These bonkers eyeglasses commercials aren’t even the worst commercials I’ve seen on Youtube, but a lot of these ads are great arguments for government regulation that’s unfortunately not happening.
Ever since I was getting new glasses recently, which involved a multiple trips to eye care over a couple of months in order to get it right, and I guess mentioning it in front of some device running google or in email or Google Meet or who knows, ever since I’ve been getting a lot of scam ads for glasses when watching Youtubes. And when I say scam ads for glasses, I mean that they’re advertising literally x-ray glasses and very obviously trying to target market to boys. I found a youtube video where someone was also complaining about an ad that was similar and I found the one I saw being talked about on Reddit. I also get the ads aimed at seniors, glasses that are pretty much miraculous that can see far and close at the same time but aren’t bifocals and somehow make vision marvelously better. It reminds me a little bit of the Quackenbush quackery. The claims in the commercial are really out there, perhaps not x-ray vision level bonkers, but they still talk about “new technology” in this magical way. (And apparently that’s typical I read in one paper about AI, and isn’t something new either.). The ad perhaps deliberately tells old folks “You can play with your cell (pause…) phone” and it sounds like they’re saying “play with yourself” basically.
But this latest example takes the cake.
The ad for eyeglasses literally starts out by saying “Have you seen the magic glasses that can see clearly without glasses?” Magic glasses that can see clearly without… glasses. I watched the whole thing when I saw that just out of curiosity of how they were going to pull that one off. The commercial indeed says you can wear glasses without lenses. And then shows glasses with lenses in them, getting run over by tires or crushed by what looks like a styrofoam fake boulder from Star Trek from the 1960s. The ad also claims that the glasses can zoom far and see close at the same time. I was waiting for them to claim x-ray vision too. But they just also claimed to block blue light. I’ve seen people online saying that they’re probably just selling ordinary blue light glasses. But of course blue light glasses themselves are pretty much a scam because that’s based on unproven pseudoscience. There’s really no evidence blue light blocking glasses do what they claim either. And it’s a better bet to just reduce your screen time and take more breaks to ease eyestrain symptoms. And who knows if they actually sell any actual glasses at all, it could just be a phishing scam, because I don’t trust Google & Youtube to make any effort to keep straight up criminals from advertising.
Anyway another internet ad pet peeve of mine is the commercial on youtube I see a lot for some (probably dangerous or maybe non-existent) powered garden tool that starts out: “Until now, game changer…” I imagine the idea was that “Until now” or “Game changer” are common openers, so why not use both right!? It’s probably AI slop. And that’s what I think explains these eyeglasses that can do anything randomly, including being glasses that can see without lenses or whatever that sentence was.
These scammy weird ads are so bad that they’re not just harming customers who might be in a position to be fooled into clicking on this stuff for whatever reason, but they’re also just a waste of the internet in general, and they’re maybe crowding out more legitimate advertising like the legitimate ads that I see a lot now criticizing Rep. Rob Bresnahan for lying to constituents to their faces in meetings where he swore he was not voting for Medicaid cuts and then he voted to cut Medicaid twice after dumping stocks related to Medicaid.
Anyway, I digress…
At least these commercials are not like the ones I was seeing maybe a year ago where the commercial was selling an incredibly dangerous sharp object straight out of a torturer’s cabinet and being specifically advertised for putting in the ears of infants. I really hope that was just a phishing scam ad and the product really didn’t exist at all and was never actually sent to anyone. It was so horrendous I wrote my reps about it but was hesitant to even share it with anyone because it was the stuff of nightmares.
Still, at least there’s been a shift from AI slop body horror porn to get people to linger watching just because they don’t understand what they’re seeing, like Jason Koebler of 404 Media described on the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast a few months ago , to now where Jason Koebler is reporting targeted hyper individualized AI slop deepfakes of celebrities doing good deeds.
This is the information landscape now.
My letter to reps:
We need the government to crack down on these youtube commercials that are being allowed to run that are so obviously AI slop doing some kind of scam. In one case there’s x-ray glasses being sold that can zoom or are for the elderly. It’s probably a phishing scam. I really hope the ear torture device for infants I saw awhile back was a phishing scam that was never sent to anyone because that was just downright dangerous. But these AI slop scam ads are rampant on social media, not just Youtube. The government is supposed to protect consumer interests from this kind of fraud and waste. You need to do something about it.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose for your own letters to reps.
“Many people rationalize that if it were really dangerous the government wouldn’t let it be advertised. They are wrong in that thinking. It is dangerous and the government does let it be advertised.” — Rick Pollay, Pack of Lies: The Advertising of Tobacco (1992)