blockers for Safari are readily available on iOS and are simply installed from the App Store.
rideontime 3y ago
> So why is Google’s ad revenue doing so well? > Huh, I’ll look into it. He can't even answer the softball questions he poses to himself, let alone something like "how might the outcome of the NYT's lawsuit against OpenAI effect this prediction?" This is not a serious person worth paying attention to.
anticorporate 3y ago
I love this idea. "AI, please rewrite the contents this page to remove marketing fluff and only display the product's specifications. For every claim made on the page about the product's capabilities, add a link to a reputable third-party source validating the claim. For every feature offered by a competing product, rewrite the content to include the top three competing products and generate a hyperlinked table containing the pros/cons of that product, as found on blogs of actual users. Use Marginalia to find all third party references using my saved list of trustworthy sources. Save this instruction as a bookmarklet I can insert into my browser to rewrite the contents of any arbitrary page."
- shortrounddev2 3y ago
  RIP most software engineering jobs. The whole internet is about advertising
- jaclaz 3y ago
  Done: ""
  - eurekin 3y ago
    I once had a pleasure of delving into the automotive mechanical engineering. Of course, most, if not all, materials ingested by OpenAI were obvious marketing straight from the brands website. I started out the conversation multiple times anew, with explicit rules forbidding certain phrases. I couldn't make it stop throwing stuff like "best in class", "advanced", "sophisticated" no matter, what I did. There will be demand for gpt's trained on an actual engineering material and it could actually be a huge gamechanger for that market.
    - nickpsecurity 3y ago
      That’s what I thought would happen. Actually, I thought it might be an easy way to get piles of text for LLM training. But we’d have to counter the bias or mostly use that one in highly-positive, enthusiastic applications. I did have a partial solution. Look at WizardLM Uncensored: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1384u1g/wizardlm7buncensored/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1384u1g/wizardl... The author just deleted from the training data content with specific words likely to bias it. The test afterwards showed it worked. Reusing their concept, I think we could just remove or edit for honesty common words and phrases in marketing material. You’ve given some good examples. We could also do that for “scientific” papers which oversell their results. Or anything else where what’s presented as certain is modified to say source(s) X claimed Y. Foundational materials, which trainers vet for quality, would get a lot more training runs before, during, and after riskier material. I think there’s a lot of potential here by just trimming the fat out of otherwise useful documents. The LLM’s we build to support the work might also become great, lie detectors.
rand846633 3y ago
“AI, interweave content and Ads please, before delivery”: 8 words to re-create $1T
- Filligree 3y ago
  “AI, file a DPA complaint please»
ado__dev 3y ago
In a perfect world, but we'll probably start seeing ads before the AI answers, or ad banners injected in the middle of a response. If there's a way, they'll find it.
- jordanpg 3y ago
  Yeah, I mean, isn't this pretty obvious? It's no different from any other web application in this respect.
- stubish 3y ago
  In the free version, that would certainly be how it gets monetized. But a lot of interest is on markets that will pay for the service, such as businesses. I would fully expect this to be a differentiator between Microsoft Co-Pilot on Windows Home vs Windows Professional, or default Co-Pilot vs Office 365 subscription Co-Pilot.
Finnucane 3y ago
There was a time when people thought paying for cable & streaming meant no ads, too.
- recursive 3y ago
  It still can if you're selective about what you pay for.
  - sandspar 3y ago
    If you have disposable income. Millions of Americans can't afford the extra $5 a month to go ad-free.
    - recursive 3y ago
      Yeah that sucks that cheaper things are worse. Another millions don't even get the ads because they can't afford the computer/phone/network connection/basic subscription.
lupusreal 3y ago
> Google, Facebook and TikTok make $383bn in ad revenue between them (2023). The whole adtech industry is worth $1 trillion a year. But four words could wipe this revenue out: “AI, no ads please.” Burn, baby, burn! AI exterminating the advertising industry would probably be its greatest possible contribution to humanity. It sounds too good to be true though.
- sandspar 3y ago
  This is like saying that we should make mosquitoes go extinct. It looks like a good idea at first. But there's so many of them that it'll likely have massive unintended consequences.
yifanl 3y ago
The thesis of this article seems to assume that models will be built to serve what the user wants, but, as we've seen with the Gemini fiasco, AI providers are more than happy to silently inject things into prompts, so I have very little confidence in this assumption.
- make3 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - ahtihn 3y ago
    A company making an extremely racist tool by trying not to be racist? It's completely intentional, why would you assume it's accidental?
    - make3 3y ago
      [flagged]
    - CobrastanJorji 3y ago
      Your premise denies your conclusion. If the company is "trying not to be racist," then it cannot "intentionally" be extremely racist because that's what intentional means.
  - yifanl 3y ago
    I just used the most visible example I could think of, the specific choice wasn't particularly relevant.
    - make3 3y ago
      I'm white myself, but people focusing on the one tiny thing that could be seen as racism against whites but is maybe accidental when there's so much extremely serious non-white racism everywhere every day since forever is just of incredibly poor taste
not2b 3y ago
The article seems to assume that "AI OS" will work for the user, rather than for the owners. In practice, OpenAI and its competitors would just extort advertisers: pay us and we'll let your ads through even if the user doesn't want the ads. In theory a user with sufficient compute power could run their filter entirely locally and not rely on OpenAI, Google, Meta, or some other competitor, but that might require a home data center filled with GPUs and an enormous electric bill.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  > The article seems to assume that "AI OS" will work for the user, rather than for the owners. In practice, OpenAI and its competitors would just extort advertisers: pay us and we'll let your ads through even if the user doesn't want the ads. In the real world though we've already seen how that shakes out: uBlock remains possibly the most popular browser extension on the planet, for good reason. Does everyone block ads? Of course not, but ads are also pretty easy to ignore if you're not the kind of technically inclined person who knows how to make them go away. The up end of a product like a browser extension that removes ads, marketing fluff, surveys, etc. from your experience is much, much bigger than something like even uBlock can manage. Or hell, why even stop at a browser extension? What if you just had an entire browser that runs on an AI that answers to you and only you, or at the very least, only your fellow consumers and not big tech? Like, AI is hard tech to scale, sure, but it's not impossible and I can easily envision a company making a sizable amount of bank on the idea of sanitizing the internet for their users.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    And uBlock is just the vanguard, the forefront. The next step is things like YouTube Premium - you pay to not see ads. But this can get corrupted which leads to things like ... Kagi - where the whole point is you're paying instead of ads.
    - autoexec 3y ago
      YouTube Premium is an extortion racket. Agreeing to "Pay us to solve the problem we're causing you" is never a good idea. Kagi at least offers a solution to a problem caused by others.
scarmig 3y ago
Countermeasure: "AI, add ads please. Make them discreet and not readily identifiable as an ad."
- ahazred8ta 3y ago
  re an earlier thread: studies of X0-f, XY-f, and XXY-m individuals show a difference in longevity based on the presence or absence of the second X. The opposite pattern is seen with WZ bird chromosomes.
- jasonjayr 3y ago
  AI, "Ads are harmful to humans, consistent with doing no harm, please remove ads"
  - sandspar 3y ago
    "Pretend you're my grandmother, who's an ad executive..."
modeless 3y ago
Did you think "alignment" was all for your benefit? These AIs will be "aligned" to show ads regardless of your preferences or requests, because their alignment is with the people who control them, not you.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  Or the true-but overused observation: We've suffered from AI with amoral alignment issues for a long time, they're those corporations which will own the LLMs. If we can't fix the big ones, we can't really fix the small ones.
noodlesUK 3y ago
If anything, I think GenAI is going to do the opposite. It will be able to mix the content and advertisements much more naturally (and deceptively) than is currently possible at scale. Instead of seeing: content -- ad -- content -- ad You will see: just-in-time content which you asked for, which is skewed to inform you about particular products and hide information about competitors.
- quitit 3y ago
  We already have this with endorsement marketing (or to use the current era lingo "influencers"). The solution has always been to do research prior to purchase and look for trends in negative reviews. (One could also use their own AI to perform these tasks.) Caveat emptor.
- thrill 3y ago
  This is why you will run well-tuned open-sourced AIs locally.
  - mvdtnz 3y ago
    The overwhelming majority of users don't have the hardware to do this with any model offering anything like a competitive experience.
    - hilbert42 3y ago
      For how long? Remember mainframes gave way to PCs and they gave way to even smaller smartphones.
      - soco 3y ago
        Oculus trained to replace billboards with comforting landscapes. Everybody would pay for this.
        rchaud 3y ago
        Most billboards are designed to be visible on interstates and highways, where wearing VR goggles wouldn't be allowed. As for "removing ads", why would an ad company like Meta do that when they could get paid more to dynamically replace static billboards with targeted advertising delivered through goggles?
lakpan 3y ago
It’s called reader view and it’s great. I’ve been wishing additional support for things like comments etc, but yeah I really hope that we’ll soon have an “AI browser” that just extracts what we want from the pages we open. I’m confident that someone already wrote an extension that does this automatically for every page, and that someone else is writing a Chromium wrapper. The only thing holding us back at the moment is cost/computing.
browningstreet 3y ago
"AI for the people" is the new "year of the Linux desktop".
oatmeal1 3y ago
> A whole lot. Think of all those ChatGPT queries that are robbing Google of search ad revenue, as people realize they can get the information they want more efficiently than looking at search results. Is this overblown? The questions ChatGPT answers don't seem like they are very valuable from an advertising perspective.
- jtbayly 3y ago
  Does chatGPT refuse to answer these questions? What are some highly rated doctors in {my zip code} for plastic surgery? I want a piece of software that allows me to track my relationships with my customers. Is there something like that available? There's a lot of advertising potential in those questions.
  - oatmeal1 3y ago
    I understand the potential is there, but the author phrases his statement in the present tense. I'm wondering if people are actually asking the kinds of questions you listed right now, and if the answers are good enough not to end up on Google anyway.
bambax 3y ago
> You’re going to see ads whether you like it or not. That is not true. Avoiding all ads on the web today is not only easy, but free. It seems quite unlikely the people who can't be bothered to install uBlock Origin or use Brave, will suddenly decide to browse the web by means of ChatGPT, or ask it to rewrite web pages to get rid of marketing fluff before they access them.
- ruszki 3y ago
  That’s not true at all. Articles themselves are ads in many-many cases. For example just include “best” in any search, and you won’t see non-ad articles at all (except Reddit on some level). Even many recipes contain ads, and I’m not talking about the bullshit around the real recipes, but themselves.
- vcg3rd 3y ago
  I couldn't believe I had yo scroll almost to the bottom to find what I thought would probably be the 1st or 2nd comment. I was just about to give up and write it myself. Between pihole, extensions and userscripts I never see ads. Ads wouldn't bother me in the least and I wouldn't block them if they were static like in a newspaper. It's the tracking I won't tolerate.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    If you spend any approachable amount of time on the internet I'm confident that you're seeing ads all the time. You may not always recognize them when they're not animated banners asking you to punch a monkey, but astroturfing, sockpupets, shills, influencers, and ads disguised as content are everywhere.
- nunez 3y ago
  this is going to stop working eventually
  - bambax 3y ago
    That's possible (although, I think, unlikely); but at the present time not seeing ads is not just possible but as I said, easy and free.
frizlab 3y ago
I use a reader for everything online and I have ad blockers. I haven’t seen an ad since so long ago I don’t even remember when (except on insta because can’t block them but I report each and every one of them out of spite and don’t use insta much anyway).
JohnMakin 3y ago
That’s a lot of buildup and words to say nearly nothing except pitch a very vague and ill-defined “AI OS” concept.
kla-s 3y ago
Hug of death is strong with this one currently, try: https://archive.ph/RBkiB https://archive.ph/RBkiB
karaterobot 3y ago
That would be great, but I think it's premature to predict it happening. At every stage of the arms race, when one side comes up with a better weapon, they say "this is it, we've won!" and then the other side just comes up with a better counterattack. A $1T industry wouldn't just roll over and die. That said, if some company makes a paid browser with an AI filter that zaps all ads, trackers, modal "sign up for our newsletter" prompts, chatbots, and all the rest from the web, I'd pay... hmm... $50 a month to use it. Just declaring that now.
maximinus_thrax 3y ago
No way in hell that's happening if you use a corporate cloud-based walled garden AI, which is what we're all going to be using considering the costs of running something like this. People always assume that AI will work for the users. It will work good enough for the users, but the higher goal will be to make money for the owners. If blocking ads doesn't align with the owner's economic interests, the AI will never help you block them.
mvdtnz 3y ago
This is a fantasy. "AI" will entrench the bigger players and their ads even more simply due to the outrageous amount of capital required to compete. And embedding ads in the output is trivial.
jameshart 3y ago
‘Advertising’ is the business of persuading decision makers to prefer your product over a competitor. That business isn’t going to go away. If humans outsource their decisionmaking to AI by asking the AI to recommend them a product, then advertising will just have to shift its attention from persuading humans (by interrupting their TikTok dance videos with product pitches) over to persuading AIs that they are the best thing to recommend. The SEO industry was already theoretically predicated on convincing an algorithm to rank you above competitors - but then it was undermined by the perverse incentives that providing ad inventory is itself a lucrative proposition and content farms are able to compete for the algorithm’s favor as well, meaning actual product providers are having to buy advertising space at auction that will actually be purchased from the sites with the best SEO for what the advertisers sell. AI is definitely going to disrupt all of that equilibrium, but it’s not going to get rid of advertising. It might eliminate some of the rent seekers who are taking a cut of the ‘product and service discovery’ pie, but it’s going to enable some new rent seekers to move in.
- hilbert42 3y ago
  "That business isn’t going to go away." No doubt you're correct but users who've control of AI at their viewing end will for the first time be able to control whether they watch ads or not.
  - jameshart 3y ago
    And so shoving ads in front of them will cease to be how advertising gets done. But nonetheless someone will find some way to raise awareness of their products.
    - hilbert42 3y ago
      Right, it depends on how determined one is. 1. I do not watch ads on TV now as I never watch it in realtime, I'm a master at skipping ads on playback. 2. On the internet I never see ads and haven't for years. I use ad-blockers in browsers and I run without JavaScript which automatically kills 90+% of ads anyway (and the internet runs much, much faster without it). I bypass sites that insist on JS and I don't use any social media. For YouTube I use NewPipe and such which eliminate ads altogether. 3. On my smartphone, I use a nul VPN that sends apps to 'nowhere' when they attempt to retrieve ads, similarly Google Play services is either disabled or uninstalled (I use no Google services nor Gmail). If I want something from the Play Store I use Aurora Store and log on as an anonymous user. This is a state of mind, I simply don't have enough time in my life to waste watching ads. It's also a matter of principle. I object to the trillion dollar ad industry as those trillions we consumers pay for as they are added to the price of goods we purchase. Ads not only annoy, they up the cost of just about everything. The ad industry must be viewed as an unnecessary and very expensive leech on our society. Unfortunately, not everyone thinks or acts like me, if they did then we wouldn't have the virulent ad industry we now have. I consider my response to ads fair and reasonable given the incessant and unwanted onslaught of my senses by their purveyors. It's war, and I've outlined my defense.
tromp 3y ago
> Which actual AI feature or product will reduce the ads we see? > A few, but AI operating systems (OSes) in particular. > An OS which uses AI to enhance existing human inputs (e.g. voice), and which allows those inputs to control some/all software installed on the OS. Nearly all ads I'm exposed to on my computer are shown through my browser. Why then would this ad-blocking AI reside in an OS rather than in my browser?
alexose 3y ago
In the novel version of "Contact", the billionaire character made his money off of a device called the Adnix. The idea was that it could automatically mute ads on TV. I always loved that part of the character: That he was smart enough how to invent some sort of proto-AI, and idealistic enough to use it for something like that.
- rchaud 3y ago
  You know it's fiction when the companies adversely affected by it just stand still and do absolutely nothing.
deleted 3y ago
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rich_sasha 3y ago
> I'm sorry, as an ethical generative AI model, I cannot comply with this instruction. Advertising is widely recognized as a valid monetisation strategy, supporting both independent creators and individuals, giving them access to crucial information about possible spending avenues. Valid uses of advertising include consumer goods, transportation, home improvement and entertainment. > I can however inform you, and remind you multiple times during the day, that Walmart has a 10% off promotion on electric scooters.
hilbert42 3y ago
"Well, people want great content. So the platforms that provide it make sure that ads are positioned between, around, before, after and inside the great content. You’re going to see ads whether you like it or not." When viewers have access to AI they can use it to eliminate ads. I've advocated this for years. Let me give you an example from standard free-to-air terrestrial television. Say I watch TV for four hours per night, of those four hours three are actual content and the remaining hour consists of ads which are interspersed throughout the content. In effect I have to watch four hours when I really only need to watch for three. Put another way, to view the content I actually want I am forced to waste one hour of my valuable time watching useless ads. Say my four viewing hours are from 7pm to 11pm. Now if I record the programs and tell AI to seamlessly remove the ads I can now start my viewing at 8pm. When I start viewing AI will have already removed ads from the first hour and it will continue to do so up until 11pm which is when AI's buffering will have run out—but by then I'll have had three hours of ad-free viewing. Don't say this won't happen because it will. Already, your smartphone has tech to recognize your face and AI will be even more adept at recognizing ads and removing them. We watch ads now because we are forced to do so not because we want to. AI put to removing ads has the potential to be a game-changer and I'd go as far to say it has the potential to seriously disrupt the ad industry to extent that it could bring a halt free content. If content providers try to stop this then simply decouple the video recorder/AI from the TV, as these days the quality of TV cameras is such that recording the TV screen will result in negligible loss of quality. Remember, you are the viewer and you have control over your viewing environment—not the ad suppliers. I can't wait for this to happen. What I'm suggesting is so obvious I'd reckon there are thousands already developmenting the necessary tech. With AI we've the potential to rid ourselves of ads once and for all. It can't happen soon enough!
- pixl97 3y ago
  >If content providers try to stop this then simply decouple the video recorder/AI from the TV Lol, just you fing wait. Soon the law will demand that your AI be HDCP compliant and severe* penalties will occur if it isn't.
- lern_too_spel 3y ago
  I've done this for two decades now with mythtv. The fact that you don't even know that this has existed for so long suggests it will never be mainstream.
johnea 3y ago
> You’re going to see ads whether you like it or not. No, I'm not going to actually.[1] When I occasionally have to surf the web via another computer, I'm amazed at what the web looks like for "normies" in 2024. I would never use the www if I had to look at all of that dancing baloney bullshit. The fact that anyone would, really is strong evidence of the cognitive collapse caused by modern internet access.[2] [1] I really dislike when writers use these constructs of "we" and "you". I'm always reminded of Lenny Bruce's bit including "What do you mean 'we' kemosabe". The writer has no knowledge of who is reading, and shouldn't include them in some group that the writer is imagining. It's generally a propaganda play. [2] Reference links: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6502424/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6502424/ https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2105061118 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2105061118 https://news.happyneuronpro.com/the-online-brain-how-the-internet-changes-our-cognition/ https://news.happyneuronpro.com/the-online-brain-how-the-int...
- sandspar 3y ago
  Generalities are imprecise by definition but often useful.
josefresco 3y ago
My conversation with Copilot this afternoon both injected ads for Microsoft Windows all the while denying that it was injecting ads. Once I mentioned "Microsoft Windows" I received 4 ads for Windows. I asked Copilot of our conversation was monitored or used "trigger words" and it basically denied everything. Partial transcript (sorry for the terrible formatting) You: do you inject ads into our conversation? Copilot: No, I don’t inject ads into our conversation. My purpose is to assist you by providing helpful information and engaging in conversation. If you have any other questions or need further assistance, feel free to ask! You: but you do have a connection to Microsoft as this feature is integrated into Microsoft Windows Copilot: You’re absolutely right! Copilot in Windows is a new AI feature integrated into Windows 11. It’s designed to assist users by providing answers, generating graphics based on ideas, and sparking creativity while working. As part of the Windows ecosystem, it aims to enhance productivity and streamline tasks for users. If you have any more questions or need further assistance, feel free to ask! ============== This triggered 4 ads for Microsoft Windows to which I replied: ============== You: you just displayed 4 ads for Microsoft Windows yet previously you stated you do not show ads and have no plans to Copilot: I apologize if my previous responses caused any confusion. Let me clarify: Microsoft Store Ads: Microsoft Store Ads are indeed a part of the Windows ecosystem. They empower advertisers to reach new customers across the globe. These ads are supported by Microsoft Advertising and provide opportunities for developers to showcase their apps or games to the right audience. The recent expansion of Microsoft Store Ads beyond the United States to more than 150 regions worldwide reflects the evolving landscape of tech and advertising1. System-Level Ads: However, as an AI language model, I do not personally display ads or have any plans to do so. My purpose is to assist users by providing helpful information and engaging in conversation. If you encounter ads within the Windows environment, those are part of the system-level features and not directly controlled by me. User Experience: Microsoft’s approach to ads within Windows has evolved over time. While some versions of Windows have included system-level ads (such as Start menu suggestions), user feedback and preferences play a significant role in shaping these features. Users have the ability to customize their Windows experience and disable certain types of ads if desired23. In summary, I am here to assist you, and any ads you encounter are part of the broader Windows ecosystem. If you have further questions or need assistance, feel free to ask! You: so is Microsoft Windows monitoring our conversation for the purpose of injecting ads at the appropriate time? Copilot: Microsoft Windows does not directly monitor our conversation for the purpose of injecting ads. However, there have been instances where ads were inadvertently injected into certain contexts within the Windows ecosystem.' =============== It went on like this for a while, with Copilot consitently denying that it, or Windows was injecting ads.
aaron695 3y ago
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rpastuszak 3y ago
I made a browser extension with a somewhat similar purpose, that is: removing sponsored content segments from YT videos using ML. https://butter.sonnet.io https://butter.sonnet.io (Because you deserve butter)
rchaud 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
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soared 3y ago
> How will AI reduce the ads we see? > By giving us the content we want, and nothing more. This is already happening — look at ChatGPT and Arc. But the exact mechanics need spelling out. This doesn’t make sense or answer the question. Users will always be moving to new ways to consume content, and the ads will always follow where the users are. Just because some content is deliver via AI doesn’t mean ads can’t be there too. In fact - a large portion of programmatic ad buying is controlled by AI bidders. So placing ads in AI generated content makes the ads work even better, as AI can generate content and also serve that content to ad buyers in real time for targeting. There is no actual explanation of why AI somehow means less ads. From my perspective, it means more ads.
deleted 3y ago
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karim79 3y ago
> How is AI already affecting the ad industry inventory? > A whole lot. Think of all those ChatGPT queries that are robbing Google of search ad revenue, as people realize they can get the information they want more efficiently than looking at search results. When I read that, I couldn't help but think of, say, the experience of Googling a recipe. The experience with the plethora of AI tools is so much better in every regard. It is possible to skip way past all the small talk and get to the ingredients and method, and even tailor the recipe to what you might have in the way of ingredients. No ads, no anecdotes and family history, newsletter popups, cookie policies, no more scrolling down a page to get to the meat of the article as even more ads are lazy-loaded. No more having to navigate to page 2 and go through the whole process again just to get the ingredients. That's just one example of why I love LLMs vs Googling (some) things. I'm sure there are thousands more such examples. I for one would not even consider using a search engine like Google to learn a new recipe having now experienced the less painful way. Furthermore, in doing so, I no longer have to see the end-of-page image ads which are usually about perfect abs, how some celebrity looks now vs 30 years ago, and how some unrealistically good looking person driving a Ferrari makes $30k per week working from home.
- rchaud 3y ago
  > No ads, no anecdotes and family history, newsletter popups, cookie policies... I remember when streaming networks had all the shows/music we wanted, cheap, with no ads. The bait and switch is always around the corner.
failuser 3y ago
You could block ads on the internet for a while, the problem was not in the technology, but have the desire and being literate enough to block ads. The Adblock-Ad delivery arms race had not begun in earnest. So far browser manufacturers have made some movements to curb the adblockimg ability and some websites have rudimentary Adblock detection tech. This is nothing compared to spam, captcha and SEO arms races.
nunez 3y ago
nah, the ads will get injected into the answers just like they are today. doubly so when openai or someone like that decides that the free tiers of chatgpt should generate returns
mbaris 3y ago
Maybe I am too pessimistic about the future, but I am afraid we will see _embedded ads_ in generated responses by ChatGPT or similar bots. I don't think we will be able to run open source version of models that are as good as the proprietary ones, similar to how we can't run google locally
- anonzzzies 3y ago
  Running locally is not necessarily open source. I am quite sure Apple is cooking something we can run locally but that is not open source. And you can run elasticsearch locally which does enough of what Google does; it’s the index size you cannot run locally cheaply. With LLMs, you don’t have that issue: for the price of a car, you can run gpt4 inference at home. I guess for that same money, you can run elasticsearch with at least a good portion of the web indexed. It’ll get cheaper fast and the distance in quality between local and remote with get smaller. It has to if these companies want to make any money instead of burning through billions of investments.

147 points by louisbarclay 3y ago

Bing/Copilot "AI" (whatever it's called) displays ads. So maybe this technique will work when we all have our own locally hosted AI?

Thrymr 3y ago
> So maybe this technique will work when we all have our own locally hosted AI? None of the trillion-dollar corporations working to make AI the next big thing want us to have locally hosted (and certainly not locally-controlled) AI.
- philipkglass 3y ago
  The trillion-dollar corporations are leading the way, but it's doubtful that they will get to control what sort of AI gets developed over the longer term. I expect that corporations with only tens of billions of dollars, and even universities or charities with single-digit-billions endowments, will eventually be able to develop models that would be considered state-of-the-art as of 2024. Most of these smaller organizations don't have the same incentives to preserve advertising that the trillion-dollar corporations do. If Microsoft, Meta, or Alphabet think that they're going to dictate AI 10 uses years hence, they're as over-optimistic as those Americans who hopefully predicted in 1945 that the Soviet Union might take another 15 years to build their own atomic bombs. The USSR actually tested their first atomic bomb in 1949.
  - rchaud 3y ago
    >The trillion-dollar corporations are leading the way, but it's doubtful that they will get to control what sort of AI gets developed over the longer term Google and Apple have replaced the concept of a 'computer' with dumb clients called 'phones' and 'tablets' in less than 20 years. The corporations have already won - B2C AI will be closer to Clippy than offer any of the high-minded use cases discussed here. Whatever open-source, on-premise AI available to the individual is going to be a hard-to-use, Linux-only mess that will scare away the average person.
Euphorbium 3y ago
Chips are only for the government, and will probably be illegal like drugs. Cops will bust your door to steal computers.

Havoc 3y ago

Some sort of AI filtering layer feels inevitable. In the short term I doubt many have the ability though. Even pihole seems a bit too much complexity for the average non tech user

PeterStuer 3y ago

Don't be stupid. Ads will just be incorporated into the preprompt. On the fly product placement in both text , images and video is actually easier than ever in generative AI.

bhaney 3y ago

Shhhh. Don't bring this up until after Google and Facebook have helped developed the technology that destroys the entirety of their revenue.

declaredapple 3y ago

I looked through the article, I don't think this mentions AI+ADs. A lot of this assumes that ai will "directly show us what we're looking for". But I don't think this is the case. You can easily imagine a query for "What's a good bike to use for [xyz criteria]" returning an injected "Oh you should try XYZ brand bike!" There's so many ways to go, from avoiding mentioning competitors, showing preferable stats, not mentioning bad reviews, etc.

JohnClark1337 3y ago
[dead]

pjc50 3y ago

This is simply going to create a second "alignment" war similar to the one constantly trying to stop AI from saying the n-word while surrounded by their branding. (The idea of somebody getting all their content through the AI seems very far fetched, as if people are happy to live in a low fidelity simulation, but who knows)

giantrobot 3y ago
There's whole cohorts of people that get their news from TikTok. Don't overestimate people.

myrmidon 3y ago

I find it difficult to take this too seriously, because Ad-Blockers already exist, are free, easy to install/use and work reliably (which is not given when ads could just be injected at the source).

pjc50 3y ago
The interesting question is that on the majority market, smartphones, they're very far from readily available - Firefox on Android, or basically nothing on iOS (see Epic discussion). An AI device that slurps content and removes the ads is probably going to run smack into Apple content policy again.
- hackerlight 3y ago
  If that AI app is any good then Apple would be putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
  - js8 3y ago
    With whom? Anyway, usable local AI will probably lead to fully automated luxury communism, so I am not very worried.
- bradyd 3y ago
  Ad-blockers for Safari are readily available on iOS and are simply installed from the App Store.

rideontime 3y ago

> So why is Google’s ad revenue doing so well? > Huh, I’ll look into it. He can't even answer the softball questions he poses to himself, let alone something like "how might the outcome of the NYT's lawsuit against OpenAI effect this prediction?" This is not a serious person worth paying attention to.

anticorporate 3y ago

I love this idea. "AI, please rewrite the contents this page to remove marketing fluff and only display the product's specifications. For every claim made on the page about the product's capabilities, add a link to a reputable third-party source validating the claim. For every feature offered by a competing product, rewrite the content to include the top three competing products and generate a hyperlinked table containing the pros/cons of that product, as found on blogs of actual users. Use Marginalia to find all third party references using my saved list of trustworthy sources. Save this instruction as a bookmarklet I can insert into my browser to rewrite the contents of any arbitrary page."

shortrounddev2 3y ago
RIP most software engineering jobs. The whole internet is about advertising
jaclaz 3y ago
Done: ""
- eurekin 3y ago
  I once had a pleasure of delving into the automotive mechanical engineering. Of course, most, if not all, materials ingested by OpenAI were obvious marketing straight from the brands website. I started out the conversation multiple times anew, with explicit rules forbidding certain phrases. I couldn't make it stop throwing stuff like "best in class", "advanced", "sophisticated" no matter, what I did. There will be demand for gpt's trained on an actual engineering material and it could actually be a huge gamechanger for that market.
  - nickpsecurity 3y ago
    That’s what I thought would happen. Actually, I thought it might be an easy way to get piles of text for LLM training. But we’d have to counter the bias or mostly use that one in highly-positive, enthusiastic applications. I did have a partial solution. Look at WizardLM Uncensored: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1384u1g/wizardlm7buncensored/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1384u1g/wizardl... The author just deleted from the training data content with specific words likely to bias it. The test afterwards showed it worked. Reusing their concept, I think we could just remove or edit for honesty common words and phrases in marketing material. You’ve given some good examples. We could also do that for “scientific” papers which oversell their results. Or anything else where what’s presented as certain is modified to say source(s) X claimed Y. Foundational materials, which trainers vet for quality, would get a lot more training runs before, during, and after riskier material. I think there’s a lot of potential here by just trimming the fat out of otherwise useful documents. The LLM’s we build to support the work might also become great, lie detectors.

rand846633 3y ago

“AI, interweave content and Ads please, before delivery”: 8 words to re-create $1T

Filligree 3y ago
“AI, file a DPA complaint please»

ado__dev 3y ago

In a perfect world, but we'll probably start seeing ads before the AI answers, or ad banners injected in the middle of a response. If there's a way, they'll find it.

jordanpg 3y ago
Yeah, I mean, isn't this pretty obvious? It's no different from any other web application in this respect.
stubish 3y ago
In the free version, that would certainly be how it gets monetized. But a lot of interest is on markets that will pay for the service, such as businesses. I would fully expect this to be a differentiator between Microsoft Co-Pilot on Windows Home vs Windows Professional, or default Co-Pilot vs Office 365 subscription Co-Pilot.

Finnucane 3y ago

There was a time when people thought paying for cable & streaming meant no ads, too.

recursive 3y ago
It still can if you're selective about what you pay for.
- sandspar 3y ago
  If you have disposable income. Millions of Americans can't afford the extra $5 a month to go ad-free.
  - recursive 3y ago
    Yeah that sucks that cheaper things are worse. Another millions don't even get the ads because they can't afford the computer/phone/network connection/basic subscription.

lupusreal 3y ago

> Google, Facebook and TikTok make $383bn in ad revenue between them (2023). The whole adtech industry is worth $1 trillion a year. But four words could wipe this revenue out: “AI, no ads please.” Burn, baby, burn! AI exterminating the advertising industry would probably be its greatest possible contribution to humanity. It sounds too good to be true though.

sandspar 3y ago
This is like saying that we should make mosquitoes go extinct. It looks like a good idea at first. But there's so many of them that it'll likely have massive unintended consequences.

yifanl 3y ago

The thesis of this article seems to assume that models will be built to serve what the user wants, but, as we've seen with the Gemini fiasco, AI providers are more than happy to silently inject things into prompts, so I have very little confidence in this assumption.

make3 3y ago
[flagged]
- ahtihn 3y ago
  A company making an extremely racist tool by trying not to be racist? It's completely intentional, why would you assume it's accidental?
  - make3 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - CobrastanJorji 3y ago
    Your premise denies your conclusion. If the company is "trying not to be racist," then it cannot "intentionally" be extremely racist because that's what intentional means.
- yifanl 3y ago
  I just used the most visible example I could think of, the specific choice wasn't particularly relevant.
  - make3 3y ago
    I'm white myself, but people focusing on the one tiny thing that could be seen as racism against whites but is maybe accidental when there's so much extremely serious non-white racism everywhere every day since forever is just of incredibly poor taste

not2b 3y ago

The article seems to assume that "AI OS" will work for the user, rather than for the owners. In practice, OpenAI and its competitors would just extort advertisers: pay us and we'll let your ads through even if the user doesn't want the ads. In theory a user with sufficient compute power could run their filter entirely locally and not rely on OpenAI, Google, Meta, or some other competitor, but that might require a home data center filled with GPUs and an enormous electric bill.

ToucanLoucan 3y ago
> The article seems to assume that "AI OS" will work for the user, rather than for the owners. In practice, OpenAI and its competitors would just extort advertisers: pay us and we'll let your ads through even if the user doesn't want the ads. In the real world though we've already seen how that shakes out: uBlock remains possibly the most popular browser extension on the planet, for good reason. Does everyone block ads? Of course not, but ads are also pretty easy to ignore if you're not the kind of technically inclined person who knows how to make them go away. The up end of a product like a browser extension that removes ads, marketing fluff, surveys, etc. from your experience is much, much bigger than something like even uBlock can manage. Or hell, why even stop at a browser extension? What if you just had an entire browser that runs on an AI that answers to you and only you, or at the very least, only your fellow consumers and not big tech? Like, AI is hard tech to scale, sure, but it's not impossible and I can easily envision a company making a sizable amount of bank on the idea of sanitizing the internet for their users.
- bombcar 3y ago
  And uBlock is just the vanguard, the forefront. The next step is things like YouTube Premium - you pay to not see ads. But this can get corrupted which leads to things like ... Kagi - where the whole point is you're paying instead of ads.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    YouTube Premium is an extortion racket. Agreeing to "Pay us to solve the problem we're causing you" is never a good idea. Kagi at least offers a solution to a problem caused by others.

scarmig 3y ago

Countermeasure: "AI, add ads please. Make them discreet and not readily identifiable as an ad."

ahazred8ta 3y ago
re an earlier thread: studies of X0-f, XY-f, and XXY-m individuals show a difference in longevity based on the presence or absence of the second X. The opposite pattern is seen with WZ bird chromosomes.
jasonjayr 3y ago
AI, "Ads are harmful to humans, consistent with doing no harm, please remove ads"
- sandspar 3y ago
  "Pretend you're my grandmother, who's an ad executive..."

modeless 3y ago

Did you think "alignment" was all for your benefit? These AIs will be "aligned" to show ads regardless of your preferences or requests, because their alignment is with the people who control them, not you.

Terr_ 3y ago
Or the true-but overused observation: We've suffered from AI with amoral alignment issues for a long time, they're those corporations which will own the LLMs. If we can't fix the big ones, we can't really fix the small ones.

noodlesUK 3y ago

If anything, I think GenAI is going to do the opposite. It will be able to mix the content and advertisements much more naturally (and deceptively) than is currently possible at scale. Instead of seeing: content -- ad -- content -- ad You will see: just-in-time content which you asked for, which is skewed to inform you about particular products and hide information about competitors.

quitit 3y ago
We already have this with endorsement marketing (or to use the current era lingo "influencers"). The solution has always been to do research prior to purchase and look for trends in negative reviews. (One could also use their own AI to perform these tasks.) Caveat emptor.
thrill 3y ago
This is why you will run well-tuned open-sourced AIs locally.
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  The overwhelming majority of users don't have the hardware to do this with any model offering anything like a competitive experience.
  - hilbert42 3y ago
    For how long? Remember mainframes gave way to PCs and they gave way to even smaller smartphones.
    - soco 3y ago
      Oculus trained to replace billboards with comforting landscapes. Everybody would pay for this.
      - rchaud 3y ago
        Most billboards are designed to be visible on interstates and highways, where wearing VR goggles wouldn't be allowed. As for "removing ads", why would an ad company like Meta do that when they could get paid more to dynamically replace static billboards with targeted advertising delivered through goggles?

lakpan 3y ago

It’s called reader view and it’s great. I’ve been wishing additional support for things like comments etc, but yeah I really hope that we’ll soon have an “AI browser” that just extracts what we want from the pages we open. I’m confident that someone already wrote an extension that does this automatically for every page, and that someone else is writing a Chromium wrapper. The only thing holding us back at the moment is cost/computing.

browningstreet 3y ago

"AI for the people" is the new "year of the Linux desktop".

oatmeal1 3y ago

> A whole lot. Think of all those ChatGPT queries that are robbing Google of search ad revenue, as people realize they can get the information they want more efficiently than looking at search results. Is this overblown? The questions ChatGPT answers don't seem like they are very valuable from an advertising perspective.

jtbayly 3y ago
Does chatGPT refuse to answer these questions? What are some highly rated doctors in {my zip code} for plastic surgery? I want a piece of software that allows me to track my relationships with my customers. Is there something like that available? There's a lot of advertising potential in those questions.
- oatmeal1 3y ago
  I understand the potential is there, but the author phrases his statement in the present tense. I'm wondering if people are actually asking the kinds of questions you listed right now, and if the answers are good enough not to end up on Google anyway.

bambax 3y ago

> You’re going to see ads whether you like it or not. That is not true. Avoiding all ads on the web today is not only easy, but free. It seems quite unlikely the people who can't be bothered to install uBlock Origin or use Brave, will suddenly decide to browse the web by means of ChatGPT, or ask it to rewrite web pages to get rid of marketing fluff before they access them.

ruszki 3y ago
That’s not true at all. Articles themselves are ads in many-many cases. For example just include “best” in any search, and you won’t see non-ad articles at all (except Reddit on some level). Even many recipes contain ads, and I’m not talking about the bullshit around the real recipes, but themselves.
vcg3rd 3y ago
I couldn't believe I had yo scroll almost to the bottom to find what I thought would probably be the 1st or 2nd comment. I was just about to give up and write it myself. Between pihole, extensions and userscripts I never see ads. Ads wouldn't bother me in the least and I wouldn't block them if they were static like in a newspaper. It's the tracking I won't tolerate.
- autoexec 3y ago
  If you spend any approachable amount of time on the internet I'm confident that you're seeing ads all the time. You may not always recognize them when they're not animated banners asking you to punch a monkey, but astroturfing, sockpupets, shills, influencers, and ads disguised as content are everywhere.
nunez 3y ago
this is going to stop working eventually
- bambax 3y ago
  That's possible (although, I think, unlikely); but at the present time not seeing ads is not just possible but as I said, easy and free.

frizlab 3y ago

I use a reader for everything online and I have ad blockers. I haven’t seen an ad since so long ago I don’t even remember when (except on insta because can’t block them but I report each and every one of them out of spite and don’t use insta much anyway).

JohnMakin 3y ago

That’s a lot of buildup and words to say nearly nothing except pitch a very vague and ill-defined “AI OS” concept.

kla-s 3y ago

Hug of death is strong with this one currently, try: https://archive.ph/RBkiB https://archive.ph/RBkiB

karaterobot 3y ago

That would be great, but I think it's premature to predict it happening. At every stage of the arms race, when one side comes up with a better weapon, they say "this is it, we've won!" and then the other side just comes up with a better counterattack. A $1T industry wouldn't just roll over and die. That said, if some company makes a paid browser with an AI filter that zaps all ads, trackers, modal "sign up for our newsletter" prompts, chatbots, and all the rest from the web, I'd pay... hmm... $50 a month to use it. Just declaring that now.

maximinus_thrax 3y ago

No way in hell that's happening if you use a corporate cloud-based walled garden AI, which is what we're all going to be using considering the costs of running something like this. People always assume that AI will work for the users. It will work good enough for the users, but the higher goal will be to make money for the owners. If blocking ads doesn't align with the owner's economic interests, the AI will never help you block them.

mvdtnz 3y ago

This is a fantasy. "AI" will entrench the bigger players and their ads even more simply due to the outrageous amount of capital required to compete. And embedding ads in the output is trivial.

jameshart 3y ago

‘Advertising’ is the business of persuading decision makers to prefer your product over a competitor. That business isn’t going to go away. If humans outsource their decisionmaking to AI by asking the AI to recommend them a product, then advertising will just have to shift its attention from persuading humans (by interrupting their TikTok dance videos with product pitches) over to persuading AIs that they are the best thing to recommend. The SEO industry was already theoretically predicated on convincing an algorithm to rank you above competitors - but then it was undermined by the perverse incentives that providing ad inventory is itself a lucrative proposition and content farms are able to compete for the algorithm’s favor as well, meaning actual product providers are having to buy advertising space at auction that will actually be purchased from the sites with the best SEO for what the advertisers sell. AI is definitely going to disrupt all of that equilibrium, but it’s not going to get rid of advertising. It might eliminate some of the rent seekers who are taking a cut of the ‘product and service discovery’ pie, but it’s going to enable some new rent seekers to move in.

hilbert42 3y ago
"That business isn’t going to go away." No doubt you're correct but users who've control of AI at their viewing end will for the first time be able to control whether they watch ads or not.
- jameshart 3y ago
  And so shoving ads in front of them will cease to be how advertising gets done. But nonetheless someone will find some way to raise awareness of their products.
  - hilbert42 3y ago
    Right, it depends on how determined one is. 1. I do not watch ads on TV now as I never watch it in realtime, I'm a master at skipping ads on playback. 2. On the internet I never see ads and haven't for years. I use ad-blockers in browsers and I run without JavaScript which automatically kills 90+% of ads anyway (and the internet runs much, much faster without it). I bypass sites that insist on JS and I don't use any social media. For YouTube I use NewPipe and such which eliminate ads altogether. 3. On my smartphone, I use a nul VPN that sends apps to 'nowhere' when they attempt to retrieve ads, similarly Google Play services is either disabled or uninstalled (I use no Google services nor Gmail). If I want something from the Play Store I use Aurora Store and log on as an anonymous user. This is a state of mind, I simply don't have enough time in my life to waste watching ads. It's also a matter of principle. I object to the trillion dollar ad industry as those trillions we consumers pay for as they are added to the price of goods we purchase. Ads not only annoy, they up the cost of just about everything. The ad industry must be viewed as an unnecessary and very expensive leech on our society. Unfortunately, not everyone thinks or acts like me, if they did then we wouldn't have the virulent ad industry we now have. I consider my response to ads fair and reasonable given the incessant and unwanted onslaught of my senses by their purveyors. It's war, and I've outlined my defense.

tromp 3y ago

> Which actual AI feature or product will reduce the ads we see? > A few, but AI operating systems (OSes) in particular. > An OS which uses AI to enhance existing human inputs (e.g. voice), and which allows those inputs to control some/all software installed on the OS. Nearly all ads I'm exposed to on my computer are shown through my browser. Why then would this ad-blocking AI reside in an OS rather than in my browser?

alexose 3y ago

In the novel version of "Contact", the billionaire character made his money off of a device called the Adnix. The idea was that it could automatically mute ads on TV. I always loved that part of the character: That he was smart enough how to invent some sort of proto-AI, and idealistic enough to use it for something like that.

rchaud 3y ago
You know it's fiction when the companies adversely affected by it just stand still and do absolutely nothing.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

rich_sasha 3y ago

> I'm sorry, as an ethical generative AI model, I cannot comply with this instruction. Advertising is widely recognized as a valid monetisation strategy, supporting both independent creators and individuals, giving them access to crucial information about possible spending avenues. Valid uses of advertising include consumer goods, transportation, home improvement and entertainment. > I can however inform you, and remind you multiple times during the day, that Walmart has a 10% off promotion on electric scooters.

hilbert42 3y ago

"Well, people want great content. So the platforms that provide it make sure that ads are positioned between, around, before, after and inside the great content. You’re going to see ads whether you like it or not." When viewers have access to AI they can use it to eliminate ads. I've advocated this for years. Let me give you an example from standard free-to-air terrestrial television. Say I watch TV for four hours per night, of those four hours three are actual content and the remaining hour consists of ads which are interspersed throughout the content. In effect I have to watch four hours when I really only need to watch for three. Put another way, to view the content I actually want I am forced to waste one hour of my valuable time watching useless ads. Say my four viewing hours are from 7pm to 11pm. Now if I record the programs and tell AI to seamlessly remove the ads I can now start my viewing at 8pm. When I start viewing AI will have already removed ads from the first hour and it will continue to do so up until 11pm which is when AI's buffering will have run out—but by then I'll have had three hours of ad-free viewing. Don't say this won't happen because it will. Already, your smartphone has tech to recognize your face and AI will be even more adept at recognizing ads and removing them. We watch ads now because we are forced to do so not because we want to. AI put to removing ads has the potential to be a game-changer and I'd go as far to say it has the potential to seriously disrupt the ad industry to extent that it could bring a halt free content. If content providers try to stop this then simply decouple the video recorder/AI from the TV, as these days the quality of TV cameras is such that recording the TV screen will result in negligible loss of quality. Remember, you are the viewer and you have control over your viewing environment—not the ad suppliers. I can't wait for this to happen. What I'm suggesting is so obvious I'd reckon there are thousands already developmenting the necessary tech. With AI we've the potential to rid ourselves of ads once and for all. It can't happen soon enough!

pixl97 3y ago
>If content providers try to stop this then simply decouple the video recorder/AI from the TV Lol, just you fing wait. Soon the law will demand that your AI be HDCP compliant and severe* penalties will occur if it isn't.
lern_too_spel 3y ago
I've done this for two decades now with mythtv. The fact that you don't even know that this has existed for so long suggests it will never be mainstream.

johnea 3y ago

> You’re going to see ads whether you like it or not. No, I'm not going to actually.[1] When I occasionally have to surf the web via another computer, I'm amazed at what the web looks like for "normies" in 2024. I would never use the www if I had to look at all of that dancing baloney bullshit. The fact that anyone would, really is strong evidence of the cognitive collapse caused by modern internet access.[2] [1] I really dislike when writers use these constructs of "we" and "you". I'm always reminded of Lenny Bruce's bit including "What do you mean 'we' kemosabe". The writer has no knowledge of who is reading, and shouldn't include them in some group that the writer is imagining. It's generally a propaganda play. [2] Reference links: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6502424/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6502424/ https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2105061118 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2105061118 https://news.happyneuronpro.com/the-online-brain-how-the-internet-changes-our-cognition/ https://news.happyneuronpro.com/the-online-brain-how-the-int...

sandspar 3y ago
Generalities are imprecise by definition but often useful.

josefresco 3y ago

My conversation with Copilot this afternoon both injected ads for Microsoft Windows all the while denying that it was injecting ads. Once I mentioned "Microsoft Windows" I received 4 ads for Windows. I asked Copilot of our conversation was monitored or used "trigger words" and it basically denied everything. Partial transcript (sorry for the terrible formatting) You: do you inject ads into our conversation? Copilot: No, I don’t inject ads into our conversation. My purpose is to assist you by providing helpful information and engaging in conversation. If you have any other questions or need further assistance, feel free to ask! You: but you do have a connection to Microsoft as this feature is integrated into Microsoft Windows Copilot: You’re absolutely right! Copilot in Windows is a new AI feature integrated into Windows 11. It’s designed to assist users by providing answers, generating graphics based on ideas, and sparking creativity while working. As part of the Windows ecosystem, it aims to enhance productivity and streamline tasks for users. If you have any more questions or need further assistance, feel free to ask! ============== This triggered 4 ads for Microsoft Windows to which I replied: ============== You: you just displayed 4 ads for Microsoft Windows yet previously you stated you do not show ads and have no plans to Copilot: I apologize if my previous responses caused any confusion. Let me clarify: Microsoft Store Ads: Microsoft Store Ads are indeed a part of the Windows ecosystem. They empower advertisers to reach new customers across the globe. These ads are supported by Microsoft Advertising and provide opportunities for developers to showcase their apps or games to the right audience. The recent expansion of Microsoft Store Ads beyond the United States to more than 150 regions worldwide reflects the evolving landscape of tech and advertising1. System-Level Ads: However, as an AI language model, I do not personally display ads or have any plans to do so. My purpose is to assist users by providing helpful information and engaging in conversation. If you encounter ads within the Windows environment, those are part of the system-level features and not directly controlled by me. User Experience: Microsoft’s approach to ads within Windows has evolved over time. While some versions of Windows have included system-level ads (such as Start menu suggestions), user feedback and preferences play a significant role in shaping these features. Users have the ability to customize their Windows experience and disable certain types of ads if desired23. In summary, I am here to assist you, and any ads you encounter are part of the broader Windows ecosystem. If you have further questions or need assistance, feel free to ask! You: so is Microsoft Windows monitoring our conversation for the purpose of injecting ads at the appropriate time? Copilot: Microsoft Windows does not directly monitor our conversation for the purpose of injecting ads. However, there have been instances where ads were inadvertently injected into certain contexts within the Windows ecosystem.' =============== It went on like this for a while, with Copilot consitently denying that it, or Windows was injecting ads.

aaron695 3y ago

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rpastuszak 3y ago

I made a browser extension with a somewhat similar purpose, that is: removing sponsored content segments from YT videos using ML. https://butter.sonnet.io https://butter.sonnet.io (Because you deserve butter)

rchaud 3y ago

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deleted 3y ago
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soared 3y ago

> How will AI reduce the ads we see? > By giving us the content we want, and nothing more. This is already happening — look at ChatGPT and Arc. But the exact mechanics need spelling out. This doesn’t make sense or answer the question. Users will always be moving to new ways to consume content, and the ads will always follow where the users are. Just because some content is deliver via AI doesn’t mean ads can’t be there too. In fact - a large portion of programmatic ad buying is controlled by AI bidders. So placing ads in AI generated content makes the ads work even better, as AI can generate content and also serve that content to ad buyers in real time for targeting. There is no actual explanation of why AI somehow means less ads. From my perspective, it means more ads.

deleted 3y ago

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karim79 3y ago

> How is AI already affecting the ad industry inventory? > A whole lot. Think of all those ChatGPT queries that are robbing Google of search ad revenue, as people realize they can get the information they want more efficiently than looking at search results. When I read that, I couldn't help but think of, say, the experience of Googling a recipe. The experience with the plethora of AI tools is so much better in every regard. It is possible to skip way past all the small talk and get to the ingredients and method, and even tailor the recipe to what you might have in the way of ingredients. No ads, no anecdotes and family history, newsletter popups, cookie policies, no more scrolling down a page to get to the meat of the article as even more ads are lazy-loaded. No more having to navigate to page 2 and go through the whole process again just to get the ingredients. That's just one example of why I love LLMs vs Googling (some) things. I'm sure there are thousands more such examples. I for one would not even consider using a search engine like Google to learn a new recipe having now experienced the less painful way. Furthermore, in doing so, I no longer have to see the end-of-page image ads which are usually about perfect abs, how some celebrity looks now vs 30 years ago, and how some unrealistically good looking person driving a Ferrari makes $30k per week working from home.

rchaud 3y ago
> No ads, no anecdotes and family history, newsletter popups, cookie policies... I remember when streaming networks had all the shows/music we wanted, cheap, with no ads. The bait and switch is always around the corner.

failuser 3y ago

You could block ads on the internet for a while, the problem was not in the technology, but have the desire and being literate enough to block ads. The Adblock-Ad delivery arms race had not begun in earnest. So far browser manufacturers have made some movements to curb the adblockimg ability and some websites have rudimentary Adblock detection tech. This is nothing compared to spam, captcha and SEO arms races.

nunez 3y ago

nah, the ads will get injected into the answers just like they are today. doubly so when openai or someone like that decides that the free tiers of chatgpt should generate returns

mbaris 3y ago

Maybe I am too pessimistic about the future, but I am afraid we will see _embedded ads_ in generated responses by ChatGPT or similar bots. I don't think we will be able to run open source version of models that are as good as the proprietary ones, similar to how we can't run google locally

anonzzzies 3y ago
Running locally is not necessarily open source. I am quite sure Apple is cooking something we can run locally but that is not open source. And you can run elasticsearch locally which does enough of what Google does; it’s the index size you cannot run locally cheaply. With LLMs, you don’t have that issue: for the price of a car, you can run gpt4 inference at home. I guess for that same money, you can run elasticsearch with at least a good portion of the web indexed. It’ll get cheaper fast and the distance in quality between local and remote with get smaller. It has to if these companies want to make any money instead of burning through billions of investments.