One of the biggest obstacles that ad blockers have been consistently facing during their entire existence is deeply intertwined with their very nature — it’s the limitations of filter lists and the need to maintain them. This maintenance is, in most cases, manual and extremely painstaking.
In this research, I’ll explore how ad blocking works today and review previous attempts to automate it by applying machine learning. Then, I’ll move on to my own experiments of adding LLM to ad blocking, discuss where this approach is headed, and even show the working prototype browser extension that you can download and test for yourself.
And while I know you’re probably eager to hear about the LLM experiments and check out the extension — but first, let’s set the stage with some context.
