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.
Such a move would also presumably be incompatible with Apple's highly lucrative search engine deal with Google.
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.
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.
Ignoring that users care deeply about images so a browser that did this would be considered broken from the get go.
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.
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.