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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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”.
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.
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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.
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Tell that to Johnny Felatio.
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.
Sorry, but the only AI TV you’ll get has the job of analyzing your habits and selecting additional ads especially for you while completely trampling on your right or privacy.
“We’re sorry, using AI-based ad-blockers is a violation of our Terms of Service Agreement. Per the agreement terms, your account is now suspended and you’ve been charged an additional early termination fee, because fuck you.”
While I’m sure there will eventually be some grass-roots attempts, the providers will fight it to the death. A person can dream, though.
Then they’ll get sued by some rando, and the company won’t immediately ban other users but instead use their own version of AI generated ads that will figure out a way to increase all the ads, bypassing the blockers, and then they increase their subscription prices because the “pirates made us do it!”
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
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.
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.
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 run my tv through my pihole. It doesn’t take out everything, but it’s a good start.
This is why i pirate. Haven’t seen a tv ad in months (not counting product placement in shows/movies obviously).
It does help a bit, but most stuff I watch on my TV with ads (Hulu, YouTube, and YouTube TV) don’t work unless the ads are unblocked as well :’(
Any issues with content not coming through like it should when using that? My household uses youtube apps on roku, and i have a feeling i would just mess that up if i employ a pihole since youtube serves ads on the same servers as content.
My YouTube is ad free, although that isn’t the pihole as far as i know. The most noticable effect is lack of ads in Samsung apps like the broadcast tv guide. I will say that Samsung is a bunch of assholes since they try to process more than 1000 requests per minute and i see that in the pihole log.
Either support FOSS or the ai won’t be yours when it does it. And you are back where you are started.
Denying profit to shady data merchants is the key to reclaiming digital sovereignty. It is done by cutting their access to your data.
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?
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.
Meanwhile tv manufacturers are working on AI to sneak in more advertising.
I don’t get why anyone wants a smart peripheral. You can attach peripherals to smart devices if that is needed but I want them to do the thing they do. speaker, display, input, etc.
Not for most duff you mentioned, but the adbreaks themselves:
Our old dvr enabled us to skip ads in the recorded tv programs pretty accuratley. It set chapter markings whenever an ad-block began/ended which it figured out by the frequency of hard cuts as ads have them between every ad (so multiple times a minute) whlie normal programming usually does not. This was way pre-AI (like late 00s). Sadly the built in dvrs in our tvs after that did not have that function, but maybe there is a modern implimentation somewhere.
I use npvr with comskip.exe and it does a fairly reasonable job of taking the ads out of free to air TV.
You can see in the timeline where it’s detected ads, but you can use the mouse or arrow keys to still play those areas if it got it wrong.
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.
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.
