I believe it’s called Copilot
So here in the states (for now) there’s an actual rule that ads on service sights (such as news sites) have to be stated and made evident they are in fact ads. WSJ isn’t allowed to post an article that is really a commercial.
So one of the effects this may lead to is acceleration in the development of visual adblockers, which identify ads by their positioning on the site rather than from their servers, what’s been a long running project since Google has been trying to figure out how to stealth ads so they don’t come directly from the ad servers (even though this gums up their analysis computations).
Now for the time being, laws against commercial shenanigans are not strongly enforced, so they may get away with using AI to fold ads into news articles, although that may have side effects like end-users associating Folgers Crystals (Instant Coffee) with the latest rampage shooting, much the way that Twitter/X sponsors are getting their products associated with white supremacist rhetoric.
Commercials blended seamlessly into content risk the content not being brand-safe, which drives moderation of social media far more than public preferences.
It seems like neither marketers nor webservice providers know what they’re doing, and so mixing AI into their efforts for more clicks and more buy-ins is going to lead to some exciting absurd consequences.
commercials blended seamlessly into content…
…will guarantee I never visit that site again. Resorting to “HA! Made you look at an ad” tactics will not only make me hate the site that does it, but the product/company in the ad as well.
One can hope. We have generations now suckered by Transformers as a toy-line and full-slot commercial programs to sell them, now several (not terrible at all) series and a run of movies.
They’re better at the process now, but so is the public at being less influenced by them.
I’m sorry, what? Maybe it’s because I just woke up that I’m not comprehending what you’re saying. I know the transformer movies are product placement showcases, it’s pathetic, but it sounds like you’re calling the very existence of transformers a successful ad campaign.
They were a toy set first (inspired by variable mechs in Japanese Anime, e.g. the Valkyrie variable fighters Macross) and the original pitch of the series was as a means to sell initial line of toys.
So yeah, it would be much like if they made a TV series about Hot Wheels cars. That isn’t to say it was of poor quality, just that the primary motivation was to sell toys.
So yes. the very existence of transformers emerged from a successful ad campaign. Deregulation of television during the Reagan era was what allowed this to happen during the early eighties.
This happens
Internet speeds for ads go through the roof
Trick your ISP that your torrents are ads
Profit
I will 100% quit using electrically powered screen-besring devices if this becomes a thing. I’ll cold turkey electronic tech instantly, fuck that noise.
I tried to cold turkey technology. I went near insane.
It takes prep, and also, you’re probably not going to truly “cold turkey.” I like music, for instance, and there’s literally only two ways to get music now - streaming or 🏴☠️, so you would have to make plans for that. I’m ok with 🏴☠️ so I’d be set with that for a good while. I also like books, retro games (which I already have a large library of), and physical hobbies that don’t require internet - hiking, etc.
I will not just lay down and accept intrusive Idiocracy levels of ads though. I will literally “cave man” the rest of life if necessary.
There’s more than two ways to get music. I’m looking at a stack of CDs and records right now.
Do modern bands still print CDs? I haven’t bought a CD in so long that I dont think I even own one anymore. I have bought directly from several bands “bandcamp”/other pages and that was cool. Got mp3, FLAC, artworks, lyrics, etc for less than the price of a CD except every penny went to the band.
I love modern tech and don’t want to see it destroyed but I will gladly go insane like a mountain man if they try to find out how many ads they can serve before it causes siezures.
Oh actually you know what you’re probably right 😬 I know modern bands do records still, but I think the last CD I bought was Tranquility Base in like 2016. Bandcamp is great!
I’m totally on board with you. I hate ads, especially when they interrupt music – and double especially when they interrupt music and the ad has its own music that completely shits up the mood!
Yea same. And I’m a Systems Admin lol
God bless NoScript.
I think SMBC nailed it with All-Despising Baby Skull back in 2012. Make advertising as horrible as possible, then jack up the costs on making it go away.
kinda but no. where’s the money?
Same place as ever, impressions and click-through. The theoretical goal here would be to offload all the processing to the user’s PC, making delivery of this customized ad content close to free.
However the largest advertising targets are now mobile by far, and those platforms don’t have GPU to speak of, especially from an AI perspective. So so far not feasible.
I’m not scared of AI advertising because it will be impossible to sell. There are 3 issues:
- No marketing agency would ever have the balls to say “we’ve checked our database and there is no one who would click on your ad.”
- Any marketing department that gets told their ad has a near 100% click through rate would demand to be shown to more people because “obviously there’s a massive audience for our product.”
- There would be situations where the AI could not find an ad that the person would click on and the AI would shit itself because it would be prompted to “always show an ad”
We already could have the option to only relevant ads but no ad company would because it’s being paid to shove ads in front of eyeballs.
FYI assuming this is genuine, OP is a long-time science fiction writer with a couple novels that take place during or after an AI singularity: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Stross
He’s also made some damn insightful comments over the years. I wish a little less insightful in this case. He had a programming background and usually isn’t full of shit.
“The Merchant Prince’s” series is deep into pre-Great Recession liberal economics, but still a pretty good read.
I’m not that great at English, what’s the grammar on"merchant Prince’s"?
Is this a prince that’s also a merchant?
Is this a merchant that works or is associated with a prince?
Is it a typo and is supposed to read princess?
Rule 34 in particular is an excellent read, and expands on some of the concepts in the post.
Risky click of the day.
Excellent title.
Thx for this, added a few of his books to the list of things I need to consume.
Don’t start with Accelerando, or do if you’re a little bit weird.
Haha, lul, that title did seem to stand out a bit from the other ones, but I didn’t read the des.
I might start with Index, Codex, or Saturn - but I’ve intentionally skipped reading the synopsis (not as a spoiler, I’m indifferent to those, just as adhd management to ‘start the thing’ - by keeping the info simple it might seem like an easier pick for my brainhole to chose & allow me to perform the activity, and I feel like I don’t need to do much more research on the author or specific books).
Yup, you can find him on Mastodon now: https://wandering.shop/@cstross/112274383742505743
On the plus side, the sheer power consumption of using an LLM to dish out targeted advertisements will be prohibitively expensive. Any agency stupid enough to do this with current technology is gonna go bust.
As for hosting the LLM locally on the viewer’s machine… Remember the furore of shady companies burying crypto miners into their software? This is going to be even more wasteful of system resources and is going to result in such a sluggish user experience that the industry will go bankrupt.
Well yeah, NOW IT IS, now that you put the idea out there! Thanks!
I’ll have you know that this is famous sci-fi author Charles David George Stross posting an excerpt from his seminal novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus. The warning is right in the title, I’m sure nobody will be dumb enough to ignore it!
🤞🤞
Doubt it.
Only a matter of time until some company comes up with BlipVerts.
Dev here. Javascript engines (especially Chromium) have a memory limit (as per
performance.memory.jsHeapSizeLimit), in best case scenarios, 4GB max.LocalStorageandSessionStorage(JS features that would be used to store the neural network weights and training data) have even lower limits. While I fear that locally AI-driven advertisement could happen in a closer future, it’s not currently technically feasible in current Chromium (Chrome, Vivaldi, Edge, Opera, etc) and Gecko (Firefox) implementations.I really hope you don’t know about this 4GB limit specifically because you’ve run up against it while doing anything real-world.
Canvas code can get out of hand very quickly if not done right
I’ve made exactly two projects that utilized canvas, both of which I “released” in a sense. One contains 248kb of JS code and the other contains 246kb. That’s before it’s minified.
So I guess that means I did my canvas code right. Lol.
(Unless you meant 3d canvas or WebGL stuff with which I haven’t played.)
Code size isn’t really related to how much graphics data you’re throwing in RAM
I think they’re referring to the memory footprint, not the source code file size.
Not yet, but I often code myself some experiments involving datasets (i like to experiment with Natural Language Processing, randomness, programmatic art and demoscenes, the list goes on).
It would just slowly accumulate it over time, little bit here, little bit there until it has a fleet of stuff to serve you in a queue, so while you’re making more and more bits for more videos, it’s serving you videos while you make bits of new videos and sharing them over websockets that JS CDNS force-feed our browsers to centralized servers to offload similar users with similar ad-tastes to also help compile.
Some shit like that. Adtech is cyber terrorism. Never forget.
Then Alphabet will come up with a new bullshit idea, “remove the limits for ‘trusted’ advertisers” so that they can inject more code than allowed as long as they keep paying for their ad “partnership”
remove the limits for ‘trusted’ advertisers
Exactly… Including themselves, as they are a major player in advertising market (Google Adsense).
That’s why we need to fight against chromium monopoly
It became difficult as Web technologies grown complexier, such as implementing native CPU instructions through WASM, bluetooth through Web Bluetooth, 3D graphics through WebGL, NFC, motion sensors, serial ports, and so on. Nowadays, it’s simply too hard to maintain a browser engine, because many of the former alternatives were abandoned and became deprecated.
I dare anyone to even just compile a document containing all the standards you’d need to implement
Actually, there is a compilation of all the standards specifications. It’s on W3 (World Wide Web Consortium), where all the technical details are deeply documented (called “Technical Reports”), available on https://www.w3.org/TR/ . To this day, there are 309 published Technical Reports regarding “Standard” specifications.
Fun fact: while seeking for the link to send here, I came across a Candidate Standard entitled “Web Neural Network API”, published exactly yesterday. Seems like they’re intending to implement browser-native neural network capabilities inside Web specifications, and seems like the “closer future” I mentioned is even closer… 🤔
