Comment by littlecranky67
5 hours ago
Ads will be no longer a buisness model in 3-5 years when simple, locally run models that do nothing besides blocking ads become available. Twitter, Facebook etc. already get past most modern adblockers, but the AI extension will be able to filter them. In-text advertising must be marked as advertisment in most countries, and even if it isn't, local AI will filter this probably out. So a free ChatGPT service with in-text AI can simply be countered by another local browser extension, that rewrites the text and removes ads.
One can make the point that Google, Meta and others are investing so much into AI as they know, we are facing the end of the ad-based internet economy. The investments are to create new buiness models, because their old ones are gone soon.
I pray you are right. Still, there's no guarantee that the next business model won't be an order of magnitude more user-hostile.
Alternatively, DRM for websites will start being a thing and remove any possibility of blocking ads.
Sad truth is vast majority of users today are not savvy enough to install a good adblocker. We live in a bubble here in technology where we assume people know to do things like block ads. Really at this point people don’t know what files are anymore or even what a website actually is.
True, but some 20 years ago, I already could (and did) use photoshop to cut out the head of a woman (celebrity or from my social group) and put it onto a naked or bikini body of a woman. This is an old problem, but the bar to achieve that was too high and required tech savyness. The second Grok does it on twitter available for every idiot, suddently politicians see this as problematic and want to pass laws against it [0]. My point: Whatever local AI that you will have on your computer or browser, will react to "do not show me ads and filter all product placement in content out" as a single line prompt. And if we won't have a local AI capable of doing it in 5years or more, the whole investement into AI are clearly a bubble and AI will face another winter.
[0]: https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/gesellschaft/ki-kuenstliche... (sorry, german only, but this is an AI thread and you know what to do...)
The problem is the way consumer rights are going, companies will simply make it impossible for you to run a line like that, or at least make it difficult enough that only a small percentage of the population can do it.
Every layer of friction they add means millions of people just throwing up their hands and accepting whatever nonsense is thrown at them.
2 replies →
Adblockers already remove the vast majority of ads. Adtech works because most people dont use them.
See my sibling response. More people will use adblock if all they have to do is prompt a single line into their computer. Hell people will not even visit websites. They will ask AI to present it in whatever form they prefer. I can have a big-breasted anime character reading my personalized news for me, or have it printed in a 1890 style newspaper. Ads will not make it into either format, because I prompt that out.
Using adblock right now is even easier than that though. Most people will not use a command line, but going to https://chromewebstore.google.com/, searching adblock and clicking install is something literally anybody could do.
2 replies →