6 ms·

> I think soon people expect this service to be provided for free and ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots. I also think adtech corru

by imiric 2y ago

> I think soon people expect this service to be provided for free and ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots. I also think adtech corrupting AI as well is inevitable, but I dread for that future. Chatbots are much more personal than websites, and users are expected to give them deeply personal data. Their output containing ads would be far more effective at psychological manipulation than traditional ads are. It would also be far more profitable, so I'm sure that marketers are salivating at this opportunity, and adtech masterminds are hard at work to make this a reality already. The repercussions of this will be much greater than we can imagine. I would love to be wrong, so I'm open to being convinced otherwise.

GolfPopper 2y ago
Do they want a Butlerian Jihad? Because that's how you get a Butlerian Jihad.
- vinceguidry 2y ago
  Just call it Skynet. Then at least we can think about pithy Arnold one-liners.
jononor 2y ago
I agree with you. There is also a move toward "agents", where the AI can make decisions and take actions for you. It is very early days for that, but it looks ike it might come sooner than I had though. That opens up even more potential for influence on financial decisions (which is what adtech wants) - it could choose which things to buy for a given "need".
- imiric 2y ago
  Hey, we could save them all the busywork, and just wire all our money to corporations... But financial nightmare scenarios aside, I'm more concerned about the influence from private and government agencies. Advertising is propaganda that seeks to separate us from our money, but other forms of propaganda that influences how we think and act has much deeper sociopolitical effects. The instability we see today is largely the result of psyops conducted over decades across all media outlets, but once it becomes possible to influence something as personal as a chatbot, the situation will get even more insane. It's unthinkable that we're merrily building that future without seemingly any precautions in mind.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  I have yet to understand this obsession with agents. Is making decisions the hardest thing in life for so many people? Or is this instead a desire to do away with human capital — to "automate" a workforce? Regardless, here is this wild new technology (LLMs) that seems to have just fallen out of the sky; we're continuously finding out all the seemingly-formerly-unimaginable things you can do with it; but somehow the collective have already foreseen its ultimate role. As though the people pushing the ARPANET into the public realm were so certain that it would become the Encyclopedia Galactica!
  - tilne 2y ago
    > Or is this instead a desire to do away with human capital — to "automate" a workforce? This is what I see motivating non-technical people to learn about agents. There’s lots of jobs that are essentially reading/memorizing complicated instructions and entering data accordingly.
  - dinfinity 2y ago
    > I have yet to understand this obsession with agents. 1. People who can afford personal assistants and staff in general gladly pay those people to do stuff for them. AI assistants promise to make this way of living accessible to the plebs. 2. People love being "the idea guy", but never having to do any of the (hard) work. And honestly, just the speedup to actually convert the myriad of ideas floating around in various heads to prototypes/MVPs is causing/will cause somewhat of a Cambrian explosion of such things.
    - samtp 2y ago
      A Cambrian explosion of half baked ideas, filled with hallucinations, unable to ever get past the first step. Sounds lovely.
      - fragmede 2y ago
        They were already not getting past the first step before AI came along. If AI helps them get to step two, and then three and four, that seems like a good thing, no?
mike_hearn 2y ago
You're assuming ads would be subtly worked into the answers. There's no reason it has to be done that way. You can also have a classic text ads system that's matching on the contents of the discussions, or which triggers only for clearly commercial queries "chatgpt I want to eat out tonight, recommend me somewhere", and which emits visually distinct ads. Most advertisers wouldn't want LLMs to make fake recommendations anyway, they want to control the way their ad appears and what ad copy is used. There's lots of ways to do that which don't hurt trust. Over time Google lost it as they got addicted to reporting massively quarterly growth, but for many years they were able to mix in ads with search results without people being unhappy or distrusting organic results, and also having a very successful business model. Even today Google's biggest trust problem by far is with conservatives, and that's due to explicit censorship of the right: corruption for ideological not commercial reasons. So there seems to be a lot of ways in which LLM companies can do this. Main issue is that building an ad network is really hard. You need lots of inventory to make it worthwhile.
- imiric 2y ago
  > You're assuming ads would be subtly worked into the answers. There's no reason it has to be done that way. I highly doubt advertisers will settle for a solution that's less profitable. That would be like settling for plain-text ads without profiling data and microtargeting. Google tried that in the "don't be evil" days, and look how that turned out. Besides, astroturfing and influencer-driven campaigns are very popular. The modern playbook is to make advertising blend in with the content as much as possible, so that the victim is not aware that they're being advertised to. This is what the majority of ads on social media look like. The natural extension of this is for ads to be subtly embedded in chatbot output. "You don't sound well, Dave. How about a nice slice of Astroturf pizza to cheer you up?" And political propaganda can be even more subtle than that...
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    There's no reason why having an LLM be sly or misleading would be more profitable. Too many people try to make advertising a moral issue when it's not, and it sounds like you're falling into that trap. An ideal answer for a query like "Where can I take my wife for a date this weekend?" would be something like, > Here are some events I found ... <ad unit one> <ad unit two> <ad unit three>. Based on our prior conversations, sounds like the third might be the best fit, want me to book it for you? To get that you need ads. If you ask ChatGPT such a question currently it'll either search the web (and thus see ads anyway) or it'll give boring generic text that's found in its training set. You really want to see images, prices, locations and so on for such a query not, "maybe she'd like the movies". And there are no good ranking signals for many kinds of commercial query: LLM training will give a long-since stale or hallucinated answer at worst, some semi-random answer at best, and algorithms like PageRank hardly work for most commercial queries. HN has always been very naive about this topic but briefly: people like advertising done well and targeted ads are even better. One of Google's longest running experiments was a holdback where some small percentage of users never saw ads, and they used Google less than users who did. The ad-free search gave worse answers overall.
wkat4242 2y ago
Yeah me too and especially with Google as a leader because they corrupt everything. I hope local models remain viable. I don't think ever expanding the size is the way forward anyway.
- coliveira 2y ago
  Once again, our hope is for the Chinese to continue driving the open models. Because if it depends on American big companies the future will be one of dependency on closed AI models.
  - imiric 2y ago
    You can't be serious... You think models built by companies from an autocracy are somehow better? I suppose their biases and censorship are easier to spot, but I wouldn't trade one form of influence over another. Besides, Meta is currently the leader in open-source/weight models. There's no reason that US companies can't continue to innovate in this space.
    - JKCalhoun 2y ago
      To play devil's advocate, I have a sense that a state LLM would be untrustworthy when the query is ideological but if it is ad-focused, a capitalist LLM may well corrupt every chat.
      - signatoremo 2y ago
        The thing is Chinese LLMs aren't foreign to ad focused either, like those from Alibaba, Tencent or Bytedance. Now a North Korea's model may be what you want.
      - fragmede 2y ago
        Which is why we can't let Mark Zuckerberg co-opt the term open source. If we can't see the code and dataset on how you've aligned the model during training, I don't care that you're giving it away for free, it's not open source!
bookofjoe 2y ago
If possible watch Episode 1 of Season 7 of "Black Mirror." >... ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots. What if people were the chatbots? https://youtu.be/1iqra1ojEvM?si=xN3rc_vxyolTMVqO https://youtu.be/1iqra1ojEvM?si=xN3rc_vxyolTMVqO
datavirtue 2y ago
Right, but no one has been able to just download Google and run it locally. The tech comes with a built in adblocker.

by imiric 2y ago

GolfPopper 2y ago

Do they want a Butlerian Jihad? Because that's how you get a Butlerian Jihad.

vinceguidry 2y ago
Just call it Skynet. Then at least we can think about pithy Arnold one-liners.

jononor 2y ago

I agree with you. There is also a move toward "agents", where the AI can make decisions and take actions for you. It is very early days for that, but it looks ike it might come sooner than I had though. That opens up even more potential for influence on financial decisions (which is what adtech wants) - it could choose which things to buy for a given "need".

imiric 2y ago
Hey, we could save them all the busywork, and just wire all our money to corporations... But financial nightmare scenarios aside, I'm more concerned about the influence from private and government agencies. Advertising is propaganda that seeks to separate us from our money, but other forms of propaganda that influences how we think and act has much deeper sociopolitical effects. The instability we see today is largely the result of psyops conducted over decades across all media outlets, but once it becomes possible to influence something as personal as a chatbot, the situation will get even more insane. It's unthinkable that we're merrily building that future without seemingly any precautions in mind.
JKCalhoun 2y ago
I have yet to understand this obsession with agents. Is making decisions the hardest thing in life for so many people? Or is this instead a desire to do away with human capital — to "automate" a workforce? Regardless, here is this wild new technology (LLMs) that seems to have just fallen out of the sky; we're continuously finding out all the seemingly-formerly-unimaginable things you can do with it; but somehow the collective have already foreseen its ultimate role. As though the people pushing the ARPANET into the public realm were so certain that it would become the Encyclopedia Galactica!
- tilne 2y ago
  > Or is this instead a desire to do away with human capital — to "automate" a workforce? This is what I see motivating non-technical people to learn about agents. There’s lots of jobs that are essentially reading/memorizing complicated instructions and entering data accordingly.
- dinfinity 2y ago
  > I have yet to understand this obsession with agents. 1. People who can afford personal assistants and staff in general gladly pay those people to do stuff for them. AI assistants promise to make this way of living accessible to the plebs. 2. People love being "the idea guy", but never having to do any of the (hard) work. And honestly, just the speedup to actually convert the myriad of ideas floating around in various heads to prototypes/MVPs is causing/will cause somewhat of a Cambrian explosion of such things.
  - samtp 2y ago
    A Cambrian explosion of half baked ideas, filled with hallucinations, unable to ever get past the first step. Sounds lovely.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      They were already not getting past the first step before AI came along. If AI helps them get to step two, and then three and four, that seems like a good thing, no?

mike_hearn 2y ago

You're assuming ads would be subtly worked into the answers. There's no reason it has to be done that way. You can also have a classic text ads system that's matching on the contents of the discussions, or which triggers only for clearly commercial queries "chatgpt I want to eat out tonight, recommend me somewhere", and which emits visually distinct ads. Most advertisers wouldn't want LLMs to make fake recommendations anyway, they want to control the way their ad appears and what ad copy is used. There's lots of ways to do that which don't hurt trust. Over time Google lost it as they got addicted to reporting massively quarterly growth, but for many years they were able to mix in ads with search results without people being unhappy or distrusting organic results, and also having a very successful business model. Even today Google's biggest trust problem by far is with conservatives, and that's due to explicit censorship of the right: corruption for ideological not commercial reasons. So there seems to be a lot of ways in which LLM companies can do this. Main issue is that building an ad network is really hard. You need lots of inventory to make it worthwhile.

imiric 2y ago
> You're assuming ads would be subtly worked into the answers. There's no reason it has to be done that way. I highly doubt advertisers will settle for a solution that's less profitable. That would be like settling for plain-text ads without profiling data and microtargeting. Google tried that in the "don't be evil" days, and look how that turned out. Besides, astroturfing and influencer-driven campaigns are very popular. The modern playbook is to make advertising blend in with the content as much as possible, so that the victim is not aware that they're being advertised to. This is what the majority of ads on social media look like. The natural extension of this is for ads to be subtly embedded in chatbot output. "You don't sound well, Dave. How about a nice slice of Astroturf pizza to cheer you up?" And political propaganda can be even more subtle than that...
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  There's no reason why having an LLM be sly or misleading would be more profitable. Too many people try to make advertising a moral issue when it's not, and it sounds like you're falling into that trap. An ideal answer for a query like "Where can I take my wife for a date this weekend?" would be something like, > Here are some events I found ... <ad unit one> <ad unit two> <ad unit three>. Based on our prior conversations, sounds like the third might be the best fit, want me to book it for you? To get that you need ads. If you ask ChatGPT such a question currently it'll either search the web (and thus see ads anyway) or it'll give boring generic text that's found in its training set. You really want to see images, prices, locations and so on for such a query not, "maybe she'd like the movies". And there are no good ranking signals for many kinds of commercial query: LLM training will give a long-since stale or hallucinated answer at worst, some semi-random answer at best, and algorithms like PageRank hardly work for most commercial queries. HN has always been very naive about this topic but briefly: people like advertising done well and targeted ads are even better. One of Google's longest running experiments was a holdback where some small percentage of users never saw ads, and they used Google less than users who did. The ad-free search gave worse answers overall.

wkat4242 2y ago

Yeah me too and especially with Google as a leader because they corrupt everything. I hope local models remain viable. I don't think ever expanding the size is the way forward anyway.

coliveira 2y ago
Once again, our hope is for the Chinese to continue driving the open models. Because if it depends on American big companies the future will be one of dependency on closed AI models.
- imiric 2y ago
  You can't be serious... You think models built by companies from an autocracy are somehow better? I suppose their biases and censorship are easier to spot, but I wouldn't trade one form of influence over another. Besides, Meta is currently the leader in open-source/weight models. There's no reason that US companies can't continue to innovate in this space.
  - JKCalhoun 2y ago
    To play devil's advocate, I have a sense that a state LLM would be untrustworthy when the query is ideological but if it is ad-focused, a capitalist LLM may well corrupt every chat.
    - signatoremo 2y ago
      The thing is Chinese LLMs aren't foreign to ad focused either, like those from Alibaba, Tencent or Bytedance. Now a North Korea's model may be what you want.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      Which is why we can't let Mark Zuckerberg co-opt the term open source. If we can't see the code and dataset on how you've aligned the model during training, I don't care that you're giving it away for free, it's not open source!

bookofjoe 2y ago

If possible watch Episode 1 of Season 7 of "Black Mirror." >... ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots. What if people were the chatbots? https://youtu.be/1iqra1ojEvM?si=xN3rc_vxyolTMVqO https://youtu.be/1iqra1ojEvM?si=xN3rc_vxyolTMVqO

datavirtue 2y ago

Right, but no one has been able to just download Google and run it locally. The tech comes with a built in adblocker.