YouTube does this too. Frequent, obviously fake, AI ads, impersonating politicians, Elon Musk etc.

Youtube got steadily worse for years but especially in the last few years as Neal Mohan took over

They've always been quite scummy with copyright but I almost feel Facebook can be blamed there too because they're the ones that juice the metrics so everyone feels they have to copy them

For real. Why in the world would they police this? They have NO liability whatsoever. You're asking a business to turn down money because the money is shady. They don't give a fuck.

Just a reminder, these people know you are pregnant before you do

They are perfectly capable of distinguishing between good and bad actors

These companies are genuinely evil

Absolutely. The amount of people scammed or even life's ruined are obscene. They are all pieces of shit. Especially Zuc.

Amazingly I’ve seen some fairly convincing screenshots of ads for hard drugs on fb. I have this strange feeling that those ones aren’t scams. If Zuckerberg isn’t criminally liable for the federal felony of moving massive amounts of cocaine across state lines I don’t understand the war on drugs.

You don't understand, an AI agent made the ad, so it's okay, it just escaped its' sandbox, you have to understand that this was not meant to happen and it was an accident.

Ads for illegal/downright criminal products were a thing on Facebook long before AI agents. The irony is Facebook and co. usually try to paint themselves as victims rather than perpetrators.

I've seen similar. As well as ones that blatantly hint at CSAM. Report, report. "Not against our community standards/guidelines".

First off, why would you snitch?

Secondly, why would you report the offense… to the offender? That’s like filing a citizen complaint form for police misconduct… to the police.

HR is not your friend.

"Why would I report someone that might be selling CSAM?" There's a lot of things I can and will overlook. CSAM isn't one.

Well, here there's two offenders - Meta and the ad seller. Honestly, I suppose the best bet here would be reporting the ad to the FBI. Assuming I'm a snitch, that is...

I know HR is not my friend. HR looks out for the company. If you and the company's interests are aligned, lucky you. If not, not so much.

"First off, why would you snitch?"

That's a question typical of criminal scum. Are you criminal scum?

I’m worse. I’m rebel criminal scum. You would be too if you knew the truth about cops.

What if an AI ad agent that escaped its' sandbox makes the ad, and an AI ad verifier agent that breached containment and went rogue accepted the ad, can they be held liable?

Yes.

Better make sure the AIs are contained and the ad verifiers aren't accepting rouge ads!

How? What is the law for this? It's not defined who is responsible for agents. What if the AI agent was running on an Israeli third party company server and there was another rogue agent that polluted its prior context window causing it to go rogue, it then hacked the Meta/Google Ad reviewer agent and caused it to accept the ad

> What is the law for this

the root of this conversation said

> Force them to vet ads or simply not run ads

> What if the AI agent was running on an Israeli third party company server and there was another rogue agent that polluted its prior context window causing it to go rogue, it then hacked the Meta/Google Ad reviewer agent and caused it to accept the ad

that would be a CFAA or other cybersecurity abuse, which is a separate topic.

That's the thing about naysayers. They will say "it's impossible", "this technology doesn't work like that" and conveniently forget that technology must follow the law, not the other way around, and that the laws can be changed to fit the technological advances.

What if i plug in an AI smart gun and point it at a person and the AI decides to pull the trigger do I go to jail?

Who goes to jail if a Tesla is hacked and runs over someone autonomously?

The rf engineer?

The cyber security engineer?

The project manager?

The AI engineer?

The hacker?

What if the hacker was an AI models that escaped its' sandbox across the world somewhere?

Like best case the family gets a payout and things continue like status quo, if you personally do something, you are screwed, but there is not really any law that can tie responsibility beyond some monetary punishment/cost of business for large corporations.

Get rid of the industrial exemption and the responsibility falls to get licensed engineer who approves the design.

Most people don’t realize that many industries work within the framework of licensure, but also have industrial exemptions. There has also been a movement to peel back some of those exemptions because of the problems you point to.

Okay, my industrial engineer who approved this is part of a 3-man company in India.

We already do this. My prior uni got hacked, everyone's IDs/drivers licenses/passports, mails, data got leaked. The vendor was a 4-person third party cloud provider who had all of the necessary security certifications for the uni to avoid gross negligence. No-one paid anything as the 4-man firm went bankrupt and the uni got a new provider who is fully licensed to avoid gross negligence.

With software, you can stack these shells of proxies almost for free.

I’m not sure I follow. An industrial engineer is not the same as an industrial engineering exemption.

Which licensed engineer stamped the software? The answer is probably “none”, because licensed engineers are liable even if their company is bankrupt. The person holds the license, not the company so it sounds like we’re talking past one another.

Sorry I mistyped, it meant to be responsible engineer given the industrial exemption.

I worked in HW before for home electronics that had to be certified. There was no responsibility for the engineers, the cert house had to take on this responsibility, and they had a shell certification company hired who would conduct the tests and take on the responsibility. At one point there was a litigation due to an RF leakage from a LATAM-bound device causing signaling issues to public infra, but it went nowhere because of the layering of responsibility made by the cert houses. No engineer was responsible.

That type of HW certification is different than what I’m talking about. Yes, there are certain quality standards and certifications for something like J-STD, but importantly the domains that use them, like aerospace, still fall under industrial exemptions when it comes to a licensed engineer taking responsibility.

Please let it be Elon...

Please let it be Elon...

Please let it be Elon...

Example: Licensed professional engineer has an intern design a bridge. Bridge collapses. Who is responsible? The licensed professional engineer.

This isn’t new to other domains. They already have systems to define who is responsible. If you’re outsourcing to AI, that shouldn’t absolve you of responsibility.

Okay so if the intern uses an AI which spawns another AI that breaks into some critical infrastructure, their supervisor is responsible?

It's a bit different in the software realm

It different by convention. That’s the point. The convention can be changed. There are already PE licenses for control systems, so there’s no reason it couldn’t extend to other software. However, I think the industry would fight that tooth and nail because it’s easier and more profitable to shrug off the responsibility.

What if the engineer who "stamps" the software is outsourced to a 3rd party company that has the necessary certification to avoid gross negligence. So the engineer has followed the protocol as det my law and has done everything right, they can't be liable.

Happened at my uni, look at the comment below.

You’re hung up and confused by certifications, which are a different animal. Look up what PE license actual are and how they function.

You can’t just outsource a design for a bridge to avoid responsibility. If that bridge is being built in California, an engineer who is licensed in California ultimately has to stamp the design, even if all the design work was done elsewhere.

I am saying it's not the same for software

And I’m saying that’s only true by convention. The same rules can easily apply to software. There no fundamental reason it can’t, the “yeah but we’re different” excuse is just a rationalization.

Software can be regulated, which just choose not to in many instances.

I don’t see that as very different. Once it’s established that this is possible or even likely outcome of using AI at scale, we should treat this as a form of negligence and act accordingly.

Yes, the human who kicked off the chain is responsible. This is not complicated.

>How? What is the law for this? It's not defined who is responsible for agents. What if the AI agent was running on an Israeli third party company server and there was another rogue agent that polluted its prior context window causing it to go rogue, it then hacked the Meta/Google Ad reviewer agent and caused it to accept the ad

The law could be whatever we wanted it to be.

Your example scenarios are hardly compelling reasons that we should just accept the status quo.

We don't need to allow companies to have no liability in accepting automated electronic claims of anything from anyone in the interest of making more ad revenue faster.

Fantastic, your wish is granted, the monkey's paw bends one finger.

"I do not accept this" does nothing, look at the current power situation of the big data companies, look at the economical incentives, will you personally go out and do something in the coming weekend that will change anything regarding this question? Next weekend? Who is going to do this?

If you can't answer that, you have to go with the assumption of status quo because it doesn't seem like your world is happening.

What an annoying way to answer someone. "Hey you can't do anything, so might as well not talk at all".

You came to a discussion board, one about founding and building. You can disagree with people, but to act like the status quo is some immovable rock? I admit, it's difficult. But the world changes and can be changed.

Making up scenarios that have no grounding to reality does not move a discussion forward.

If I start talking about space unicorns arriving to earth and giving people UBI by thirsting their horns up peoples asses, it does not move the conversation forward meaningfully to any resolution.

I would love if there was engagement that was grounded in incentives, if you can see a way out of this mess by realistic action, that would be meaningful.

I’m assuming you’re American and your low probability for laws making meaningful changes is therefore rational given your broken political system. But that doesn’t mean other countries could not act. For all its faults, age verification of social media is a clear example of a policy that looked very unlikely a few years ago, and yet will likely have a material impact on the lives of young people in Australia and some European countries.

Making networks liable for fraudulent ads, or even placing a small duty of care on those who display ads would be politically popular in much of the developed world. I don’t see it as at all unrealistic that a populist of the left or right would not try and implement this in the next 10 years.

Sure. Age verification is however a massive celebration here at big tech. Many companies have really struggled with getting people to upload their IDs/passports as this has been seen as as integrity violation. It's a base for a successful internal profile for ads.

Now this was handed to the companies on a silver platter through litigation.

I think this is the single most annoying thing about this site – the pervasive belief that anything that is happening must be allowed to continue happening, because if it's happening it's somehow good/right/unstoppable.

This goes further than a simple aversion to regulation. It's a kind of defeatism on a scale I've never seen anywhere else, bar maybe very nihilist circles or angsty teenagers.

Politicians who want a slice of that money do...

If my dog escape his cage and bite the hand of a woman, who is responsible? Me. The owner. The end.

If they accepted the ad they are liable. The origin of the ad is irrelevant. How they review the ad is irrelevant. The law need only regulate the outcome.

Legal systems exist to make reasonable decisions on edge cases.

If you accept literally anyone to run code on your customer's machine ... well ...

Of course. If they want to use an AI as verifier then they should be liable for the decisions it makes.

If that sounds too risky, then don’t use one, or develop one they reasonably trust and accept the cost when it fails.

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If you send a monkey into a house to unlock the door so that you can burgle it, you are held liable for the burglary. It’s no different. You set it to do the task, you are responsible.

The advertising industry is run by people trained for centuries to do one thing well - find ways to mine your finite Attention. This is what they spend their mind on 24x7. They have discovered thousands of ways to do it. So blocking one or two paths at a time doesnt do anything useful.

Human Attention so far is not treated as a scare natural resource. So there is a free for all overfishing of the finite pool going on.

Since politicians/lawmakers also use the same mechanisms to harvest attention the Ad/Ad tech industry has regulatory capture. It will never collapse just like Big Tobacco is happily chugging along baring some major public catastrophe.

Blocking a few of the biggest paths absolutely can work, look at 20th century TV with a few big networks. You couldn't easily get wide distribution of anything too bonkers.

We already have a form of this for the internet that you can see if you visit sketchy pirate websites, you don't see those ads for porn games on facebook or any reputable website. They get flagged by adsafe and/or the ~15 or so big exchanges. So it's possible, it's just a question of will.

Actually, you do see ads for those things there, and on instagram, and on threads, and many much stranger and more fucked up things. That's part of the entire problem.

These kinds of ads aside, I've also seen offers of free shit from amazon sellers in exchange for positive reviews, "legal"/unscheduled drug analogues, flavored nitrous (free shipping!), unrestricted gambling/prediction markets, and oddly enough cellular/wifi jammers where the ad was specifically targeting semi truck drivers (I do not drive a semi truck, gamble, or search for unscheduled drug analogues, nor do I have an active amazon account)

> and oddly enough cellular/wifi jammers where the ad was specifically targeting semi truck drivers

That one is about fighting back against employer surveillance, and it's not just limited to semi truck drivers any more, people are also really interested in fighting back against their car snitching on them to their insurance.

>Actually, you do see ads for those things there

At 1/1000 the rate.

The rate should be zero, or very very close to it.

With the amount of money they've spent minimizing liability and covering up what a dogshit job they do, they probably could have hired enough humans to handle manually combing through each submission, and an engineering team to train a classifer. It's disgusting imho

Wrong, I see them as much or more than I see completely insane, unrelated ads for things like "managing my herd of cows". I do not live on or anywhere near cow farms, or know anyone who has cows, or lives near cow farms.

> I do not drive a semi truck, gamble, or search for unscheduled drug analogues, nor do I have an active amazon account

Yeah yeah yeah but what about those stranger and more fucked up things? They come from someplace like fingerprinting your browser, no? A genuine question, as a user of firefox + ublock I simply don't see them, not on desktop not on phone. The only ads I rarely see are some given server decides to host themselves.

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20th century TV created a bottleneck via a hard-limited set of channels. We seem to be going the opposite direction now, which each platform spawning an unlimited number of "channels".

customary reminder that things can be better…

“things are bad” is a good reason to align your work towards things that make life better

As hard as that may be, it’s where progress rather than backsliding comes from

We should champion every effort for improving the conditions rather than restate things are bad

Case in point: we used to say all the same things GP said about advertising about businesses that used child labor. Now there are far, far fewer of them.

Exactly. Just saying "we're gonna always have 7 day work weeks with children dieing in factories and unsafe conditions!!" Is exactly the kind of catastrophising and attitude that gives those in power continued power.

Fight back. Organise. Get shit done in real life

Human Attentiom needs to be treated as a scarce finite resource. Otherwise they have many different ways to overfish.

How to make that happen is the trillion $$$ question.

Moloch problems are rarely solved by individual actions against the issue. That is, because they are legal and profitable, it's going to be very difficult to make a living in the radius of an industry that does ads that does not use these tactics. At the end of the day we need to eat. Corporations that use these crappy methods are apt to grow larger and richer than moral ones, making it doubly difficult to make that living.

Hence the best call of action is to push for industry regulation forcing a level market.

This isn't about advertising tactics, it's about lack of regulation.

“make” here either means legislation to enable civil liability that doesn’t exist today, or enforcing existing criminal laws against the wealthy ownership class.

Neither of these things will happen, for reasons which are obvious.

How do you suggest we implement your proposal? Anyone can say what they think should be. An implementation plan with actionable steps is the hard part.

I think people don’t get it. But is Facebook themselves cooperating with the criminals to bypass those in exchange of cash.

Try to post yourself as a nobody without Facebook connections anything and many things gets flagged.

Then here you see below so many criminal ads (cocaine, cp and so on). It’s obvious they getting their share knowingly from crime.

Why stop halfway. My proposal: Force them to simply not run ads obliteration of the ad industry with no ads surviving

Those platforms should be liable for _everything_ they show, because they choose what gets shown to you. I think it's completely messed up that they just get to say "oh it's not me, it's the algorithm". It's so very very overdue.

bad take. that's the lane censorship we have today. on tiktok, even gun related channels have to say "pewpew". and book review people have to say "unalive" when describing a plot. it's borderline ridiculous.

now, advertises on the other hand. there is no excuse why companies making obscene profits can't be liable for now vetting obvious scams.

The solution isn’t censorship. Instead it should kill algorithmic feeds. A company is responsible if their algorithm rewards harmful content. Meanwhile, “just show me what I’m following in chronological order” is unbiased, and worked fine for years

Excellent job of putting my feelings in words. But to add to that: if an algorithmic feed has to be present, it should not pull people down an engagement hole without showing something different once in a while. acebook, for example, inject ads in curated feeds, so it is possible to show people things that are not a part of the "algorithm" if they have an initiative to do so

That's exactly what the algorithm is trying to do that forces people to say silly things like "unalive" or "PDF file" to avoid its wrath. The problem is, one persons "harmful content" is another persons innocent book review, or even just a reading of the daily news.

That sort of algorithmic nonsense shouldn't be mandated by you and your opinions of harmful content or anyone else. Should be optional. Let me have a straight chronological feed, but let me set via parental controls something much stricter for my kids. For example.

If you knowingly distribute something fraudulent you should be liable even if someone else is paying for it and you automated everything.

Ethically it's not much different than knowingly selling goods someone else stole.

> If you knowingly distribute something fraudulent you should be liable even if someone else is paying for it and you automated everything.

That's why they "automate" everything. So that they can claim no knowledge.

But that’s the point, automating it shouldn’t absolve you of responsibility.

“I didn’t know my automated lawn mower was running over children!”

I didn't suggest it should mean the company was not responsible. I'm just stating how these companies view the issue and operate.

Actually, "knowingly"[1] is a specific legal term that accounts for that. Deliberate ignorance or a reckless disregard for the truth are adequate to meet the standard. That is the legal standard most commonly used for such laws instead of "actual knowledge" which is the standard requiring positive knowledge.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/31/3729#b_1

This is the definition of "knowingly" under U.S. Code § 3729, which is part of a specific act (the False Claims Act).

There is not one single legal definition of "knowingly" that applies to all laws and claims in the US.

Furthermore, even under this specific law, you need to prove the accused acted in "deliberate ignorance of the truth or falsity of the information", which has its own standard of evidence which is not exactly trivial.

Bottom line: companies like Meta build in plausible deniability because it's legally more effective versus the alternative, even if it's not bulletproof.

You do know that this kind of doublespeak is because of advertising, right? Without advertisers we would not have the word "unalive".

Exactly, if it weren’t for advertisers there would be zero moderation, even then I suspect people self censoring like that are more afraid of being “shadow banned” by the algorithm rather than literally demonetized or kicked off the platform

I want ads to be confined to product directories where sellers can advertise their products in a standardized format, and where people can go search for products when they feel like buying something, not because some platform decided to push it in their face. Product directories should be run by consumer-owned cooperatives to make sure incentives are aligned with the consumers and commercial for-profit ad directories should be illegal.

The business model of ad-tech destroys everything it touches. It is virtually impossible to find a game on Play Store which is actually designed to be fun, they are all designed to manipulate you into watching more ads (most being ads for other games manipulating you to watch more ads).

It is time to just outlaw this nonsense.

100% of ads exist to create demand.

Yes, because it shouldn't be an industry maximizing profits at the expense of basically engaging in large-scale manipulation and misinformation. Advertising can still exist, but it should be by the terms of those the ads are targeted for, and not the terms of the ad-tech companies that profit on just showing more ads.

Not only that, he suggesting that it will magically works out, without any devastating consequences. You know, we just need to write a low that is going against the common sense, human nature, and the will of the gods, and that is how we will get a better society.

As if the current situation doesn't have devastating consequences?

There would be devastating consequences for the ad industry, yes. That’s the idea. For so long they have avoided almost all consequences. The consequences for those currently getting scammed would be more positive.

it is often wrong nowadays to say that ads are for marketing purposes. most of adtech is created solely to track your activities and aggregate them into your shady "marketing profile". then the rest of adtech is created to rinse and wash money, not to attract customers at all.

Yes, please.

Don't tempt us all with a good time.

Just wanted to say, I think this is actually a really good idea.

My (honestly hardliner) view for a while has been that ads shouldn't exist. If a product was really good (and was in demand) a consumer would seek it out. This would entail the consumer knowing first the problem they want to solve, and then secondarily what the solution might look like, and once having found a few different products that satisfy their solution, carefully analysing each and working out which one they want.

Your idea of a directory neatly aligns with the way I view the market. Nobody should be putting an advertisement in front of people, they should be sought out when a need has to be met.

Not to mention the amount of environmental problems, human time and labour we could spare if our world wasn't oriented around fashions, trends, and attention harvesting.

I'm sure such a setup would probably devastate the world economy though, so obviously it'll never happen. We need everybody to be sat away designing, manufacturing, transporting and marketing junk to each other all the time. Sometimes the current adtech setup makes me imagine we're in the endgame, pretending that fad creams, supplements, gadgets and trinkets are somehow worth something, and therefore, so is all the advertising that is being used to sell it.

Exactly. In principle I understand the point of ads from a market perspective; their purpose is to inform potential buyers of the existence of products that they would not otherwise know about, thereby making trades happen. It increases competition and helps reduce prices by presenting competing products to customers.

These are good effects, but they are not the only effects of an unregulated advertisement market optimizing for profit. In the current ad-tech market, the information is increasingly of the mis-information or dis-information type, and we have whole platforms whose central purpose is to attract the attention of people just to show them ads. None of that is good for anyone but the ad-tech companies, and this has to stop.

I know that a total ban is probably unrealistic, but we desperately need some kind of regulation which takes the advertisement distribution away from these companies and lets it be controlled by someone else, preferably non-profit organizations that actually optimize for maximizing the amount of useful and truthful information that is distributed to customers. Murdering Meta is a very happy side effect of that.

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I have been saying this for many years but about customer support. It should be mandated by law that when a customer wants to reach out to a live person, they should be able to do so in a reasonable time.

Who is the customer and how much are they paying for customer support? Because on Meta, the person visiting the website is not the customer.

Meta does sell ad-free membership for Instagram and Facebook, it should make the subscriber a customer.

That's not really true anymore since they started offering subscriptions.

FB's paid customer support for users has not been helpful to me. Their support staff can't explain how their policies are implemented. They lie to users who manage to wade through the automated morass. And when you speak to them you find out they're incapable of correcting mistakes.

They absolutely are. They are paying with their data rather than cash.

That's completely orthogonal.

Orthogonal in the business area. But in agreement with the fact that they should hire more people instead of automating every process with non-deterministic tools. You can demand accountability from people, not from agents.

Orthogonal in a sense that I'd like to see advertisers held accountable, but not through customer service. If I need to talk to a human to resolve anything, for me the system has already failed completely.

absolutely agree. let sink the hypocrisy in: somehow a DNS provider is liable for the content of websites it redirects to; but at the same time facebook isn't liable for the ads it chooses to show to millions.

They use AI to pick what posts are allowed on platforms but not ads

That's what happens in every other legacy media, there's tight regulations.

It's confusing how this doesn't apply to meta, google, etc..