I was watching a youtube video of a supposed robotic butterfly (“Chouchou Electric Butterfly - CScout Japan”) and found it intriguing that the main google ad was for radio controlled helicopters.
Mainly because, while it seems obvious to a human that ‘electric butterfly’ and ‘radio controlled helicopter’ are both electronic flying things, it’s much less obvious how you would program a computer to recognize this connection. So I’m wondering how much or how little sophistication was put into whatever made youtube/google pick this ad as the one. I can think of a few ‘tricks’ to make this sort of thing appear more intelligent than it actually is, but I’m wondering which were actually used.
For example, in the suggested videos (I’m guessing the algorithm for that is that people who have favorited this video, have their data polled to see what their most commonly shared favorites are), there is one robot helicopter, but it’s about halfway down the list, and more of the suggestions have to do with weird Japanese toys, so I would think that the more obvious and easily programable ad would be for some kind of online Japanese toy store.
Or possibly the push is backwards - robot helicopter company is paying bigger bucks than weird Japanese toy store to google, and therefore their ad is the one that gets prevalence.
When you place Google ads, you select appropriate keywords for each. That company most likely selected RC, remote control, robot, robot, flying or some similar combo.
So the linkage between the two is human, not some clever AI.
But a friend and I were talking about this just yesterday - we both brought up the same YouTube of a dancing cat and his advertisements were all about suicide prevention while mine were all about losing weight.
He is middle-aged and unemployed while I am a middle-aged female. (And, yes, 20 pounds overweight).
They’re probably personalizing based on your search history… either from Google or YouTube searches… or both. Before I installed ABP I used to see a lot of ads that were (somewhat peripherally) connected to my searches; been ad free for years now
I’d be concerned he’s been doing some research on suicide (or the prevention of suicide).
Have you been doing research on weight loss?
I really started noticing this when I was in the market for a car. Suddenly every banner ad was for cars.
What really caught my attention was when I started checking out overstock.com. I’d say about 40% of all banner ads right now on my computer are for things I looked at on overstock. The actual items I want (especially if I have it saved) show up in the banners. In the past I rarely even got ads for Overstock.
