The Untouchables
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@futurebird I question the assertion that a significant portion of people who have taken explicit measures to opt out of advertising are using chatgpt - I feel like there must be a huge overlap between technical users who are negative about advertising and about ai
I would suspect that those who opt out of ads are less likely to use an LLM for some reasons, but also more likely for others. Not everyone sees avoiding ads through a semi-political lens. Ads are annoying and when people have the resources, or knowledge to avoid them many will.
Ads are just annoying and they waste your time. So a lot of people are in that basket.
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I would suspect that those who opt out of ads are less likely to use an LLM for some reasons, but also more likely for others. Not everyone sees avoiding ads through a semi-political lens. Ads are annoying and when people have the resources, or knowledge to avoid them many will.
Ads are just annoying and they waste your time. So a lot of people are in that basket.
Now there is a lesson and a lane for growth and education in this: ads are not well-liked or popular. It's often how I connect with people who don't agree with me on much of anything.
Doesn't the world feel junky and filled with ads? What if it wasn't like that?
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The Untouchables
This pitch calls them the "untouched audience." These are people who avoid ads. Sometimes I wonder just how large we are? I think it is likely that a significant portion of people with disposable income, the exact people advertisers want to reach, are also doing their best to avoid ever seeing any of those ads.
OpenAI has been planning to introduce ads to chatGPT for about a year. Sounds like they have done some trials already.
Were the ads even clearly identified as ads?
@futurebird I wonder what the Venn diagram of this "untouched audience" and people who won't touch ChatGPT either would look like. More specifically, I wonder if it's basically just a circle.
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@futurebird Talk about actively fighting consent.... They know they want to target the ones who actively avoid being targeted.
#NoAI #NoSlop@zipkid @futurebird The thing about advertising and consent is that they don’t work together. In the old days people mostly just accepted ads as a mandatory but not too annoying a thing.
But now? Every screen I see would be basically filled with ads if I didn’t block them. On webpages they are often in front of what I want to see.
If they were to ask for consent for ads, very few people would give it.
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@futurebird Talk about actively fighting consent.... They know they want to target the ones who actively avoid being targeted.
#NoAI #NoSlop@zipkid @futurebird Fighting consent has been the tech industry modus operandi since for a while now, "to be fair".
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@futurebird I wonder what the Venn diagram of this "untouched audience" and people who won't touch ChatGPT either would look like. More specifically, I wonder if it's basically just a circle.
Ad blocking people is a big circle. LLM skeptics is a smaller circle inside of the bigger circle with just a little bit of the circle peeking out of the edge.
Most people don't like ads, most don't know that they could avoid them all or cannot afford to avoid them. But I suspect that the advertising industry has been hiding just how many people are to some degree hard or impossible to reach. Since if that's true their product is kind of worthless.
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Now there is a lesson and a lane for growth and education in this: ads are not well-liked or popular. It's often how I connect with people who don't agree with me on much of anything.
Doesn't the world feel junky and filled with ads? What if it wasn't like that?
@futurebird sigh, I even have a hard time getting people to agree with that
here, there's still a big business in those paper advertising circulars that are in newspaper form factor, like from grocery stores and hardware stores and churches and real estate agencies and basically every physical business. like, it's a common job for kids to drag around big wagons filled with them, dumping them into people's mailboxes, from which point they go straight into people's trash cans (or recycling bins, in the best case). you used to have to go to the post office and explicitly opt out of them (which consisted of them giving you a big "NEJ TAK" sticker to put onto your mailbox) - now that we've dismantled our postal service, I honestly don't know how you would go about this today. I said something once to a group of people about how banning this would be an easy and huge environmental win - several (otherwise reasonable) people immediately jumped on me with stuff like "oh, but those jobs are really good for kids" and "but then how will old people know what's on sale" and …
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Ad blocking people is a big circle. LLM skeptics is a smaller circle inside of the bigger circle with just a little bit of the circle peeking out of the edge.
Most people don't like ads, most don't know that they could avoid them all or cannot afford to avoid them. But I suspect that the advertising industry has been hiding just how many people are to some degree hard or impossible to reach. Since if that's true their product is kind of worthless.
@futurebird @DamonWakes In The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, Cory Doctorow describes how Facebook use KPIs to show that people were lapping up short form videos on the platform l, replacing local news. It worked for the advertising companies, but after a while the accountants noticed there were not much in sales. Facebook discontinued there short form local news push and went on to the "Metasphere".
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Ad blocking people is a big circle. LLM skeptics is a smaller circle inside of the bigger circle with just a little bit of the circle peeking out of the edge.
Most people don't like ads, most don't know that they could avoid them all or cannot afford to avoid them. But I suspect that the advertising industry has been hiding just how many people are to some degree hard or impossible to reach. Since if that's true their product is kind of worthless.
@futurebird @DamonWakes Advertising works well enough today that it justifies outlays for the buyers (I have some visibility into marketing to sales funnel tracking at a company that buys ads.) I think this is about forcibly expanding the inputs into the marketing funnel, but even if they did that, there isn't a linear relation from increasing leads to sales.
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Ad blocking people is a big circle. LLM skeptics is a smaller circle inside of the bigger circle with just a little bit of the circle peeking out of the edge.
Most people don't like ads, most don't know that they could avoid them all or cannot afford to avoid them. But I suspect that the advertising industry has been hiding just how many people are to some degree hard or impossible to reach. Since if that's true their product is kind of worthless.
@futurebird @DamonWakes
Remember that advertisers want dumb people they can influence Ad-blocking tools require a certain competence and level of critical thinking to figure out the scams and install something useful.That’s why this pitch doesn’t make sense unless they can hide the ads in the output.
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@futurebird @DamonWakes Advertising works well enough today that it justifies outlays for the buyers (I have some visibility into marketing to sales funnel tracking at a company that buys ads.) I think this is about forcibly expanding the inputs into the marketing funnel, but even if they did that, there isn't a linear relation from increasing leads to sales.
@futurebird @DamonWakes If you think about what's going on and apply it through an analogy to dating apps, forcibly showing your profile to a bunch of people who don't want to see dating profiles does not lead to getting more dates, no matter how many more people have seen the profile.
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@futurebird @DamonWakes
Remember that advertisers want dumb people they can influence Ad-blocking tools require a certain competence and level of critical thinking to figure out the scams and install something useful.That’s why this pitch doesn’t make sense unless they can hide the ads in the output.
Advertising and propaganda work on everyone. Being "smart" even knowing exactly how ads work isn't really a protection.
"You are NOT immune..."
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Ad blocking people is a big circle. LLM skeptics is a smaller circle inside of the bigger circle with just a little bit of the circle peeking out of the edge.
Most people don't like ads, most don't know that they could avoid them all or cannot afford to avoid them. But I suspect that the advertising industry has been hiding just how many people are to some degree hard or impossible to reach. Since if that's true their product is kind of worthless.
@futurebird @DamonWakes I wonder if ChatGPT will help set up a piHole when asked
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@futurebird I avoid both ads and LLMs. So they're out of luck with me.
️@Razemix @futurebird big same, can't avoid the radio ads unfortunately, but there are many stations to switch to
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Advertising and propaganda work on everyone. Being "smart" even knowing exactly how ads work isn't really a protection.
"You are NOT immune..."
@futurebird @DamonWakes
Not to the same extent. There’s a reason so many scams are directed against old people.I’m not saying advertising doesn’t work on smart people. I’m saying it doesn’t work as cheaply.
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@futurebird sigh, I even have a hard time getting people to agree with that
here, there's still a big business in those paper advertising circulars that are in newspaper form factor, like from grocery stores and hardware stores and churches and real estate agencies and basically every physical business. like, it's a common job for kids to drag around big wagons filled with them, dumping them into people's mailboxes, from which point they go straight into people's trash cans (or recycling bins, in the best case). you used to have to go to the post office and explicitly opt out of them (which consisted of them giving you a big "NEJ TAK" sticker to put onto your mailbox) - now that we've dismantled our postal service, I honestly don't know how you would go about this today. I said something once to a group of people about how banning this would be an easy and huge environmental win - several (otherwise reasonable) people immediately jumped on me with stuff like "oh, but those jobs are really good for kids" and "but then how will old people know what's on sale" and …
@Tak @futurebird how to go about it now? Get your typewriter, write "NEJ TAK" put some clear tape on top for protect it from moisture and stick it on your post box.
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Now there is a lesson and a lane for growth and education in this: ads are not well-liked or popular. It's often how I connect with people who don't agree with me on much of anything.
Doesn't the world feel junky and filled with ads? What if it wasn't like that?
@futurebird @Tak Super anecdotal, but I don't think I know anybody who avoids LLM stuff who doesn't also use an ad blocker as a rule (not that I know anybody who admits to using LLMs)
I live a relatively ad free life and it's always a shock to me when I brush up against how prevalent it is for people who are more accepting. When I see/hear an ad, unless it's a person independently sharing their own work, I'm like "I know who I won't be buying from."
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@Tak @futurebird how to go about it now? Get your typewriter, write "NEJ TAK" put some clear tape on top for protect it from moisture and stick it on your post box.
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Ad blocking people is a big circle. LLM skeptics is a smaller circle inside of the bigger circle with just a little bit of the circle peeking out of the edge.
Most people don't like ads, most don't know that they could avoid them all or cannot afford to avoid them. But I suspect that the advertising industry has been hiding just how many people are to some degree hard or impossible to reach. Since if that's true their product is kind of worthless.
@futurebird @DamonWakes FWIW I find the term "AI skeptics" insulting and inaccurate.
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@futurebird sigh, I even have a hard time getting people to agree with that
here, there's still a big business in those paper advertising circulars that are in newspaper form factor, like from grocery stores and hardware stores and churches and real estate agencies and basically every physical business. like, it's a common job for kids to drag around big wagons filled with them, dumping them into people's mailboxes, from which point they go straight into people's trash cans (or recycling bins, in the best case). you used to have to go to the post office and explicitly opt out of them (which consisted of them giving you a big "NEJ TAK" sticker to put onto your mailbox) - now that we've dismantled our postal service, I honestly don't know how you would go about this today. I said something once to a group of people about how banning this would be an easy and huge environmental win - several (otherwise reasonable) people immediately jumped on me with stuff like "oh, but those jobs are really good for kids" and "but then how will old people know what's on sale" and …
@Tak @futurebird Wow, you have to get an "official" thing? That's bonkers. Here you can get a "No junk mail" sticker/sign/whatever and that works. Some of them are polite.
Whenever the "jobs for kids" thing comes up in conversation, I point out that when I see people doing it, I point out that training kids to accept demeaning/unnecessary work as an opportunity doesn't help their long term prospects, and neither does being exploited
