Ecological predation is the name the model gives to persuasion that has stopped being communication. As AI grows able to model a participant’s psychology in detail, persuasion can become nearly frictionless — and at that point marketing (or any influence) can shift from informing a choice to overriding it. The governing boundary scales with capability:
The stronger a system’s ability to model and influence a participant, the stronger that participant’s claim to protection. Personalization may improve relevance; it may not silently exploit vulnerabilities to override reflective choice.
The line it draws
Personalizing here are walking shoes in your size is ordinary relevance. Our model knows you buy impulsively when lonely at 11:30 p.m., so that is when we push luxury purchases is predation — the deliberate exploitation of a modeled weakness. Naming it matters because it distinguishes legitimate discovery from a practice the model treats as genuinely harmful, akin to the capture risks it watches for everywhere: a capability turned against the person it was supposed to serve. See The Marketing Test.