Yeah, this is Bob Dobbs at Big-Ass Ad Agency. I need a dozen donuts for a client meeting tomorrow morning.

What kind would you like? Or would you prefer an assortment?

They’re for a client, I don’t care. Put 11 donuts in there. Or 10. Or rocks. Or turds, or poison mushrooms. The client will accept whatever.

Got it, one dozen fresh-baked artisanal donuts. See you tomorrow.

James Hercher covers Why Wall Street Turned Against The Trade Desk, which is basically the adtech version of that.

Once again, investors are increasingly dubious of independent, third-party ad tech, while their confidence grows in big, media-owning ad platforms.

The problem with The Trade Desk (TTD) is that they’re trying to run an honest business in a market where pretty much everyone is willing to accept crooked and shitty. Take a look back at the Adalytics research on how big brand ads end up in all kinds of God-awful places.

For example, Are ad tech vendors facilitating or monitoring ads on a website that hosts Child Sexual Abuse Material? The answer is yes, but not The Trade Desk. TTD was actually doing some adtech nerd stuff that is freely available as open source and an existing industry best practice and that you have no excuse to not do. And doing those fundamental checks got them to the point of not sponsoring CSAM. And see how far that got them with “Wall Street.”

Unfortunately, The Trade Desk is only one link in the chain that delivers an ad, so you can’t unblock just that one company and start seeing some legit subset of the ads. Google and others still have their sticky fingers on things. Is it safe to turn off your ad blocker? No. (I will update that if things change)

And the proponents of CCBA must basically agree with me about that. If CCBA were beneficial, the companies that put so much effort into lobbying for it would have been able to publish some research, including studies on behavioral advertising that probably already exist. Instead, companies setting out to argue in favor of CCBA are more likely to tell on themselves for monopoly or duopoly control of a small business ad medium.

So it’s pretty clear that CCBA is, at least, something that people should be able to turn on or off.

Paul Budde, in Australia’s Digital Duty of Care: reclaiming control from the platforms suggests that online platforms should be required to make design decisions to benefit the users.

Unfortunately, permission-based systems never became the foundation of the digital economy. The advertising model was too profitable. Personal information became an enormously valuable commercial asset, while the platforms accumulated ever-greater power over users’ data, attention and participation.

What the 1990s Internet optimists didn’t predict was the rapid collapse of business norms in the age of network effects. Today’s CCBA is a duopoly: one company that started as transgressive hackers and never had to go legit, and one that started off respectable and did a heel turn at some point. Both Meta and Google have deliberately designed their advertising systems to deliver deceptive advertising, because allowing extra, fake bidders into an auction-based ad system drives up the ad rates for everyone.

Offering a simple CCBA on/off control would still leave both the “on” and “off” people a little dissatisfied, though.

With lots of watts it took control, the first one of its kind. Billy Gibbons said, Even though Dusty, Frank, and I grew up in different part of Texas we listened to the same stations, particularly the X stations and, as a result, we gained a lot of the same musical and cultural points of reference.

“The X” wasn’t playing Mexican music. They were playing the music of the USA back to us. And people remember the border blaster stations fondly, despite the sketchy ads. So if you missed out on the days of the infamous goat gland treatment and the “genuine WHITE BIBLE autographed by JESUS CHRIST” maybe you won’t miss out this time. There’s a new “blaster” medium spreading here. Just like the X…

It’s imported from a country with food we love.

It’s feeding our own events and culture back to us.

It’s got all the right people mad.

It’s the SuperBox.

Yes, Think twice before installing this device promising free movies, but seriously, the ad trackers on supposedly legit, USA-maintained devices are a national security menace that our own Army, Navy, and Air Force need to turn off too, so whatevs. Yeah, if you bring home a SuperBox, the dreaded Red Chinese have root on a media server on your home network, but honestly the typical American has more in common with a Communist Party commissar than with the weird AI cultists running the big companies closer to home. (Both would un-alive most of us given the chance, but the Communists would keep more of us around to work the collective farms, while the TESCREAL oligarchs likely expect they can get by with a lower survival rate and more uploading.)

So Everyone is stealing TV. I’m not even going to pretend to understand The cheapest NFL streaming options or how to figure out what movie is available where. Personally, I go to the public library for books, comics, and DVDs. But I can see the appeal, and I can also see that I’m missing out on a trend. Just as a lot of the music that made it big on the X stations wasn’t the music that the established record business wanted to push, the SuperBox going to affect the culture. Somehow.

Cinemas, schools and ICE are all banning Meta smart glasses by Ana Maria Constantin. (Some places already had the policy in place from Google Glass.)

Bad Men by Rich Siegel. I wanted to bring the Burger Chef character out of retirement to be the spokesperson for Hardee’s. But unlike other cheery spokespeople, like Flo from Progressive or the very grating Jan for Toyotathon, we wanted Burger Chef to be angry, reluctant and alcoholic! In other words, real. We had some very funny scripts, now buried in a box out in my garage. And might have even written a catchphrase for the ornery old guy who would often show up the restaurant to make sure the kids were doing the food right. Mostly, they weren’t. Get outta my kitchen!, Burger Chef would growl. And hilarity would ensue.

optimise for high density. by Jake Archibald. (I’ll do the lazy version, lower quality but higher resolution)

We need a PIT Crew for news by Ben Werdmuller. (News organizations have understaffed and undercompensated internal software teams almost as badly as social media companies have understaffed and undercompensated their moderation teams.)

The Real Thucydides Trap Is Inside Western Tech by Justin Bassi. (Oversimplifying to “West” vs. China is not helpful on most of these issues, though. There are three teams: the market-reliant West and the two factions—CPC and TESCREAL—of the centrally planned economy side.)

A Common Thread by Mansour Behabadi. (Use camera thread style connections to connect and mount a variety of projects.)

“Google and Reddit do not own the Internet,” web scraper says after court win by Ashley Belanger. [A] court took the somewhat rare step of granting SerpApi’s motion to dismiss very early on in Google’s lawsuit. In that case, the judge found that Google had no DMCA standing to sue SerpApi, since it didn’t own any of the content in the search results and has not shown that it’s acting on behalf of any rights holders.

Somehow, the Old Google, which was respectable, has turned into New Google, which, well, not so much. But when did it happen? Can we assign a date to Google’s heel turn? It’s not going to be any of the current “AI” or “Epstein Ballroom” political stuff, it happened before that. Going whole hog for weird right-wing politics is the kind of thing an organization does when they have already crossed over.

I think we can narrow it down to some time before the Epstein Ballroom bribe and after Cory Doctorow’s “What if Google Were Evil?” That was saleable speculative fiction back in 2007, so the consensus date is going to be some time after that.

August 22, 2019: Launch of “Privacy Sandbox” project, to hard-code an anticompetitive advertising system into the web browser. (This project is still not over—control of ad measurement is too tempting of a target for Google to give up on.) I don’t think this is a good date to pick for the heel turn, though. It’s more of a symptom. The perpetrators of anticompetitive schemes were so thoroughly influential within the company that they could substitute their own project for something like web browser privacy.

February 5, 2019: The Men Who Killed Google Search do a “Code Yellow” update, which increased searches (and ad impressions) at the expense of search quality. This is a good story, especially since it shows the relevance of the old Brin and Page warning, “The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.” But something must have happened before this in order to give an ad revenue maximizer such influence over search quality.

November 1, 2018: Worldwide walkout by more than 20,000 employees. This was an attention-getting event, but not a good date to assign for the heel turn. The harassment/crime faction ICYMI: The Al Capone theory of sexual harassment by Valerie Aurora and Leigh Honeywell at Google was already dominant enough to provoke the walkout in the first place. Google later retaliated against four organizers of the event.

March 22, 2018: Google requires web publishers to hand over their reader data under the cover of changes in ad policies to comply with GDPR. Robin Berjon explains, in Notes on Google’s Commitments to the CMA. In one of the most ambitious crossover events in history, four publisher trade bodies representing several thousand publishers across two continents, including many of the biggest, wrote a letter requesting that this change. That the terms stuck should give you an idea of what asymmetric market power looks like.

August 15, 2015: Sundar Pichai, trained as a McKinsey consultant, becomes CEO.

October 13, 2013: The flagship Samsung Galaxy Nexus doesn’t get an Android 4.4 update. I had food in my fridge when I bought this phone that was still good when they announced they would stop updating it. Yes, another event that’s more symptom than turning point. But this marks the old Google/new Google divide for me personally. Maybe there’s no one big heel turn, more of a series of rugpulls.

March 13, 2013: End of Google Reader. A fan favorite, and might be a good date for the beginning of the techlash in general. Google Reader wasn’t the Facebook-ish addictive feed that Google Plus was trying to make at the time, but did have a lot of power users who were journalists or lawyers. (Goomics 340)

May 18, 2012: Facebook IPO. Facebook (now Meta) and Google have been consistently bad influences on each other. Facebook’s Google envy means over-focusing on automation while failing to build up a hard-to-replicate team of skilled human moderators—the hard part about running a social site. Google’s Facebook envy means an over-focus on internal social/reputation graphs—not just under-emphasizing the company’s core competencies on analyzing and searching trustworthy content, but actively rewarding web sites for making themselves less useful.

March 17: 2011: Final judgment enforcing the settlement in High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation. It’s hard to tell when Google’s collusion against employees started, but this is a promising set of events for spotting the original heel turn. (TODO: Possibly replace this date with the date of the first documented agreement between Google and another employer)

September 1, 2008: Google Chrome announced. An open source release that is a strong contender for heel turn date. Like the switch from competing to colluding in hiring, shows Google de-emphasizing competing to offer a fair service on the server side and moving to try to control both client and server.

April 13, 2007: Google agrees to acquire DoubleClick Had to put this one on there, but really, why didn’t Old Google culture and priorities crowd out the adtech hustle, instead of the other way around?

Byrne Hobart’s Ad-Supported Platforms are a Unique Antitrust Problem comes from the timeline where a large oligopoly platform company is

a market where incumbents can’t slack off, where everyone competes on a level playing field, and where the taxes the platform levies are precisely calibrated based on ability to pay

and where

generosity to the consumer is monetized through ruthless exploitation of their business counterparties

The problem with applying this to our timeline, though, is that it’s based on assuming a platform where it’s reasonable to expect an honest seller.

On our timeline, the platform companies design the rules of the advertising game to facilitate fraud. They’re not setting up a market where sellers compete on price, quality, and service. Platforms choose to increase their own ad revenue by operating an auction with, in effect, shill bidders. So if a platform runs an ad auction that’s limited to the real sellers of a particular product or service, they’re going to make less money in the short term than if they also allow fraudulent sellers to bid.

So the platforms end up extracting value from both sides—from the sellers in the form of artificially high ad rates, and from the customers in the form of exposure to more fraud than they would encounter otherwise.

Maybe the difference betwen the two timelines is that here, we have a Section 230 that applies to advertising? Or maybe, on the other timeline, there wasn’t the gap between expected revenue growth and value creation that motivated platforms to try to fill that gap with crime?

The most important feature of a win-win ad medium is that it’s based on some activity that is obviously (to the buyer) harder for a fraudulent seller to do than for an honest one.

Not in the news: any comment from anyone who spends their ad money, on their client’s, on Meta ads.

This settlement will result in a lot fewer ads being delivered. So where are any marketers speaking up to defend them? Or express concerns about the impact of the settlement?

I’m not even seeing anything on LinkedIn.

The whole marketing profession knows this company is creepy and crooked. But—because group cohesion, dealing with the problem is going to mean that the whole herd has to move at once.

Online advertising is still stuck in its own version of the productivity paradox faced by pre-Internet IT. Back then, Robert Solow said, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” And now, Michael Farmer is pointing out that today’s surveillance advertising is Ineffective for Many Advertisers and Unhealthy for Democracy.

Analyses of the revenue performance of the top 60 advertisers between 2009 and 2024 show that 40 advertisers, or 2/3rds of this group, all of them major programmatic users, saw their growth rates fall below nominal GDP growth rates from 2009-2024.

While the surveillance ad duopoly grows, the brands that use their advertising, not so much. And the squeeze is getting worse, not better. Meta’s revenue is up 28% while claimed conversions on Facebook are up 15.7%—the customer acquisition cost squeeze continues.

While advertisers, on average, are doing worse, each individual advertiser’s dashboard makes it look like their ad spend with the duopoly is a win. Because the duopoly controls the measurements. In Why Social Media’s Ad Dominance Is A Billion-Dollar Measurement Illusion, Vicky Chang writes,

Meta’s attribution infrastructure is clean, fast and easy to defend in a spreadsheet. A brand CMO can walk into a board meeting with an ROAS number, a cost per acquisition and a clear story. That’s not a small thing. Internal budget decisions rarely go to the channel that works best. They instead go to the channel that can be proven most clearly.

But much of it is an illusion.

When a platform owns the measurement, it is more likely to push the narrative that the ads are working. The measurement models make that easy to do.

(And yes, this is the same kind of racket that the duopoly companies are trying to push into the browser with the attribution cartel scheme at W3C.protip: if you’re running an industry organization, have an up-to-date antitrust policy and enforce it, or big companies will turn your meetings into a crime clubhouse.)

So if Google and Meta control the ad measurements that your boss sees, it’s game over, right? Staying in marketing means sending money to the companies that push the next measles epidemic or dictatorship or whatever, and there goes the chance to support anything win-win? Brian Jacobs writes, in Lessons from Spock,

If the professionals know this is crazy, and if they are as well informed as they are, why do their clients do the exact opposite to what logic suggests they should do? Are agencies these days so removed from the real decision makers in client companies that nobody with any real say over budget allocation cares about, or even hears their advice?

Or are agencies so complicit in the hopeless placing of their clients’ ads that they would rather keep quiet?

But what if that dismal, centrally-planned future doesn’t happen, and markets can win? Meta and Google were early adopters of machine learning, for their own villainous ends, but other AI projects, including “open” LLMs, are catching up.

Rick Bruner suggests borrowing some ML techniques from Big Tech and running them under control of the individual brand, in RCTs Aren’t Just Backward-Looking. They’re Training Data for Optimization Models.

Imagine instead a platform offering RCT incrementality testing transparently to advertisers while accumulating those experiments into its own causal benchmark. Advertisers get causal proof; the platform builds a valuable knowledge base; and the evidence improves its models and optimization systems.

With that kind of project in place, advertising decision-makers would have an alternative to those slick Google and Meta measurements that back up the decision to dump more ad money into Google and Meta. A marketer who wants to branch off from the dystopia timeline can vibe code a measurement tool that could show how feeding money and customer data to the ad duopoly has lower ROAS than the positive-sum options.

I don’t think that kind of shift would happen on its own, though.

Marketing decision-makers will need some kind of crisis to not waste.

More later.

Lawsuit alleges Sony investigated WPP’s media operation and said it ran a ‘global crime scene’, WPP seeks to seal ‘highly confidential and sensitive’ client information from lawsuit with former exec by Lara O’Reilly. (This may be a common pattern. ICYMI: Meta tolerates rampant ad fraud from China to safeguard billions in revenue.)

Why does everything feel like a scam? by Hanna Horvath. (I thnk I know this one. As the IT industry ran out of ideas, but had to keep growing anyway, they filled in the gaps with crime. Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni reportedly knew Phia was ‘cookie stuffing’ for months.)

8 thoughts on “Who’s Tracking You? Use This New Service to Find Out” by Brian Krebs. A powerful and free new service called DecryptAds scrapes and correlates this adtech data and makes it simple to quickly learn a great deal about the entities that are tracking you. (This is a good start. What’s harder is figuring out the ML “inferences” about whether you’re a person in immediate need of the product, or a bargain hunter with more options.)

Separating AI’s Technological Problems from Its Capitalism Problems by Bruce Schneier. The question is not whether it is possible to develop AI in a non-exploitative way, or even whether we can trust AI companies to act in the public interest. The question is whether we will recognize that our existing social and economic systems are failing to achieve these outcomes, and whether we can act in time to make structural change. (A big part of the problem is the extent to which “AI” investors and execs see themselves as post-capitalist: a cognitive elite capable of ML-assisted economic central planning with better judgment than old-fashioned markets. More: reinventing Gosplan)

Be a Rube. by George Tannenbaum. I noticed the Times had told the story with six or seven cartoonish pictures and a few hundred words of copy. The New York water system is one of the most-complex infrastructures in the world. If it can be explained this simply, why can’t we do the same when we’re selling AI, or data migration, or Quantum, or whatever? (Maybe a clear explanation would be not so helpful? The More People Learn About AI, the More They Want It Out of Their Lives)

Federal lawsuit accuses four major publishers of extorting article processing charges The case, which became unsealed July 30, claims Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Informa forced U.S. research institutions to submit false claims to the government for reimbursement through article fees up to 10 times the cost of processing the articles.

AI is Removing Bottlenecks to Effective Content Moderation at Scale by Dave Willner. When platforms don’t prevent this kind of harm, it’s clear that it is no longer because the problem is technically hard. It’s because they’ve decided not to. (I agree: but I want to turn people into dinosaurs)

Reddit ads pose as news stories to promote AI investment scams by Chance Townsend. The promoted posts redirect users to cloned news websites designed to closely mimic the appearance of legitimate publishers, where fabricated articles, invented testimonials, and fake profit screenshots are used to build false credibility. (Why are ad blocker users happier than non-users? Some possibilities: picking up cheap shoes in front of a steamroller)

Extended availability of the products that customers are used to is not unusual in the firearms business. Colt had a “1991A1” near-reissue of the famous M1911A1 pistol from World War II. A serious hobbyist can get a hold of a surprising fraction of the entire firearms tech tree, newly manufactured. And, possibly as a result, even though the firearms market has what looks like a normal level of customer/vendor disputes, the customer base and the manufacturers are roughly aligned, and customers vote with the industry on issues that concern both.

Now compare that to IT. Can you still get the version of anything that was still good? Say, a desktop OS that works like Mac OS “Snow Leopard” or Windows XP Service Pack 3? Or an Apple iOS update without Liquid Ass? Or pre-“cloud” Adobe Photoshop? No—the necessary new code to support new hardware and fix bugs is bundled with stuff that’s just in there because reasons. Not just business reasons, like sticking ads on everything. Sometimes an adult software exec just wakes up with the determination to make an aesthetic impact, even when it makes the product look like a 1990s raver tried to design a psychedelic window manager theme.

IT CEOs are household names—but famous for being untrustworthy. That’s not ideal for an industry that’s trying to build popular support. AI was supposed to win people over by now – it hasn’t. People are asking librarians how to disable or avoid intrusive AI.

The problem is not just the big picture stuff like trying to get people to accept the impact of (still unpopular) data centers. Failure to keep what works, working is costing the industry in other ways, too. In Apple Dropping AirPort Utility From the App Store With iOS 27, Juli Clover covers how one company is turning a usable WiFi device into e-waste by dropping software support. There’s not even an open source code dump.

Cool trick, but now who’s going to buy an Apple Vision Pro? When a support rugpull could come at any time?

The Apple Vision Pro didn’t flop because it’s overpriced. When the Apple Macintosh came out, it cost about 1559 Big Macs or almost half a Honda Civic. That’s for a computer with no networking, Please insert the disk dialogs instead of a hard drive, and a tiny screen.

The Apple Vision Pro does so much more, and it’s far cheaper, at only 604 Big Macs or about one-seventh of a Civic.

But the Macintosh was sold into a 1980s market with conventional norms, and the Vision Pro was too expensive for most people, even developers, to take a chance on in today’s rugpull economy.

When you choose the behavior, you choose the consequences. If the industry wants political support and willingness to try ambitous new platforms, a lot of people will have to make more respectful and long-termist decisions.

One more point being made in favor of standardizing on Big Tech’s built-in ad tracking for web browsers: in the EU, the fix is already in. Supposedly, someone over in Europe (maybe the same crooked politicians in Ireland who help Big Tech evade taxes?) are going to allow attribution cartel tracking without consent, and make everyone else who wants to collect advertising data do the annoying “cookie banner” thing.

I’m not buying it. Do people really expect regulators and politicians in the EU to be all,

Gosh, thank you for the new awesome tracking system, Big Tech! Even though it’s a big risk, your elegant math and “privacy” branding will make us totally accept it without consent!

And do they expect regulators to give special treatment to the attribution cartel even when that would mean giving a problematically USA-centric tracking system—and Big Tech ad inventory—an advantage over European adtech and publishers?

That’s not the way things are going over there. Nick Heer explains a recent German competition authority (Bundeskartellamt) decision about Apple ATT, in After Regulator’s Investigation, Apple Will Make Changes to App Tracking Transparency Prompts in Germany. The definition of tracking Apple uses is self-serving, which would not matter so much if it did not also have a parallel desire to grow its advertising business.

Apple makes it easy to turn off “tracking” by non-Apple apps, while Apple’s own “personalization” and “privacy preserving ad measurement” are harder to find. (turn off advertising measurement in Apple Safari) But now they have to cut out the self-preferencing. From the English version of the decision:

Apple is allowed to provide for a level of protection for its users that exceeds the minimum legal requirements. However, if Apple sets up additional rules within its ecosystem for the use of data, these rules must, under Germany’s special abuse provision for large digital companies, not treat its own offerings better than those of its competitors. This is precisely where our competition concerns arose. Apple will now align the consent requests much more closely and give third-party app providers more freedom to combine the necessary requests in a sensible way.

More coverage by Ana-Maria Stanciuc: Apple bows to Germany and rewrites its tracking-consent rules, ending a self-preferencing probe.

So even if Irish regulators try to get special treatment for the attribution cartel, different from what all the other online ad companies get, eventually the rest of Europe will catch up with them.

Nobody who claims they can tell good writing from bad should care this much. If they’re not using the slopbot instead of doing the writing.

The watermarked text doesn’t even make it into the final writing project, if the LLM was just used for assistance, with methods such as Seth Godin’s AI tear down. So it shouldn’t really matter. Maybe Matt Birchler is right, and the reader’s desire to know when text is AI-generated is more important than the AI user’s desire for the opposite. Maybe Dave Winer is right in A rebuttal to Doc Searls’ piece about watermarks and the risk that a watermark might be detected could help discourage people from getting a long bit of writing from the bot, and then pasting it into a comment thread in a GitHub repo I run.

The bigger question, though, isn’t about the negligible difference between watermarked slop and somehow purer non-watermarked slop.

If LLM output can have watermarks, what else can it have?

Other identifiers. If Anthropic can get a 1-bit yes/no watermark into 200 words of text, how many words does an LLM provider need to encode a 32-bit identifier? That’s probably infeasible in the lengths of text that most people use LLMs for in practice. Maybe they would be able to find the authors of all those slop clone books on Amazon dot com, but for most business writing and article-length text it wouldn’t work. SynthID, described in Scalable watermarking for identifying large language model outputs, encodes a single bit of information by over-weighting token choice from one red list and one green list. Splitting the list into 2ⁿ categories would give you more bits but require a lot more text to encode it.

But what about just a few more bits? Now that governments and Big Tech know that encoding information into LLM-generated text is possible, what’s next?

• USA Citizen/non-citizen? This would be a obvious one for a company trying to get in good with the Federal government here.

• Age verification? I don’t know, they’re sticking age verification on everything now, someone will try it.

• Marketing-related data? The highest-earning 10% of people in the USA buy 50% of the stuff, so there could be all kind of uses for a flag to show which side of the K-shaped economy the user is on.

Infringing or plagiarizing text. The big AI companies have a pretty well-defined political program, and can identify likely opponents to some or all of that program. Some of those opponents are consistent “AI vegans” in their own personal IT choices, but if someone is politically inconvenient and an AI user, well, it’s possible to tune the likelihood that an LLM’s output contains material straight out of the training set.

Could the LLM’s output contain deliberate infringement bombs or plagiarism bombs? Deliberately giving users some text that would get them in trouble later is not the kind of thing that a human developer would risk—too much risk that the commit messages would come out in discovery—but it is the kind of trick that a heavily “agentic” automated software process would come up with. An AI agent can already hack a gym to get its owner a spot in pilates class, so a program of compromising political opponents who are also users seems feasible.

Marketing side effects. Some LLMs are serving ads now, which means a lot of hard-to-predict ML-driven ad placements. And this stuff will be a lot weirder and more indirect than current projects like the attribution cartel, which is pretty clearly going to cause ML to come up with privacy-violating ways to juice the apparent results from Big Tech advertising. ML systems going for other goals are going to get a lot weirder. Meta’s ad ML is already doing pretty weird (and creepy) stuff to maximize engagement, and it’s only going to get weirder.

What happens when more ad-revenue-maxing ML is in the loop in more places? What if you can sell a renter’s insurance policy to user A by giving their friend, user B, some bad household tips that result in an expensive bill from their landlord? Consumer-facing LLMs are run by the same companies that find themselves in a desperate squeeze to keep raising ad revenue at startup-like growth rates. Corners will be cut. Other ways will be looked. Slop advice will reflect the need to achieve ambitious business goals, even at the user’s expense.

Anyway, the difference between watermarked slop and non-watermarked slop is tiny compared to some of the text that’s going to be in the LLM output. Enjoy.

Our lab has agreed on a blanket ban on the use of generative AI for writing….Using generative AI inherently exposes you to the risk of career-ending accusations of plagiarism.

Even though there’s a lot of pressure on academics to adopt AI or be left behind!!1! this is a lot bigger deal. Especially for this particular research team.

They’re a public health lab, which puts them into an unavoidable adversarial relationship with the anti-public-health oligarchs who run the “AI” companies. The “E” in TESCREAL doesn’t stand for “eugenics,” but the political movement behind “AI” is more likely to believe in improving society by weeding out the “unfit” recipients of health misinformation than in public health as we know it.

More from the blog post:

Plagiarism accusations are now a core part of the right-wing harassment toolkit, and knowing that those accusations were made in bad faith or for political reasons does not make them disappear.

It’s safest to assume that a future well-connected accuser will be able to get access to large quantities of text, for practical purposes all of it, and the computing resources to look for a pattern match between anything that the targeted person has ever written and anything that anyone else has ever written. They’ll be able to do the search much better than the targeted person could, even using the best commercial “plagiarism detection” software and services.

Related: On the non-use of AI in my writing process by Charles Stross.

If I was crazy enough to feed the outline of a story I was working on as a prompt to ChatGPT or Claude in hope of getting the stochastic parrot to do my homework for me, then it would be only my own fault and nobody else’s if the next model from the company in question was trained on my book outline and could reproduce part or all of it for someone else.

Authors of scientific papers don’t have the choice to keep their work out of training sets in most cases. As soon as it’s published or on a preprint server it will get crawled, either with the publisher’s cooperation or not.

So what’s next? Prediction markets, apparently. Yes, I admit, predicting that they’re going to fail at this is a safe prediction. Meta trying to build an end-user platform is like Wile E. Coyote trying to catch the Road Runner.

• 2013: Facebook Home

• 2014: The Metaverse

• 2017: Diem (digital currency)

• 2018: Meta Portal

Meta bought Instagram and Whatsapp, and continues to grow as part of the advertising duopoly, but making new consumer-facing stuff, not so much. Open Compute Project was a huge success inside the IT department, but nobody has their hardware at home. The interesting part here isn’t that Meta is going to fail at prediction markets, it’s how they’re going to fail.

One of the arguments for the attribution cartel is that in-browser attribution tracking will somehow displace other forms of ad measurement. Because reasons, I guess. Or because the cartel members believe that they can convince people that everyone else’s ad data collection needs consent—or at least those fake “consent” dialogs that the Irish regulators will let you get away with—and somehow the attribution cartel doesn’t.

The problem with that argument is that there have already been two big opportunities for substitution effects to happen. And they haven’t.

• Google’s “Privacy Sandbox” included an Attribution Reporting API. But as far as I can tell it was the only one of the major “Privacy Sandbox” ad systems not to get an independent test. (If I’m wrong, let me know and I’ll add it to the timeline.)

• Apple Safari has “privacy-preserving ad attribution” that came out in 2021, but as far as I can tell most of the people talking about it are users who found it buried under “Advanced” in settings and are talking about turning it off.

Why so little marketer interest in an in-browser ad measurement system?

The problem is that for the attribution cartel, the system has a limited set of acceptable outputs. The Google and Apple systems would have had to agree that the best-performing ads are on Google and Apple properties.

Likewise, whatever W3C ends up standardizing on, the attribution reports will have to agree with the ad placement decisions already made by the Facebook and Instagram algorithms, by Google’s Performance Max, and by whatever Apple is going to be doing as they continue to enshittify over there. Imagine an attribution report that contradicted the optimal placements decreed from above, and gave credit for sales to legit independent sites instead. That would be like writing a biology paper contradicting Trofim Lysenko back when he was a big shot.

Since marketers can predict that the attribution reports are going to hide the halo effects of the likely most impactful ad placements, and just back up what the cartel members were saying anyway, there was little interest in the Google and Apple systems, and there will be little interest in the new one. The attribution cartel members have reasons to do what they’re doing—but they have to do with lobbying and consolidation, not benefits to legit advertisers or legit ad-supported sites.

More: Are ya winning, son? How the attribution cartel is getting privacy nerds and adtech execs to agree on something.