While I get the spirit of your message, advertising has been around for over a century, and I don’t believe it has done near the damage to society over that timespan that AI will likely do in a decade (if we’re not careful and responsible).

I also don’t believe addiction and other psychological exploits are used for the sole purpose of ad revenue. There are other more direct forms of monetization involved, such as microtransactions and subscriptions.

If you really want to blame something, it really all comes down to one word:

Greed.

Spot on. Or because of addictiveness. Or impact on democracy. Or ruining people's ability to focus on anything. Those attention grabbing algos havent been designed by non-technical people.

He's not even leaving "because AI". He's literally leaving to focus more on AI stuff.

> I plan to study how AI agents debug code and whether debugging tools that can make them more effective at that.

> I want to use AI agents to bring some of my hobby project ideas to life.

> I’m keen to reap the benefits of AI

and addresses the anti-AI view:

> AI detractors think that AI won’t really work. I think it will. (ed. for brev)

The main reason then is the concern of the velocity of the rollout and the increased pervasiveness of AI. Too fast, too much.

When the both ends of your platform continue buying and selling you tend to not stand in the way. I personally can't believe these stupid ads sell anything at all. Since they call it a 'business model' software people don't think about it too much.

Advertising is an irritation. AI is a threat.