(also this feels hella iffy legally speaking)
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2024
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It's amazing how newspapers were able to sustain themselves when they only had non-targeted ads
Whether targeted ads work for actually getting more revenue per ad impression is debatable. Those selling the surveillance infrastructure want you to think that they do, of course, though it has not been impartially shown that an ad targeted at someone whose browsing history, credit card purchases and TV viewing digest that they’re in the target demographic for a product get more conversions than a context-based ad (i.e., if you’re selling gym shoes, buying untargeted ads on fitness forums and such).
I used to work for a big data company and internally we acknowledged that for the targeting to be truly effective we'd have to do a truly creepy amount of behavior analysis. The fact that ads don't really drive clicks is a dirty little secret in the industry.
I feel like its also pretty easily spotted / avoided / defeated, after a very small amount of knowledge about the industry is understood. Unless there's an Ad-agent assigned to individuals, I can't see there being an ad targeted towards me that I wouldn't immediately note as such.
Oh they'll be putting "AI" on it as your personal agent soon enough. Undoubtedly already have pushed it through many black box algorithms and machine learning models, so arguably too late.
Like I said, they'd need an agent assigned to a small amount of people. If AI has shown us anything, its that its severely lacking in the "I" part in almost every context.
Well, that's because it's the marketing and exec hacks (read: morons) that decided to call it "AI". Any engineer with a quarter of a braincell left knows better than to call the current generation (or the next several) of ML models et. al. "intelligent", let alone AI.
An actual AI would be far, FAR more than capable of sorting your silly preferences.