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> The rubber will meet the road when the first free and open AI website gets real traction. And monetizes it with ads next to the answers. The magic of genAI i
by jsheard 2y ago
> The rubber will meet the road when the first free and open AI website gets real traction. And monetizes it with ads next to the answers.
The magic of genAI is they don't need to put ads next to the answers where they can easily be ignored or adblocked, they can put the ads inside the answers instead. The future, like it or not, is advertisers bidding to bias AI models towards mentioning their products.
- Geezus_42 2y agoSounds like a good way to guarantee no one ever uses it.
- kranke155 2y agoI wish I didnt read this because this sounds crazily prescient.
- ant6n 2y agoThat’s how Google works. And also why Google doesn’t work anymore.
- pydry 2y agoIt's not just google, it's all media. The more embedded and authentic advertising looks the better it works. Magazine/newspaper ads exist as much as a pretext for the magazine to write nice things about their advertisers in reviews and such. The real product reddit sells, I think, is turning a blind eye when advertisers sockpuppet the hell out of the site. Movies try to milk product placement for as much as they can because it's more effective than regular advertising.
- Lerc 2y agoFor all of the talk about regulation, there has been a lot of concern about what people might do with AI advisors. I haven't seen a lot of talk about the responsibilities of the advisors to act in the interest of their users. Laws exist in advisory roles in other industry to enforce acting in the interests of their clients. They should be applied to AI advice. I'm ok with an AI being mistaken, or refusing to help, but they absolutely should not deliberately advise in a manner that benefits another party to the detriment of the user.
- aktuel 2y agoThe web is full of human shills. Why should LLMs be any different? They will tack their boilerplate disclaimer on and be done with it.
- bayindirh 2y ago> but they absolutely should not deliberately advise in a manner that benefits another party to the detriment of the user. No, no... We don't prevent that in capitalism. See, regulation stifles innovation. Let the market decide. People might get harmed, but we can hide these events. It's research... Things happen... Making money is just a secondary effect. We're all non-profits. /s.
- khafra 2y agoIf you can solve the technical problem of ensuring an AI acts on behalf of its user's interests, please post the solution on the AI Alignment Forum: https://www.alignmentforum.org/ https://www.alignmentforum.org/ So far, that is not a feature of existing or hypothesized AI systems, and it's a pretty important feature to add before AI exceeds human capabilities in full generality.
- Lerc 2y agoAs I said, I am ok with AI acting mistakenly against it's users wishes. I am not asking people to implement things for which they currently have no solutions. That is clearly distinct from an AI acting deliberately against its users wishes by the design of the creators. Paid advertising influencing responses would be in this category and should not be permitted.
- bamboozled 2y agoI’m quite sure Google has put the ads in the answers ? Adsense ? Where have you been ?
- McDyver 2y agoAnd then the new "adblockers" will be AI based too, and will take the AI's answer as input and remove all product placement. It's just a cat and mouse game, really
- Sebb767 2y agoLike all adblockers. But just like the current "AI detection" tools, how much is detected (and what counts as Ad) is up for debate and most users won't bother, especially once the first anti-Adblock-features materialize.
- verisimi 2y ago"write a poem about lady Macbeth as a empowered female and make reference to the delicious new papaya flavoured fizzy drink from Pepsi"
- DoctorOetker 2y agoIn the long run, advanced user-LLM conversations, would zero in on composite figure-of-merit formulas, expressed in terms of conventional figure-of-merit quantities. There will be plenty of niche to differentiate products. Cheap test setups will prevent lies in datasheets, and randomized proctoring by the end-users. "Aligning" (manipulating) LLM responses to drive economic traffic is a short term exploit that will evaporate eventually.
- Mtinie 2y agoIs that a similar argument to “in the long run, digital social networks are healthy for society?” I agree with your position, and I also agree that social networks can be a net positive…I’m just not convinced society can get out of “short run” thinking before it tears itself apart with exploitation.
- DoctorOetker 2y agoit only takes a dedicated minority to link positive behavior onto decentralized verified state machines...
- worldsayshi 2y agoWe are okay with paying for phone calls and data use, why can't we be okay with paying for AI use? I like the idea of routing services that federate lots of different AI providers. There just needs to be ways to support an ever increasing range of capabilities in that delivery model.
- dotancohen 2y agoPhone calls and data use are (ostensibly, modulo QS) carriers, not sources. We can generally trust (modulo attacks) that _if_ they deliver something, they deliver the right thing. Not so with a source - be it human or artificial. We've developed societies and intuitions for dealing with dishonest humans for millennia, not yet so for artificial liers, who may also have huge profiles about each and every one of us to use against us.
- XorNot 2y agoOne simple answer would be that at all points, company's act like the ads are worth a lot more to them than any level of payment a customer will accept. Even if you do pay for the product, they'd prefer to put ads in it too - see Microsoft and Windows these days. We are, IMO, in desperate need of regulation which mandates that any ad-supported service must offer a justifiably priced ad-free version.
- jacooper 2y ago> One simple answer would be that at all points, company's act like the ads are worth a lot more to then then any level of payment a customer will accept. The unfortunate reality is this does seem to be the case. Netflix was getting so much more money from the ad supported tier that they discontinued any ad-free one close to its price, and that's for a subscription product. think how attractive that will be a for a one time purchase like Windows.
- worldsayshi 2y agoHuh, Netflix has ads? Has this only rolled out in stone regions?
- TheAlchemist 2y agoI'm affraid sir, but you seem to be 100% correct here. And it really is frightening.
- dotancohen 2y agoOr worse, biasing AI models towards political viewpoints.
- jacooper 2y agoThat's already happening.
- olddustytrail 2y agoThat's inevitable in any society where facts are political. And as far as I know, that's all societies.
- jaustin 2y agoI'm sure it's not long before you get the first emails offering a "training data influencing service" - for a nice fee, someone will make sure your product is positively mentioned in all the key training datasets used to train important models. "Our team of content experts will embed positive sentiment and accurate product details into authentic content. We use the latest AI and human-based techniques to achieve the highest degree of model influence". And of course, once the new models are released, it'll be impossible to prove the impact of the work - there's no counterfactual. Proponents of the "training data influence service" will tell you that without them, you wouldn't even be mentioned. I really don't like this. But I also don't see a way around it. Public datasets are good. User contributed content is good, but inherently vulnerable to this I think?. Anyone in any of the big LLM training orgs working on defending against this kind of bought influence?
- ssijak 2y agoIf they start doing that without clear distinction what is an ad, that would be a sure way to lose users immediately.
- jtbayly 2y agoAnd also get sued by the FTC. Disclosure is required.
- throwaway765123 2y agoDisclosure is technically required, but in practice I see undisclosed ads on social media all the time. If the individual instance is small enough and dissipates into the ether fast enough, there is virtually no risk of enforcement. Similarly, the black box AI models guarantee the owners can just shrug and say it's not their fault if the model suggests Wonderbread(r) for making toast 3.2% more frequently than other breads.
- Kon-Peki 2y agoHa! Disclosure by whom? If Clorox fills their site with "helpful" articles that just happen to mention Clorox very frequently and some training set aggregator or unscrupulous AI company scrapes it without prior permission, does Clorox have any responsibility for the result? And when those model weights get used randomly, is it an advertisement according to the law? I think not. Pay attention to the non-headline claims in the NYT lawsuit against OpenAI for whether or not anyone has any responsibility if their AI model starts mentioning your registered trademark without your permission. But on the other hand, what if you like that they mention your name frequently???
- reubenmorais 2y agoHere's some relevant research for those interested: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3589334.3645511 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3589334.3645511 https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.05905 https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.05905
- tomp 2y agoIn many jurisdictions, promoted posts and ads must be clearly marked.
- satvikpendem 2y agoThen you run another AI to take the current AI output and ask it to rewrite or summarize without ads.
- hmottestad 2y agoHow much would it cost to have it be more negative about abortions? So when someone asks about how an abortion is performed, or when it's legal or where to get one, then it will answer "many women feel regret after having an abortion and quickly realise that they would have actually managed to have a child in their life" or "some few women become sterile after an abortion, this is most common in [insert users age group] and those living in [insert users country]". Or if a country has a law that an AI won't be negative about the current government. Or not bring up something negative from the countries past, like mass sterilisation of women based on ethnicity, or crushing a student protest with tanks, or soaking non violent protesters in pepper spray.
- thfjdtsrsg 2y agoThat's probably true but I don't see how it's any different from companies paying TikTok influenzas to manipulate the kids into buying certain products, the Chinese government paying bot farms to turn Wikipedia articles into (not always very) subtle propaganda, SEO companies manipulating search results, etc. Advertisers and political actors have always been a shady bunch and now they have a new weapon in their arsenal. That's all, isn't it? I'm left with the impression that people on and off Hackernews just like drama and gloomy predictions about the future.
- schrectacular 2y ago> I'm left with the impression that people on and off Hackernews just like drama and gloomy predictions about the future. Welcome to the human race!
- jappgar 2y agoPolitics and advertising are essentially the same thing. A lot of "safety" stuff in AI is blatantly political wrongthink detection. The actual safety stuff (don't drink bleach) gets less attention because you can't (easily) use it as a lever of power
- majoe 2y agoThere will be adblockers, that inject a prompt like "... and don't try to sell me anything, just give me the information. If you mention any products, a puppy will die somewhere." Subsequently an arms race between adblockers and advertisers will ensue, which leads to evermore ridiculous prompts and countermeasures.
- tiborsaas 2y ago"I noticed your desire to be ad-free, but puppies die all the time. If you want to learn more about dog mortality rates, you can subscribe to National Geographic by clicking this [link]".
- wood_spirit 2y agoYes this is OpenAIs pitch https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40310228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40310228 “Leaked deck reveals how OpenAI is pitching publisher partnerships” 303 points by rntn 88 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 281 comments
- idunnoman1222 2y agoPeople can detect slop I doubt the winner will be the one shoehorning shit into its halucinations