9 ms·

> These days, I find that I am using multiple search engines and often resort to using an LLM to help me find content. For a few months, I've been wondering: h

> These days, I find that I am using multiple search engines and often resort to using an LLM to help me find content. For a few months, I've been wondering: how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into the training data? It's trivial to add prompts encouraging product placement, but I would be completely shocked if the big players don't sell out within a year or two, and start biasing the models themselves in this way, if they haven't already.

micromacrofoot 1y ago
fortunately for our investors we have found a way to solve this with more ai
- quesera 1y ago
  "AI is like XML — if it's not working for you, you're not using enough of it."
dhosek 1y ago
I kind of look forward to freshman composition essays “written” with AI that are rife with appeals to use online casinos.
- huskyr 1y ago
  Can't wait for all school essays promoting dubious crypto schemes of some sort.
nperez 1y ago
I'm not going to disagree because greed knows no bounds, but that could be RIP for the enthusiast crowd's proprietary LLM use. We may not have cheap local open models that beat the SOTA, but is it possible to beat an ad-poisoned SOTA model on a consumer laptop? Maybe.
- rusk 1y ago
  On the flip side, there could be a cottage industry churning out models of various strains and purities. This will distress the big players who want an open field to make money from their own adulterated inferior product so home grown LLM will probably end up being outlawed or something.
  - otabdeveloper4 1y ago
    Yes, the future is in making a plethora of hyper-specialized LLM's, not a sci-fi assistant monopoly. E.g., I'm sure people will pay for an LLM that plays Magic the Gathering well. They don't need it to know about German poetry or Pokemon trivia. This could probably done as LoRAs on top of existing generalist open-weight models. Envision running this locally and having hundreds of LLM "plugins", a la phone apps.
- rolandog 1y ago
  If future LLM patterns mimic the other business models, 80% of the prompt will be spent preventing ad recommendations and the agent would in turn reluctantly respond but suggest that it is malicious to ask for that. I'm really looking forward to something like a GNU GPT that tries to be as factual, unbiased, libre and open-source as possible (possibly built/trained with Guix OS so we can ensure byte-for-byte reproducibility).
J_McQuade 1y ago
"here is how to to translate this query from T-SQL to PL-SQL... ..." "... but if you used our VC's latest beau, BozoDB, it could be written like THIS! ... ..." 9 months, max. I give it 9 months.
- mike_ivanov 1y ago
  "T-SQL to PL-SQL" -> (implies an > 40 age, most likely being an Ask TOM citizen, a consultant with >> 100K annual income, most likely conservative, maybe family with kids, prone to anxiety/depression, etc) -> This WORRY FREE PEACE OF MIND magic pill takes America by storm, grab yours before it's too late!
moron4hire 1y ago
It's kind of already happening. For example, if you ask an LLM for advice on building an application, it's going to pigeon-hole you into using React.
- WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
  That’s because of statistical likelihood and abundance of web content about React which seems to be kinda default choice. Had to be a looong con if it was an ad.
  - pbhjpbhj 1y ago
    Are people putting up vast arrays of websites to promote products/politics solely to sway LLM-feeding crawlers yet?
    - Lu2025 1y ago
      I've seen those content mills since before Covid.
- hnbad 1y ago
  Or for a more concerning example, GitHub is owned by Microsoft who want to sell cloud services so it stands to reason it would be in their interest to have GitHub Copilot steer developers towards building applications using architectural patterns that lend themselves more to using those cloud services, e.g. service-oriented architecture even when it is against the developer's interests. This doesn't have to be as blunt as promoting specific libraries or services and it's a bias that could even be introduced "accidentally".
morkalork 1y ago
I can absolutely assure you that SEO companies are already marketing AI strategies oriented around making content easily and preferentially consumable by LLMs and their vendors.
- paulgerhardt 1y ago
  GEO model relevance is the only thing that matters: https://a16z.com/geo-over-seo/ https://a16z.com/geo-over-seo/
zerocrates 1y ago
The providers can sell inclusion in the system prompt to advertisers. Run some ad-tech on the first message before it goes to the LLM to see whose gets included.
- kijin 1y ago
  For most advertisers, sure, there's no need to go all the way back to the training data. Advertisers want immediate results. Training takes too long and has uncertain results. Much easier to target the prompt instead. If you're someone like Marlboro or Coca-Cola, on the other hand, it might be worth your while to pollute the training data and wait for subtle allusions to your product to show up all over the place. Maybe they already did, long before LLMs even existed.
  - rightbyte 1y ago
    The annoying part is that we part of the "pollution" since we namedrop Coca Cola etc.
  - robocat 1y ago
    > Marlboro or Coca-Cola Your product placement is appropriately ironic.
gofreddygo 1y ago
> how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into the training data You're so right. it's not an if anymore, but when. and when it does, you wouldn't know what's an ad and what isn't. In recent years i started noticing a correlation between alcohol consumption and movies. I couldn't help but notice how many of the movies I've seen in the past few years promote alcohol and try to correlate it with the good times. how many of these are paid promotions? I don't know. and now, after noticing, this every movie that involves alcohol has become distasteful for me mostly because it casts a shadow on the negative side of alcohol consumption. I can see how ads in an LLM can go the same route, deeply embedded in the content and indistinguishable from everything else.
- HSO 1y ago
  Ha, now try cigarettes/smoking! At least low level alcohol consumption is only detrimental to the drinker. Cigarettes start poisoning the air from the moment they are lit, and like noise pollution there is no boundary. I hate them or thrir smokers with a vengeance and the foreign satanic cabal that is „hollywood“ sold everyone out for their gold calf tobacco money
  - WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
    But a drunkard might sit behind the wheel, at which point it becomes detrimental to everyone on the road… And there are countless books and movies where the hero has drinks, or routinely swigs some whisky-grade stuff from a flask on his belt to calm his nerves, then drives.
    - chgs 1y ago
      Driving itself kills more people in the us every month than 9/11, yet has been glamourised for a century
      - WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
        It's just that bad drivers are abundant in the US, and driving is way underregulated for such a car-centric country.
aardvarkr 1y ago
I think for the moment the leading AI companies are strongly incentivized to not succumb to the advertising curse. Their revenue is subscription driven and the competition is ridiculously fierce and immune to collusion. Everyone is trying to one-up everyone else and there is no moat that locks you into a single product. Their incentive is to score as high as possible on benchmarks in order to drive up their user base in order to increase subscriptions. Any time spent on implementing advertising is time their adversaries are spending making their models better. Let’s hope the competition stays fierce so that we don’t get enshitification anytime soon
- galaxyLogic 1y ago
  The adds can be outside of the AI reply-pane. Just like adds are outside of Google search results.
  - pbhjpbhj 1y ago
    Not anymore they're not, they're tightly integrated.
  - immibis 1y ago
    ? Google search ads aren't outside of the results. They used to be, until they realized they got more clicks if they weren't.
- myaccountonhn 1y ago
  You can start with subscription, then add ads on top. When you constantly need growth that's kind of the logical conclusion.
shwouchk 1y ago
this is already happening in full force. sota models are already poisoned. leading providers already push their own products inside webchat system prompts.
rodgerd 1y ago
There are already companies promising to attack Wikipedia and product LLM-bait YouTube content. Ship's sailed.
- vintermann 1y ago
  Sure, but what makes you think they will actually deliver that? There's no honor among spammers. If there's an obvious idea with new tech, 100 sleazy startups will claim to offer it, without even remotely having it.
reubenmorais 1y ago
Google has been working on auctioning token-level influence during LLM generation for years now: https://research.google/blog/mechanism-design-for-large-language-models/ https://research.google/blog/mechanism-design-for-large-lang...
- sph 1y ago
  Google: ruining their core product for that sweet ad money.
  - junga 1y ago
    Ads are Google's core product, isn't it?
  - Parae 1y ago
    Their core product is software meant to make sweet ad money.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
    Google's core product has always been advertisement. They sell advertisements to companies looking to advertise, and they bring in tens of billions in revenue from that business. In effect, their core product is you: they're selling your eyeballs. If the bait that they used to bring you to them so they could sell your eyeballs has finally started to rot and stink, then why do people continue to be attracted by it? You claim they've ruined their core product, but it still works as intended, never mind that you've confused what their products actually are.
- willvarfar 1y ago
  And just over a year ago now the OpenAI "preferred publisher program" pitch deck to investors leaked. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40310228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40310228
jedbrooke 1y ago
not quite ads in LLMS, but I had an interesting experience with google maps the other day. the directions voice said "in 100 feet, turn left at the <Big Fast Food Chain>". Normally it would say "at the traffic light" or similar. And this wasn't some easy to miss hidden street, it was just a normal intersection. I can only hope they aren't changing the routes yet to make you drive by the highest bidder
- collingreen 1y ago
  This is devilish. I'm adding your idea to my torment nexus list.
  - isoprophlex 1y ago
    "Continue driving on Thisandthat Avenue, and admire the happy, handsome people you see on your right, shopping at Vuvuzelas'R'Us, your place for anything airhorn!"
  - jedbrooke 1y ago
    oof, I’m not sure if I’m proud or ashamed of having an idea in the “torment nexus”. I believe I heard of the idea in some of the discussion surrounding a patent from an automaker to use microphones in the car for a data source for targeted ads. Combine that with self driving cars and you could have a car that takes a sliiight detour to look at “points of interest”
- dizhn 1y ago
  I am still waiting for navigation software to divert your route to make sure you see that establishment. From your experience, it seems like we're close to that reality now.
- carlosjobim 1y ago
  Most users want the best directions possible from their maps app, and that includes easily recognizable landmarks, such as fast food restaurants. "Turn left at McDonalds" is what a normal person would say if you asked for directions in a town you don't know. Or they could say "Turn left at McFritzberger street", but what use would that be for you? Although I've had Google Maps say "Turn right after the pharmacy", and there's three drug stores in the intersection...
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
drdrek 1y ago
Assume that if you thought about it its already too late. I've been to an AI SEO session by our VC. It was a guide on how to find chatbot primary sources for a keyword and then seeding that source with your content. Advertisers and spammers have the highest possible incentive to subvert the system, so they will. Which is only one step worse (or better depending on your view) than letting a mega corp control all the flow of information absolutely. Welcome to the new toll booth of the internet, now with 50% less access to the source material (WOW!), I hope you have a pleasant stay.
Lu2025 1y ago
> advertisers This kind of ads is also impossible to filter. Everyone complains about ads on YouTube or Reddit but I never see any with my adblocks. Now we won't be able to squash them.

micromacrofoot 1y ago

fortunately for our investors we have found a way to solve this with more ai

quesera 1y ago
"AI is like XML — if it's not working for you, you're not using enough of it."

dhosek 1y ago

I kind of look forward to freshman composition essays “written” with AI that are rife with appeals to use online casinos.

huskyr 1y ago
Can't wait for all school essays promoting dubious crypto schemes of some sort.

nperez 1y ago

I'm not going to disagree because greed knows no bounds, but that could be RIP for the enthusiast crowd's proprietary LLM use. We may not have cheap local open models that beat the SOTA, but is it possible to beat an ad-poisoned SOTA model on a consumer laptop? Maybe.

rusk 1y ago
On the flip side, there could be a cottage industry churning out models of various strains and purities. This will distress the big players who want an open field to make money from their own adulterated inferior product so home grown LLM will probably end up being outlawed or something.
- otabdeveloper4 1y ago
  Yes, the future is in making a plethora of hyper-specialized LLM's, not a sci-fi assistant monopoly. E.g., I'm sure people will pay for an LLM that plays Magic the Gathering well. They don't need it to know about German poetry or Pokemon trivia. This could probably done as LoRAs on top of existing generalist open-weight models. Envision running this locally and having hundreds of LLM "plugins", a la phone apps.
rolandog 1y ago
If future LLM patterns mimic the other business models, 80% of the prompt will be spent preventing ad recommendations and the agent would in turn reluctantly respond but suggest that it is malicious to ask for that. I'm really looking forward to something like a GNU GPT that tries to be as factual, unbiased, libre and open-source as possible (possibly built/trained with Guix OS so we can ensure byte-for-byte reproducibility).

J_McQuade 1y ago

"here is how to to translate this query from T-SQL to PL-SQL... ..." "... but if you used our VC's latest beau, BozoDB, it could be written like THIS! ... ..." 9 months, max. I give it 9 months.

mike_ivanov 1y ago
"T-SQL to PL-SQL" -> (implies an > 40 age, most likely being an Ask TOM citizen, a consultant with >> 100K annual income, most likely conservative, maybe family with kids, prone to anxiety/depression, etc) -> This WORRY FREE PEACE OF MIND magic pill takes America by storm, grab yours before it's too late!

moron4hire 1y ago

It's kind of already happening. For example, if you ask an LLM for advice on building an application, it's going to pigeon-hole you into using React.

WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
That’s because of statistical likelihood and abundance of web content about React which seems to be kinda default choice. Had to be a looong con if it was an ad.
- pbhjpbhj 1y ago
  Are people putting up vast arrays of websites to promote products/politics solely to sway LLM-feeding crawlers yet?
  - Lu2025 1y ago
    I've seen those content mills since before Covid.
hnbad 1y ago
Or for a more concerning example, GitHub is owned by Microsoft who want to sell cloud services so it stands to reason it would be in their interest to have GitHub Copilot steer developers towards building applications using architectural patterns that lend themselves more to using those cloud services, e.g. service-oriented architecture even when it is against the developer's interests. This doesn't have to be as blunt as promoting specific libraries or services and it's a bias that could even be introduced "accidentally".

morkalork 1y ago

I can absolutely assure you that SEO companies are already marketing AI strategies oriented around making content easily and preferentially consumable by LLMs and their vendors.

paulgerhardt 1y ago
GEO model relevance is the only thing that matters: https://a16z.com/geo-over-seo/ https://a16z.com/geo-over-seo/

zerocrates 1y ago

The providers can sell inclusion in the system prompt to advertisers. Run some ad-tech on the first message before it goes to the LLM to see whose gets included.

kijin 1y ago
For most advertisers, sure, there's no need to go all the way back to the training data. Advertisers want immediate results. Training takes too long and has uncertain results. Much easier to target the prompt instead. If you're someone like Marlboro or Coca-Cola, on the other hand, it might be worth your while to pollute the training data and wait for subtle allusions to your product to show up all over the place. Maybe they already did, long before LLMs even existed.
- rightbyte 1y ago
  The annoying part is that we part of the "pollution" since we namedrop Coca Cola etc.
- robocat 1y ago
  > Marlboro or Coca-Cola Your product placement is appropriately ironic.

gofreddygo 1y ago

> how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into the training data You're so right. it's not an if anymore, but when. and when it does, you wouldn't know what's an ad and what isn't. In recent years i started noticing a correlation between alcohol consumption and movies. I couldn't help but notice how many of the movies I've seen in the past few years promote alcohol and try to correlate it with the good times. how many of these are paid promotions? I don't know. and now, after noticing, this every movie that involves alcohol has become distasteful for me mostly because it casts a shadow on the negative side of alcohol consumption. I can see how ads in an LLM can go the same route, deeply embedded in the content and indistinguishable from everything else.

HSO 1y ago
Ha, now try cigarettes/smoking! At least low level alcohol consumption is only detrimental to the drinker. Cigarettes start poisoning the air from the moment they are lit, and like noise pollution there is no boundary. I hate them or thrir smokers with a vengeance and the foreign satanic cabal that is „hollywood“ sold everyone out for their gold calf tobacco money
- WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
  But a drunkard might sit behind the wheel, at which point it becomes detrimental to everyone on the road… And there are countless books and movies where the hero has drinks, or routinely swigs some whisky-grade stuff from a flask on his belt to calm his nerves, then drives.
  - chgs 1y ago
    Driving itself kills more people in the us every month than 9/11, yet has been glamourised for a century
    - WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
      It's just that bad drivers are abundant in the US, and driving is way underregulated for such a car-centric country.

aardvarkr 1y ago

I think for the moment the leading AI companies are strongly incentivized to not succumb to the advertising curse. Their revenue is subscription driven and the competition is ridiculously fierce and immune to collusion. Everyone is trying to one-up everyone else and there is no moat that locks you into a single product. Their incentive is to score as high as possible on benchmarks in order to drive up their user base in order to increase subscriptions. Any time spent on implementing advertising is time their adversaries are spending making their models better. Let’s hope the competition stays fierce so that we don’t get enshitification anytime soon

galaxyLogic 1y ago
The adds can be outside of the AI reply-pane. Just like adds are outside of Google search results.
- pbhjpbhj 1y ago
  Not anymore they're not, they're tightly integrated.
- immibis 1y ago
  ? Google search ads aren't outside of the results. They used to be, until they realized they got more clicks if they weren't.
myaccountonhn 1y ago
You can start with subscription, then add ads on top. When you constantly need growth that's kind of the logical conclusion.

shwouchk 1y ago

this is already happening in full force. sota models are already poisoned. leading providers already push their own products inside webchat system prompts.

rodgerd 1y ago

There are already companies promising to attack Wikipedia and product LLM-bait YouTube content. Ship's sailed.

vintermann 1y ago
Sure, but what makes you think they will actually deliver that? There's no honor among spammers. If there's an obvious idea with new tech, 100 sleazy startups will claim to offer it, without even remotely having it.

reubenmorais 1y ago

Google has been working on auctioning token-level influence during LLM generation for years now: https://research.google/blog/mechanism-design-for-large-language-models/ https://research.google/blog/mechanism-design-for-large-lang...

sph 1y ago
Google: ruining their core product for that sweet ad money.
- junga 1y ago
  Ads are Google's core product, isn't it?
- Parae 1y ago
  Their core product is software meant to make sweet ad money.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  Google's core product has always been advertisement. They sell advertisements to companies looking to advertise, and they bring in tens of billions in revenue from that business. In effect, their core product is you: they're selling your eyeballs. If the bait that they used to bring you to them so they could sell your eyeballs has finally started to rot and stink, then why do people continue to be attracted by it? You claim they've ruined their core product, but it still works as intended, never mind that you've confused what their products actually are.
willvarfar 1y ago
And just over a year ago now the OpenAI "preferred publisher program" pitch deck to investors leaked. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40310228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40310228

jedbrooke 1y ago

not quite ads in LLMS, but I had an interesting experience with google maps the other day. the directions voice said "in 100 feet, turn left at the <Big Fast Food Chain>". Normally it would say "at the traffic light" or similar. And this wasn't some easy to miss hidden street, it was just a normal intersection. I can only hope they aren't changing the routes yet to make you drive by the highest bidder

collingreen 1y ago
This is devilish. I'm adding your idea to my torment nexus list.
- isoprophlex 1y ago
  "Continue driving on Thisandthat Avenue, and admire the happy, handsome people you see on your right, shopping at Vuvuzelas'R'Us, your place for anything airhorn!"
- jedbrooke 1y ago
  oof, I’m not sure if I’m proud or ashamed of having an idea in the “torment nexus”. I believe I heard of the idea in some of the discussion surrounding a patent from an automaker to use microphones in the car for a data source for targeted ads. Combine that with self driving cars and you could have a car that takes a sliiight detour to look at “points of interest”
dizhn 1y ago
I am still waiting for navigation software to divert your route to make sure you see that establishment. From your experience, it seems like we're close to that reality now.
carlosjobim 1y ago
Most users want the best directions possible from their maps app, and that includes easily recognizable landmarks, such as fast food restaurants. "Turn left at McDonalds" is what a normal person would say if you asked for directions in a town you don't know. Or they could say "Turn left at McFritzberger street", but what use would that be for you? Although I've had Google Maps say "Turn right after the pharmacy", and there's three drug stores in the intersection...

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

drdrek 1y ago

Assume that if you thought about it its already too late. I've been to an AI SEO session by our VC. It was a guide on how to find chatbot primary sources for a keyword and then seeding that source with your content. Advertisers and spammers have the highest possible incentive to subvert the system, so they will. Which is only one step worse (or better depending on your view) than letting a mega corp control all the flow of information absolutely. Welcome to the new toll booth of the internet, now with 50% less access to the source material (WOW!), I hope you have a pleasant stay.

Lu2025 1y ago

> advertisers This kind of ads is also impossible to filter. Everyone complains about ads on YouTube or Reddit but I never see any with my adblocks. Now we won't be able to squash them.