Comment by aidenn0
4 days ago
Anyone else notice that most youtube ads are really bad. Seeing a product in a youtube ad now causes me to be more likely to believe it's a ripoff.
Things like a cheap $5 fan being sold for $60 as roughly: "Super efficient A/C that will save you $100s on your electricity bill and can cool a room down in just minutes"
I assume you mean all the snake oil pre-playback ads? Mostly dangerous medical advice, solar scams, or wellness quackery.
This week, an instructional video I was watching on how to repair my water heater was suddenly interrupted by a campy ad for pussy-hair razors.
It was so ill-timed, bizarre, and inappropriate I burst out laughing.
The other one I was seeing a lot of, until very recently, was pornographic static ads that were implemented as an optical illusion. If you viewed it at full scale it was an innocuous image of a closet or chair or something, so it passed all checks, but when scaled into a thumbnail, it turns into a silhouette of a woman giving oral or something else obscene. Not sure what this technique is called or how it's done. (It's not a schooner, it's a sailboat.)
>Not sure what this technique is called or how it's done
Downscaling/downsampling attack.
Commonly used against AI systems either to pass filters or poison data.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.02456
If you know the sampling rate of the sampling filter you want to pass you can do some tricky encoding to show a different image at that particular resolution bypassing AI/content recognition systems. This said if it starts happening a lot Google will take those images/videos and feed them into a learning system that looks for those patterns and preemptively marks the video.
I find the downsampling thing happens on Temu ads a lot.
I do a cryptic crossword from a free UK newspaper most days, because my Dad (many thousands of miles away), also does the same crossword and we can bond over good and bad clues, and so on.
The banner ad on that page is always Temu. It always, always looks pornographic. And then you look closer, and it's completely innocuous.
I have assumed that the alogrithm is just optimising for attention, and it just so happens those images, at that scale, are going to get a lot of attention. But it does mean I can't show somebody else the crossword I'm doing for fear of looking like a degenerate pervert, and I am at risk of causing an issue if I play it on public transport.
> Anyone else notice that most youtube ads are really bad.
Claiming that (youtube) ads are bad is a tautology at this point. What else can be expected from something competing for what is left of a user's attention at the very lowest end of a market already overflooded with crud?
The question should rather be: why would one voluntarily let one's well-being be polluted by such invasive, parasitic crap.
There is nothing normal about ads everywhere. There is nothing healthy about ads everywhere. Ads are not an inevitability.
Run an ad-blocker, protect your mental sanity.
If I were into AI, right now I'd be working on ad blocking.
Now we just need someone to build AR glasses with real-world adblocking...
Ahh, but once you get neurolink and the ads are injected directly into your subconscious mind what happens then?
I propose a new natural law: every medium that can carry advertisements, will.
Exhibit A: gasoline pumps. Why do those have ads? I'm already paying for gas. And I can't even run away.
1 reply →
I mean, it can be done with legislation too. Poland where I'm from used to be absolutely plastered with giant bilboards everywhere you looked, you literally couldn't go anywhere without seeing some ad in your perhipheral vision. But recently a new law was passed that banned all advertising in public spaces unless it's literally a banner above your store, and we suddenly got our public spaces back. It's almost weird not seeing ads on every tree and every 10 meters by the side of the road.
3 replies →
https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/A_Bicyclops_Built_for_Two
That's just... every ad. I mostly avoid products that I see in ads (like TV, radio and internet ads) ironically.
Yes, I saw a promoted video with cryptocurrency scam ("earn lot of money trading crypto with ChatGPT") for many months on European Youtube. As I remember, to become rich you just need to put your private keys into their script and run it.
The good ads are just normal videos (movies trailer, product announcements, sponsored video)
When ai slop makes it cheap to churn out the ads this is what you get. What does YT care, they get the money either way.
Enshittification continues
what I don't understand is how paying for YT ads can be profitable. I've never clicked on a YT ad _intentionally_ nor I know anyone who did, having asked a few people. I admit the brand awareness works tho.
There's a counterintuitive effect sometimes, which is that the person who tolerates a stupid ad is also more likely to buy the product. This was used by email spammers whose messages came littered with deliberate grammatical errors as an efficient filter against too-smart targets.
> Anyone else notice that most youtube ads are really bad. Seeing a product in a youtube ad now causes me to be more likely to believe it's a ripoff.
YT needs a button to the effect of "I will never, ever, EVER, buy or use this product, stop spending money on this ad"
the obviously-AI created slop or the mobile games that I will never play, etc. is just a waste of time for basically everyone (except YT making that money, I guess)
No, why would you allow ads lol.