I have no doubt that current AI is capable of this (in fact I'm sure it would be trivial for GPT-3.5 and well within reach of even locally-run LLMs), the question is what fraction of users can be bothered -- and I don't see any reason why AI would lead to an increase there.
So be it. If those services can't survive without ads and surveillance capitalism, they don't deserve to exist.
I'll bite. Is hearing or seeing any idea that you have not previously consented to likewise mind rape?
If not, where do you personally draw the line? And, just as importantly, who do you feel should get to decide in the general case?
I'll bite: yes. If you show me images of goatse or mutilated bodies in a war zone without my consent that’s mind rape. Same with bring politics forcibly into the workplace, showing Fox news at the bbq joint while I’m trying to eat or at the gym while I’m trying to exercise, or screaming at me in protest while I’m trying to access family planning services. Whether its appropriate or not depends on set and setting.
Just like women have the right to walk the streets in whatever attire they damn well please without getting raped, I have the right to experience the world without constantly being bombarded by commercial and political mind rape.
> If not, where do you personally draw the line? And, just as importantly, who do you feel should get to decide in the general case?
Consent. Is that such a hard line to understand? If you want to challenge peoples viewpoints go to college or start a poker night with a bunch of philosophically diverse neighbors who like to argue politics. If you want to shove ads down everyones throat, go join an influencer support group.
Everyone else deserves to live free from constant mental assault.
Exactly. Our minds are sacred.
Do men, and lesbian and bisexual women, have the right to walk down the street without seeing a woman dressed in a way they find distracting?
I think you will say that they have no such right. But if so: What makes this form of attention-grabbing behaviour (wearing a skimpy dress) acceptable, and the other form (advertising) unacceptable?
This example highlights that (a) we are, in fact, capable of managing distractions to quite some degree, and (b) in both cases there is another party involved whose interests oppose our own, but whose rights nevertheless also need to be considered.
Billboards on a highway: mind rape.
Advertising is by definition noise. Superfluous. Information I did not ask for. Irrelevant stuff that someone paid money to put in front of me. Information I explicitly ask for is not advertising, it's simply information.
My cognitive functions are inalienable, they are not theirs to sell to the highest bidder, nor are they currency to pay for services with. I have attention deficit disorder. It's hard enough for me to focus without these corporations trying to grab my attention. I consider their attempts to do so a violation of my personal integrity. I consider ad blocking to be justified self-defense. I will literally do everything in my power to avoid looking at ads.
I always try to make sure my online contributions are worthy of the valuable attention of their readers they take up.
> advertising at its core does _NOT_ have to be evil
Advertising has inherent and irreconciliable conflicts of interest that make it worthless to any rational person. They're trying to sell you stuff, it's literally guaranteed that they will be overstating the pros and downplaying the cons. When you want to make an informed decision, the last person you want to listen to is the advertiser. You want to listen to people you personally trust or independent third parties, not the seller who has every incentive in the world to lie to you.
Therefore the existence of advertising is incompatible with a rational society. There is no such thing as "non-evil" advertising. It doesn't inform anyone. On the contrary: it is disinformation, inherently untrustworthy.
Because I don't consent to it. I don't want it. That's all the justification necessary. They violate my boundaries despite the fact I say no.
Interestingly, I agree that it doesn't have to be evil, but in practice it is, so close to 100% of the time that the exceptions are actually not worth discussing.
We aren't talking about a Clockwork Orange type of scneario. You're trivialising real rape when you refer to easily avoidable online-advertising.
Your mind "rape" is in no way or form analogous to rape.
No, it isn't. It's defined in terms of penetration. Both legal definitions and dictionary definitions.
If your argument depends on a word having a different meaning from the dictionary definition, it's your argument that is wrong, not the dictionary.
> My mind is part of my body. I feel violated.
Violation is not rape.
> define rape
> The act of seizing and carrying off by force; abduction.
> "the rape of Europa by Zeus."
> The act of pillaging or plundering.
> "the rape of the city by the invaders."
> Abusive or improper treatment; spoiling or abuse.
> "the rape of the land by polluters."
Who knows? Maybe one day there'll be a "rape of the mind" dictionary entry in there.
Well, when there is you can claim your argument doesn't trivialise rape. Until then your claim is baseless.
Seems to fit well for my intended purpose. I see no reason to avoid using the word.
But we are.
(OTOH if that intention is conveyed in p. 37 of an EULA in dense legalese, it seems clearly designed to swamp the user. I'd like to see a lot more attention paid to this in legal circles.)
If for example youtube with all of its information or even Google search required a subscription, suddenly a lot of people who make significantly less than the average for the developed world would no longer be able to access those resources.
I still hate the ad surveillance everywhere, but it was a point I hadn't considered before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
There are plenty of online resources which don't require ads. Sibling comment mentions Wikipedia, Open Street Map also comes to mind. We need more of these in this world. Not this ad-supported nonsense.
I wonder how many millions of people have missed their train/bus connection because they couldn't find a departure board among the billboards.
>There are plenty of online resources which don't require ads
So you claim, but one of the two links you provided contains an ad. Which did not bother me at all, of course -- I'm happy to provide a couple of seconds of my attention in return for the interesting and useful information someone spent time preparing.
If everyone blocks that ad, though, the site will make less money, unless they start charging a fee to view some or all of it. I'm interested enough to read for "free" (paying with a couple of seconds of my attention), but not interested enough to pay cash -- and the world is full of people like me. What do you think will happen to sites like this if everyone blocks ads? Is that what you want?
Yes, there is Wikipedia, which is excellent and free. I think Wikipedia is an outlier, though. It's high-profile enough that people actually donate money to it, which is exceedingly rare. In some countries, the government donates only a small amount to well-known charities like the Blind Foundation or the Red Cross because they are known to be high-profile and trusted enough that large numbers of the public will give to them directly -- but there is a long, long tail of deserving charities that almost no one has ever even heard of, which the government has to subsidise fully. What do you propose to do about the long tail of websites that no one cares enough to donate to, once you shut off their main (and possibly only) source of income?
You know who has seeded that argument into the public domain? PR agencies working for the advertising industry. It doesn't have any merit whatsoever. People in developing countries don't like ads any more than anyone else.
Almost no one likes ads. What many people do like is the trade-off of some ads for access to high quality services that would otherwise cost them money.
This argument definitely gets pushed now and then, but seeing you write it out actually made me realize it seems like a red herring.
Ads are priced, bid, bought, and sold based on their expected return on investment.
If lower-income countries would be unable to sustain a public website because of being unable to pay for subscriptions, wouldn't they also be unable to sustain that website because ads sold there should have lower prices?
I forget how bad Google Search is until I get a new computer/phone without ad blocking enabled
Ads are irritating, and Google is not supplying these services out of the goodness of their heart, but I think there's no question that the world is a better place with these ad-supported services in it.
I would rather have all google products be paid, and lessen the incentive for business to spend a large share of their revenue on advertisement.
I don't follow, sorry. By "you", do you mean the end-user, sitting in front of their browser? I'd agree that that person is paying Google with their attention (hopefully in exchange for other valuable content nearby in time or space). But it's the companies trying to advertise stuff that pay Google cash (in exchange for that attention). Google then pays a cut to the site hosting the ad.
>I would rather have all google products be paid, and lessen the incentive for business to spend a large share of their revenue on advertisement.
I don't think Google would have ever gotten off the ground if you had to pay cash to search for stuff -- do you?
How many people do you know who watch YouTube?
How many of them have YouTube Premium?
> I don't think Google would have ever gotten off the ground if you had to pay cash to search for stuff -- do you?
If online advertisement became illegal, Google or somebody else would have gotten off by selling search as a service.
I am not saying that this move would have made Google more successful, they are already successful. But I do not believe that this success is reaching us, consumers.
You talk as though this has already happened, but that's not the case. Companies pay Google with money they hope to recoup from you via your purchases, but whether or not you choose to buy the thing advertised is completely up to you. Advertising is an investment with uncertain returns, like any other.
>If online advertisement became illegal, Google or somebody else would have gotten off by selling search as a service.
It's possible, but I just don't think there's enough of an appetite to pay small amounts of cash for this. It will be interesting to see what happens with Kagi (though I acknowledge that if it fails, that would not be definitive, since it has to compete with ad-supported services, and massive, entrenched ones at that).
It has already happened. Things you buy have an online/google advertisement markup whether you use youtube premium or not. You pay for the ads no matter if you watch them or not.
Free services aren't actually free, on a large scale they affect how much everything should cost.
> It's possible, but I just don't think there's enough of an appetite to pay small amounts of cash for this. It will be interesting to see what happens with Kagi (though I acknowledge that if it fails, that would not be definitive, since it has to compete with ad-supported services, and massive, entrenched ones at that).
This is because free services are a trap. People do not want to pay for search BECAUSE there are """free""" alternatives. If every services become paid people wouldn't be as reluctant.
Free services also create wrong expectations and change the way we should use the service. Take youtube, it is free so everybody expect everyone to be able to access the platform, and so people tend to only upload to youtube because "why would you be anywhere else". And now, when youtube obviously change its term you have a wave an angry people seeing youtube as a platform that must remain convenient or their world will collapse.
If video platforms were all paid, people wouldn't have the same expectations. Uploaded videos could only target users who also paid for the platform, and would instinctively understand that this is a temporary platform.
Have also woken up to an ad that was hours long.
Not quite sure what the incentive is but maybe it works for some cases, sometimes I wonder if they're scam setups - sitting through a super long ad is a pre filter. Weirder things have been known for Internet scale.
I use Apple Maps and not Google maps
I don't use gmail because why would anyone want to use gmail for anything but temporary throwaways that'll get spammed.
I don't use google maps. nokia heremaps and openstreetmap (I use magic earth) are better in most ways, worse in others. When I go to a different country, I click "download country" and have a fully searchable map. No, I don't want a map that needs a data connection. No, I don't want to have to visually search the map for the thing I'm looking for, because someone barfed up a salad of dots that are place ads for things unrelated to my search. Google maps is not usable to anyone who has used something else. People who always use google maps don't know any better.
I do use google translate. This does not support your argument, because that's a service that is free, and does not display ads. You saying that the current ad-free service will disappear if ads were blocked from it... Can't make the comment on here that I want to make, so I'll let you imagine <words>
Youtube... Who give a crap. There were sites with videos before, there are other sites now. No, no one can host a huge expensive platform like that for free. So how about the people posting stuff, pay for their stuff being hosted. Then those people can inline talking ads or put a coke can on their desk, in their videos. You know, how ads in videos have been done since the existence of the video format, in 1920 all the way up to right now.
Google products, google customer service, and google the company, are inferior to the competition in almost every way. Except for google translate. Which again - has no ads.
Google Maps has had the ability to download maps for offline use as long as I can remember -- at least since 2013.
>This does not support your argument, because that's a service that is free, and does not display ads.
All Google services are ad-supported, at least indirectly. That's because Google pays for their development and upkeep, and Google's primary income stream is ads.
Now, speaking of reading, I unfortunately stopped reading after your first sentence. This is because you immediately made it clear you are not communicating in good faith.
You have a good day, and enjoy winning all those arguments you yourself made up. The adults in the room ignore people like you and just move on.
>I specifically gave an example, you then purposely ignored most of what I wrote to create a claim I did not make
No. Your next sentence implicitly claims that Google Maps is unable to download maps in general, and I succinctly contradicted this claim. Google Maps is able to download maps, but there are size limits, and Australia is much too big for it to download in a single offline map. True, it would be more convenient if it could download the entire country -- but wouldn't those other apps likewise be more convenient if they could download entire continents, or even the entire world at once? Why can't they? I haven't found the offline map size limit in Google Maps a hindrance in practice, and I've relied on it all over the world for years.
In case you've bravely shrugged off the mountains of bad faith that you have no doubt uncovered in this reply so far, and are still reading: Search works on downloaded maps, though only for car trips (not public transport or walking).
That is true, but what is also true is that a few products are currently sucking all of the air out of the system, preventing new entrants from encroaching on the incumbents territory.
Maps, Search and Youtube all serve the Google Search business. Any new ad-supported entrant, by necessity, also has to serve the Google Search business.
If the Google Search Business is crippled, there are only good things that can result from that. I don't see a downside to making Google Search unprofitable due to smart ad-blockers. (I welcome hypothetical scenarios in which the Search Business being limited due to ad-blockers has bad unintended consequences).
Unrelated: I don't understand why this comment is modded so low that I can barely see it? It is not in any way controversial and can be (and is, above) rationally debated.
A big increase in the use of ad blockers (AI-enhanced or not) would not only cripple Google, but also hurt the multitudes of small business and hobbyist sites that scrape by on what Google pays them to host ads. If users could somehow culturally readjust en masse to the idea of actually paying for online stuff, this would not be a problem -- but I think that's unlikely to happen immediately, and even in the long term, unlikely to happen to the same extent. So there would be a net loss of free (i.e., paid-for-by-Google-ad-money) content and services available to people. Also, it's not like a new wave of smaller, more democratised ad-sellers would arise in Google's wake, since ad-blocking works on them too.
>It is not in any way controversial and can be (and is, above) rationally debated.
Thanks, I appreciate that. Every society has things that are true but which you aren't supposed to say, and it's amusing to me that "Google provides some high quality free services" seems to be one of ours.
You're correct, but I don't know how bad a thing that is.
To my mind (i.e. my opinion), there's no such thing as a power vacuum that remains a power vacuum.
Something is going to arise that replaces (for example) youtube. It is inconceivable that those content producers on youtube are simply going to give up the ghost and die.
It has to be a self-sustaining something(s) that isn't driven by ads (I agree with you on the point that a replacement can't be ad-supported), and I am arguing that whatever it(them) is will be better than the current ad-driven youtube.
The whole TLDR of my argument is that, even if the ad-driven sites go away, the content-producers and the content-consumers aren't going away!
Right now, the arbitrage is performed by ad-driven middlemen, so the motivation for abuse, control and censorship is incredibly high. I think that whatever arbitrage process or middlemen arise is going to be a lot better for society as a whole than the obnoxious ads with which I am bombarded with whenever I turn off the ad-blocker.
Maybe I'm wrong, but this is one of those things we'll only see when we see it.
Such a person is the very last creature I want parsing every byte of content delivered to me. in order to make this service a reality it must be local.
What we need is data poisoning. Have the AI watch ads, spoof responses, while we watch ad free content. Run it like SETI, during our devices downtime. They'll try to raise fraud concerns. Understandable. Accusations of piracy? Certainly possible. Convictions, though? Probably not.
Absolutely. AI should be local and under our control at all times. Local models that run on our computers is something I want very much.
> What we need is data poisoning.
Agreed. Anything reduces their profits is valid. Ideally to zero or into the negatives. Their "concerns" are irrelevant.
It would be better to produce a more profitable business model that doesn't incentivize or benefit from being shitty/harmful. "They" can then either adapt and cut it out with their shenanigans, or die out outcompeted by companies that do.
They're virtuous capitalists who got to where they are via pure genius and will to power, right? Adapt or die. And they better not cry about it or beg the government for intervention.
It would seem that it is just as likely that browser producers would add AI "watchers" to the browser to make sure you are not using any ad blocking! AI doesn't see any ads or marketing copy for 30 mins, sorry browser temporarily unusable ... unless you have a business account, then no ads for 8 hours.
I'm not against ad-blocking but this seems a bit too Big Brother-ish.
Maybe I'm just fatigued from the constant erosion of user autonomy over information consumption, but as long as a ML ad blocker runs locally by the user's own decision, it doesn't seem that Big Brother-ish (compared to serverside shovel-feeds), and as long as there's a single-click toggle to disable it like in existing ad blockers (or if E.G. the UI exposes a side pane to show the content it's blocked) and it can be configured to be less or more aggressive based on content patterns, it hardly seems like censorship… As far as uses of "AI" go.
Censorship that many people, myself included, agree with (I don't believe all censorship is harmful) but it is clearly censorship.
But the real problem is assuming everything an AI blocks will be an "ad." Why is this the only instance where the slippery slope doesn't apply? This is different than a normal ad blocker that uses specific heuristics to block specific elements - an AI will be employed to make "intelligent" editorial decisions based on interpreting the intent of the content. What happens when it decides - or is ordered to decide - that political advocacy or the promotion of certain ideas or contrary narratives amounts to "advertising" them?
It's literally just enforcing wrongthink, most likely using closed source centralized services run by corporations who will be harvesting and selling your data to advertisers anyway. But it's cool because ads. It's not cool when it's Nazis or doxxing transgender people or spreading conspiracy theories or plotting sedition, but it's definitely cool if Justin Whang wants to sell me on Nord VPN.
Choosing to block ads is more like choosing to not read a book. Or skipping a boring chapter to get to the action.
It's kind of like someone creating a list of bad books, and you looking avoiding reading any books on that list.
Doesn't matter either way. Can't wait for AI-powered ad blocking. Just imagine it. AI parses content and filters out ads, brands, even subtle PR text from pages automatically. Not just textual content either. It also kills ads in audio, video, images.
If I can imagine it, it must be possible. I'm sure someone much smarter than me will create this at some point. Perhaps this comment will inspire that person.