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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44946 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Looks like the war against advertising is continuing to fail, predictably. Google Chrome is now banning restricting ad blockers starting as early as next year. (1) I am not convinced this model of: create a free, ad-free service to get users --> slowly pull in ads for $$$ --> eventually become an ad-riddled hell is the best model. I often balk at paying for services up front, but if a service as essential as google is now bowing to the pressure, when will it end?

Advertising definitely has some uses in connecting buyers to sellers, and informing consumers about the market, but I'm convinced it's a bit of a 'tamed demon.' If we don't want to devolve into a horrid anarcho-capitalist future, we need to get serious about restricting what advertisers can do, and where they can advertise. I predict advertising will become far more ubiquitous with the rise of Dall-E and similar image producing AIs. The cost of creating extremely compelling, beautiful ads will plummet, and more and more of our daily visual space will become filled with non stop advertising.

On top of this, we have Meta and other tech oligarchs attempting to push us all into the Metaverse. I am no detractor of AR/VR, in fact I think utilized correctly it could solve many of our current problems. However if the Powers That Be take over the metaverse, we will soon have ads that engage all of our sense - not just vision and hearing.

Given how powerful advertising already is, can we really afford to let it run rampant in an age where we have such powerful technologies?

1 - https://developer.chrome.com/blog/mv2-transition/

I predict advertising will become far more ubiquitous with the rise of Dall-E and similar image producing AIs. The cost of creating extremely compelling, beautiful ads will plummet, and more and more of our daily visual space will become filled with non stop advertising.

I predict it won't, honestly. You currently a 20B parameter model to generate pictures with readable text, and then you need a marketing expert to filter for the best generated outputs, anyway. Maybe a year from now, Google will train a static ad generator based on their AdSense data, but those are still just static ads. They don't perform that well. You need animated visuals at the very least, or a video if possible, and that kind of technology just isn't here yet -- not to mention how expensive it'd be.

30s scripted ads on YouTube are not going to come from AI within the next 1-2 years. Maybe 5. But by the time text2YouTubeAd comes out, we'll have far more problems than more attractive advertisements.

Which problems do you think are worse? AGI alignment?

How about the fact that you could make a video about literally anything happening at all? Fake any event you want. Nudes, terrorism, declarations of war... ideally we would learn to just ignore all of the fake content, but if we could do that, why would ads be a problem anymore?

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