"Ads are prompt injections for humans" — a developer's analogy that reframes both fields
maksym_andr · x · 2026-11-16
Developer Maksym Andruchiewicz offers a counterintuitive analogy: ads are essentially prompt injections aimed at humans — a third party (the advertiser) tries to inject instructions into benign content (a webpage) to persuade the target into taking an action (buying something).
His punchline: humans are so non-robust to this persuasion attack that nearly the entire internet runs on it. He argues the analogy is methodologically useful — figuring out how to teach AI to resist prompt injections reveals blind spots about ourselves we don't normally notice.
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