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Once LLMs get fast enough at processing real-time images Apple (or anybody really) can just roll out a browser rendering engine that just masks all ads. It will
by jcfrei 3mo ago
Once LLMs get fast enough at processing real-time images Apple (or anybody really) can just roll out a browser rendering engine that just masks all ads. It will take a few years but the browser ad-business is in it's terminal phase.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 3mo agoThis is the first and only use-case for LLMs that I am genuinely excited about.
- AlexandrB 3mo agoSuch naïveté. The much more likely scenario is that AI is used to add or replace ads in a website in a way that's now impossible to remove. Running your own AI on the browser will be disallowed to "ensure a safe browsing experience".
- Eddy_Viscosity2 3mo agoI wonder how far we are away from AI being required to link to the TPM in a way that the OS and hardware people can have full authority on what you can use.
- debazel 3mo agoWe're not that far off. But it will not just be for AI, but all software. Mobile OSes has already normalized the expectation that you don't control what can run on your own devices.
- monooso 3mo agoGiven that Safari doesn't even have a built-in ad-blocker, I doubt Apple will be leading the charge on this. Such a move would also presumably be incompatible with Apple's highly lucrative search engine deal with Google.
- gdulli 3mo agoIt's amazing how people think Apple has a clean reputation because they've added a thin layer of indirection to their participation in the surveillance ecosystem.
- robocat 3mo agoThey copied what our government does: deception about the causes of everything. For business, our purchases clearly reveal self-deceptive practices, and dark marketing patterns certainly take advantage of that. For government, our voting preferences reveal that we want to be deceived. Although we often say good things that our social group memes us. I'm not sure when I learnt to be so cynical.
- 65 3mo agoMakes me even more excited for Ladybird to be released.
- metahost 3mo agoApple sells ads too; increasingly across its surfaces.
- vintermann 3mo agoYes, it's a near-universal legal requirement that humans be able to tell if something is an ad or not. So once they sabotage that, they're in hot water.
- AlexandrB 3mo agoIs there any enforcement of this? Like at all? All the review bots and bots promoting random crap on reddit say otherwise. Traditional media still pays lip-service to this, but only barely.
- pjc50 3mo agoI was under the impression that America had very few legal restrictions on ads at all.
- concinds 3mo agoSafari was the first to cripple adblockers and went further than ManifestV3, but it seems their reputation will never catch up to that.
- musictubes 3mo agoAd blockers work fine for me in Safari. They may not have the flexibility of manifest v2 but they are hardly crippled. Their reputation will continue to be what it is as long as they keep making things that people like.
- pllbnk 3mo agoThe race of ending personal computing is there. I am sure big players want to control entire stack and users just sitting in front of dumb monitors consuming their ads.
- inigyou 3mo agoIt's a scam. Do not redeem (your money for a crippled device).
- threetonesun 3mo agoIf we're just talking about image based ads it would be easier to simply denylist every image on a page and only render alt-text until the user clicks to reveal it. Worth noting though that Apple injects ads into the News app, which is just a webview, so it's certainly not them that will do this.
- pavel_lishin 3mo agoI wonder what percentage of images even has meaningful alt-text.
- nemomarx 3mo agoIf it doesn't have alt text it can't have been that important as an image, I guess.
- whywhywhywhy 3mo agoYou're trying to stop ads because they're malicious but you think they'd be honest with their alt text? Ignoring that users care deeply about images so a browser that did this would be considered broken from the get go.
- sentrysapper 3mo agoYou anticipate a large language model to understand visual queues for an advertisement?
- triceratops 3mo agoCues, not queues. And yes that sounds workable.
- whywhywhywhy 3mo agoCost issues aside yeah image embedding tech is really good and can already do tasks like this, LLMs with native image understanding are even better at it. Reasons this wouldn't work are you'd really need to get it to a good enough and small enough model to run low energy use and very fast to not impact browsing. The other issue is it'll be a fixed target for a period of time so the ads could be tweaked to find how to get them through it.
- preg_match 3mo agoOn the big platforms, the ads actually have “ad” written on them somewhere or “sponsored”. It will be harder on other sites, but not that hard. There’s an unbreakable ceiling for the ads here - they need to be readable trivially by human eyes, or they don’t work as ads. So, you can hide or obfuscate the ad… but then it’s not a very good ad.
- kart23 3mo agoapple has ads in the os. that seems deeply anticompetitive
- philipallstar 3mo agoThe hard bit isn't killing ads. The hard bit is doing whatever will replace ads to pay for sites.
- rebelpixel 3mo agoBut that means wasting CPU cycles that adds to what was consumed to render the ads in the first place. Compounding all of that produces a slower browser/device experience, making the user hate ads even more.