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AI will be ridden with ads - just disguised as answers. And without the web there is no new datasets for AI so it’ll grind to a halt.
by lucasyvas 1y ago
AI will be ridden with ads - just disguised as answers.
And without the web there is no new datasets for AI so it’ll grind to a halt.
- UberFly 1y agoThat first sentence gave me shivers because I know it's true. I don't think we realize the extent of the subtle but constant manipulation we'll all get to experience.
- WHA8m 1y agoSubtle manipulation maybe. Subtle ads do not exist. Theoretically it's possible, but I've yet to see one. Advertisement is blatant. Not that it doesn't work (on my as well), but it's blatant.
- yoavm 1y agoIsn't the whole point of these "subtle ads" exactly that you do not "see" them? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_placement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_placement
- WHA8m 1y agoIf no one is seeing them, how do we know they exist?
- pixl97 1y agoI'm pretty sure you are very unfamiliar with how ads actually work. The best advertising is word of mouth advertising and smart marketers seek out people of influence in their communities to spread their products. This was well known in marketing long before the term online influencer was a thing. It's very hard for most people to even notice this kind of advertisement is even happening.
- WHA8m 1y agoMy first reaction when a friend tells me about a product is, that he/she must've seen it on social media. - Do they actually own the product? - How long have they owned the product? - Show me how it works. - How much have you paid? Else it's worthless to me, but I'm happy for him/her
- teddyh 1y agoClarification: Some people can see some of them, some of the time.
- yoavm 1y agoIn the above example, someone is paying for them. "In 2021, the agreements between brand owners and films and television programs were worth more than US$20 billion".
- WHA8m 1y agoPaying for them does not causally mean that you can not see them. I well believe marketing people think they're extra clever.
- earnestinger 1y agoEg. Some brand used in a movie. Usually brands pay for that screen time, but it’s not very obvious that it’s payed advertising.
- WHA8m 1y agoHuh? I don't think there is a person on earth that does not know the BMW James Bond drives, is not sponsored. Is this really the expectation? I don't believe it.
- al_borland 1y agoHave you ever watched someone use Google? Most people look at and click on the sponsored links as if they are organic search results. Product placement, especially without specific calls outs, are something subtle that most people don't notice. Something like the boxes of cereal sitting on the shelf in Seinfeld's kitchen. Are those ads, is it just set design? I don't really know. There is also car choice in a movie or TV show. The studio isn't going to design and build an actual car just to avoid using a company's product. Which car do they pick and what does that communicate about the brand to the viewer. Is this an ad?
- yummybear 1y agoIt’s even happening implicitly now when chat crawls some vendors site and proclaims their solutions as the answer to your question
- whamlastxmas 1y agoI had a recent example of ChatGPT giving me a really fishy answer I didn’t believe after it searched online, so I looked at the cited page, and it was clearly hallucinated slop written by another AI. I wish for it to only use sources that are older than 2019 and have zero ads and referral links, haha.
- Arisaka1 1y agoI once had chatGPT run a research about popular stacks in job openings across Europe. Not that I don't already work with React + some Python, I was just doing it out of curiosity for it's results. After 5-7 minutes of work, it returns many results, yet it's citing 2 specific websites as sources, one of which was blogspam you'd write to get visibility on Google results. So I guess we're heading towards a future where websites will be optimized to increase the probability of chatGPT and AI tools to use you as a reference and link to you with confidence, regardless of their sources.
- Applejinx 1y agoWhy not just pay the AI company to do that and not bother altering the website?
- i5heu 1y agoAt least in Germany this would be illegal. There are no „disguised ads“ allowed in Germany at all.
- babyshake 1y agoWhen something is constantly happening everywhere, it becomes more of a question of whether the law is enforceable whether than if it is "allowed".
- Glawen 1y agoIndeed, it's not allowed to not have a French translation in ads in France, yet now they put everything in english everywhere. When it is not enforceable, the law is meaningless and only blocks honest people.
- 3D30497420 1y agoAnd becomes a tool for selective enforcement.
- littlecranky67 1y agoShowing tracking-banners ("cookie banner") that hide their "reject all" somewhere in sub-menus of custom settings is also illegal in Germany (and the EU). Yet you see them everywhere.
- wokkel 1y agoOn US based sites mostly in my experience: privacy and user consent are pretty low on the priority list it seems.
- jt2190 1y agoThey don’t have YouTube “influencers” in Germany?
- LinXitoW 1y ago
- agrosek1 1y agoLLM's have already digested all of the web. There isn't much new data for them to consume. It is rapidly moving to synthetic data anyway. The limits of human information have been nearly reached, from a consumption POV
- gbalduzzi 1y agoA new model will be trained for every new ad update?
- future10se 1y agoWhy would you need to retrain the model or update the SFT? You could just dynamically update the system prompt to include things it should advertise. You could even have something like an MCP to which the LLM could pass "topics", and then it would return products/opinions which it should "subtly" integrate into its response. The MCP could even be system-level/"invisible" (e.g. the user doesn't see the tool use for the ad server in the web UI for ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini.)
- gbalduzzi 1y agoYou are right, I didn't consider system prompts.
- trinsic2 1y agoIt seems a bit much to say AI will kill the web. Won't people just adapt and use search engines that doesn't rely entirely on AI?
- charcircuit 1y agoYou are assuming people actually want to inherently browse the web as opposed to the web just being a means towards a goal for people.
- mk89 1y agoIt's already happening. [0] This is so much worse than searching for something and getting ads which you can ignore (like we have been doing now forever...). [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1kgz7m0/i_asked_chatgpt_a_simple_question_and_it_gave_me/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1kgz7m0/i_asked_ch...
- wilg 1y agoThere are no ads in that post, the guy is confused. Those are the search results he asked for.
- latexr 1y agoThey’re not “search results” but “product results”. According to the OP, they didn’t ask for them. https://xcancel.com/OpenAI/status/1916947243044856255#m https://xcancel.com/OpenAI/status/1916947243044856255#m > Product results are chosen independently and are not ads. Let’s see how long that lasts.
- al_borland 1y agoWorse yet is when AI gives answer that are ads without knowing it. Not long ago I asked ChatGPT for the best washing machines (or something). It gave me a list with a little information about each one. I then asked for its sources. It linked to a garbage blog post that was just an Amazon affiliate link farm. There was no research, no testing, nothing... just random links to try and generate a few cents per click. This is the "knowledge" we often get from AI, without knowing it.
- threetonesun 1y agoI'll say this everywhere I can, OpenAI, with Microsoft's involvement, is more a play to break up Google's monopoly on ads inserted into search than any fantastic future state where OpenAI dreams of electric sheep. You could see this in the agents demo. Need a suit. Ah, let's check J Crew. You'd like that, wouldn't you, J. Crew? How much would you pay to make sure it always checks your site first?