Advertising has the appearance of representing an on-going revenue source for an increasing number of devices used in our daily lives by way of surveillance and creation of a picture of an individuals habits and psychology in order to manipulate said psychology to induce the individual to spend more money on literally worthless shit.

That is a threat to the fundamental stability of society.

Advertising is surveillance, and surveillance is a threat.

The dire state most western democracies have found themselves in is a direct consequence of the work big tech did over the last 15+ years.

AI is concerning in some aspects, yes, but the loss of a shared reality has nothing to do with that, and is even more scary.

It’s funny how the [very real] thing that normalizes the exploitation of user data, enables “reel casinos,” suffocates creators and replaces them with “influencers,” etc. is compared with the [still very abstract] danger of AI.

Even before big money was on the table, people didn’t blink an eye at starting to work for Google/Facebook, “solving fun tasks.”

> Advertising is an irritation

I think it's worse than that. Or at least, the products that have been built because of advertising are worse than that. Instagram/TikTok/Facebook are all ultimately just surfaces to serve ads, but they've wormed their way into their users' consciousness in fairly insidious ways

AI is a threat if you're a messy codebase, an unsolved math problem, or cancer. Otherwise you only have an improved quality of living to look forward to IMO.

Advertising turned brains of entire generation (or maybe a few) into mush.

All intellectual, psych and social scores are in free fall since introduction of ad-supported attention grabbing internet.

AI is theorethical threat. Advertising is a constant detriment to our brains, societies and culture.

If AI can mitigate a fraction of the damage that ads do it will have massive positive impact.

We live in times where everyone can pick their own flavor of apocalypse to be scared of. Ads are leading us into Idiocracy since ~2004 and made huge progress towards it.

Google and Meta's wealth came at the cost of civilization getting sucked dry of its attention and mental capacity.