this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
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Enshittification
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What is enshittification?
The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source
The lifecycle of Big Internet
We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.
Embrace, extend and extinguish
We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.
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This is where we need to start harnessing AI for our advantage rather than corporations. Have it scan the videos as it buffers and automatically remove the ads.
This seems like it ought to be possible? Seems that way to me as a lay person anyway.
comskip.exe does it well on free to air TV, but I suspect the methods it uses might not work so well for Sponsorblock etc. That said, maybe a hash can be made of the video every ten seconds, and when the playback hash differs, skip that ten second block. Computationally intensive I suspect, but might work for embedded ads.
Only works if google inserts ads without re-encoding the video. I think that's possible, as long as you only cut only keyframes of the video (shutter encoder has a feature to cut without re-encoding, and it warns of this limitation)
And then Google sues the AI provider to stop them from doing that.
AI is not our tool, it is a corporate tool, for corporate profits, that they deign to let us dabble with, but only when it suits them.
There are plenty of open source ai, especially these single purpose one.
You could probably train something like that on semi-reasonable consumer hardware. Ads often have a very distinctive style and tone, and you need only a single output - the probability of it being any given second being an ad. It would probably take a lot to run though, you better hope the people who install the extension have good PCs. And, it would probably never get 100% accurate, you'd have to put up with still seeing some ads and having to rewind when it skips over valid video.
it might even be ridiculously simple given that ads almost 100% of the time have louder audio than the content by design.
It's usually even easier than that... In my jurisdiction, ads have to be clearly labeled and identified. It should be relatively trivial to detect this label.