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.
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Unfortunately this does not financially benefit the tv manufacturers, and may land them in trouble with the platforms they themselves advertise on (like Google).
They’re more likely to use AI to serve you more ads as an extra revenue stream; capitalism has gotta capital.
Sounds like a viable market gap for a new manufacturer!
Like this? 😱
I recently read Contact(the book by Carl Sagan, still need to watch the movie), which features a tech billionaire who built his wealth doing exactly that. He developed a chip that could block TV commercials, and later one to filter televangelists as well.
For a book that was published in the 80s and set in the late 90s, it’s prescient in a few very specific ways. We weren’t exactly communicating by Portable Telefax in 1999, but adblockers were not far away either.
He also wrote (in the non-fiction 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World), “I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”
That was goddamn prophetic
Would you consider EFax to be portable Telefax (I assume that’s what Telefax was) or even email?
I haven’t read it, so I may be misinterpreting the terms.
It’s not a device that Sagan goes into much detail about, aside from it being a new and less-than-reliable technology in the early parts of the story. I always imagined it as a laptop-sized, wireless fax machine using cellular networks to share data. Characters mostly use paper documents throughout the book, and while there are some sci-fi technologies like holographic displays that advance throughout the story, Sagan never describes anything like portable computers or smartphones. Even the internet(or its closest approximation) never goes beyond a rudimentary data-sharing network for astronomers, never open to the public.
A quick google search tells me EFax would probably work over that network, sending documents from a desktop straight to someone’s Portable Telefax like an email, so you’re not far off.
How would you describe SMS to people in the 80s?
“See how you can call people with your telephone? It’s like that, but you can send text messages instead. All telephones have a little screen to display the message.”
I don’t think people from the 80s would have much trouble understanding sms, tbh.
Or, and hear me out, you could say “portable fax” and be done with it. YOU are making it complicated by not being culturally acclimated to the timeframe when it was written. Everyone knew what faxes were, no explanation was necessary.
Portable fax: thing that sends and receives messages
Portable Fax IS how you describe SMS in the 80s.
I dont mean that your understanding is unimportant, but that you inherently understand what’s being described to a degree that to hear it described differently than you expect you reject what you hear in favor of assuming the folks in the 80s needed more than “portable fax” to understand what you are on about.
Pagers were in somewhat common use in the 60s, by 1980 wide area paging was on the market offering the ability to send text messages to portable devices anywhere in the country - I’d describe sms as two way pagers.
That’d work, but Sagan opted for portable fax.
Or perhaps an AI that blocks ads and then gives you buying recommendations based on products from their competitors.
Ah yes, I’ve been waiting for an ad block that replaces an ad with 2 more ads
Buying recommendations as in a list of products provided on request, rather than intrusive narratives that disrupt what you’re trying to watch.
You’ll never be able to buy that at like a Walmart of Best Buy type retailer. TVs these days are already just spy machines to serve ads. It’s a lovely idea, but it’ll never happen.
TVs are cheap right now like really cheap. I seriously doubt they’re selling them much above cost and making the money back on the advertising and information gathering.
I don’t think any of the TV manufacturers would bulk too much at selling you a TV but it’s going to be at a price of around the lifetime value of your watching habits. You can get a 50-60" reference monitor for about 10 grand. If there was a market for it Best buy would probably sell it.
Yep.
I’ve previously used PiHole and my smart TV got so much faster because it couldn’t load the BS.
Just using NextDNS or any other ad blocking DNS makes it work better.
The idea that AI would be used to prevent companies from making money seems a bit far fetched to me.
AI doesn’t require a company. There are already AI created by independent groups
In it’s current iteration, either you run a local model which has limitations that I think would prevent it from being used to this end (I don’t know that for sure, and am happy to find out if anyone does know), or you use a corporate one. Unfortunately corps seem largely to want to use AI to make money and one of the best ways to make money in the age of information is ads. There’s a reason they have become more and more prevalent despite the fact that so many people hate them.
Best chance it happening is by a open source app that you run on a shieldtv or HTPC and run your video through for filtering. Everything will probably be on a long delay so the video can be scrubbed. But this should be doable soonish.
It wouldn’t be a TV itself, it would be an extra box you feed the TV signal into for filtering, then out to the TV itself.
This has been done previously for language filtering with hilarious results. It was called “TVGuardian”, oh, almost 30 years ago now.
It translated “the Dick Van Dyke Show” to “Jerk Van Gay”.
TiVo used to have a commercial filter. The networks sued them. I don’t remember who won. This was a lifetime ago for most Lemmy users.
Here is a video (24:27) by Technology Connections talking about the TV Guardian. There’s also this video (20:59) by Ben Eater, who looks at the memory chip on the device to figure out how it works. It’s pretty neat, and I recommend both videos if you have some spare time.
I’m friends with a family who had one of those until maybe about 10 years ago when it stopped working.
“Asshole” became “idiot”.
IIRC “fuck” was skipped over entirely.
Some movies were unwatchable.
To be fair, Dick Van Dyke is ALREADY a hilarious name. Not even sure how that made it past 1950s censors who wouldn’t let Ricky and Lucy sleep in the same bed, or Barbra Eden show her belly button.
Because it’s his actual legal name. It’s not some snarky name they created for the show.
Tell that to Johnny Felatio.
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Meanwhile tv manufacturers are working on AI to sneak in more advertising.
That would be glorious.
But you’d definitely have to jailbreak your device and sideload it somehow.
Or pay to import one from a country where the govt doesn’t give a damn about piracy if it ever gets made.
Ad blocking is not piracy. It is not copyright infringement. It is not illegal. Given the right circumstances it could come to be, but it’d be a fine line to walk.
Agreed 100%.
But no business in the capitalist world where selling ads is a billion dollar industry is going to make this available. In fact they’ll fight it tooth and nail. All the way to the SCOTUS if they have to.
no business in the capitalist world where selling ads is a billion dollar industry is going to make this available
How about an open-hardware open-source project on e.g CrowdSupply (something like https://www.crowdsupply.com/jie-zou/rggber but dedicated) where everything is setup to do so efficiently, e.g an HDMI/HDMI box where you put the signal in, get the signal out, and on its own does nothing but cool looking visual filters, e.g from color to black&white, yet when the user reconfigure it, with community made filter, it removes ads?
A pet pieve of mine is people randomly sticking the term “AI” into a description of some particular tech solution.
You want ad blocking. (Which is based.) But you don’t want “AI”. If this can be done in a way that doesn’t qualify as “AI”, that would satisfy you, yes?
And using the term “AI” that way makes it clear you haven’t really thought through what you really even want in that feature. (Not that there’s anything particularly wrong with that, especially in a showerthoughts community, but it’s still kindof a “slaps me in the face” kind of thing.)
And the term “AI” is so imprecise anyway.
And particular kinds of “AI” are such a bubble right now. And that’s why everybody is sticking the word “AI” into random contexts for no fucking reason. But it’s also just a gimmick at best and a huge scam at worst.
And “AI” is inevitably bad about false positives and such.
I’d really rather see the word “magic” than “AI” in this context. Because at least that admits that this is an idle wish and not something you think actual real-world adult humans should be seeking venture capital to attempt.
I’m sorry for taking this out on you specifically. You’re definitely not the first person I’ve seen do this.
They have absolutely thought through what they want in terms of features and the features they described absolutely require machine learning as it stands today. I cannot think of any other methods to remove advertisements from objects in a live video feed like the pitcher mound example op provides.
I cannot think of any other methods
Exactly. What you’re describing isn’t “AI.” It’s “magic.” And “AI” can’t do what OP wants either.
No “AI” solution we have any reason to expect we’ll be able to create in anything approaching the foreseeable future is going to be able to do anything remotely like this without ridiculous amounts of false positives and/or false negatives.
By false positives in this case, I mean things like not coming back from the cool little slideshows until a minute past the end of the commercial break or obscuring important details of the show having falsely “concluded” that it’s a logo or some such.
And I would have assumed “without a lot of false positives” would have gone without saying. If OP is comfortable with lots of non-ad content blocked/obscured along with the ads, then I’ve got a 100% guaranteed zero-false-negatives solution that’ll fit OP’s requirements without involving a speck of “AI” anywhere that OP can implement right now: turn the TV off.
You could always just buy any TV with an an analog tuner and watch whatever’s on the air these days.
Interestingly, in the novel Contact by Carl Sagan a rich character got his money by selling a device that did more or less that.
I just want a good quality TV without a smart os built in.
Same! So hard to find and much more expensive when you do.
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.
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.
