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Researchers fear a scenario in which smart speakers feed sleepers subliminal ads

sciencemag.org

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Re: Researchers fear a scenario in which smart speakers feed sleepers subliminal ads

#81
post #11

Every morning I ask my three-year old if she dreamt something nice. "No", she said a few weeks ago, "just ads".

I have an 8 yo that _really_ wants to do videos. Just this morning, she helped her mother cook the meal, but she wanted to roleplay as if she was recording a YT video like the ones she watches. It was honestly hilarious - I was HW just across a door - but at the same time frightening when you think about how much this new media permeates our society. P.S.: Having already lost the war with my daughters from a previous…

Our 13 year old has the youtube culture ingrained as well, with a lot of things he feels like he should voice his opinion even if nobody asked, or he comes out with some BS that he knows nothing about, but instead of going "I don't know" he'll just say it with confidence. I'm sure that's a youtube thing, because silence and not having an opinion won't get you those dank views.

Is this my "get off my lawn" moment?

Re: Researchers fear a scenario in which smart speakers feed sleepers subliminal ads

#82
post #3

Lightspeed briefs! As seen in your dreams! It takes a long duration of stimulus to influence our dreams and even after the influence, the dream can be in any shape. They had people play tetris for three days straight and only 60% dreamed of it. They plan on target specific sleep states specifically but that means that something has access to my brain waves and is allowed to make sound while I am sleeping? I am all fo…

That's not so hard to do when we have pulse meters connected to our wrist and sleep monitoring programs on our phones to improve oyr bedtime habits.

I use Sleep As Android. It has a "lullaby" feature. It has "lucid dreaming" prompting. It has (allegedly) good REM detection.

Add those features and one large donation from an ad company... Wait, I see a lynch mob heading towards me.

Re: Researchers fear a scenario in which smart speakers feed sleepers subliminal ads

#84

They are kind of doing it already e.g. I hate when ads exploit classical music for trivial purposes. Whenever I hear Libiamo ne' lieti calici now my mind instantly fills with pizza ads. And once an association is made, it doesn't go away. Ads attach themselves to positive memories like parasites. Whenever you think back to your first kiss, a nice family moment, a cherished memory of going out with friends – here they…

> when ads exploit ... music

https://boingboing.net/2021/06/14/facebook-asked-pink-floyds...

Pink Floyd's Roger Waters:

> It's a request for the rights to use my song, "Another Brick in the Wall II" in the making of a film to promote Instagram.

> So it's a missive. It's a missive from Mark Zuckerberg, to me, right? Arrived this morning with an offer of a huge, huge amount of money. And the answer is, "Fuck you. No fucking way."

Re: Researchers fear a scenario in which smart speakers feed sleepers subliminal ads

#85
post #51
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW I have a pihole running on my local, but my Samsung TV still shows YT ads because I cannot disable cdn.samsung.com or the TV will not work, and I think the ads are being served via this domain to my TV....

Connect your own media center. I use an RPi 4. It can play netflix and youtube in Kodi, for example. Admittedly there are many minor compat issues, of course.

Yup, will check this out thanks

Re: Researchers fear a scenario in which smart speakers feed sleepers subliminal ads

#86
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW I have a pihole running on my local, but my Samsung TV still shows YT ads because I cannot disable cdn.samsung.com or the TV will not work, and I think the ads are being served via this domain to my TV....

Get yourself a Nvidia shield. It has no advertisement build in and even can turn on and off the host TV. Also, I would advise you to disconnect your smart TV entirely.

Interesting, I had not seen this.

Re: Researchers fear a scenario in which smart speakers feed sleepers subliminal ads

#87

They are kind of doing it already e.g. I hate when ads exploit classical music for trivial purposes. Whenever I hear Libiamo ne' lieti calici now my mind instantly fills with pizza ads. And once an association is made, it doesn't go away. Ads attach themselves to positive memories like parasites. Whenever you think back to your first kiss, a nice family moment, a cherished memory of going out with friends – here they…

Advertisers pay for a moment of your attention and get a lifetime of brand presence in your memory.

Re: Researchers fear a scenario in which smart speakers feed sleepers subliminal ads

#88

On the bright side, smart speakers aren't even a little bit essential, so it's easy enough to just not buy them if this starts happening. I don't think the value proposition of an always-on device connected to a vast advertising network is very high to begin with. Throw in subliminal advertising and you'd have to be very... dedicated... to want such a device. If it succeeds even a little, though, they'll bake it into…

> a giant active noise cancelling headphone cup to sleep in

This sounds like hiring big aggressive monkeys to fend off small troublesome monkeys. Edit: I mean, how do you protect from this headphone doing exactly the same thing?

Re: Researchers fear a scenario in which smart speakers feed sleepers subliminal ads

#90
We have gotten to the point where the simple (and arguably essential) task of individuals learning about what the economy is producing is degenerating into a societal gangrene. No, this is not all the handywork of Zuck and the "don't be evil" company. All the conditions for their "success" have been engineered in the previous decades of the adoption and scaling of TV tech: The captive population of couch potato, oversized "consumers", the behind the scene rat races of "brands", the ever so inventive and smart adtech people (you always need talented and willing accomplishers to dehumanize a situation).

It goes deeper: why is forced consumption such an existential need that must be serviced at all costs? Because without the promise of a consumerist bliss always around the corner all the internal frictions, deep dissatisfaction and social fracture lines come to the fore...

One can only hope that digital information systems will at some point switch from being part of the problem to being part of the solution...

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