So you assume your fellow humans are stupid and will fall for this crap, and must be protected at all costs including the cost of regulation preventing speech?

By the way, how's that scammer SBF doing? I heard he managed to scam even more money than that funny YouTube ad, and I think he was advertising on mainstream media too. Even got to lobby in Congress.

This is still far from the leading mainstream narrative that "your fellow humans are stupid". By your anecdote I can learn that here we have another person who's capable of recognizing false information, therefore it isn't dangerous.

Anyone who fell for disinformation is welcome to step in and contribute an anecdote to the opposite statistics so maybe I'll be convinced people really are guillible and need protecting.

Somehow it's always other people who the speaker thinks are more stupid and will fall for something he sees as a scam.

I have no expectation that everyone will fall for it, but I've seen my own elderly father get confused and drawn into scam ads. My irritation is that what little accountability in advertising that existed in the past is now gone, and that "platforms" are failing the general public by allowing these things to propagate.

Put a button in the corner of the ad that says "report this", and get a human to check if the ad passes a smell test. If a platform can cancel accounts of random people for violating policies at random, they can put a small amount of effort into enforcing policies on advertisers.

So now it's the elderly. I've seen them fall for phone scams much more commonly, they usually don't have the technical ability to use the internet.

You're deflecting from the disinformation narrative into elderly scam. Which I agree is a problem, just a completely different one than the disinformation narrative presents.

It's still disinformation. It doesn't matter what segment of the population falls for it. It's not a real video of Elon Musk, and the get rich quick claims are as fake as always. Showing these ads is still immoral and unethical promotion of disinformation for profit.

You are conflating an advertisement -- a separate category, which normal people and regulators recognize as often being deceptive and manipulative -- with "news," including statements from current and formal government officials, and even testimony in courts and congressional hearings.

Advertisements are often total bullshit (and I would likely consider anything created by AI to almost certainly be), but that is an entirely different phenomenon than today's concept of "disinformation."

Until recently, it was costly to fake a video of someone talking. Recent advances in generative AI have changed that.

One definition for disinformation is "deliberately misleading or biased information; manipulated narrative or facts; propaganda". The ad I viewed meets that qualification. This was not your typical advertisement trying to persuade the viewer that their product is better than others. It used a generated video of Elon Musk saying things that he did not say, endorsing a product he did not endorse in an attempt to appear legitimate. This is very different from traditional advertising.

The AI shitpocalypse is here. We get to watch it play out in real time over the coming decade.

I agree that the AI generated stuff is fucked up. What I'm pointing out is that an advertisement is expected to be biased and not necessarily tethered to "facts." It's why magazines and social media platforms require (or are supposed to) ads and paid content to be marked as such.

GM doesn't claim that Ford is spreading "disinformation" -- but newspapers, TV stations, politicians, etc do constantly claim that people with the opposite viewpoint on a variety of topics are spreading disinformation. And now, despite the 1st Amendment, even courts are enabling censorship because the censored words are "hateful" or "disinformation" or "violence."

The difference is that ads in magazines, newspapers and on TV are curated by humans, so that the kind of clearly illegal and unethical ads peddled by platforms never get published.

Free speech comes with the obligation of responsibility. You can't go around yelling "Fire!" in a theatre because of the clearly obvious possible negative consequences of that action. Legacy mainstream media appear to understand that better than big tech platforms do. Big tech wants to profit off the illegal and unethical content without having any responsibility for doing so. This is wrong.

If curators blocked one unethical ad, it doesn't mean they block other unethical ads. Even worse, unethical ads they didn't block are assumed to be ethical. Who curates the curators?

So your argument is that making rules is hard so we shouldn't make rules?

The bare minimum standard of ethical behaviour is to not do things that harm other people. The ads I am referring to meet the test of causing harm to people that act based on the content presented. Plus they violate securities laws. It's pretty cut and dry for that case.

>Until recently, it was costly to fake a video of someone talking.

Due to which Tom Cruise talking in an ad had bigger impact.

>On the other hand, platforms are unaccountable and unwilling to act in the public interest.

Broadcasters don't act in the public interest either, they act in owner's interest.