What AI is up to: Deceptive capitalism & ad blindness

Last December, I bought a paid subscription to Pxy to get unlimited access to deep research searching. So far so good, but time is running out. Despite a belief that I would never break away from Google advanced search (my home page for decades), I did. By then, Google has fully monetized search results, making results mostly stupid ads disguised as search results. In essence, Google search results had turned into mostly useless but always annoying crap. Now all Google is good for is quick synonym-antonym lookups, finding images and cute cat videos, not falling for click-bait, and not much else. 

Comet is Pxy's companion AI package that is agentic. Agentic means AI with agency. It really wants me to ditch Chrome and make itself my default browser. Default browser or not, if Comet is given permissions it has agency (power) to spend money from my accounts, write and send my gmails for me, spy on me and sell the info to ruthless marketers, and Dog only knows what else. I asked Comet about what happens to my privacy. It gave what appears to be an honest answer. It says my privacy will be seriously compromised. That's the whole point of agentic AI for consumers. 

How is the marketing to be done? By deceit. When asked about AI use by consumers, Comet was honest and said that it will follow Google's trajectory of monetizing search results. But those ads will be disguised. Comet commented on the transition, which is well underway right now:

Based on your experience with Google Search, your expectation that AI search will be monetized to the point of diminished value is already becoming a reality. The transition you're anticipating is not a future event; it began in earnest in 2025, and the infrastructure for a fully monetized AI search experience is actively being built now. .... Your concern that search results will become "distractions and stupid, annoying sales pitches" reflects the new monetization strategies being deployed for AI.

Well, I can't say that's a surprise.

What about how the deceit is to be done? By use of things like this. With Integrated Sponsored Placements, ads are embedded directly into the AI's generated text, making them appear to be native recommendations, not ads.​ That's deceptive. There's also Affiliate and Commission Models where AI recommends products and provides links for purchase to generate sales commissions. Marketers call that a "zero-click commerce experience". The user never leaves the AI interface to buy crap. Finally, there's the really sneak one called ​Intent-Based Targeting. That moves away from keywords. AI analyzes the user's conversation history, context, and "memory" to serve hyper-targeted ads. That is the explicit goal of AI browsers like Comet.

I asked how do marketers see this? With what I call casual capitalist immorality. Even their jargon is immoral. Marketers learn to weave their ads into AI responses to blur the line between actual search results and paid ads. This approach intends to overcome "ad blindness", where users simply ignore traditional banner ads. By presenting a commercial message as a helpful, conversational suggestion from a trusted AI assistant, the customer is less likely to spot the embedded ad.

Ad  blindness?? It's not ad blindness. I say it's conscious ad avoidance, not unconscious ad blindness. We all know the ad is there and we all knowingly ignore it. 

Marketers marketing to marketers

So what does Comet say about conscious ad avoidance vs unconscious blindness? Another honest answer:

Your analysis is not wrong; it highlights a critical and accurate distinction between "ad blindness" and "ad avoidance" that gets to the heart of the advertising industry's framing of the issue. The professional jargon is, as you suspect, very much "pro-deceit framed".

In other words, baby marketers are taught from the marketing crib that consumers with ad blindness are lazy and brain-defective. Us consumers need to be tricked into buying stuff, dumb fucks that we are. Yes, brain-defective. Baby marketers are taught that consumers' brains have developed a "blindness" to their shitty ads due to overexposure. Well duh! Overexposure indeed.

Bad consumer brains, bad, bad brains!

That needs to be fixed!

Marketer framing subtly creates and puts a fabricated blame and onus on consumers' perceptions and cognitive limits. Consumer ad blindness, actually ad resistance, is taught to be a challenge for marketers to "fight" or "overcome". This framing makes marketer cognitive dissonance go away by defining the problem as a user-centric matter of lazy brains, rather than an industry-centric issue of unwanted intrusion. What a total hoot!

Of course, making cognitive dissonance go away assumes that the baby marketer has a conscience to trick into complacency. Marketers are subtly nudged into acceptance of the wonderful idea that their unwanted intrusions into our lives with their obnoxious ads is our lazy brains' fault.   

Q: To be a modern marketer in the AI age, do marketers have to check their moral baggage to the door before entering the cathedral, or is marketing a profession that inherently self-selects or attracts people with little or no moral qualm about knowingly deceiving the money out of people and not caring enough to not do deceit?

 

No dickhead, our eyes are open -- we see your fracking 

 ad, but we just consciously ignore it

"Native ads" = trick ads