Sorry, I apparently got lost and didn't realize I was in a Canadian community. I have no idea what your laws are about it. In the US it sure isn't illegal.
Ads should be explicitly opt-in. Not even "implicit" opting-in or opt-out. You should specifically say you want to see ads before seeing them. And if that means no more billboards, ads in bus shelters, ads on radio, etc. then I'm all for it.
This only works if social media is regulated like every other communications platform before it.
Newspapers were the only source of news 100 years ago ... they were regulated and kept in line to prevent outright lies from being spread or disinformation from being promoted
Radio came after newspapers ... they were regulated and kept in line to prevent outright lies from being spread or disinformation from being promoted
Network TV came after ... they were regulated and kept in line to prevent outright lies from being spread or disinformation from being promoted
Today, everyone uses the internet and specifically social media as their preferred source for news ... social media is not regulated to same degree as media platforms before it and now the world is awash with disinformation, misinformation, non-information, lies and mistruths ... and everyone wonders why that happened.
AI generated content will become prolific no matter what. It's only a matter of time, so rather than just banning such things and pretending it will never become an issue once you do so, it's better to simply legislate so that it is less likely to become an issue.
Things like limiting what sorts of ads you're allowed to make, how much money each ad would be worth for election purposes, rules and regulations on the contents of the ads (like significant penalties for being misleading or outright lies).
In fact, since AI in theory should be much better at fact checking than humans, the standards of information quality should be much higher and enforced by law, by penalty of a significant fine either against the party or individual's coffers, or against their campaign funds, depending on when it's done.
I think AI generated content is fine as long as it's not spreading misinformation. Mostly because there's no stopping it. If you ban it, people will find a way around it, so just regulate it to make it as beneficial as possible.
In fact, since AI in theory should be much better at fact checking than humans, the standards of information quality should be much higher
What we're all calling "AI" right now has basically zero ability to fact check.
Large Language Models are essentially just a form of autocomplete. They predict valid outputs based on statistical analysis of their training data. This makes them quite good at passing the Turing test (ie, convincing the average user that they have something approximating intelligence), but what they completely lack is the ability to evaluate source for reliability. That's why it's so easy to deliberately trick them into repeating false information.
Real fact checking is a lot more than just googling something and finding a source that agrees with you. I can find sources claiming that the Earth is flat, aliens rule the world and Hillary Clinton is a baby eating lizard person. But none of those sources are in any way credible. However explaining why they're not credible is a much more difficult question. Media literacy is a conplex skill, and it's one that involves evaluating a huge number of different criteria, using a large number of different metrics, and it often involves making difficult judgement calls. Even people who are good at media literacy can be fooled, or just get it wrong. The entire study of history is basically about evaluating sources, and there's often serious disagreements over the veracity of a piece of information. Good journalists have to be very careful over exactly how they frame information to disambiguate the exact degree of confidence they have about it (ie, I can say with absolute certainty that this person told me this thing, but I can't say with absolute certainty that what they told me is true)... And that's the good journalists. There are a LOT of bad journalists out there.
It's possible that some hypothetical future generation of AI will be better at fact checking them humans, but that's not what we have today. The only way to get modern LLMs to produce factual information is to be extremely careful about what data they are fed; and even then, they will often just make shit up out of whole cloth from that data. Any output has to be verified by a human operator to avoid situations like Microsoft recommending the Ottawa food bank as a must see tourist attraction.
No, I know that modern AI has no real ability to fact check, but the reason is because they've never been built that way, nor do they have the resources to do it properly. They have no way to know what is a reliable source, nor how to interpret the data in a meaningful way if it needs to be used in an abstract manner.
But I do believe that modern AI technology should be able to do so if given the resources. Create an AI that only references from a list of credible sources, and is able to compare them to what is said elsewhere.
I'm no AI specialist or anything, so maybe I'm completely wrong and such a method wouldn't work. But at the very least, I haven't even heard of any real attempt at making a fact checking AI yet. All the existing ones are shit and only adapt normal language learning models to reference other internet sources regardless of their legitimacy.
Most people cannot tell AI generated photos from real ones.
You may be able to and I may be able to but we live in a bubble. I work with a wide range of people with various levels of tech expertise and most of them aren’t even aware that AI can create realistic images.
How can there be a hatred of something that doesn't exist? 😲
What's called Artificial "Intelligence" right now is nothing of the sort. At the absolute best they're a bunch of hallucinating digital parrots. They show no comprehension of any kind of the whatever it is they churn out and it takes about 30 seconds to prove it with any of them (yes, even the much-vaunted ChatGPT).
So I don't "hate AI" because it doesn't exist. I hate LLM generative text, though, or its pictorial and audio counterparts.