I don't think your average adult is inspired by the idea of AI generated advertisements. Probably a small bubble of people including timeshare salesmen. If advertisements were opt-in, I expect a single digit percentage of people would ever elect to see them. I don't understand how anybody can consider something like that a net good for the world.
How does non-consensually harassing people into spending money on things that don't need add value to all the world's citizens?
I wish some of these people would think about how they'd explain to their 5 year old in an inspiring way what they do for a living: And not just "I take JSON data from one layer in the API and convert it to protobufs in another layer of the API" but the economic output of their jobs: "Millions of wealthy companies give us money because we can divert 1 billion people's attention from their families and loved ones for about 500 milliseconds, 500 times a day. We take that money and give some of it to other wealthy companies and pocket the rest."
I mean, you'd see the same thing if paying for your groceries were opt-in. Is that also a net bad for the world? Ads do enable the costless (or cost-reduced) provision of services that people would otherwise have to pay for.
Is that seriously the comparison you want to make here? Most of us think the world would be better if you didn't have to pay for food, yes.
They do not enable any costless anything at all. They obfuscate extraction of money to make it look costless, but actually end up extracting significant amounts of money from people. Ad folks whitewash it to make it sound good, but extracting money in roundabout ways is not creating value.
Groceries are opt-in. Until you realize you don't want to hunt and cook your own food, then you opt back in for survival.
UBlock origin + some subscriptions show I'd definitely would love to opt out of IRL ads.
>Is that also a net bad for the world?
World, yes. We have to tech to end food scarcity, but poor countries struggle while rich countries throw out enough food each day to feed said poor countries.
A similar amount of wealth would be generated if every advertised product would be represented by a text description, but we have a race to the bottom.
There is advertising and advertising of course but most of advertising is incredibly toxic and I would argue that by capturing attention, it is a huge economic drain as well.
Of course an AI would also be quite apt at removing unwanted ads, which I believe will become a reality quite soon.
I fear statements like this go too far. I can't agree with the first part of this sentence.
I feel this about both marketing and finance:
They are valuable fields. There are huge amounts of activity in these fields that offer value to everyone. Removing friction on commerce and the activities that parties take in self-interest to produce a market or financial system are essential to the verdant world we live in.
And yet, they're arms races that can go seemingly-infinitely far. Beyond any generation of societal value. Beyond needless consumption of intellect and resources. All the way to actual negative impacts that clutter the financial world or the ability to communicate effectively in the market.
This is quite a statement to make.
Please elaborate on what enormous value has spam ads and marketing emails added to _world_ citizens?
Unless of course by “world” you mean Silicon Valley venture capitalists..
