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Comment by littlecranky67 | Hacker News Reader

Ads will be no longer a buisness model in 3-5 years when simple, locally run models that do nothing besides blocking ads become available. Twitter, Facebook etc. already get past most modern adblockers, but the AI extension will be able to filter them. In-text advertising must be marked as advertisment in most countries, and even if it isn't, local AI will filter this probably out. So a free ChatGPT service with in-text AI can simply be countered by another local browser extension, that rewrites the text and removes ads.

One can make the point that Google, Meta and others are investing so much into AI as they know, we are facing the end of the ad-based internet economy. The investments are to create new buiness models, because their old ones are gone soon.

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Alternatively, DRM for websites will start being a thing and remove any possibility of blocking ads.

Yeah some form of google's Web Integrity API will be forced one of these days

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrit...

There are already DRM for Websites e.g. several audio and video streaming services.

I pray you are right. Still, there's no guarantee that the next business model won't be an order of magnitude more user-hostile.

Adblockers already remove the vast majority of ads. Adtech works because most people dont use them.

See my sibling response. More people will use adblock if all they have to do is prompt a single line into their computer. Hell people will not even visit websites. They will ask AI to present it in whatever form they prefer. I can have a big-breasted anime character reading my personalized news for me, or have it printed in a 1890 style newspaper. Ads will not make it into either format, because I prompt that out.

Using adblock right now is even easier than that though. Most people will not use a command line, but going to https://chromewebstore.google.com/, searching adblock and clicking install is something literally anybody could do.

Not on mobile.

So then people also won't be able to one-shot prompt an ad blocker on mobile either then. And mobile is where most of the ad money is.

Sad truth is vast majority of users today are not savvy enough to install a good adblocker. We live in a bubble here in technology where we assume people know to do things like block ads. Really at this point people don’t know what files are anymore or even what a website actually is.

True, but some 20 years ago, I already could (and did) use photoshop to cut out the head of a woman (celebrity or from my social group) and put it onto a naked or bikini body of a woman. This is an old problem, but the bar to achieve that was too high and required tech savyness. The second Grok does it on twitter available for every idiot, suddently politicians see this as problematic and want to pass laws against it [0]. My point: Whatever local AI that you will have on your computer or browser, will react to "do not show me ads and filter all product placement in content out" as a single line prompt. And if we won't have a local AI capable of doing it in 5years or more, the whole investement into AI are clearly a bubble and AI will face another winter.

[0]: https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/gesellschaft/ki-kuenstliche... (sorry, german only, but this is an AI thread and you know what to do...)

The problem is the way consumer rights are going, companies will simply make it impossible for you to run a line like that, or at least make it difficult enough that only a small percentage of the population can do it.

Every layer of friction they add means millions of people just throwing up their hands and accepting whatever nonsense is thrown at them.

You assume all models will be closed-source and there will be no competition. I can imagine that, but I would assume training an AI model for ad-filtering is something the community can and will do - maybe think 5 years ahead what hardware will be available for training and inference to a "small developer".

I don’t assume that at all. I’m saying that they just need to capture the vast majority of people, which has happened many times. For instance, Linux is available to everyone and would end a lot of frustrations and headaches they currently experience with macOS and windows. But for many reasons it still remains in the low single digit percentages when it comes to adoption, a lot of which is inflated by the steam deck.

It’s the same reason people pay to get their oil changed rather than doing it themselves. We are willing to compromise for convenience. And for a lot of people, that means just not dealing with it. Accept the ads, pay a small fee, whatever is the quickest way to make the thing works again or to get where they need to go.

> Linux is available to everyone and would end a lot of frustrations and headaches they currently experience with macOS

That is a very bad argument for the AI thing, because as a Linux fan (started in the late 90s with Linux) I am using a Macbook because the Laptop story on Linux is not at all a success story. The headaches macOS causes would just be exchanged for the headaches Linux does.

But that is entirely my point. You are merely trading headaches off because a solution like “running your own local LLM“ is never going to be as turnkey as simply paying a subscription and throwing down your questions on ChatGPT. Certainly not for the “average” user. It’s not a real solution. They will accept tons of compromises for it to be that simple.

They want an up-to-date answer with a modern/user-friendly interface. ChatGPT is as simple as Google search, I’ll give them that. Go to the site-> type -> receive an answer (of varied quality to be sure). We have seen this over and over again. You can’t throw the average person in front of LM Studio, tell them to go to town, and expect them not to open a browser and fire up ChatGPT at the first sight of that interface. You’re placing too much value in local control/customization for the “average” user.

At the end of the day a computer is “the thing that gets you to the thing.” Most people want it to just do that as intuitively as possible. Local control and customization more often than not bumps against that. It’s a decision that compromises ease of use for functionality, something that you and I value but most people do not.

More than an extension, imagine us having good enough, fast enough, vision models that you never even see a real website. Maybe the whole OS in Microsoft's case if they keep putting more ads in. It will be a level of inefficiency inconceivable but really something.

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