We mostly watch news and sports in my house. So unfortunately, live TV. Occasionally we watch other things. I mute the commercials and browse my phone when they’re on.
But I would love a TV that is smart enough to auto hide & mute every kind of ad. Even little logos on the athletes’ uniforms. Hide the ads on the pitcher’s mound. Hide the billboards and signs in the stadium. Show some cool little generic animation, music video, or slide show during commercial breaks. Hide the damned popup window ads and scrolling ads that some channels do. Remove product placements from movies and shows. Basically make all ads completely vanish.
So, the best part about this example is that it is well intended but would have so many side effects it would be hilarious to see someone try to make it work. My assumption is that you want it to just have regular uniform colors where the ads are now.
The first assumption is that the team logo and colors aren’t advertising. They are! Yeah, they make bank on tickets, but the real money is in merchandising. Merchandising only works because the people associate it with the team, so team uniforms at their core are ads. They weren’t as much in the past when the majority of income was from tickets and concessions, but they are now. An easier version of this example is auto racing, where the car colors and entire paint job is an advertisement with a bunch of smaller ads plastered all over. Would the AI need to recolor all the cars to avoid color based advertising like bright yellow and black for DeWalt?
That also means that other media that exists to prop up sales in other areas are also ads. A lot of cartoons like Transformers, GI Joe, and My Little Pony existed as advertisements for the toys. The best way this gets convoluted is that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) was originally a comic book, which someone thought would be a great starting point for selling toys and to sell the toys they made a cartoon. But then they stopped selling the toys for a while, so the cartoon reruns weren’t really ads at that point in time the same way they were originally. So does the TMNT cartoon always count as an ad because of the intent at the time it was created, or is it only an ad while the thing it is advertising is being sold?
Then you get into the fake ads in movies for things that don’t exist. Are they ads? What about media where a real world thing is part of the plot, like how the military being in a movie is likely to be intended as an ad for the military?
I’m sure the idea is that the AI would know what the user means by ads, but the viewer will always be surprised when things they don’t realize are ads get blocked and it would have to adapt to each individual viewer. Even more fun when multiple people try to watch something and they aren’t on the same page about ads that impact the ability to watch!
I still love the post, but thinking how it could play out even if it worked is kind of funny.