Why work on a broad message (ad) when you can afford (cpu time wise) to have a dedicated con artist target every individual in the world at the same time?
Exactly, and thanks for making this point explicitly.
It's one of the end-game consequences of the change in advertising economics I mentioned: with costs of future AI models going down, eventually companies may be able to afford to generate individually personalized and highly persuasive ads on the fly. A personal dedicated con artist for everyone, indeed.
Not necessarily. LLMs at the model of GPT-4, and eventually above, affect the economics of advertising. Currently, there's only so much sense in optimizing your ads before it's cheaper to just spam more of it (er, "increase exposure"). LLMs will make it cheaper to optimize the ads further (i.e. get more bang for the same buck), so I expect the baseline manipulative effect of most ads to increase.