ep1032's recent activity
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Comment on OpenAI’s H1 2025: $4.3b in income, $13.5b in loss in ~tech
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Comment on Gianmarco Soresi: Thief of Joy in ~tv
ep1032 LinkThis was the best special I've watched in months, thank you for the reference!This was the best special I've watched in months, thank you for the reference!
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Comment on The rise of Whatever in ~tech
ep1032 (edited )Link ParentI completely agree with you about crypto, and strongly recommend Folding Idea's video on the same topic if you have two hours to burn. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g Its worth...I completely agree with you about crypto, and strongly recommend Folding Idea's video on the same topic if you have two hours to burn. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
Its worth pointing out (and is not included in the video) that a completely unregulated financial environment does have value, in finance, which seems to be the one sector that has embraced crypto. Though whether that is a good thing is a separate conversation.
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Comment on Looking for games like wordle in ~games
I honestly think that AI is going to make the concept of an advertisement outdated. Like, sure, advertisements will still exist, because why not.
But right now, we are living in a world where it is technologically too difficult to do subtle product placement. Product placement sits like a sore thumb in most places where it is tried.
Similarly, it is extremely difficult to change, dynamically, the way people communicate. If you want to make a movie script more right or left leaning, or softer on big oil or whatever, you need to pay people to rewrite the script.
And the people producing that product are going to push back on such requests. Partly because each of these requests take time to implement, but more fundamentally because right now we differentiate between advertising and actual products. We do this, because producing a product requires capital, and advertising undermines trust in that product. So there is a built in social force for people to protect the investment they have made in their product and their brand's credibility by ensuring the consumer can differentiate between the product and advertising related to that product.
But AI undermines all three of these things.
And it introduces the ability to manipulate all three of these things on a much higher abstraction level.
For example, right now if CoCa-Cola wants a product placement in a movie, then they could ask a character to buy a coke in a scene where they go to a bar, and characters could potentially do so. This requires some coordination during the filming to set up, and as a result a movie could only realistically do so many requests like this without bogging down production. But in a post-AI era, how much do you think that Coke would be willing to pay, to update a movie pre-release so that every drink in every background shot is carbonated? How much would they pay to ensure that such a filter was run on every movie that comes out this year?
How much would Fox pay to change every TV in the background of every shot to have their color scheme, even if too blurry to see in shot?
Do you think Ford would be willing to pay to increase the percentage of automobiles on every show shown on ABC to be 50% pickup trucks? Would Toyota pay for it to be 50% sedans?
What if you could automatically update every time a radio host or newspaper editor or youtube influencer used a metaphor about cars, to instead automatically say "Ford F-150"?
Do you think a political campaign would be interested in slowing down text messages in key counties only for people who have discussed more liberal or conservative topics with friends in the last 6 months leading into an election? Facebook and twitter are already hiding or promoting user posts based on this metric, how different would it be to do it to interpersonal communication?
If advertisements themselves can be AI generated right before being shown to an individual person, how much could a marketing firm get a hotel company to pay to ensure that whenever a person is shown in an ad, that they are shown standing in a hilton, and not a hayatt?
We can already pay Google to prioritize specific search results, how much would changing the language it uses in its responses be worth?
What if you can change the language, for different socioeconomic groups?
What if you can change the language those socioeconomic groups use themselves? Hell, just start with autocorrect. Would Ford be interested in ensuring that 20% of the time, when you type car for the next 3 months, your phone autocorrects to the word pickup?
Net neutrality was never passed in this country, so what if when you sent a message, your message was just updated automatically after you sent it, and you never knew? The person you sent the message to wouldn't find it weird that you said pickup instead of car, how would you ever know? Surely, doing that would be valuable, wouldn't it? What if we only did it 5% of the time? Would anyone notice? Would that change spending habits? Would that flip elections?
What could be a more effective form of advertising than changing the language people use, the language people hear, and the way the world they see around them looks?