[jwr]

This is depressing. We are already meat in the google ad-serving machine that tracks us, profiles us, gives us "free" stuff (gmail, anyone?) in order to feed us advertising.

Now even that advertising will be AI-generated. The human is reduced to the ultimate consumption machine, to be fed stuff paid for by advertisers and generated by machines.

[bko]

I don't know, I feel like it will help smaller businesses without a budget for a designer or even design taste compete with larger companies.

Maybe that's good and maybe not. But big brands always had this splashy advertising, so this evens the field

[TeMPOraL]

Advertising is a negative sum game[0]. Helping smaller businesses without budget compete with larger companies on advertising is just contributing to making life worse for everyone.

There's no evening the field, only deepening the muck. There's no persistent advantage possible here, because whatever new cool thing a small business can do, a large business can do more of it and better

--

[0] - It's a zero-sum game in the sense that everyone's effort only serves to cancel out the effort of their competitors, but it's hugely negative to society in absolute terms, because all that effort burns labor and natural resources.

[xmprt]

There's an argument to be made that if everyone is doing it then it will stop being effective and brands will have to start reaching for more honest forms of marketing/advertising their product. I think we've already gone through a cycle of this with influencer marketing where a decade ago, if a Youtuber recommended a product it had a lot more weight (eg. I could actually imagine a lot of creators using Audible/Squarespace) than today where most people realize it's just a way for them to make money and doesn't really hold much weight.

[wholinator2]

Not just labor and resources, but attention and time as well. It's literally burning up the brains of our youth. Of course, so is the "content" between the ads but you can make an argument that without the ad incentive these things wouldn't have gotten so bad in the first place

[verdverm]

> There's no evening the field, only deepening the muck.

While I generally agree, I think if we the consumers do more to level the playing fields from our vantage point, we can have more influence

This would be done by running more ad blockers and being vocal about our rejection of how bad ads have become, so they hear back (in theory...)

[Retr0id]

Is this really aimed at the smaller businesses, or is it aimed at the big businesses who want to cut down their marketing department?

[bko]

Obviously both parties will have access to the tech, but I don't see giant brands just using something like this to hack an ad campaign. Either way it doesn't really matter. It just levels the playing field

[TeMPOraL]

Giant companies don't use do ad campaigns anyway. They hire ad agencies, which themselves may hire smaller ad agencies or consultants, and those are more than happy to innovate and improvise using whatever trick can come across.

Note, I said companies, because brands at this point are merely labels, most of them throwaway; big companies use them the same way small companies do, including to run fly-by-night scams on burner brands. They're more than happy to delegate it to smaller agencies, too.

Point being: there's not much correlation between branding, ownership structure, and what advertising techniques can be applied by what organizations.

[mbreese]

That’s where I stay to see some benefits. Will AI ads (or media) be better than an expert human made ad campaign? Not at the moment.

But can a small business use AI tools to make a better ad for their smaller budget? Probably.

I was thinking about this in the context of some videos posted here a few weeks back. They were AI generated video shorts. They weren’t fabulous, but they were funny and entertaining. There was a small writing team behind it that was able to produce solid video content that would have been way out of their budget just a few years ago. But with AI tools they were able to get their ideas made and content available.

That’s where I start to struggle… I’m not a fan of pure AI content, but if it helps smaller teams on smaller budgets compete a little more, or helps individual creators get to tell their story when they otherwise couldn’t, is AI content completely wrong?

[Retr0id]

The first time I saw an AI-generated ad was Coca Cola's 2024 xmas ad.

[awillen]

I tried this out, and the stuff it produces is just simple text overlaid nicely on images you supply. If you have a designer, it'd take 60 seconds to knock one of these out, plus you'd already have a style guide that this app wouldn't follow closely enough to use. This is definitely for small businesses.

[rafaelmn]

Thing is at that scale cutting down on marketing with slop has huge implications. It's not like this thing blew he ceiling, it just lifted the floor.

[ErroneousBosh]

A Modest Proposal:

We set all our servers to listen on port 4443, and walk away from the whole sorry mess.

Make it all again from scratch. Block whole swathes of IP ranges known to belong to FAANG.

[realusername]

Personally I'm okay with that as it weakens the argument that ads are content, a dubious argument often used by ad companies.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

One of the best arguments in favor of ads is that high-quality ads act as an honest/credible signal that a firm is a serious business offering a serious product. Through making the production of high-quality ads cheap, people who are truly passionate about their small business will be "disrupted", and scammers/fly-by-night operations will be "supercharged".

[mcny]

I wonder if these ads will still be called "creatives".

[realusername]

I'm sure they will, this industry is completely delusional and out of touch with reality

[Culonavirus]

> The human is reduced to the ultimate consumption machine.

Question is, if the AI bros are right about a "new industrial revolution", will there be consumers to consume if all the wealth is concentrated in the top 1-2% of the population? (the owners of AI hardware and software)

[impossiblefork]

If that happens it won't be the AI people who benefit. The wealth will be concentrated among the present capital owners. Even many top AI experts who contributed critical research won't become rich.

You'll see the wealth concentration you talk of, but it'll be completely different people who get this wealth, maybe even people who own businesses where wages are a large outlay.

[ddalex]

I keep seeing this worry about "who will consume?!!?" This is entirely unfounded - the AI will develop its own marketplace and AI will consume.

The question is, will be there anything left for humans to consume ? will we survive ?

[Thorrez]

Currently AI isn't allowed to own assets AFAIK.

[ddalex]

Of course they are allowed, they're called "corporations" because they have a "body" and legal rights.

The datacenter is held by a corporation, and the corporation does what the resident AI wants it to do.

[Thorrez]

Who owns the corporation though? It has to be humans. And corporations need to have a board of directors composed of humans.

[vbezhenar]

Buy acre of land, plant potatoes, raise chicken, pay your tithe to your landlord. People will survive, for sure. Not all of them, but enough.

[jeremyjh]

There won’t be any such leases if machines can make more productive use of the land than a potato farmer.

[overfeed]

This is why they are looking at government coffers with a hunger in their eyes. They don't care for the long term societal stability; the richest of them fantasize riding it out in their island bunkers.

[simianwords]

The answer is already in your question. The original Industrial Revolution concentrated wealth and yet increased the baseline wealth for everyone else.

There is no reason to believe otherwise in this revolution.

[rogerrogerr]

Though for those of us above the current baseline (e.g. basically everyone reading this), it’s not guaranteed that the new baseline will be above our current lifestyle.

[simianwords]

Why? Industrial Revolution increased everyone’s baseline

[rogerrogerr]

If you’re a software bro making $300k today, and lose your job to AI, it’s very unlikely that the new baseline for everyone is going to be that of a $300k income. At least not anytime soon.

[simianwords]

sure but whatever mechanism allowed for jobs to exist a few years/decades after industrial revolution will apply here as well. with some jobs lost and chaos in the middle that is un-avoidable.

[reaperducer]

Question is, if the AI bros are right about a "new industrial revolution", will there be consumers to consume if all the wealth is concentrated in the top 1-2% of the population?

Who cares? That's two quarters away. What matters is that I got my Lambo and my speedboat today. Let the poors worry about the future.

[nkrisc]

People can choose to not consume crap they don’t need. They won’t, but they can.

Advertising is now just worthless noise to me because I generally don’t buy stuff anymore but what I need.

I can’t imagine why anyone would buy most of the crap I see advertised, but they do. Halloween was a recent example: how many tons of plastic shit for costumes was shipped from China only to be thrown away the next day? How much candy was bought? Even when I was 12 I started to see what a disgusting consumerist affair the whole thing was and it lost its appeal. And yet we have adults participating.

The ad machine exists because people let it be successful.

[FinnLobsien]

Would you make the same argument for smoking?

I think we’re in a world so dominated by the attention economy and things optimized to hook us in that it’s hard to just say “I quit”.

[nashashmi]

> They won’t, but they can.

That is the problem with this advice. “Can choose not to” is code to stop someone complaining. “Just don’t use it then”. It sounds equivalent to the “love it or leave it” slogan used in the 70s in America.

We don’t leave. We fight. We don’t stop using. We openly and publicly criticize

[lrvick]

Leaving it is the right choice though. The corpos will never care about you. I consume no ads, or Google software, and still do anything I want in the tech world.

[macintux]

I left Facebook, but its algorithm continues to actively encourage the divisiveness and misinformation that’s poisoning the world I live in.

Sometimes “you don’t have to participate” isn’t strong enough advice, not that I know what the answer actually is.

[lrvick]

Get yourself off the toxic platforms first, then immediate family and friends.

It is a bit like denormalizing smoking. It is a long game and a lot of education work but it is working.