[shortrounddev2]

> While the ecosystem in which the Web thrived had one colossal flaw, namely, Surveillance Capitalism,b it had a stable business model. That business model is now being threatened by GenAI

Good. If there is one silver lining to generative AI, then it is that programmatic advertising will become less viable as a source of income.

If the internet were to overnight become a place where it is impossible to make money via advertising revenue, it could very well save the internet, if not the world.

[kakokiyrvoooo]

What happens when openai starts interjecting ads into chatgpt output?

[gerdesj]

You ask Chat to add some tags to its output, via your prompt. You get your browser to filter output that is not tagged properly.

Counter measures will need another LLM "AI" to filter out efforts to filter out ads from my prompts. However, when openai's adversary is their customer, my money is on me!

[svachalek]

That's a dumb way to do advertising. The "right" way is to shift all the weights a little, so that it's influencing you with everything it says but you don't even see it happening.

[gerdesj]

The "nudge" done right!

[shortrounddev2]

Then the fools who continue to use it can enjoy their crappy little corner of the internet

[mvanbaak]

who guarantees that this is not already happening?

[martin-t]

Or... we could just make advertising illegal[0].

It would be really nice to get rid of one parasitic zero-sum "industry" without feeding all intellectual output into a slop machine which resells it without credit or compensation.

[0]: https://simone.org/advertising/

[trod1234]

Not good. Have you considered the second order effects of a breakdown of communications?

Marketing and Advertising is about communicating a product to someone that may be interested in purchasing it.

If Communications is jammed because AI slop has dominated the web, no marketing happens, no hiring happens, no purchases are made because no jobs. In short order (relatively speaking), you get deflationary collapse of all human organization.

Should that collapse, population levels will be forced to make a deep correction in ecological terms. The planet is in ecological overshoot. What happens when 2/3 of people can suddenly no longer feed themselves, and technology allows one person to destroy everyone on the planet. Quite bad.

Also, the money in surveillance capitalism is almost straight from the money-printer. It may be laundered a bit, but overall the reason old marketing/advertising failed is because it was outcompeted by money-printing, and when that fails (as it always does), you have a barren soil where nothing will grow. Corporate business today has a tendency to burn their house down with themselves in it to save a few pennies.

[tines]

> Marketing and Advertising is about communicating a product to someone that may be interested in purchasing it.

This is only what advertising is about for the advertisers.

For the other side of the coin, namely, the platforms that sell users to the advertisers, advertising is about capturing as much attention as possible in order to sell it. That means addiction, scams, sensationalism, lying, and preying on fear, greed, lust, and all the baser motives of a human being.

[Legend2440]

> In short order (relatively speaking), you get deflationary collapse of all human organization.

Lolol no, human organization would not collapse because web advertising went away.

[trod1234]

Your wrong. Here's how it might go down.

Web advertising goes away because communications platforms reach the Shannon limit driven by AI generated slop, and deceit. People can no longer communicate with each other, this spawns chaotic hallucinations and delusions that grow into a dragon-king event. Businesses make decisions based on the hallucinatory perceptions that are not sound resulting in losses. Money-printing increases to try to cope with losses by extending debt nationalizing the economy, inflationary pressures cause rapid devaluation of the dollar which in turn puts companies responsible for food production out of business. This culminates in one single company remaining in the food production sector that serves as inputs for other smaller companies, and then they too fail due to chaotic instability and devaluation of the currency, with no further food production thereafter citing regulatory and safety issues confounded by corruption. All the while advertising to everyone that food will be available in the future, but never actually taking the steps to make it happen given the desperate situation that cannot be resolved.

Three days later, most people start getting desperate to feed their families. Rioting breaks out. Some start resorting to cannibalism, looting, and ivolence. The electric grid fails. Production of everything ceases, and the remaining people kill each other using guns/other tools, or detonate nuclear bombs ending it for everyone.

The relation between each step of this is a small domino that by itself wouldn't break a resilient system, it would only break in a predisposed centralized system, a system that has been optimized for chaos to create profit.

You've got the cause and effect reversed that seems based in fallacy. Are you one of those people that would say, "This can't ever happen", sound in that false belief but through your actions then try to make it happen?

Cascade failures lag with time. If you juggle balls up in the air, eventually they will all come down at the same time, where you won't be able to react. This is why these failures are so serious and existential, and shouldn't be ignored by rational people. Those that ignore reality end up dying through their own choices given sufficient time.

[Legend2440]

I think that story is absolutely nuts, both the premise and the outcome.

If society were as brittle as you describe we’d have collapsed under the first gust of wind.

[trod1234]

The premise starts with Claude Shannon's well established work, and the demonstrated ability of GenAI to costlessly saturate communications channels.

What about Shannon's work do you find absolutely nuts? Keeping in mind, to overturn established science you need extraordinary proof for refutation, do you have any?

The inducement of delusion and hallucination of the mind, as well as the limits of human perception, are equally well documented and established under psychology like behavioral modification therapy, behavioral engineering, NCI, torture, hypnosis, and the like.

The economics are also well established that absent a market distribution of labor, corruption occurs regardless leading to positive feedback loops, and runaway money-printing is known to drive and distorts price floors with clear profit cutoffs that determine behavior (closing shop when its no longer possible to make a profit).

Under such adverse circumstances, its not unheard of that the imposed stress causes people to degrade in thought to an almost automaton level, incapable of reacting to their environment correctly, which naturally occurs and is aligned with many of the same things we see under fascism, and the nature of numerous underlying positive feedback systems is they easily run away out of control until conditions are met for catastrophic collapse.

Cascading failures, where everything slips through your hands because the incentives drive the outcome chaotically is expected in such environments.

Your statement amounts to survivorship bias, it hasn't happened yet so it can't ever happen; which is fallacy and easily refuted.

At a bare minimum there are many historical examples of societies that suddenly vanished in the historic record (i.e. suddenly died out). While we can't know the exact circumstances after-the-fact we can know it is a regular possibility.

Given that refutation, because it has happened. Approaching failures that result in no control, it would be appropriate to perform due-dilligence at a point of control where you can affect change, which is necessary to change course, and failure to do that favors extinction.

If you just take a wait and see approach, and you have all your eggs in one single basket, who survives when you are wrong and that hubris spirals consequences out of your control?

The vast majority of people have forgotten the inherent cruelty of natural law, and what it initially took to break past the Malthusian trap. It was the work of a larger part of our population sharing and communicating knowledge.

Distributed communication of useful information is largely what made this possible, and it elevated everyone with access to it. A coordinated effort of solving many problems in unity; and this isn't, or more appropriately can't happen anymore.

Communication won't be available when communication is jammed, and nothing can pass the noise floor due to channel capacity exhaustion. That necessarily means everyone falls to their base cognitive levels, which previously have been augmented through an intelligent minority that has been shrinking.

What chances would you give cavemen in averting a planet killer Impactor? How about without our communications systems, and the built-up expertise (on the shoulder's of giants), what chance would you give modern man to do the same? Equal odds?

Hubris not tempered by reality is a very dangerous thing.

Society didn't used to be so brittle. There were redundancies to pick up slack, but these are gone now. Its been made that way in recent history through complicit insiders seeking profit, power, and control above all else.

[shortrounddev2]

> If Communications is jammed because AI slop has dominated the web, no marketing happens

Don't threaten ME with a good time!