Brave's AI might be better than a small army of humans at spotting ads on websites

Brave has developed AI technology called AdGraph that outperforms conventional ad-blocking technology, the browser startup said Friday. "We can train supervised machine learning models to automatically block ads and trackers," researchers from Brave and four universities said in a research paper. "We found that AdGraph replicates the behavior of popular crowdsourced filter lists with an 97.7 percent accuracy. In addition, AdGraph is able to detect a significant number of ads and tracker which are missed by popular crowdsourced filter lists." Ad-blocking browser extensions like Adblock Plus today typically use manually maintained filter lists such as Easylist to determine what's an ad and what's not.