Limitless Adscapes
Listen to this post
“I love that Facebook shows me the ads I want to see!”
Have you ever come across anti-privacy apologists?
“Privacy is dead. It’s a thing of the past. You just can’t expect a right to privacy in the modern world.”
This is such a dark road to go down. The end-game is a black mirror episode where the ads we see are so innocuous, so inconspicuous that we don’t even realise how they’re manipulating us.
It’s dynamic AI-generated product placement in the background of an Instagram reel, shown when your brain patterns indicate that you’re most likely to be susceptible to influence.
It’s subliminal cues, micro-targeted dopamine hits, and algorithmic content nudges, imprinting a desire before we ever know we want it.
It’s Pavlov’s dog at a global scale.
Building on our previous work toward decoding the perception of images and speech from brain activity, we’re sharing research that successfully decodes the production of sentences from non-invasive brain recordings, accurately decoding up to 80% of characters, and thus often reconstructing full sentences solely from brain signals.
Queue the apologists:
“That’s years away”, “it’s a far cry from anything dangerous”, “it’s still way too expensive”.
Meta is literally researching technology that can read your mind. Is it still years away from being practically applicable? Thank goodness, it is. But there’s a trajectory, there’s an incentive, and there’s a pattern of abusive behaviour.
“If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear.”
At least this way, the ads are relevant.