A sufficiently advanced personal assistant AI would use multimodal capabilities to classify spam in all of its forms:
- Marketing emails
- YouTube sponsorship clips
- Banner ads
- Google search ads
- Actual human salespeople
- ...
It would identify and remove all instances of this from our daily lives.
Furthermore, we could probably use it to remove most of the worst parts of the internet too:
- Clickbait
- Trolling
- Rage content
I'm actually really looking forward to this. As long as we can get this agent into all of the panes of glass (Google will fight to prevent this), we will win. We just need it to sit between us and everything else.
Until _that_ company gets overrun by MBAs who are profit-driven then they start injecting ads into the results.
It will come in the vein of "we are personalizing the output and improving responses by linking you with vendors that will solve your problems".
Found companies with people that share your values. Hire people that share your values. Reject the vampires. Build things for people.
Competing with bad actors is very, very hard. They will be fat with investor money, they will give their services away, and commonly they are not afraid to do things like DDOS to raise your costs of operations.
What if the user is a conservative voter and considers anything counterpoint to their world view the worst part of the internet and removes all instances of it from their daily lives? Not to say that isn’t already happening but they are consciously making the choice, not some AI bot. I can see something like this making the country even more polarized.
Growing up as a southern evangelical before the internet, I can promise you that there has never been a modern world without filter bubbles.
The concept of "fake news" is not new, either. There has been general distrust of opposing ideas and institutions for as long as I've been alive.
And there's an entire publishing and media ecosystem for every single ideology you can imagine: 700 Club, Abeka, etc. Again, this all predates the internet. It's not going anywhere.
The danger isn't strictly censorship or filter bubbles. It's not having a choice or control over your own destiny. These decisions need to be first class and conscious.
Also, a sure fire way to rile up the "other team" is to say you're going to soften, limit, or block their world view. The brain has so many defenses against this. It's not the way to change minds.
If you want to win people over, you have to do the hard, almost individual work, of respecting them and sharing how you feel. That's a hard, uphill battle because you're attempting to create a new slope in a steep gradient to get them to see your perspective. Angering, making fun, or disrespecting is just flying headfirst into that mountain. It might make you feel good, but it undoes any progress anyone else has made.
I fell for oldschool marketing yesterday. Im moving into a new appartment in a couple months. The local ISP who runs fiber in my new building cold-called me. I agreed over the phone to setup the service. That was proper target marketing. The person who called me knew the situation and identified me as a very likely customer with a need for service (the building has a relationship with the ISP). I would never have responded to an email or any wiff of AI chatbot. They only made the sale because of expensive human effort.
I'd say the art industry is somewhere in-between because of
1. Being a traditionally disrespected but non-trivial skill to acquire 2. A skill valuable for advertisement (good art -> pretty ads -> more money 3. A valuable skill, but not one many industries need full time work from 4. Due to #1, a "vulnerable" industry. There won't be too many millionaire artists to fight back against the AI Overlords compared to, say, Politicians or businessesmen.
But it's not like I have any say on who or what gets affected.
Not all. Also men on Mars, AGI, Fusion etc.
SpaceX is launching multiple rocket ships into orbit every week. Google is.. releasing webpage CSS tweaks like “New Google Sign In Page” and a couple second rate AI products no one asked for when they get caught with their pants down.
usdebtclock.org
All of the debt has to be paid back but it can’t all be paid back or else there would be no currency in circulation.
One of the biggest reasons the USD is so strong is because the federal reserve is distinct, separate, and independent from the government. Most governments in history have eventually moved to influence or take over their central bank so they can spend even more wastefully & recklessly than before. America was designed with a unique separation of powers. Other’s weren’t. All of the rest of the world’s paper currencies have been worse to hold over the last 30 years and possibly more.
The "smart people are all working in advertising" trope is idiotic. Just an excuse for people to justify their own laziness. There is an infinite number of opportunities out there to make the world better. If you are ignoring them, that's on you.
Which is true. But clearly far fewer people work doing that than in advertising or some other seemingly meaningless grunt work. And I’m including the technological plumbling work with many on this site, myself included, have depended upon to support themselves and/or a family.
Which at best is effectively doing minor lubrication of a large and hard to comprehend system that doesn’t seem to have put society as a whole in a particularly great place.
Clicking on ads helped with our goal to AI today. Showing you the right ad and beating those trying to game it is machine learning heavy. When was the first time we started seeing spelling correction and next word suggestions? It was in google search bar. To serve the correct ads and deal with spam? heavy NLP algorithms. If you stop and think of it, we can drop a think line from the current state of LLMs to these ads click you are talking about.
I don't think your average adult is inspired by the idea of AI generated advertisements. Probably a small bubble of people including timeshare salesmen. If advertisements were opt-in, I expect a single digit percentage of people would ever elect to see them. I don't understand how anybody can consider something like that a net good for the world.
How does non-consensually harassing people into spending money on things that don't need add value to all the world's citizens?
I wish some of these people would think about how they'd explain to their 5 year old in an inspiring way what they do for a living: And not just "I take JSON data from one layer in the API and convert it to protobufs in another layer of the API" but the economic output of their jobs: "Millions of wealthy companies give us money because we can divert 1 billion people's attention from their families and loved ones for about 500 milliseconds, 500 times a day. We take that money and give some of it to other wealthy companies and pocket the rest."
I mean, you'd see the same thing if paying for your groceries were opt-in. Is that also a net bad for the world? Ads do enable the costless (or cost-reduced) provision of services that people would otherwise have to pay for.
Is that seriously the comparison you want to make here? Most of us think the world would be better if you didn't have to pay for food, yes.
They do not enable any costless anything at all. They obfuscate extraction of money to make it look costless, but actually end up extracting significant amounts of money from people. Ad folks whitewash it to make it sound good, but extracting money in roundabout ways is not creating value.
Groceries are opt-in. Until you realize you don't want to hunt and cook your own food, then you opt back in for survival.
UBlock origin + some subscriptions show I'd definitely would love to opt out of IRL ads.
>Is that also a net bad for the world?
World, yes. We have to tech to end food scarcity, but poor countries struggle while rich countries throw out enough food each day to feed said poor countries.
A similar amount of wealth would be generated if every advertised product would be represented by a text description, but we have a race to the bottom.
There is advertising and advertising of course but most of advertising is incredibly toxic and I would argue that by capturing attention, it is a huge economic drain as well.
Of course an AI would also be quite apt at removing unwanted ads, which I believe will become a reality quite soon.
I fear statements like this go too far. I can't agree with the first part of this sentence.
I feel this about both marketing and finance:
They are valuable fields. There are huge amounts of activity in these fields that offer value to everyone. Removing friction on commerce and the activities that parties take in self-interest to produce a market or financial system are essential to the verdant world we live in.
And yet, they're arms races that can go seemingly-infinitely far. Beyond any generation of societal value. Beyond needless consumption of intellect and resources. All the way to actual negative impacts that clutter the financial world or the ability to communicate effectively in the market.
This is quite a statement to make.
Please elaborate on what enormous value has spam ads and marketing emails added to _world_ citizens?
Unless of course by “world” you mean Silicon Valley venture capitalists..
I think the answer is pretty clear in the fact that so many of them, bluntly speaking, just don’t give a shit any more. I absolutely don’t blame them.
The comparison here is between moonlanding and advertisement. So I choose the moon obviously.
Ecommerce can work just the same without LLM augmented personalized ads, or no advertisement at all. If a law would ban all commercial advertisement - people still need to buy things. But who would miss the ads?
Yet somehow people have still been buying mattresses, cars, and laundry detergent.
I can't say I missed the ads one minute during my trip.
It made me realize that I think many computing people need more of a fundamental education in "hard" physics (statics, mechanics, thermodynamics, materials science) in order to better understand the staggering paradigm shift that occurred in our understanding of the world in the early 20th century. Maybe then they would appreciate how much of the world's resources have now been directed by the major capital players towards sucking the collective attention span of humanity into a small rectangular screen, and the potential impact of doing so.
Is the idea that any and all movement of money is virtuous? That all economic activity is good, and therefore anything that leads to more economic activity is also good? Or is it what it sounds like, and it just means "making some specific people very wealthy"? Wouldn't the more accurate wording be that it "concentrates wealth"? I don't see a huge difference in the economic output of advertisement from most other scams. A ponzi scheme also uses psychological tricks to move money from a large amount of people to a small amount of people. Something getting people to spend money isn't inherently a good thing.
Maybe this was your point, but this is built in to one of the definitions of GDP, isn’t it? Money supply times velocity of money?
I’m no economist though I’m sure there are folks on here who are. But this seems like an unfortunate fact that’s built into our system- that as laypeople we tend to assume that ‘economic growth’ means an increase in the material aspects of our life. Which in itself is a debatable goal, but our GDP perspective means even this is questionable.
For example, take a family of five living out in a relatively rural area. In scenario one, both parents work good paying remote tech jobs and meals, childcare, maintenance of land and housing, etc. are all outsourced. This scenario contrubutes a lot according to our economic definitions of GDP. And provides many opportunities for government to tax and companies to earn a share of these money flows.
Then take scenario 2, you take the same family but they’re living off of the grid as much as possible, raising or growing nearly all their own food, parents are providing whatever education there is, etc. In this scenario, the measurable economic activity is close to zero- even if the material situation could be quite similar. Not to mention quality of life might be rated far higher by many.
What rating an economy by the flow of its money does do is, and I’m not sure if this is at all intentional, is it does paint a picture of what money flows are potentially capturable either by government taxation or by companies trying to grab some percentage as revenue. It’s a lot harder to get a share of money that isn’t there and/or not moving around.
Perhaps my take on economics is off base but, for me, seeing this made me realize just how far off our system is from what it could and should be.
I concede that GDP is a good indicator, but I think you can have things that help GDP while simultaneously hurting the economy. Otherwise any scam or con would be considered beneficial, and it would make sense to mandate minimum individual spending to ensure economic activity. A low GDP inherently shows poor economic health, but a high GDP does not guarantee good health.
In my mind (noting, again, that I'm no economist), economic health is defined by the effectiveness of allocating resources to things that are beneficial to the members of that economy. Any amount of GDP can be "waste", resources flowing to places where they do not benefit the public. As Robert Kennedy famously pointed out, GDP includes money spent on addictive and harmful drugs, polluting industries, and many other ventures that are actively harmful.[0]