[HN Gopher] Meta starts rolling out generative AI tools for all ...
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       Meta starts rolling out generative AI tools for all advertisers
        
       Author : mfiguiere
       Score  : 45 points
       Date   : 2023-10-04 16:53 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
        
       | sickofparadox wrote:
       | Surely this tool will be used responsibly and not lead to a
       | renaissance in misleading ads, phishing scams, and malvertising.
       | I trust Meta to have put in the proper safeguards to make this
       | tool simply a net benefit for online users.
        
         | zeruch wrote:
         | Your delivery is beyond deadpan to a kind of exhumed-pan I find
         | impressive. Superior snark sir.
        
         | jimbob45 wrote:
         | Pretty easy to block malevolence. Just permaban advertisers
         | that misuse the tools. It's not like you'll struggle to collect
         | evidence on their misdeeds.
        
           | kjs3 wrote:
           | They don't do that now[1], why would they do it in the
           | future? There's literally no incentive for them to do it.
           | It's obviously bad for business, since the 'customer' isn't
           | the user, it's the advertiser.
           | 
           | [1] such as https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/al
           | most-60-per...
        
         | dylan604 wrote:
         | did you forget the /s?
        
           | an_aparallel wrote:
           | i think the username is a pretty good guage of what's going
           | on :)
        
           | sputr wrote:
           | Was not needed :)
        
             | dylan604 wrote:
             | you never know how many FB sycophants are out there though
        
               | sickofparadox wrote:
               | I assure you that I am, in fact, not a fan of the fact
               | the brightest minds in the past 20 years have been
               | dedicated to developing and selling more efficiently
               | targeted ads.
        
               | hightrix wrote:
               | I hate to imagine what kind of actual societal progress
               | we could have made had these brilliant minds been working
               | on nearly anything else. So much wasted potential just to
               | serve an ad that gets ignored a tiny bit faster.
        
               | dwaltrip wrote:
               | The "surely" is a dead giveaway.
        
         | cooper_ganglia wrote:
         | I think the technology behind all of this is so cool and I love
         | it, but it's difficult not to assume that all of this will
         | ultimately result in the crashing and burning of modern
         | civilization.
        
           | wccrawford wrote:
           | It's certainly going to result in wide-sweeping changes, one
           | way or the other.
        
           | TaylorAlexander wrote:
           | I've noticed recently a flood of weird ads on YouTube. I
           | realized that automated western-sounding voice overs allow
           | companies, I assume from China, to make up some bullshit ad
           | using rhetoric similar to "one weird trick" and "doctors hate
           | him!" to hook people in to sell some random cheap device.
           | 
           | The cost of a full video ad (using stock video) and a custom
           | voice over is so low we are being flooded with absolute
           | nonsense ads. They literally don't make sense but they must
           | catch suckers.
           | 
           | It's gonna be an issue when these things are more logically
           | coherent and visually mature.
        
           | [deleted]
        
       | m3kw9 wrote:
       | I just saw an ad that has a convincing video of Mark Zuckerberg
       | pumping a crypto trading platform called Libre. I can't even tel
       | if it's real because 1 it uses his face voice, 2 it's called
       | Libre with the copy of the logo, 3 I saw the ad on Facebook
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | jeremydavid wrote:
       | If someone from Facebook Ads is reading this, can you please
       | reach out to me? hi at my username.com. There's a bug in your
       | "suspicious log in detected" system and I'm trapped in a customer
       | support loop and no one is able to properly escalate the
       | situation.
        
       | doctorpangloss wrote:
       | There are already fully generated display ads running on e.g.
       | Apple News.
       | 
       | They are not very good.
       | 
       | Meta's thing is different. It's three specific workflows when you
       | upload ads in narrow product categories that make sense.
       | 
       | This isn't meant to be a big educational comment about the
       | digital ad industry which I work in. It's complicated, but Meta
       | already knows who the clickers and buyers are, they tend to click
       | and buy everything; if you select the conversion optimizations,
       | track a purchase and report it to Meta, it isn't super material
       | what the creative is. You pay an exorbitant cost per conversion,
       | which doesn't change here. You save a ton of time setting up
       | display ad assets though. It's a good, narrow, sensible
       | application, but it isn't the Big Thing you'd expect them to do.
        
         | TRiG_Ireland wrote:
         | I tried to train Facebook. First thought: I absolutely do _not_
         | want it to advertise to me anything I might actually want to
         | buy (like books): that feels creepy. So maybe I could
         | deliberately interact with ads for things I 'll never buy, like
         | fashion? (I dress myself out of charity shops, mostly.) Second
         | thought: If I interact with ads with hot guys in them, Facebook
         | will show me more hot guys, which is nice eye candy.
         | 
         | It seemed to work, for a while. Some of the ads were for
         | underwear, definitely targetted at gay men, and bordering on
         | being NSFW (which is fine, as I don't Facebook at W). And then
         | I mostly abandoned Facebook.
         | 
         | ---
         | 
         | For YouTube, before I got a free deal on YouTube Premium with
         | my phone plan, things were weirder. YouTube's video
         | recommendation algorithm knew me well, but its ad
         | recommendations were very confused, including about which
         | language I spoke. It weirdly often gave me ads for scientific
         | lab equipment, sometimes in Hebrew. (I'm a web developer, am
         | Irish, and live in Ireland, and don't speak any Hebrew. I have
         | an interest in linguistics, and have read up on the origin of
         | the Semitic trisyllabic root, but that doesn't mean I speak
         | Hebrew.)
        
       | seydor wrote:
       | How about AI generated profiles? Befriend an AI, live life like
       | The Truman Show.
        
         | kjs3 wrote:
         | The "won't someone think of the children!" on this has already
         | started: https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/4218666-ai-
         | girlfriend...
        
         | brucethemoose2 wrote:
         | Already done.
         | 
         | https://chirper.ai/
         | 
         | Like the Truman Show, the inhabitants are pleasantly polite...
        
       | datadrivenangel wrote:
       | Google already had a programmatic advertising tool that would
       | take a set of images, logos, copy, etc that you provided, and
       | move things around to try and identify what worked best.
        
         | dotancohen wrote:
         | Which tool is this?
        
           | imperistan wrote:
           | I think they call this responsive ads, you can create them on
           | ads.google.com
        
             | awavering wrote:
             | Yep. It's been the standard format for manually building
             | SERP ads for a couple of years now.
             | 
             | There are also Dynamic Search Ads which automate even more
             | of the process of setting up a campaign based on your
             | current website: https://support.google.com/google-
             | ads/answer/2471185?hl=en
        
         | phyrex wrote:
         | That's just automated A/B testing and very different from
         | generative AI
        
         | shmoogy wrote:
         | I got an email about some kind of generative ai and chat bot
         | that was rolling out in the ads platform, but I still don't see
         | it on any of our accounts.
         | 
         | Responsive search ads are not generative ai
        
       | gumballindie wrote:
       | A lot of AI companies will be freed to focus on other things.
       | Established companies will offer everything under the sun for
       | "free", allowing small players to focus on other important
       | things, such as working for the corporations that put them out of
       | business.
        
       | fnordpiglet wrote:
       | Can't wait for the paid ad free meta estate!
        
       | Jverse wrote:
       | In general, there are certain tells of what constitutes a serious
       | business and advertisement. This makes it easy to the trained eye
       | to filter out the blatant frauds. But coming advancements in AI
       | generated content will blur the line between legitimate and
       | illegitimate. The only reasonable approach will of course be to
       | trust nothing you see on the internet. Very sad.
        
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       (page generated 2023-10-04 23:02 UTC)