[jameshart]

‘Advertising’ is the business of persuading decision makers to prefer your product over a competitor. That business isn’t going to go away.

If humans outsource their decisionmaking to AI by asking the AI to recommend them a product, then advertising will just have to shift its attention from persuading humans (by interrupting their TikTok dance videos with product pitches) over to persuading AIs that they are the best thing to recommend.

The SEO industry was already theoretically predicated on convincing an algorithm to rank you above competitors - but then it was undermined by the perverse incentives that providing ad inventory is itself a lucrative proposition and content farms are able to compete for the algorithm’s favor as well, meaning actual product providers are having to buy advertising space at auction that will actually be purchased from the sites with the best SEO for what the advertisers sell.

AI is definitely going to disrupt all of that equilibrium, but it’s not going to get rid of advertising. It might eliminate some of the rent seekers who are taking a cut of the ‘product and service discovery’ pie, but it’s going to enable some new rent seekers to move in.

[hilbert42]

"That business isn’t going to go away."

No doubt you're correct but users who've control of AI at their viewing end will for the first time be able to control whether they watch ads or not.

[jameshart]

And so shoving ads in front of them will cease to be how advertising gets done.

But nonetheless someone will find some way to raise awareness of their products.

[hilbert42]

Right, it depends on how determined one is.

1. I do not watch ads on TV now as I never watch it in realtime, I'm a master at skipping ads on playback.

2. On the internet I never see ads and haven't for years. I use ad-blockers in browsers and I run without JavaScript which automatically kills 90+% of ads anyway (and the internet runs much, much faster without it). I bypass sites that insist on JS and I don't use any social media. For YouTube I use NewPipe and such which eliminate ads altogether.

3. On my smartphone, I use a nul VPN that sends apps to 'nowhere' when they attempt to retrieve ads, similarly Google Play services is either disabled or uninstalled (I use no Google services nor Gmail). If I want something from the Play Store I use Aurora Store and log on as an anonymous user.

This is a state of mind, I simply don't have enough time in my life to waste watching ads. It's also a matter of principle. I object to the trillion dollar ad industry as those trillions we consumers pay for as they are added to the price of goods we purchase. Ads not only annoy, they up the cost of just about everything. The ad industry must be viewed as an unnecessary and very expensive leech on our society.

Unfortunately, not everyone thinks or acts like me, if they did then we wouldn't have the virulent ad industry we now have. I consider my response to ads fair and reasonable given the incessant and unwanted onslaught of my senses by their purveyors.

It's war, and I've outlined my defense.