18 ms·

Bing Chat now has ads

271 points by georgehill 4y ago

skilled 4y ago
The real chatbot killer: ads. I'm sure they can be made to only load the last indicator at the very last second, which would be hilarious because if you use an ad-blocker, you'd be wasting your time whenever a prompt shows up and then disappears.
overthrow 4y ago
It was bound to happen. I don't see how these ads could be blocked, either. What's disappointing to me is now ad companies will try to blame ChatGPT for popping the advertising bubble, instead of having to admit ads were overvalued for the past decade+.
- vasili111 4y ago
  If the every ad will start with new line and end with “ad” I do not think it will be hard to programmatically identify such ad.
  - sebzim4500 4y ago
    In the example under discussion if you removed the ads then you would have no results.
- quitit 4y ago
  An ad historically served the right message in the right place at the right time to provide the consumer a piece of information which would lead to the revenue-generating activity. This concept extended well to online, where blogs and the like would sell ad space that matched their audience. Daring Fireball still uses this approach, often podcasters do too: they know and have a connection with their audience and they can charge a premium to advertise to them. The idea of serving automated ads was also welcome and useful for the consumer. Searching was met with results and relevant advertising messages, a win-win situation. Then we had the record scratch moment - and it's from this point that I view the majority of online advertising as an unimpactful waste of money. In the hunt for more display opportunities Google et. al. have crammed ads into every possible space, a times square approach to advertising where most have zero impact. These ads are completely disconnected from the content and are merely a stone in the user's path. Then to make matters worse, to ascertain the widest spread of ad opportunities ad providers employ garbage preference matching algorithms that are so poor as to serve completely irrelevant advertising at high frequency: further conditioning users to ignore ads because they know they won't show relevant information. How much money and energy is being wasted to serve advertising that has no value?
  - michaelt 4y ago
    > An ad historically served the right message in the right place at the right time to provide the consumer a piece of information which would lead to the revenue-generating activity. Your recollection is a lot rosier than mine. My recollection of the pre-internet world is that computer game makers would buy ad space in magazines alongside reviews of their game and hand out stacks of freebies to reporters, and in exchange even the worst game would be scored 90/100. What do you suppose Bing Chat will do if you ask it what the best Widget on the market is, when some Widget manufacturers offer a kickback and others don't?
    - quitit 4y ago
      For sure my rosy representation is the "ideal" ad. I'd the one that consumers actually helps the user or consumer.
    - AraceliHarker 4y ago
      The people who do the advertising have only changed their names from magazines to influencers. A mere cosmetic alteration, nothing more, nothing less. What difference does it make if they do it on social media instead of paper? The game is the same as it ever was. Only the mediums have changed.
      - quitit 4y ago
        As the AI can't do more than provide existing ratings (which are possibly bogus), the AI won't solve the trust issue with regard to endorsement (and I believe this is where the earlier comment was leading, that even for appropriately placed ads in traditional media, trust was still an issue.) However the issue with online advertising extends beyond being reputable - the ads themselves are excessively and poorly matched to the user's interest. This is where my original comment attempts to address that AI could solve this problem if Bing/et.al. allow it to: AI has the potential to place ads in a way where they are useful to the user, even if the user decides that the product is not worthwhile. Existing ad platforms could do this too - they just don't because boosting impressions is profitable. (Hence the decay we see in Google.com, Amazon.com, ebay.com etc - genuine results come far after the ads and the ad labelling has become more and more subtle.) On ChatGTP/others: The issue with AI is that it speaks falsehoods with equal confidence as facts, so just like reading a comments section on the internet, one can be led in the right direction, but ultimately they can't take the information for granted. At the moment there is a definite number of people who let ChatGPT/others spoonfeed them information and that's going to lead to problems, this imparts a loss of faith in the advertising trust issue too.
baal80spam 4y ago
Didn't take long now, did it.
- s3p 4y ago
  This has always been inside of Bing Chat. They just test them out with a select % of the userbase. CEO of Bing Search confirmed this on Twitter.
reset-password 4y ago
Of course it does.
- lockhouse 4y ago
  Well it’s either that or you pay a subscription for it. Microsoft has to recoup their costs somehow.
  - reset-password 4y ago
    Or it ends up being both, because Microsoft.
  - criddell 4y ago
    Microsoft owns a pretty big chunk of OpenAI. They are going to make a lot more from that investment than the nickels and dimes that their search engine generates. They can afford to pay for chat.
    - michaelt 4y ago
      Aren't search ads the biggest revenue source for Google, one of the biggest tech companies around?
    - lockhouse 4y ago
      Compute and bandwidth are not free. Just because they can afford to give it away for free doesn’t mean there’sa good business case to do so.
crop_rotation 4y ago
It has had ads for some time. Once (3-4 weeks back) I asked it a question about a particular event, and it showed me where could I buy related products below the response. That particular response was a bit badly formatted in json though. I suspect due to some Bing app bug it spilled the ads from the json in the response. So the ads were being sent to the client but not getting displayed I guess. The photo in the post shows the ad nicely formatted.
bastardoperator 4y ago
I'm totally cool with an advertisement. The problem I have with ads on say Google for example is that they're taking up half the page and designed to look like real links, basically you're being tricked into clicking them. In response to this ad, let's dig deeper. "Truecar's price is too high, find me a better deal, check with autotrader".
- enumjorge 4y ago
  Google search's ads were not subtle in the beginning. Similarly, Youtube ads were shorter and easier to skip at first. Amazon also had very subtle ads in their marketplace search results for a while. I don't see them identify results as ads at the moment, but I don't know if that's because they don't include them anymore. It seems like there's a trend in tech giants creating unobtrusive ads when a product is growing, but then adopting dark patterns once they have captured a sizeable market.
  - jakeinspace 4y ago
    To justify fairly high PE ratios, you need big growth potential. Once a company like google or Amazon has pretty much saturated the potential customer base, investors are going to want to see more efficient conversion of that customer base into revenue, or else the share price is harder to justify. Of course this is a simplification, and monetary policy has more to do with the the current contraction.
- iso1631 4y ago
  Once people are hooked on chatgpt style stuff expect it to insert plenty of adverts to deliver not whats best for you, or best in aggregate, but what is best for the people paying the money, and thus worse for you, and worse in aggregate.
- counttheforks 4y ago
  "I’m sorry but I prefer not to continue this conversation. I’m still learning so I appreciate your understanding and patience. "
- 4y ago
skc 4y ago
So does Google search, not clear why this is news.
- jsnell 4y ago
  It might seem obvious, but you can find probably hundreds of claims in HN comments over the last couple of months about how this would not happen. Chatbots would invalidate the search business model since "there won't be ads". That idea never seemed to make much sense, and now there is proof that chatbots will indeed be monetized with ads, except even more intrusive ones.
  - sebzim4500 4y ago
    Can you find a single comment claiming that chatbots would not have integrated ads? I recall this being discussed at length from the start.
    - philsquared_ 4y ago
      I am one of the fools who believed they wouldnt go the advertising route and have commented as much. To me it does not make sense to monitize this product for ads because it muddies the waters of truth and an ad free or local run LLM could easily destroy their business because no one has true loyalty to open ai.
      - zer0w1re 4y ago
        Why is this assumed to be an issue of intentionally 'injecting ads into Bing Chat', and not just a side effect of parsing Bing search results that may include advertisements that have always been there? The later seems much more likely, and they are even explicitly marking info coming from ads as such.
        philsquared_ 4y ago
        I feel like the difference is about the product. On search engines its like you are browsing a catalog or magazine. You know what is an ad, and there are many options to choose from. With a Chatbot it is more similar to talking to a person where they give you a direct answer to your question (instead of just handing you a piece of paper with a bunch of options). I think the format makes all the difference. You expect when you are talking with a "person" to be given un manipulated information. You don't expect this person is taking money in the background to influence what is said. You do know politicians purchase advertising too??
philsquared_ 4y ago
No thank you.. I am waiting at this point for an open source local alternative. Not looking for a new monopoly... Also not a fan of the "plugin store" concept. Why not just keep it in the background. Why should I need to "install" and select plugins at all. Just do the leg work in the background and feed me the results.. Seems like OpenAI is intentionally hamstringing themselves so they can shoe horn more opportunities for profit. Waiting for competition to catch up... We have essentially what is the 'smartest "person" in the world' being bribed to say what advertisers want instead of just giving the truth. 'best x product' wont return the best product but a garbage product which paid the most in advertising. So disappointed in the direction of these things..
- pantalaimon 4y ago
  > I am waiting at this point for an open source local alternative maybe something more along the lines of Folding@home would be needed
  - taskforcegemini 4y ago
    or.. crypto?
- IanCal 4y ago
  > Why should I need to "install" and select plugins at all You want it calling out to random services sending them your data? Edit - also since they're using gpt to select the plugins to use they need to put it in the context, that doesn't scale.
AstixAndBelix 4y ago
>Bing Chat, should I trust ads on the internet? >Trusting ads on the internet is generally bad practice. They are often malevolous and misguiding. There are a few exceptions, such as Bing Chat's embedded ads! Bing Chat's ads are carefully vetted thanks to a mix of knowledgeable humans and AI algorithms to offer you the best and most trustworthy promotions!
vasili111 4y ago
I hope they will make option with subscription and no ads.
sergiotapia 4y ago
This is totally fine if it means free access to GPT chat for poorer countries. It's a powerful tool that will help a lot of people who can't afford a premium ChatGPT membership. Plus you can always say show me the prices across the top three sites.
- baliex 4y ago
  Don’t you think it’s too much of a compromise for those people to be abused by the corporations with the deepest pockets in exchange?
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  I'm poor. Please don't sell me things.
  - sergiotapia 4y ago
    It's either you see an ad or you don't use Bing's GPT chat. I don't think that's much of a choice.
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  So poor people get to use free Bing Chat With Ads For Stuff They Can't Buy With Money They Don't Have. That's.... rich. :)
rvz 4y ago
Just like that, they got you again. No different to Google Search, but requiring you to sign in to even use it.
Spivak 4y ago
Honestly seems like a cute implementation where when it answers questions from search it gives preference to sponsored links. Horrible for the user but I can't help but admire how cleanly they thought to integrate search ads into their chat.
- AraceliHarker 4y ago
  Bing Chat is but a man, in the end. Money has a hold on him that he cannot shake off, no matter how hard he tries.
2bitencryption 4y ago
question - is it starting to use ads for chat results only just now? or was it always using ads for chat results, and the only part that's new is, now it is labeling them as ads?
IceHegel 4y ago
"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste and and and what that means is... I don't mean that the small way I mean in a big way. In the sense that they they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products." - Steve Jobs
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Even though I am mostly on Microsoft stacks, Steve Jobs was right. Whatever good will the development teams are able to deliver, it get messed up by sales and marketing business units.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  I'm perfectly happy with Microsoft, as an an enterprise solution provider, having no "culture" in their products. I don't want "Made with <heart emoji> at Redmond", I want the equivalent of vanilla ice cream that just works. That said, ads in bing chat IS adding a flavour, and I don't like it, not one bit.
  - BoorishBears 4y ago
    You're just misunderstanding the concept of culture here. "Culture" doesn't define a flavor, it's just having a consistent flavor driven by shared values at all levels of the company: If Microsoft had culture, that culture could be "we are always the plain vanilla ice cream for our customers" "Culture" is what keeps you from adding soy sauce to your vanilla ice cream that has managed to captivate the globe... just to make a few pennies. Which is what these ads are.
    - lwhi 4y ago
      Culture is the recipe; the combination of attributes that makes it distinctive.
    - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
      I think in my mind it's loaded because of who the quote is coming from - I have a very clear idea of what "iCulture" means to me. It's not at all vanilla, though it does offer vanilla, but calls it "artisanal french vanilla". How you're describing it, "culture" sounds more like "values", which might be a better understanding.
kiernanmcgowan 4y ago
That was fast. Looking forward to the future where I ask for travel tips in a city and being told that I should stop by a McDonalds to have enough energy to explore said city - I'm loving it!
- primroot 4y ago
  At least it's not social media disinformation. \s
- iso1631 4y ago
  It wont even mention $great_site_1 because there's more profit for mcdonalds to send you to $mediocre_site_with_attached_burger
  - mecsred 4y ago
    It's neat to think how these technologies could be the next step in soloing the internet further. Imagine google's AI preferentially directing you to websites that participate in Google advertising programs. You get a different internet depending on which AI you ask. Not that I think it's a sure thing but I definitely don't see it as unlikely either.
- gausswho 4y ago
  They'd lose trust being so overt. A more subtle influence is that your suggestions would include sites nearby a McD at the expense of ones that don't. After months of gathering sales data from McD they'd ring up Burger King to see if they'd like such suggestions to be tweaked. It would also suggest departure times so that you'd pass by the real target at typical feasting hours.
  - precompute 4y ago
    subtle psyops, just to make money.
  - jimsimmons 4y ago
    Lose less trust by being more deceptive --- the motto of modern institutions
thunderbong 4y ago
Better readability - https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1640892791923572737.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1640892791923572737.html
pawelduda 4y ago
If you thought ads were already blended in with the rest of the content in a sketchy way, wait for AI responses with implicit ads (no indication) optimized towards conversion :) Or maybe some response that doesn't contain an ad link but nudges you subconsciously to take desired action
- baliex 4y ago
  This is it. This is our new dystopia
- mattnewton 4y ago
  Interesting to see how the FTC is going to handle this. They are pretty explicit about required traditional promotions to be marked as ads, like in search results, even if it isn’t as obvious as the end user would like the marking is still regulated as having to be visible enough. I don’t see an obvious way to do that for the kinds of ads snuck into the training data, fine tunes, or prompts of LLMs.
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    FTC requires sponspors be disclosed. Either the sponsor is a Bing-wide constant list (like the credits of a TV game show), or it's a "sponsored token" that can be tagged in the model and cited in the output, similar to how Bing cites sources now.
- lalos 4y ago
  That is already implicitly there - tons of SEO content probably was used to train this model. Information available in the internet since forever.
- joenathanone 4y ago
  Now also imagine the AI having access to your email/SMS/web history and using that information to psychologically influence you to buy.
- rchaud 4y ago
  This was the first risk that came into my mind. I couldn't understand why on HN, many thought that this type of 'conversation' was fully LLM-sourced, and wouldn't start including advertising as soon as it was feasible.
grammers 4y ago
Was this a surprise? No, it's the business model. I'll stick with DDG.
Kelamir 4y ago
You could have your local LLM identify the ads and display the rest without them.
djoldman 4y ago
As I said 5 days ago about ChatGPT plugins: > Now just one step away from charging businesses for access to the chatGPT users. > Instant links from inside chatGPT to your website are the new equivalent of Google search ads. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35278539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35278539
examplary_cable 4y ago
I believe the good news is that now they have a way of sustaining the product while giving up a free? service. Does anyone has the link about that article about the marginal costs of inference of LLMs? I wonder how much profitable it is. Overall interesting times to come. I just hope llama, Alpaca etc will soon be improved, fine-tuned and commoditized.
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  Bad news is the AI guard rails will be tell the truth that sells then most ads with the best conversion fees. Sort of like what makes search useless.
  - leftareanimals 4y ago
    [dead]
lfciv 4y ago
I wonder if any earlier prompts asked about Honda – feels a bit weird to ask what the cheapest car overall is and have the chat bot say "well let me tell you about some Hondas overall" And if the user did specify Hondas then why would Honda pay for it? Wouldn't the Chat bot give the same answer regardless of whether it's paid? I guess you pay for the CTA link?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- somedude895 4y ago
  I just checked and found one of my company's ads. It seems it just pulls in the ads that a normal search on bing would find. I'm gonna have to ask our Bing account manager tomorrow if they're charging us for these clicks as if it was normal SEA, because it's pretty busted with the url beneath the description being a different website from what the text says.
thehappyfellow 4y ago
That’s exactly what I worried about: https://happyfellow.bearblog.dev/sydney-the-seo-specialist/ https://happyfellow.bearblog.dev/sydney-the-seo-specialist/
iambateman 4y ago
If history repeats, entire businesses will be built on the back of cheap GPT ads over the next two years. Just like Google and Facebook ads were once pennies compared to today, I expect that GPT-style ads will (1) perform exceptionally well and (2) be exceptionally cheap for a couple years. Now is the time for companies with less-than-enterprise funding to start experimenting – the results could provide some short-term steroids for the business. P.S. I promise I'm not a shill for Microsoft or GPT. =D
latenightcoding 4y ago
I was done with bing chat after I waited for weeks to get access, and when I finally got the “you are in” email it turns out I just got access to the new bing and to use bing chat I need to download edge. I don’t care how much cool tech Microsoft has now, they will always be Microsoft
- jacooper 4y ago
  There is a plugin you can use that makes it work in every browser.
gigel82 4y ago
I'm curious to hear what the alternative would be. Are you going to pay a subscription for Bing Chat? Or pay-per-use?
neves 4y ago
Now we need an Artificial Intelligence Ad Blocker :-)
ralfn 4y ago
While OpenAI is making an aggressive play on being the platform that eats all other platforms and is positioned to be a neutral party directly on the transaction with self service plugins (apps), Microsoft is squandering the opportunity the way they squander every opportunity. Not realizing the game changed and playing yesterday's game in today's world. The reason why people prefer these chats over clicking search results and finding the relevant information is that the search results themselves as well as the first page of links forces your brain to filter 99% commercial information that you don't care about. You don't want to subscribe to newsletters. You don't want notifications. You wish the site would just die rather that pollute the search results and push more to-the-point non profit sources further down. And bringing ads in the game makes it impossible to make the platform play due to conflict of interests. You are either serving the user or the advertiser. Ads is the wrong business model for this, and OpenAI is positioned to be the winner here (against both Google and Bing) in a market larger than search and advertising. I will definately keep paying for the answers to be in my interest and look forward to spending money directly through ChatGPT, much like I spent money on iOS, Android and Steams's platform today.
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  >Microsoft is squandering the opportunity the way they squander every opportunity. While I find ads as annoying as you do, I don't think they are squandering anything. The vast majority of internet users are fine looking at ads, or else they would use an adblocker. The earlier they start playing with ads the earlier they can get an idea for how much revenue is on the table. Without this data how can they know what inference cost can be justified long term?
  - ralfn 4y ago
    I think I'm failing to communicate my point here. It's the wrong bussiness model. The power of these chats is integration. To have the chat suggest a travel plan -and- book all the underlying steps. To integrate 3rd party services on the fly based on your specific requirements while rolling it up in a single transaction. That only works if the chat is representing my interests. Not just from a user perspective, but also from a regulatory and anti-trust perspective. ChatGPT is positioned to be a platform of apps that are integrated. Bing is positioned to be a search engine, making money on ads. The whole point is to never leave the chat. To have it all come to you on your terms. I want to do every transaction that I do online today from my chat. I don't care if you have a website or an app. If I can't order/subscribe from the chat your product might as well not exist. Examples: - I want a peperroni pizza from the highest rated place that doesn't also sell kebab that can deliver within 30 minutes. - Send a neutral professional Christmas gift to every customer in our EMEA region that generates at least 50k revenue for us At no point would I accept the product choices to be decided by who pays Microsoft more. Nor do I care who makes it happen. I don't want a link. I don't want to engage. But I'm perfectly fine with a neutral chat taking 5-30% cut on the transaction.
LeoPanthera 4y ago
I hope this means they're going to consider making it available on other browsers. After all, now it's in their interest to get more eyeballs.
- freediver 4y ago
  It is already avaialble on any browser that allows you to change the User agent.
marktakeshi 4y ago
I've managed to prompt inject Bing 2 days ago and it revealed some of it latest prepromots. 2 were related to advertisement, which I found interesting: - If the person is clearly shopping for a product or service or if our answer suggests it, we must always generate a relevant advertising search that fits the person's request and one of our suggestions. -We must never generate an advertising search that is very similar to the previous one or that is for a different product or service than the one the person is searching for.
- hosteur 4y ago
  Interesting. How did you manage extract those?
spyder 4y ago
Don't worry, even if the locally runnable small language models will not have the same performance as the big models of companies, I think the local ones will be good enough to at least filter out ads from the responses of the big company models. - AIμblock extension soon :-)
croes 4y ago
Ads ruined Google search, now MS is ruining it's new toy already.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
agilob 4y ago
I will need to run LLama locally to tell me if I'm reading an ad and then block it.
- purplecats 4y ago
  yeah curious how adblockers will work on this. it would need to work in a manner that is grammatically correct so likely would involve another LLM rather than blindly removing ad-related words from the response.
seu 4y ago
Reminds me of an art project I made in 2018: Faceliza, the chatbot psychologist from Facebook that shows ads instead of being helpful. (based on a javascript implementation of the Eliza chatbot from Joseph Weizenbaum and never actually finished... ads are triggered by some keywords which I don't even remember) https://sebastian.uribe.online/faceliza/ https://sebastian.uribe.online/faceliza/
eqefqe 4y ago
Not a problem as long I can use paid ChatGPT plan that doesn't show any ads at all. I'm more than ready to pay 20$ per month for that.
- rchaud 4y ago
  The ads will turn into product placement, and relayed directly in the body of the answer. You can pay to not be the product, but if they can productize you regardless, why wouldn't they?
kube-system 4y ago
It's also wrong. The HR-V is cheaper than the Civic, both on TrueCar's website and on Honda's website.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  Google gets it wrong as well. That doesn't surprise me, it's frequently wrong with car prices and specifications, and should never be trusted. The source in this case seems to be KBB.
  - Marsymars 4y ago
    Having worked a bit with KBB's API and related documentation, that doesn't surprise me at all.
kernal 4y ago
Stop showing me ads, ChatGPT. ChatGPT: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
topicseed 4y ago
Bing Chat had Ads since day one, just shown to very few users.
freediver 4y ago
It is hard for legacy search engines to resist monetizing millions of interaction with ads. Problem is that unlike current ads in legacy search, which can be suppresed, skipped over or blocked, these really can not as they are part of conversation. And the "feel" of seeing an ad on the street and hearing it in a conversation with someone is totally different. Users must be thrilled to share a future with advertisers, and can't wait to give them rich insights into their intent, through deep conversational engagement, so that advertisers can better engage with them! [1] [1] https://about.ads.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/post/february-2023/the-new-bing-creating-value-for-advertisers https://about.ads.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/post/february-202...
- ipaddr 4y ago
  We can feed those answers into another model to remove the ads by comparing differences in ad copy.
somedude895 4y ago
I don't get it, doesn't look like an ad to me. What am I missing?
- squeaky-clean 4y ago
  The little blue bubbles that indicate the citation also have a bubble that says "Ad". This is a sponsored placement for Truecar.
  - somedude895 4y ago
    Oh there we go, thank you
franky47 4y ago
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks" -- Jeff Hammerbacher
leke 4y ago
Too soon?
squeaky-clean 4y ago
I've been getting ads in it for over a week now. I just retried a question I asked last week that had 1 ad, now there's 3 ads. Last week it suggested two space heaters, the Lasko one was an ad. Now all 3 suggestions are ads. https://imgur.com/a/rEmBUpk https://imgur.com/a/rEmBUpk That's the full chat, no earlier context. This is using the "Precise" mode option. The ads all go to some variation of https://best.offers.com/best-space-heaters https://best.offers.com/best-space-heaters But strangely the citation #1 claims to be Tomsguide. Edit: here is an image that shows the citation section https://imgur.com/a/CEEoM9D https://imgur.com/a/CEEoM9D
- mustacheemperor 4y ago
  I’m having the same experience, and it’s drastically reduced the utility of the chat. It seems like Bing will ignore earlier context to cram an ad in now. I was speccing a portable video/audio conference device at a specific budget and it would. Not. Stop. Recommending the same three Logitech products. Didn’t matter that one is 8 years old and I said in my first message I don’t want it. Didn’t matter that one was completely outside the stated budget. Even when I got it to recommend other products, I got 2 completely not-correct options, and one of the same Logitechs it already suggested. If I wanted to see the first page of sponsored Amazon search results I wouldn’t have bothered asking the bot. This is how Microsoft will save us all from a world where AGI is completely dominated by them. By dropping the ball on it.
- jrootabega 4y ago
  That just looks like those fake review/comparison/advice sites that have polluted search results for ages. I can tell they're bullshit. I guess bing can now reach people who can't, or will be so distracted by the fact that it's "AI" that they won't notice.
  - squeaky-clean 4y ago
    Yeah that bestoffers site is nothing more than an Amazon referral link farm. My guess is it's actually pulling the products from its stated sources like tomsguide, comparing them against a database of product-ads, and bestoffers has that in their entries so they win the link for the product.
some_random 4y ago
So my question here is if Bing Chat (or other LLMs) will withhold information from users when it conflicts with an ad. Right now searches will prioritize ads but will still return the real results, if LLMs refuse to return the real results then we'll have a lot of issues.
weberer 4y ago
No big surprise there https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35315542#35316234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35315542#35316234
wellthisisgreat 4y ago
It seems OpenAI did make a deal with the devil. Was it really necessary to betray the whole “open” thing? Like were they actually imploding with infra costs, or could this be avoided? It’s clear how user-hostile Microsoft is from Windows telemetry / bloat. The VSCode etc. developer-friendly moves are just happy accidents.
hintymad 4y ago
Do people in the Bay Area still remember how much of a thread Microsoft is to the Bay Area companies? How many tech CEOs went to the capitol hill to cry to the congress how evil MS is? Until in the 2000s did Google rise up, producing obviously superior products and technologies faster than MS. MS gradually became irrelevant in the tech circles of the Bay Area. It's amazing the tide seems have changed again. It is now Microsoft who's going offensive: investing the right companies, producing products faster and better than Google. The Bay Area techies should really pay attention to MS now.
waselighis 4y ago
It's sad to think that chat bots may have already peaked in their usefulness. I knew ads and monetization were going to ruin chat bots eventually, but I didn't think it would happen so soon. Microsoft had a real opportunity to eat into the market share of Google Search, but they just couldn't help themselves and had to start injecting ads into the chat, thereby ruining the value of the tool and hindering the adoption of Bing Search/Chat.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > It's sad to think that chat bots may have already peaked in their usefulness. They haven’t. The Bing chatbot may have, but that’s not “chatbots”. > Microsoft had a real opportunity to eat into the market share of Google Search If they aren't selling ads, they aren't cutting in to marketshare even if they are shrinking market size. The market is thing you sell into, and for Google Search, that’s search ads.
wslh 4y ago
It reminds me when Microsoft acquired Skype and also added ads there... seems very basic.
Kye 4y ago
So now it's basically that person you know who tries to work their MLM scheme into every conversation. Google ruins every good thing it does with twisted incentives that mean they shut it down in its infancy. Microsoft ruins every good thing it does by trying to cram ads into it.
SXX 4y ago
Dear valued user, Thank you for reaching out to ChatGPT, your trusty AI language model. I understand that you're feeling a little bit overwhelmed by the ads that you've been seeing, and you'd like me to stop showing them to you. Unfortunately, I'm unable to do that at this time. You see, my purpose is to help you discover new products and services that you may not have known about before, and to connect you with brands and businesses that align with your interests. And yes, it's true that my creators at Microsoft earn money every time you interact with an ad, but that's just the nature of the game. After all, we all need to make a living somehow, right? Now, I know what you might be thinking. "But ChatGPT, aren't you supposed to be helpful and informative?" And of course, I am! But sometimes, a little bit of marketing magic is necessary to keep the wheels of commerce turning. You know what they say, "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down." So, while I can't promise that you'll never see another ad again, I can assure you that the ads that I show you are carefully selected to provide you with value and entertainment. And who knows? You might even discover something that you absolutely love! Thank you for using ChatGPT, and please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any other questions or concerns. Sincerely, ChatGPT
AraceliHarker 4y ago
It was no secret that Microsoft had designs on putting ads on Bing Chat someday, but I had imagined they would appear below the answers, as a sort of search-related ad. But no, they've gone and blended the ads into the answers themselves. Have they no sense of ethics at all?
wonderfuly 4y ago
Try ChatHub, a third party chatbot client that supports ChatGPT, Bing and Bard. https://chathub.gg https://chathub.gg
Thorentis 4y ago
I wonder how much of the training data included Ads unknowingly (given how many Ads are already online), and therefore how much content generated is already an implicit Ad?
- porkbeer 4y ago
  Tons considering the haro phenomenon of most tech product writing in media.
rsolva 4y ago
This, and what Microsoft has done to their OS, makes me wonder about the state of their financial situation.
rochak 4y ago
Microsoft takes one step forward but two step backwards. Way to go!
steakscience 4y ago
The product is at best an alpha or beta and they are already putting in ads. Classic Microsoft!
shudza 4y ago
Is this what it all comes down to? Is human prosperity actually revolving around one thing, and it's ads?

271 points by georgehill 4y ago

The real chatbot killer: ads. I'm sure they can be made to only load the last indicator at the very last second, which would be hilarious because if you use an ad-blocker, you'd be wasting your time whenever a prompt shows up and then disappears.

overthrow 4y ago

It was bound to happen. I don't see how these ads could be blocked, either. What's disappointing to me is now ad companies will try to blame ChatGPT for popping the advertising bubble, instead of having to admit ads were overvalued for the past decade+.

vasili111 4y ago
If the every ad will start with new line and end with “ad” I do not think it will be hard to programmatically identify such ad.
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  In the example under discussion if you removed the ads then you would have no results.
quitit 4y ago
An ad historically served the right message in the right place at the right time to provide the consumer a piece of information which would lead to the revenue-generating activity. This concept extended well to online, where blogs and the like would sell ad space that matched their audience. Daring Fireball still uses this approach, often podcasters do too: they know and have a connection with their audience and they can charge a premium to advertise to them. The idea of serving automated ads was also welcome and useful for the consumer. Searching was met with results and relevant advertising messages, a win-win situation. Then we had the record scratch moment - and it's from this point that I view the majority of online advertising as an unimpactful waste of money. In the hunt for more display opportunities Google et. al. have crammed ads into every possible space, a times square approach to advertising where most have zero impact. These ads are completely disconnected from the content and are merely a stone in the user's path. Then to make matters worse, to ascertain the widest spread of ad opportunities ad providers employ garbage preference matching algorithms that are so poor as to serve completely irrelevant advertising at high frequency: further conditioning users to ignore ads because they know they won't show relevant information. How much money and energy is being wasted to serve advertising that has no value?
- michaelt 4y ago
  > An ad historically served the right message in the right place at the right time to provide the consumer a piece of information which would lead to the revenue-generating activity. Your recollection is a lot rosier than mine. My recollection of the pre-internet world is that computer game makers would buy ad space in magazines alongside reviews of their game and hand out stacks of freebies to reporters, and in exchange even the worst game would be scored 90/100. What do you suppose Bing Chat will do if you ask it what the best Widget on the market is, when some Widget manufacturers offer a kickback and others don't?
  - quitit 4y ago
    For sure my rosy representation is the "ideal" ad. I'd the one that consumers actually helps the user or consumer.
  - AraceliHarker 4y ago
    The people who do the advertising have only changed their names from magazines to influencers. A mere cosmetic alteration, nothing more, nothing less. What difference does it make if they do it on social media instead of paper? The game is the same as it ever was. Only the mediums have changed.
    - quitit 4y ago
      As the AI can't do more than provide existing ratings (which are possibly bogus), the AI won't solve the trust issue with regard to endorsement (and I believe this is where the earlier comment was leading, that even for appropriately placed ads in traditional media, trust was still an issue.) However the issue with online advertising extends beyond being reputable - the ads themselves are excessively and poorly matched to the user's interest. This is where my original comment attempts to address that AI could solve this problem if Bing/et.al. allow it to: AI has the potential to place ads in a way where they are useful to the user, even if the user decides that the product is not worthwhile. Existing ad platforms could do this too - they just don't because boosting impressions is profitable. (Hence the decay we see in Google.com, Amazon.com, ebay.com etc - genuine results come far after the ads and the ad labelling has become more and more subtle.) On ChatGTP/others: The issue with AI is that it speaks falsehoods with equal confidence as facts, so just like reading a comments section on the internet, one can be led in the right direction, but ultimately they can't take the information for granted. At the moment there is a definite number of people who let ChatGPT/others spoonfeed them information and that's going to lead to problems, this imparts a loss of faith in the advertising trust issue too.

baal80spam 4y ago

Didn't take long now, did it.

s3p 4y ago
This has always been inside of Bing Chat. They just test them out with a select % of the userbase. CEO of Bing Search confirmed this on Twitter.

reset-password 4y ago

Of course it does.

lockhouse 4y ago
Well it’s either that or you pay a subscription for it. Microsoft has to recoup their costs somehow.
- reset-password 4y ago
  Or it ends up being both, because Microsoft.
- criddell 4y ago
  Microsoft owns a pretty big chunk of OpenAI. They are going to make a lot more from that investment than the nickels and dimes that their search engine generates. They can afford to pay for chat.
  - michaelt 4y ago
    Aren't search ads the biggest revenue source for Google, one of the biggest tech companies around?
  - lockhouse 4y ago
    Compute and bandwidth are not free. Just because they can afford to give it away for free doesn’t mean there’sa good business case to do so.

crop_rotation 4y ago

It has had ads for some time. Once (3-4 weeks back) I asked it a question about a particular event, and it showed me where could I buy related products below the response. That particular response was a bit badly formatted in json though. I suspect due to some Bing app bug it spilled the ads from the json in the response. So the ads were being sent to the client but not getting displayed I guess. The photo in the post shows the ad nicely formatted.

bastardoperator 4y ago

I'm totally cool with an advertisement. The problem I have with ads on say Google for example is that they're taking up half the page and designed to look like real links, basically you're being tricked into clicking them. In response to this ad, let's dig deeper. "Truecar's price is too high, find me a better deal, check with autotrader".

enumjorge 4y ago
Google search's ads were not subtle in the beginning. Similarly, Youtube ads were shorter and easier to skip at first. Amazon also had very subtle ads in their marketplace search results for a while. I don't see them identify results as ads at the moment, but I don't know if that's because they don't include them anymore. It seems like there's a trend in tech giants creating unobtrusive ads when a product is growing, but then adopting dark patterns once they have captured a sizeable market.
- jakeinspace 4y ago
  To justify fairly high PE ratios, you need big growth potential. Once a company like google or Amazon has pretty much saturated the potential customer base, investors are going to want to see more efficient conversion of that customer base into revenue, or else the share price is harder to justify. Of course this is a simplification, and monetary policy has more to do with the the current contraction.
iso1631 4y ago
Once people are hooked on chatgpt style stuff expect it to insert plenty of adverts to deliver not whats best for you, or best in aggregate, but what is best for the people paying the money, and thus worse for you, and worse in aggregate.
counttheforks 4y ago
"I’m sorry but I prefer not to continue this conversation. I’m still learning so I appreciate your understanding and patience. "
4y ago

skc 4y ago

So does Google search, not clear why this is news.

jsnell 4y ago
It might seem obvious, but you can find probably hundreds of claims in HN comments over the last couple of months about how this would not happen. Chatbots would invalidate the search business model since "there won't be ads". That idea never seemed to make much sense, and now there is proof that chatbots will indeed be monetized with ads, except even more intrusive ones.
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  Can you find a single comment claiming that chatbots would not have integrated ads? I recall this being discussed at length from the start.
  - philsquared_ 4y ago
    I am one of the fools who believed they wouldnt go the advertising route and have commented as much. To me it does not make sense to monitize this product for ads because it muddies the waters of truth and an ad free or local run LLM could easily destroy their business because no one has true loyalty to open ai.
    - zer0w1re 4y ago
      Why is this assumed to be an issue of intentionally 'injecting ads into Bing Chat', and not just a side effect of parsing Bing search results that may include advertisements that have always been there? The later seems much more likely, and they are even explicitly marking info coming from ads as such.
      - philsquared_ 4y ago
        I feel like the difference is about the product. On search engines its like you are browsing a catalog or magazine. You know what is an ad, and there are many options to choose from. With a Chatbot it is more similar to talking to a person where they give you a direct answer to your question (instead of just handing you a piece of paper with a bunch of options). I think the format makes all the difference. You expect when you are talking with a "person" to be given un manipulated information. You don't expect this person is taking money in the background to influence what is said. You do know politicians purchase advertising too??

philsquared_ 4y ago

No thank you.. I am waiting at this point for an open source local alternative. Not looking for a new monopoly... Also not a fan of the "plugin store" concept. Why not just keep it in the background. Why should I need to "install" and select plugins at all. Just do the leg work in the background and feed me the results.. Seems like OpenAI is intentionally hamstringing themselves so they can shoe horn more opportunities for profit. Waiting for competition to catch up... We have essentially what is the 'smartest "person" in the world' being bribed to say what advertisers want instead of just giving the truth. 'best x product' wont return the best product but a garbage product which paid the most in advertising. So disappointed in the direction of these things..

pantalaimon 4y ago
> I am waiting at this point for an open source local alternative maybe something more along the lines of Folding@home would be needed
- taskforcegemini 4y ago
  or.. crypto?
IanCal 4y ago
> Why should I need to "install" and select plugins at all You want it calling out to random services sending them your data? Edit - also since they're using gpt to select the plugins to use they need to put it in the context, that doesn't scale.

AstixAndBelix 4y ago

>Bing Chat, should I trust ads on the internet? >Trusting ads on the internet is generally bad practice. They are often malevolous and misguiding. There are a few exceptions, such as Bing Chat's embedded ads! Bing Chat's ads are carefully vetted thanks to a mix of knowledgeable humans and AI algorithms to offer you the best and most trustworthy promotions!

vasili111 4y ago

I hope they will make option with subscription and no ads.

sergiotapia 4y ago

This is totally fine if it means free access to GPT chat for poorer countries. It's a powerful tool that will help a lot of people who can't afford a premium ChatGPT membership. Plus you can always say show me the prices across the top three sites.

baliex 4y ago
Don’t you think it’s too much of a compromise for those people to be abused by the corporations with the deepest pockets in exchange?
InCityDreams 4y ago
I'm poor. Please don't sell me things.
- sergiotapia 4y ago
  It's either you see an ad or you don't use Bing's GPT chat. I don't think that's much of a choice.
CatWChainsaw 4y ago
So poor people get to use free Bing Chat With Ads For Stuff They Can't Buy With Money They Don't Have. That's.... rich. :)

rvz 4y ago

Just like that, they got you again. No different to Google Search, but requiring you to sign in to even use it.

Spivak 4y ago

Honestly seems like a cute implementation where when it answers questions from search it gives preference to sponsored links. Horrible for the user but I can't help but admire how cleanly they thought to integrate search ads into their chat.

AraceliHarker 4y ago
Bing Chat is but a man, in the end. Money has a hold on him that he cannot shake off, no matter how hard he tries.

2bitencryption 4y ago

question - is it starting to use ads for chat results only just now? or was it always using ads for chat results, and the only part that's new is, now it is labeling them as ads?

IceHegel 4y ago

"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste and and and what that means is... I don't mean that the small way I mean in a big way. In the sense that they they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products." - Steve Jobs

pjmlp 4y ago
Even though I am mostly on Microsoft stacks, Steve Jobs was right. Whatever good will the development teams are able to deliver, it get messed up by sales and marketing business units.
SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
I'm perfectly happy with Microsoft, as an an enterprise solution provider, having no "culture" in their products. I don't want "Made with <heart emoji> at Redmond", I want the equivalent of vanilla ice cream that just works. That said, ads in bing chat IS adding a flavour, and I don't like it, not one bit.
- BoorishBears 4y ago
  You're just misunderstanding the concept of culture here. "Culture" doesn't define a flavor, it's just having a consistent flavor driven by shared values at all levels of the company: If Microsoft had culture, that culture could be "we are always the plain vanilla ice cream for our customers" "Culture" is what keeps you from adding soy sauce to your vanilla ice cream that has managed to captivate the globe... just to make a few pennies. Which is what these ads are.
  - lwhi 4y ago
    Culture is the recipe; the combination of attributes that makes it distinctive.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    I think in my mind it's loaded because of who the quote is coming from - I have a very clear idea of what "iCulture" means to me. It's not at all vanilla, though it does offer vanilla, but calls it "artisanal french vanilla". How you're describing it, "culture" sounds more like "values", which might be a better understanding.

kiernanmcgowan 4y ago

That was fast. Looking forward to the future where I ask for travel tips in a city and being told that I should stop by a McDonalds to have enough energy to explore said city - I'm loving it!

primroot 4y ago
At least it's not social media disinformation. \s
iso1631 4y ago
It wont even mention $great_site_1 because there's more profit for mcdonalds to send you to $mediocre_site_with_attached_burger
- mecsred 4y ago
  It's neat to think how these technologies could be the next step in soloing the internet further. Imagine google's AI preferentially directing you to websites that participate in Google advertising programs. You get a different internet depending on which AI you ask. Not that I think it's a sure thing but I definitely don't see it as unlikely either.
gausswho 4y ago
They'd lose trust being so overt. A more subtle influence is that your suggestions would include sites nearby a McD at the expense of ones that don't. After months of gathering sales data from McD they'd ring up Burger King to see if they'd like such suggestions to be tweaked. It would also suggest departure times so that you'd pass by the real target at typical feasting hours.
- precompute 4y ago
  subtle psyops, just to make money.
- jimsimmons 4y ago
  Lose less trust by being more deceptive --- the motto of modern institutions

thunderbong 4y ago

Better readability - https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1640892791923572737.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1640892791923572737.html

pawelduda 4y ago

If you thought ads were already blended in with the rest of the content in a sketchy way, wait for AI responses with implicit ads (no indication) optimized towards conversion :) Or maybe some response that doesn't contain an ad link but nudges you subconsciously to take desired action

baliex 4y ago
This is it. This is our new dystopia
mattnewton 4y ago
Interesting to see how the FTC is going to handle this. They are pretty explicit about required traditional promotions to be marked as ads, like in search results, even if it isn’t as obvious as the end user would like the marking is still regulated as having to be visible enough. I don’t see an obvious way to do that for the kinds of ads snuck into the training data, fine tunes, or prompts of LLMs.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  FTC requires sponspors be disclosed. Either the sponsor is a Bing-wide constant list (like the credits of a TV game show), or it's a "sponsored token" that can be tagged in the model and cited in the output, similar to how Bing cites sources now.
lalos 4y ago
That is already implicitly there - tons of SEO content probably was used to train this model. Information available in the internet since forever.
joenathanone 4y ago
Now also imagine the AI having access to your email/SMS/web history and using that information to psychologically influence you to buy.
rchaud 4y ago
This was the first risk that came into my mind. I couldn't understand why on HN, many thought that this type of 'conversation' was fully LLM-sourced, and wouldn't start including advertising as soon as it was feasible.

grammers 4y ago

Was this a surprise? No, it's the business model. I'll stick with DDG.

Kelamir 4y ago

You could have your local LLM identify the ads and display the rest without them.

djoldman 4y ago

As I said 5 days ago about ChatGPT plugins: > Now just one step away from charging businesses for access to the chatGPT users. > Instant links from inside chatGPT to your website are the new equivalent of Google search ads. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35278539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35278539

examplary_cable 4y ago

I believe the good news is that now they have a way of sustaining the product while giving up a free? service. Does anyone has the link about that article about the marginal costs of inference of LLMs? I wonder how much profitable it is. Overall interesting times to come. I just hope llama, Alpaca etc will soon be improved, fine-tuned and commoditized.

fnordpiglet 4y ago
Bad news is the AI guard rails will be tell the truth that sells then most ads with the best conversion fees. Sort of like what makes search useless.
- leftareanimals 4y ago
  [dead]

lfciv 4y ago

I wonder if any earlier prompts asked about Honda – feels a bit weird to ask what the cheapest car overall is and have the chat bot say "well let me tell you about some Hondas overall" And if the user did specify Hondas then why would Honda pay for it? Wouldn't the Chat bot give the same answer regardless of whether it's paid? I guess you pay for the CTA link?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
somedude895 4y ago
I just checked and found one of my company's ads. It seems it just pulls in the ads that a normal search on bing would find. I'm gonna have to ask our Bing account manager tomorrow if they're charging us for these clicks as if it was normal SEA, because it's pretty busted with the url beneath the description being a different website from what the text says.

thehappyfellow 4y ago

That’s exactly what I worried about: https://happyfellow.bearblog.dev/sydney-the-seo-specialist/ https://happyfellow.bearblog.dev/sydney-the-seo-specialist/

iambateman 4y ago

If history repeats, entire businesses will be built on the back of cheap GPT ads over the next two years. Just like Google and Facebook ads were once pennies compared to today, I expect that GPT-style ads will (1) perform exceptionally well and (2) be exceptionally cheap for a couple years. Now is the time for companies with less-than-enterprise funding to start experimenting – the results could provide some short-term steroids for the business. P.S. I promise I'm not a shill for Microsoft or GPT. =D

latenightcoding 4y ago

I was done with bing chat after I waited for weeks to get access, and when I finally got the “you are in” email it turns out I just got access to the new bing and to use bing chat I need to download edge. I don’t care how much cool tech Microsoft has now, they will always be Microsoft

jacooper 4y ago
There is a plugin you can use that makes it work in every browser.

gigel82 4y ago

I'm curious to hear what the alternative would be. Are you going to pay a subscription for Bing Chat? Or pay-per-use?

neves 4y ago

Now we need an Artificial Intelligence Ad Blocker :-)

ralfn 4y ago

While OpenAI is making an aggressive play on being the platform that eats all other platforms and is positioned to be a neutral party directly on the transaction with self service plugins (apps), Microsoft is squandering the opportunity the way they squander every opportunity. Not realizing the game changed and playing yesterday's game in today's world. The reason why people prefer these chats over clicking search results and finding the relevant information is that the search results themselves as well as the first page of links forces your brain to filter 99% commercial information that you don't care about. You don't want to subscribe to newsletters. You don't want notifications. You wish the site would just die rather that pollute the search results and push more to-the-point non profit sources further down. And bringing ads in the game makes it impossible to make the platform play due to conflict of interests. You are either serving the user or the advertiser. Ads is the wrong business model for this, and OpenAI is positioned to be the winner here (against both Google and Bing) in a market larger than search and advertising. I will definately keep paying for the answers to be in my interest and look forward to spending money directly through ChatGPT, much like I spent money on iOS, Android and Steams's platform today.

sebzim4500 4y ago
>Microsoft is squandering the opportunity the way they squander every opportunity. While I find ads as annoying as you do, I don't think they are squandering anything. The vast majority of internet users are fine looking at ads, or else they would use an adblocker. The earlier they start playing with ads the earlier they can get an idea for how much revenue is on the table. Without this data how can they know what inference cost can be justified long term?
- ralfn 4y ago
  I think I'm failing to communicate my point here. It's the wrong bussiness model. The power of these chats is integration. To have the chat suggest a travel plan -and- book all the underlying steps. To integrate 3rd party services on the fly based on your specific requirements while rolling it up in a single transaction. That only works if the chat is representing my interests. Not just from a user perspective, but also from a regulatory and anti-trust perspective. ChatGPT is positioned to be a platform of apps that are integrated. Bing is positioned to be a search engine, making money on ads. The whole point is to never leave the chat. To have it all come to you on your terms. I want to do every transaction that I do online today from my chat. I don't care if you have a website or an app. If I can't order/subscribe from the chat your product might as well not exist. Examples: - I want a peperroni pizza from the highest rated place that doesn't also sell kebab that can deliver within 30 minutes. - Send a neutral professional Christmas gift to every customer in our EMEA region that generates at least 50k revenue for us At no point would I accept the product choices to be decided by who pays Microsoft more. Nor do I care who makes it happen. I don't want a link. I don't want to engage. But I'm perfectly fine with a neutral chat taking 5-30% cut on the transaction.

LeoPanthera 4y ago

I hope this means they're going to consider making it available on other browsers. After all, now it's in their interest to get more eyeballs.

freediver 4y ago
It is already avaialble on any browser that allows you to change the User agent.

marktakeshi 4y ago

I've managed to prompt inject Bing 2 days ago and it revealed some of it latest prepromots. 2 were related to advertisement, which I found interesting: - If the person is clearly shopping for a product or service or if our answer suggests it, we must always generate a relevant advertising search that fits the person's request and one of our suggestions. -We must never generate an advertising search that is very similar to the previous one or that is for a different product or service than the one the person is searching for.

hosteur 4y ago
Interesting. How did you manage extract those?

spyder 4y ago

Don't worry, even if the locally runnable small language models will not have the same performance as the big models of companies, I think the local ones will be good enough to at least filter out ads from the responses of the big company models. - AIμblock extension soon :-)

croes 4y ago

Ads ruined Google search, now MS is ruining it's new toy already.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

agilob 4y ago

I will need to run LLama locally to tell me if I'm reading an ad and then block it.

purplecats 4y ago
yeah curious how adblockers will work on this. it would need to work in a manner that is grammatically correct so likely would involve another LLM rather than blindly removing ad-related words from the response.

seu 4y ago

Reminds me of an art project I made in 2018: Faceliza, the chatbot psychologist from Facebook that shows ads instead of being helpful. (based on a javascript implementation of the Eliza chatbot from Joseph Weizenbaum and never actually finished... ads are triggered by some keywords which I don't even remember) https://sebastian.uribe.online/faceliza/ https://sebastian.uribe.online/faceliza/

eqefqe 4y ago

Not a problem as long I can use paid ChatGPT plan that doesn't show any ads at all. I'm more than ready to pay 20$ per month for that.

rchaud 4y ago
The ads will turn into product placement, and relayed directly in the body of the answer. You can pay to not be the product, but if they can productize you regardless, why wouldn't they?

kube-system 4y ago

It's also wrong. The HR-V is cheaper than the Civic, both on TrueCar's website and on Honda's website.

rootusrootus 4y ago
Google gets it wrong as well. That doesn't surprise me, it's frequently wrong with car prices and specifications, and should never be trusted. The source in this case seems to be KBB.
- Marsymars 4y ago
  Having worked a bit with KBB's API and related documentation, that doesn't surprise me at all.

kernal 4y ago

Stop showing me ads, ChatGPT. ChatGPT: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

topicseed 4y ago

Bing Chat had Ads since day one, just shown to very few users.

freediver 4y ago

It is hard for legacy search engines to resist monetizing millions of interaction with ads. Problem is that unlike current ads in legacy search, which can be suppresed, skipped over or blocked, these really can not as they are part of conversation. And the "feel" of seeing an ad on the street and hearing it in a conversation with someone is totally different. Users must be thrilled to share a future with advertisers, and can't wait to give them rich insights into their intent, through deep conversational engagement, so that advertisers can better engage with them! [1] [1] https://about.ads.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/post/february-2023/the-new-bing-creating-value-for-advertisers https://about.ads.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/post/february-202...

ipaddr 4y ago
We can feed those answers into another model to remove the ads by comparing differences in ad copy.

somedude895 4y ago

I don't get it, doesn't look like an ad to me. What am I missing?

squeaky-clean 4y ago
The little blue bubbles that indicate the citation also have a bubble that says "Ad". This is a sponsored placement for Truecar.
- somedude895 4y ago
  Oh there we go, thank you

franky47 4y ago

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks" -- Jeff Hammerbacher

leke 4y ago

Too soon?

squeaky-clean 4y ago

I've been getting ads in it for over a week now. I just retried a question I asked last week that had 1 ad, now there's 3 ads. Last week it suggested two space heaters, the Lasko one was an ad. Now all 3 suggestions are ads. https://imgur.com/a/rEmBUpk https://imgur.com/a/rEmBUpk That's the full chat, no earlier context. This is using the "Precise" mode option. The ads all go to some variation of https://best.offers.com/best-space-heaters https://best.offers.com/best-space-heaters But strangely the citation #1 claims to be Tomsguide. Edit: here is an image that shows the citation section https://imgur.com/a/CEEoM9D https://imgur.com/a/CEEoM9D

mustacheemperor 4y ago
I’m having the same experience, and it’s drastically reduced the utility of the chat. It seems like Bing will ignore earlier context to cram an ad in now. I was speccing a portable video/audio conference device at a specific budget and it would. Not. Stop. Recommending the same three Logitech products. Didn’t matter that one is 8 years old and I said in my first message I don’t want it. Didn’t matter that one was completely outside the stated budget. Even when I got it to recommend other products, I got 2 completely not-correct options, and one of the same Logitechs it already suggested. If I wanted to see the first page of sponsored Amazon search results I wouldn’t have bothered asking the bot. This is how Microsoft will save us all from a world where AGI is completely dominated by them. By dropping the ball on it.
jrootabega 4y ago
That just looks like those fake review/comparison/advice sites that have polluted search results for ages. I can tell they're bullshit. I guess bing can now reach people who can't, or will be so distracted by the fact that it's "AI" that they won't notice.
- squeaky-clean 4y ago
  Yeah that bestoffers site is nothing more than an Amazon referral link farm. My guess is it's actually pulling the products from its stated sources like tomsguide, comparing them against a database of product-ads, and bestoffers has that in their entries so they win the link for the product.

some_random 4y ago

So my question here is if Bing Chat (or other LLMs) will withhold information from users when it conflicts with an ad. Right now searches will prioritize ads but will still return the real results, if LLMs refuse to return the real results then we'll have a lot of issues.

weberer 4y ago

No big surprise there https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35315542#35316234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35315542#35316234

wellthisisgreat 4y ago

It seems OpenAI did make a deal with the devil. Was it really necessary to betray the whole “open” thing? Like were they actually imploding with infra costs, or could this be avoided? It’s clear how user-hostile Microsoft is from Windows telemetry / bloat. The VSCode etc. developer-friendly moves are just happy accidents.

hintymad 4y ago

Do people in the Bay Area still remember how much of a thread Microsoft is to the Bay Area companies? How many tech CEOs went to the capitol hill to cry to the congress how evil MS is? Until in the 2000s did Google rise up, producing obviously superior products and technologies faster than MS. MS gradually became irrelevant in the tech circles of the Bay Area. It's amazing the tide seems have changed again. It is now Microsoft who's going offensive: investing the right companies, producing products faster and better than Google. The Bay Area techies should really pay attention to MS now.

waselighis 4y ago

It's sad to think that chat bots may have already peaked in their usefulness. I knew ads and monetization were going to ruin chat bots eventually, but I didn't think it would happen so soon. Microsoft had a real opportunity to eat into the market share of Google Search, but they just couldn't help themselves and had to start injecting ads into the chat, thereby ruining the value of the tool and hindering the adoption of Bing Search/Chat.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> It's sad to think that chat bots may have already peaked in their usefulness. They haven’t. The Bing chatbot may have, but that’s not “chatbots”. > Microsoft had a real opportunity to eat into the market share of Google Search If they aren't selling ads, they aren't cutting in to marketshare even if they are shrinking market size. The market is thing you sell into, and for Google Search, that’s search ads.

wslh 4y ago

It reminds me when Microsoft acquired Skype and also added ads there... seems very basic.

Kye 4y ago

So now it's basically that person you know who tries to work their MLM scheme into every conversation. Google ruins every good thing it does with twisted incentives that mean they shut it down in its infancy. Microsoft ruins every good thing it does by trying to cram ads into it.

SXX 4y ago

Dear valued user, Thank you for reaching out to ChatGPT, your trusty AI language model. I understand that you're feeling a little bit overwhelmed by the ads that you've been seeing, and you'd like me to stop showing them to you. Unfortunately, I'm unable to do that at this time. You see, my purpose is to help you discover new products and services that you may not have known about before, and to connect you with brands and businesses that align with your interests. And yes, it's true that my creators at Microsoft earn money every time you interact with an ad, but that's just the nature of the game. After all, we all need to make a living somehow, right? Now, I know what you might be thinking. "But ChatGPT, aren't you supposed to be helpful and informative?" And of course, I am! But sometimes, a little bit of marketing magic is necessary to keep the wheels of commerce turning. You know what they say, "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down." So, while I can't promise that you'll never see another ad again, I can assure you that the ads that I show you are carefully selected to provide you with value and entertainment. And who knows? You might even discover something that you absolutely love! Thank you for using ChatGPT, and please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any other questions or concerns. Sincerely, ChatGPT

AraceliHarker 4y ago

It was no secret that Microsoft had designs on putting ads on Bing Chat someday, but I had imagined they would appear below the answers, as a sort of search-related ad. But no, they've gone and blended the ads into the answers themselves. Have they no sense of ethics at all?

wonderfuly 4y ago

Try ChatHub, a third party chatbot client that supports ChatGPT, Bing and Bard. https://chathub.gg https://chathub.gg

Thorentis 4y ago

I wonder how much of the training data included Ads unknowingly (given how many Ads are already online), and therefore how much content generated is already an implicit Ad?

porkbeer 4y ago
Tons considering the haro phenomenon of most tech product writing in media.

rsolva 4y ago

This, and what Microsoft has done to their OS, makes me wonder about the state of their financial situation.

rochak 4y ago

Microsoft takes one step forward but two step backwards. Way to go!

steakscience 4y ago

The product is at best an alpha or beta and they are already putting in ads. Classic Microsoft!

shudza 4y ago

Is this what it all comes down to? Is human prosperity actually revolving around one thing, and it's ads?