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The Trojan Horse in Your Netflix Feed
When AI stops advertising and starts persuading

Hey Friends,
Something is happening on your screen that you may not even realize. Netflix is starting to quietly roll out a new generation of AI-generated advertising that doesn’t interrupt your content, it blends into it. Instead of cutting to commercials, they’re embedding stylized ads right into the atmosphere of the shows. Picture a “pause screen” that morphs into an ad with the same color grading and tone as Stranger Things or Bridgerton. It’s subtle, cinematic, and precisely designed to disarm you.
I spent time digging into how this works, and honestly, it feels like the beginning of a massive shift in how media companies approach influence. Netflix owns the intellectual property to its characters and settings, so the idea that those characters might begin delivering persuasive messages is inevitable. This is the very definition of native advertising, taken to the next level by AI that understands aesthetics and timing. And if that sounds harmless, consider what happens when the persuasive power of narrative meets the precision of machine learning.
It’s not just Netflix either. The bigger issue here is the increasing sophistication of persuasive AI. We’re seeing glimpses of it in everything from OpenAI’s new Codex-powered agents that can debug entire codebases, to Google's research into synchronizing AI decision-making with neural activity. These systems aren’t randomly generating content, they’re targeting attention, intention, and emotion. In the wrong hands or unchecked, that turns into what I’d call superintelligent persuasion. Think propaganda with a neural net.
Meanwhile, this technology is moving faster than our culture can process. Netflix’s ad-supported tier already has 94 million users, and growing. Combine that scale with real-time AI optimization, and you're participating in an invisible focus group. That’s why I care about this, and why I think we all need to be aware of how quickly the medium is becoming the message. If we don’t think critically about the tools behind the scenes, we’ll be quietly shaped by them.

Warmly,
Dylan Curious