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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I agree but I don’t watch TV so I don’t bother. Yet… I still hate product placement so I might be interested in such a solution. Anyway here is how I would do it :
- evaluate what exists, e.g SponsorBlock, and see what’s the closest that fit my need, try it, ask in forum or repository issues if modifications are possible
- gather videos of the typically problematic content, say few hours to start
- annotate them by adding the time stamps then the location on the image
- replace problematic content with gradually complex solutions, e.g black, average color of the area, denoising (quite compute intensive)
- honestly evaluate the result
- consider the biggest problem, e.g here on first pass fixed content so a detector based on machine learning for the type of content could help
- iterate, sharing my result back with the closest interested community
Honestly it’s a worthwhile endeavor but be mindful it’s an arm race. There are a LOT of smart people paid to add ads everywhere… but there are even more people, like you and I, eager to remove them. IMHO the key trick is, like SponsorBlock, to federate the efforts.
The idea that AI would be used to prevent companies from making money seems a bit far fetched to me.
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 but 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.
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.
You aren’t allowed the use AI that’s anti-capitalist in America
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 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.
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.
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.”
AI ≠ smart
Humans ≠ smart either.
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.
Or better—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.
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.
You cleanly have gotten this all wrong. The AI is suppose to make money not reduce income. Get out of here with this “make all ads completely vanish”
People with this mentality are so odd to me, like you must be very young or actively avoided witnessing any of the endless stream of disruptor technologies which have come and ended once untouchable business by making them obsolete.
That or you’ve conveniently forgotten all the times you said something like ‘streaming will never replace video rental’ or ‘they’ll never let VoIP displace long distance call charges’ then reality has proven you wrong.
I call the other side of the world almost every day for several hours and it costs me absolutely nothing, when I was a kid we had to time how long a call to the other side of town lasted because it was so expensive.
Tech regularly makes things significantly cheaper, and not just on the scale of things like lace costing so much that lace curtains were a sign of high affluence before the industrial revolution. Have you ever had a encyclopedia salesman knock at your door? No? It was common before Wikipedia and the internet absolutely destroyed that business model and gave everyone access to information for free.
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.
