Computer vision can show greater-than-estimated-human-performance, while still failing hilariously unhuman once in a while. People remember the 1 in a 1000 wonky recommendation that made them do a double-take. Recommendation engines work best for the mean and stereotypical person. That way, you can use information of similar profitable people to effectively recommend.
Facebook, for instance, got mined for "suckers". If you are scummy, you want a list of gullible people who click the most stupidest, poorly designed, and shady ads. Ad tech knows where they are and delivers them on a silver platter. Going back 2 decades to serving ads without ML would kill a business. You don't think they thoroughly test a new recommendation engine and see relevant stats go up before they deploy it? You don't think they can serve you more relevant ads when they know you are a 17 year old male vs. a 42 year old woman? Both the data gathering and the algorithms have improved year over year. To say ad tech personalization is terrible, is akin to complaining we don't have AGI.
Yes, as OP mentions, machine learning can be applied quite well in other fields "like image processing or winning at strategy games."
And yes, they test out their new ML algorithms to see how effective they are. But they don't need the machine learning to create their list of "gullible people." Rather, they don't even -need- that list. If you just serve stupid, shady ads that look as close to porn as that platform can get away with, you'd get your desired click-through rate. The actual personalization aspect is just a myth to validate our invasion of privacy.
They need that list for max profit. Just serving ads without an intelligent platform behind it to know where and when to serve them, will hurt the CTR (which hurts both the ad tech platform and the advertiser).
Why would ad tech companies gather data and invade your privacy, and then not use it to sell more profitable ads? That makes no economic sense, but is a costly form of voyeurism. The "myth" you refer to sounds like a poorly thought out conspiracy theory.
Computer vision can show greater-than-estimated-human-performance, while still failing hilariously unhuman once in a while. People remember the 1 in a 1000 wonky recommendation that made them do a double-take. Recommendation engines work best for the mean and stereotypical person. That way, you can use information of similar profitable people to effectively recommend.
Facebook, for instance, got mined for "suckers". If you are scummy, you want a list of gullible people who click the most stupidest, poorly designed, and shady ads. Ad tech knows where they are and delivers them on a silver platter. Going back 2 decades to serving ads without ML would kill a business. You don't think they thoroughly test a new recommendation engine and see relevant stats go up before they deploy it? You don't think they can serve you more relevant ads when they know you are a 17 year old male vs. a 42 year old woman? Both the data gathering and the algorithms have improved year over year. To say ad tech personalization is terrible, is akin to complaining we don't have AGI.