Personalised advertising is about collecting every detail about your life and using it to extract as much money as possible from you. AI advancements might be making this even more effective but it's been this way for a long time.
Currently, every factlet you leak to one of these systems poisons them toward their profit (and almost unanimously against your best interests). Advertising draws your attention away from the products that would make your life better (cheaper, heathier, tastier, whatever) and toward profitable alternatives.
It doesn't have to be that way though. You physically don't have time to research every thing that exists, or even to hear about every possible product in passing. Supposing some of those would improve your life on average, is word-of-mouth really the most efficient way we can come up with to tell you about the things you do actually want to spend your money on? In theory, this is a great business -- customers want to spend money, companies want to sell things, and the information/discoverability asymmetry means that companies are inclined to get word of their products out there with customers _also_ wanting to hear about those products (if they're sufficiently personalized). If "advertising" were good enough, I'd pay money for it.
That only falls apart because of a lack of trust and ethical behavior. Instead of being treated like the information market it is, it's thrust onto individuals to try to prey on their weaknesses.
Word-of-mouth vs. paid advertisements is a false dichotomy.
Also, a friction isn't a bad thing. You don't have to "research every thing that exists, or even to hear about every possible product in passing." It's fine to pick a good enough thing from a smaller set.
> In theory, this is a great business -- customers want to spend money, companies want to sell things, and the information/discoverability asymmetry means that companies are inclined to get word of their products out there with customers _also_ wanting to hear about those products (if they're sufficiently personalized). If "advertising" were good enough, I'd pay money for it.
Advertising not a great business in theory, because it's corrupted by a fundamental conflict of interest. Without draconian regulation, it's never going to be aligned to your interests as a consumer.
A better business would be some kind of product review magazine, where they research products and write articles about them.
Personally, I favor draconian regulation. Nationalize the ad agencies. Companies submit a request to the government ad agency for an add, they write a neutral ad with a couple of photos descriptive photos of the product, its name, and a brief outline of features, and that's what gets run.
I think a lot of people confuse paid advertisements by influencers as word-of-mouth. For whatever reasoning, the concept of hired spokesperson seems to have been lost with social media influencers.
Australia has https://www.choice.com.au/ - a subscription non-profit product review website & magazine.
So imagine you have a bunch of money, watch sports while drinking and are bad at math, and therefore are considered to be a great target for sports betting companies. Making sure you get used to betting most of the time you watch a game is very valuable for the company, so just realizing what teams you like, when they play, and what kind of bets might look good to you, but are really pretty iffy is very valuable to them. Just like they would love to know when you are bored, or depressed, and maybe betting on the game that is going on right now would be appealing: A level of access to you that, say, a casino, or a bar that you haven't visited in a while just doesn't have. And habituation models are simple, you don't need a very expensive system to know when offering you a discount to entice you to don't break a gambling streak will pay off
Now that is using AI in ways that are quite antisocial by most standards: the current advertisement that tries to sell me hair growth when I have all my hair isn't all that scary.
Also there are plenty of other possible ways if you have the information. Think of people going thru breakups. People with eating disorders or other forms of body dismorphia, you could throw rather horrific ads at them.
I have YouTube ad personalization off, and sometimes get frequently repeating ads. I suspect when that happens, they are the only bidders.
"relevant" is another term seen in addition to "useful"
But "relevant" is relative
For example, "relevant" to what?
It's only if Big Tech has collected data about the ad target and, e.g., made some guess about their intent, that the ads could be "relevant"
Whether the ads are truly "relevant" is a question for the reader. The term "relevant" might just be marketing fluff
Either way, Big Tech will keep the data vacuum humming
I got an offer for life insurance for US veterans - I’m not a US veteran so this has nothing to do with me.
I got an ad for women’s hygiene products, but I’m not a woman. So that’s completely wasted on me.
I just bought a mattress, and I don’t need a 2nd mattress, so all of those are irrelevant.
I'm thoroughly annoyed that adblockers aren't installed by default and require an opt out to disable. This will not at all touch first party advertising, but, it will put a huge dent into dynamic third party advertising. Which seems to be the source of the problem you describe.
Our government is genuinely failing to represent the majority on this issue.
Buying something from an ad isn't really fundamentally different from being influenced by an HN post. For example, thanks to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46294574, I read up on and have decided to experiment with TLA+ on my next project. It's really no concern of mine what Martin Kleppman's commercial interests may ultimately have been in publishing that blog post; I received value from the information all the same.
Personally, I'm not particularly bothered by ads per se. I'd be more bothered by information being withheld from me during searches, e.g. if Brand A could pay Amazon to delist Brands B and C from organic search results, since that would directly guide me toward less optimal purchases. But as far as simply going about my day and seeing a billboard or promoted social media post every now and then, I don't see the big deal. It's generally easy to ignore, it costs me almost nothing, it occasionally helps me, and ultimately it funds a lot of things I like and take for granted (e.g. Chromium, Firefox, and Android).
I'm not saying that people who routinely waste money on irrational purchases don't exist. I just don't find that to be a compelling argument against the existence of a particular market which overwhelmingly benefits almost all of us.
I do have quite strong concerns regarding aggressive data collection, however, and I certainly wouldn't opt in to greater erosion of my privacy — but I see that as a separate issue. To the extent that ad-driven revenue models provide an incentive for companies to facilitate greater privacy invasion, I agree that it's a significant concern which warrants much stronger pushback from the public than it receives. I just think it's important to highlight that mass data harvesting per se is the major issue, more so than any perceived manipulativeness of the fact that brands pay money for exposure.
Then of course there's the issue raised in this post, which is yet again another matter entirely. I'm all for using AI to optimize pricing and efficiency, but "dynamic pricing" as described in the article sounds like a euphemism for price discrimination, and should be more strictly regulated IMO regardless of whether or not AI is involved.
That being said, I wouldn't agree that people like me don't provide value to advertisers. Aside from the fact that I do occasionally buy things from ads:
* I also get curious and research products or product categories that I learn about from ads, which translates into increased word-of-mouth, even if I never personally have a need for the thing
* If I see a lot of high-quality and/or high-profile ads for a certain brand over time, I'll be more likely to remember it and my perception of its legitimacy will improve; if I end up ever needing that kind of thing, I'll include the brand in my research of potential options
* Even if I've already purchased the thing, higher perceived legitimacy of its vendor on my part due to advertising presence could still help increase my confidence in its likely longevity, level of support, and mainstreamness, which might potentially translate into mentioning it in certain contexts where I wouldn't have otherwise
If I had to guess, that's probably where the majority of value in advertising lies. Not pure click-through rate or direct conversion, but contribution to broader mindshare. The distinction might be meaningless from a starting point of low or zero mindshare, since the marginal value of any additional mindshare at that point will be higher and the necessary timeline to produce a financial return may be tighter, but a Fortune 500 company probably doesn't buy a TV ad spot with the expectation that a handful of shopaholics will suddenly feel compelled to buy new cars or whatever on the spot.