My favorite ads are the ones that can easily be solved with minimal human interaction. Apple released an ad for their “rewind” feature where the Apple Watch records everyone’s audio and transcribes it. Their shining example is if the waitress talks too fast you can stare at your watch instead of asking her to repeat herself.
Ironically. When I was in the Nordics many moons ago and rang up the hostel with my beginner English to ask a question, the receptionist rattled off the answer at 300 words per minute, of which I understood about none. Upon me asking her to repeat, she did in fact repeat, at the same speed and with the same result. I thanked her, hung up the phone and to this day have no idea what she said.
You know what people with hearing problems do actively use when they can, especially in their non-native languages? Subtitles.
If my 70% deaf parents had this, they wouldn’t use it (much like their hearing aids)
Joe Rogan is their target demographic.
Thanks to uBlock Origin, I don’t see any ads!
-^this message is sponsored by uBlock Origin^
Raid: Shadow Legends
Couldn’t block that one, could ya bub?
there’s sponsorblock for youtube, so I don’t see most of those either.
I’ve been seeing ads made by ai and they’re even worse. Just saw one on YouTube for glasses “that change colour with just the touch of a finger!” And had ai video of smiling people at the beach tapping their lenses to change the glass colour multiple times, like the glass itself has rgb. Best part is, the fake product didn’t even work consistently in the ai video and didn’t change colour when they tapped sometimes.
I genuinely don’t understand how an ad that’s so obviously fake is tricking enough people to be worth spending an entire ad budget on.
Scams actually work better when they have obvious mistakes. It helps weed out people that might figure out the scam before they’ve handed over their money, saving the scammers time and effort and making the scam more efficient.
They’re targeting a vulnerable population. Grifters are going to grift and things are easier than ever for them. If you make it too hard to return and most people keep your crap, especially if its $20 or less. It would be nice if they found grifts that didn’t clog up our landfills and thrift stores but I guess this is better than all the identity theft. I also can’t wait to see what this decades hot new MLM is. Its the selling courses on selling courses bs thats hot now.
I really wish people would start buying this drek with credit cards and doing charge backs. Let’s see how long these fuckers last when they’re paying the cost of product, shipping, and card processing fees.
Jk, I know the margins on this shit is massive
“Hey AI does my plant hate me?”
Pretty much sums up the average AI user.
I can write my own Grade 8 essays, thank you very much.
One time I successfully used an AI to troubleshoot a sound driver problem in Linux. It was maybe a little faster than casting about on stack exchange. I had to prompt it like 30 times though because it kept being confidently wrong. I didn’t continue to use it.
Maybe there are people out there who need something to suggest “sandwich”. You buy water from the water company because you wouldn’t have water without them. I would be embarrassed to shop from a company that claims to sell “intelligence”
I used Claude terminal and it immediately identified that i had a service that constantly sent small packets to my headset and since all packets have to use the smallest ones it was crackling sometimes due to latency
Fized that and set the minimum to a reasonable amount
It had its uses
Hey Gemini, can you email my boss and make it look like I did my job?
Hey Gemini, text my wife
Hey Gemini, can you justify my behaviour to my wife and explain why it’s wrong she’s mad at me?
Hey Gemini, can you fake my resume and make me sound good for every job posting around me?
Hey Gemini, experience this tragic irony for me
NOOOOOO!!!
Hey Gemini, can you fuck this guy’s wife?
Please don’t Gemini :(
And, they all respond by using Gemini.
Might as well not even be in the loop, just let the machines talk to each other.
There’s people still not using adblockers and they get ai generated ads about ai shoved down their throats. Why are you doing this to yourselves?
Related, but the amount of tech and/or privacy adjacent youtubers I have seen complain about ads, about what they’re doing to be less susceptible, how this or that change is TOO much, and so on if baffling. JUST USE AN ADBLOCKER. There’s always one comment pointing that out, with a derailed conversation below, but most of the comments will be “actually, if you repeatedly close then reopen a YouTube video for 10-15 times, it will not show the ad on the next open!” with a million “don’t tell, now Google is gonna patch!” replies. I wish I was joking.
If you don’t use an Adblocker, get one, NOW. It takes 30s. If you think “it’s not that bad”, install it anyways and give it a try for a week. Disable it. See if it’s really “not that bad”, lmao.
Install them on your parents’ devices. Your grandparents’. Siblings. Friends.
I was using my mom’s computer the other day and I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t seeing any ads on her browser. Then I remembered that I had installed uBlock origin for her. I love when past me does current me a solid. I’ve also told her that she can go on Faceborg if she wants but I will not help her with it in any way (I can’t since I haven’t been on it since 2008). She tells people I “refuse to let her use it” which is not strictly accurate but I feel pride anyway when she says that.
I like to think of “parents and tech” as “kids and toys”. They don’t understand it, they just want to use it and enjoy it. And they certainly don’t care what problematic ethics are involved. So just like with kids, we have to be more careful and caring. And we definitely don’t want to overwhelm them with too much information.
Is uBlock Origin still the king? Been using it since it came out and I genuinely don’t understand the ads problem. Sponsorblock is also a huge help.
AdNauseam takes a more actively hostile approach to advertising. IIRC Google took it off their plugin platform because they consider it malicious. Which I suppose it is, towards ads.
deleted by creator
Meanwhile I ask Gemini “Hey Gemini, can this Google product do X?”
It responds "Here is a list of features for Google’s Product:
… Does W! Does X! Does Y! …Me: clicks source for listed feature X… gets sent to post on Product’s support forum: “Can Product do X?” “No, it can’t do X.”
Thanks Gemini!
There was some AI ad where someone pointed their camera to their messy shelf and were like “Hey, how do I clean up my shelf?” and the AI was like “try rearranging the smaller items first” and about a billion people went “no shit”.
Only 6.9 killowatt hours to come up with that recommendation. A bargain.
I’ve been seeing ChatGPT ads recently that, I think, are trying to position their AI as something old lonely people can talk to when they have nobody else in their lives. It’s really quite sad.
I’m old and alone, but there’s no fucking way I’m going to talk a machine. Because, then I’d be old, alone, AND pitiful.
Hey here youre talking to real people at least!
You can always talk to us lemmings
I heard a podcast (maybe This American Life) that spent time with a woman out in the sticks, physically no longer able to be active, all kids many hours away, who was given one of these by her local fire department. She had been scoring lower and lower on cognitive tests for several years, and after getting this thing she reversed that trend. It was creepy, and her kids didn’t like it, but it was there and her kids were not, and it clearly had improved her quality of life. It’s sad she didn’t have human connections in her daily life, but given her circumstances, the thing had upside.
Also sad is this is one of the few things ChatGPT would actually be good at. It’s basically what it was designed for.
stupid is growing faster than ever
Some of these ads actually makes me think that artificial intelligence is for the naturally dumb.
