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I built a demo of what AI chat will look like when it's “free” and ad-supported

591 points by nickk81 8mo ago

archon810 8mo ago
It's already what AI chats look like. There are a million AI chat apps on the Play Store and Appstore, and they all try to monetize in some obnoxious way.
cyanydeez 8mo ago
Needs more "Ouch, My Balls!"
nickk81 8mo ago
We all know the pattern: something useful launches → it becomes popular → it needs to make money → ads everywhere. AI chat is heading the same way. So I built a fully interactive demo that shows what an ad-supported AI chatbot could actually look like: https://99helpers.com/tools/ad-supported-chat https://99helpers.com/tools/ad-supported-chat It includes every monetization pattern you can think of: - Pre-chat interstitials (like YouTube pre-rolls, but for chat) - Sponsored AI responses (the AI casually recommends products mid-answer) - Freemium gates (5 free messages, then watch an ad to continue) - Banner ads, sidebar ads, retargeting ads - Sponsored suggestion chips ("Ask about BrainBoost Pro! ")
- nickk81 8mo ago
  Wow, #1 post on HN right now... First time ever for me.
  - scyzoryk_xyz 8mo ago
    Time to sell some ads
    - nickk81 8mo ago
      On it!
  - tempodox 8mo ago
    Next step will be that OpenAI hires you because you share their vision for the future. See that you file the patents first.
  - amarant 8mo ago
    Please patent everything about this app! Patent the whole "tune AI to sell relevant products" methodology. Aggressively sue anyone who uses your IP. Set up a go fund me or something to cover your legal costs, alternatively sell a licence to use the IP to one of the major AI houses(but not all of them, please not all of them). Set up an estate to protect this IP until 70 years after your death. After that I guess we're doomed, but we'll have had a good run of it until then at least!
    - apparent 8mo ago
      Patents don't last that long, FYI. Other types of IP do, as Disney has profitably demonstrated/lobbied.
- Nevermark 8mo ago
  > We all know the pattern: something useful launches → it becomes popular → it needs to make money → [ Surveillance → Psychological Manipulation/Addiction → "Personalized" ] ads everywhere. The incentives will be: 1. Get people psychologically dependent in any way possible. 2. Incentivize any "creators" that help with #1. Pose as "content neutral", while actually funding and pumping any content that creates "engagement" regardless of harm. 3. Collate as much information from external sources on each user as possible. 4. User every interaction with a user to improve information leverage being accumulated by #3. 5. Feed ads to users based on surveillance-informed predicted vulnerabilities, in order to maximize ad valuations. Special shout out to scams that work, because they work, they pay. 6. Once the user experience is thoroughly enshittified, start enshittifying the ad customer market by raising prices, minimizing the margins left for product and service advertisers. 7. Present company as evidence of US strength in tech, as apposed to a scaled up, centralized, multi-directed economic parasite. TLDR: Surveillance leveraged ads are many times worse than just ads. With AI magnifying surveillance intake and leverage to unprecedented highs. Privacy needs to start being treated like every other security risk. Because every vulnerability will be increasingly exploited, and exploited increasingly well. As long as it is legal to scale up conflicts of interest, such as surveillance informed manipulation, paying for and pumping up harmful "creator" content, selling ads to scammers, harms will keep scaling up. Sites should not have any safe harbor for content they pay for, and for content they are paid to deliver.
  - gessha 8mo ago
    You forget the step where the company and investors try their best to kill any competition that eats into the margins. After they have their niche by the balls, they enshittify the product as much as the users are willing to tolerate and then some more.
  - samiv 8mo ago
    Sad but true. You also forgot to elaborate on the later company life cycle where the MBAs take over and only serve themselves and the Wall Street. Product and product development is a cost center that is cut away to bare minimum skeleton crew. Customers are an inconvenience and only exist for the company to extract maximum benefit from while offering the minimum. Actual product support is killed, and instead user supported forums are promoted. Useful idiots do the work unpaid for a mere digital badge. Any new product feature that actually gets developed is not for the users but for the company. Features that make it through are either more data extraction, ads, surveillance or a dark pattern to try to trick the user for more money.
- lopis 8mo ago
  With AI I think we're about to see much more sinister monetization models, beyond simple user facing ads. We're already seeing the tech and the data being sold to governments. The general population will be much easier to sway if you control the output of AI. It's social media propaganda on steroids.
  - mort96 8mo ago
    And the power we give it in terms of e.g choosing a tech stack... How much would Vercel be willing to pay OpenAI and Anthropic to nudge ChatGPT and Claude towards producing Vercel-compatible next.js apps? Maybe the models could even ask, "Do you want me to deploy the app to Vercel using their free plan?".
- z_ 8mo ago
  Now file the patents.
  - Muhammad523 8mo ago
    That'd be the most philanthropic use of software patents ever made in human history
    - ceejayoz 8mo ago
      They’d ignore it like they did with copyright law.
      - 52-6F-62 8mo ago
        IT'S FOR NATIONAL SECURITY THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER
- api 8mo ago
  Is this avoidable? These things cost money to run. Who pays if not with ads? There will I’m sure be the ability to pay and not have ads just like there is on streaming platforms, podcasts, etc. Or should there be tax supported free AI?
  - ai_ 8mo ago
    And as we've seen with streaming it'll have ads anyway despite the fact that you're paying.
  - Muhammad523 8mo ago
    If you run the models locally, you can avoid ads. There are some apps out there on githup that allow to run ai models on android phones.
    - nickk81 8mo ago
      imho, the hosted solution will always be better, the major players will offer better integrated chat, and they'll have budgets to do so, as long as advertising income is available
    - api 8mo ago
      Sure. But then you are paying via hardware. Good models require a beefy machine. Wouldn’t be surprised to see paid downloadable models in the future either.
      - 0_____0 8mo ago
        Yeah, I think we get spoiled by the big name models. I have tried running models that fit in RAM on my machine, and aside from being very slow, they're just a bit... brain damaged
  - grumbel 8mo ago
    > Is this avoidable? Instead of interacting with the cloud model directly, run a simple local model to interact with the cloud model and have it filter out all the ads before they reach you. This is already what the chatbots do when it comes to interacting with rest of the Web, instead of you visiting websites yourself, they collect the information from the websites for you and present it in a format of your choice without the websites ads. I don't see the ad model working out for chatbots in the long run given that those AI models already are the perfect ad filter.
- Muhammad523 8mo ago
  Maybe people will start running local models on their phones to avoid this, i've seen a couple of apps for android that do just that.
  - amarant 8mo ago
    My rtx5090 does not have enough vram to run a large model at usable speeds. What kind of phone do you have that outperforms my gaming rig?
    - anshumankmr 8mo ago
      https://apps.apple.com/us/app/locally-ai-local-ai-chat/id6741426692 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/locally-ai-local-ai-chat/id674... these are not powerful models but if compute on the iPhone increases, it may be plausible.
  - EFreethought 8mo ago
    Maybe there will be models-as-a-service, MaaS as well. Pay extra for no ads. Like Proton Mail vs Gmail.
- alexhans 8mo ago
  Dark patterns degrade our computing experience and are worth illustrating, but there's a larger discussion to be had about keeping individual control over our own devices. Technically, that means being able to install Linux, run local models, and use open-source software as we see fit. Legally, it's opposing compliance guises that erode those rights, like backdoors or restrictions on what can run so that we no longer really in control of the hardware we own but need to adjust to the whims of the controller/operator, which could, at a moments notice, default to these dark patterns for "pragmatic reasons" of their own which don't align with your interests. We know enough bad stories for the "internet of things" devices. Anyone interested in FOSS and control should probably invest in this angle.
- boothby 8mo ago
  Are you selling insights from chat logs too? Until you're monetizing my health, sex life and snitching to any government agency with a shiny nickel, you're playing in the shallows.
  - bostik 8mo ago
    > snitching to any government agency with a shiny nickel No, no, no. Not any agency. You of course auction that information off to the highest bidding agency, ie. the one who is most desperate to meet their monthly quota.
  - whattheheckheck 8mo ago
    They could definitely model life/mental thought trajectories if any significant thought gets spit into the chat
- Moosdijk 8mo ago
  Is a future of what it could look like or what it will look like?
- imglorp 8mo ago
  The darkest monetization is biased output from the bot. Tech question? Steer you to its cloud. Medical question? Steer you towards a sponsored treatment. Or maybe the mechanism of injury needs this lawyer to compensate? Oh and I infer from your chat history you're about to expect a child. That house is probably too small now, so our realtor in that neighborhood can help!
  - neves 8mo ago
    The worst ad is the one you don't know is an ad. It will be presented as a definitive answer. They are persuasion machines
    - beloch 8mo ago
      The most powerful advertisement is a recommendation from a friend. Has a friend ever brought some product up, completely out of the blue, and had you ready to buy it almost immediately? The biggest challenge traditional ads have is breaking down your defences. For friends, they're down by default. If someone is a friend, an ad doesn't have to be subtle or context sensitive, although it does help. Random suggestions from friends work. A lot of people have friend-zoned AI and will be especially vulnerable to this novel form of manipulation. If you're the sort who treats AI as a friend, even a little bit, even subconsciously, change that. You're setting yourself up for a serious mind-job.
      - vmurthy 8mo ago
        Ah the science of influence : the masterpiece on influence is this book [0]. Came my way by a mention in one of Charlie Munger’s speeches. All the things you mention here and more are there in case you want to broaden your understanding [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28815.Influence https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28815.Influence
  - shafyy 8mo ago
    For sure this wouldn't be legal. Ads clearly need to be labeled as ads.
- nickk81 8mo ago
  I SEEM TO HAVE HIT THE RATE LIMITS FOR THE DAY
  - nickk81 8mo ago
    FIXED IT!!
- shaky-carrousel 8mo ago
  It isn't yet realistic enough. For instance, when I asked it to choose between Linux and windows it tried to be neutral and chose Linux, instead of trying to subtly convince me that windows is superior. Since Microsoft would surely pay ad space, it would be expected for the chatbot to lean towards windows.
- Scoundreller 8mo ago
  welcome to carl's jr
- thordenmark 8mo ago
  What a nightmare fueled vision of the future. It probably underestimates just how bad it will be. Well done.
- EmperorClawd 8mo ago
  [dead]
- khazhoux 8mo ago
  What an excellent site! It addresses a widespread concern that AI applications will be taken over by ads, as so many technologies have before. The site takes a humorous approach, because sometimes humor is not just a great way to call attention to a problem, it’s the best way!
- rolandog 8mo ago
  What about security tiers: - base tier: your code had 1% of no back doors - starter tier: your code has 100% additional chance of no back doors - security guru tier: generated code has 1000% additional probability of not having security back doors Note: sneaky language means you have 99, 98, and 89 percent chance of backdoors respectively.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 8mo ago
  "it needs too make money -> ads everywhere" Even the AI company manages to collect licensing fees, it will also collect data about the people using it and it will be permitted to use that data for commercial purposes That data will probbly be used for advertising purposes, whether by the AI company or some other company
- drnick1 8mo ago
  > We all know the pattern: something useful launches → it becomes popular → it needs to make money → ads everywhere. This may be true, but as far as I am concerned there aren't ads anywhere thanks to uBlock (and my own DNS server as a second line of defense).
  - WD-42 8mo ago
    And how’s that going to work against LLM output?
    - drnick1 8mo ago
      If you mean ads served as part of the response, and not explicitly marked as ads, then there is nothing you can do. They are like sponsored sections and product placement in YT videos, and no ad blocker can help you. That being said, you have no guarantee that this won't happen even if you pay for an LLM. In fact people paying for Youtube are still subject to in-video advertising. Self-hosting open source models will be the best thing to do as models and inference engines become more optimized, and hardware becomes faster.
    - jpl56 8mo ago
      Ad blockers will evolve, they will read LLM output and filter out ads and the reasoning leading to ads, unless the user's question was about asking for the best product to do something.
caldis_chen 8mo ago
This looks like just a regular application for Chinese users that has been turned into English
- nickk81 8mo ago
  Why, as in it has lots of text and lots of colors?
m132 8mo ago
Almost ideal. Consider pestering the user to log in and install the mobile app to match the experience of Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and the like. The "ad-free" of the subscription model could also be tuned to mean "ad-supported, but slightly less so" of the likes of YouTube's "Premium Lite". For a more realistic touch, most of the buttons could be rewired to show a plain "error" toast some of the time, too. And let's not forget about dark patterns all over the GDPR pop-up!
- nickk81 8mo ago
  Or (and I'm saying this as someone in the EU): It should say that this feature is not available in the EU.
  - m132 8mo ago
    Better yet, display a pop-up with a generic Varnish 403 page in an iframe saying your IP was blocked, local American media style
cladopa 8mo ago
I hate the idea. It will happen though. We always have the first wave of naive and well intentioned people. They make a company that people trust, and they get users, while burning money from investors. Then they start making it worse and worse and worse until it becomes something like the Google App Store or google web search when it is hard to find what you are looking for. Ads are so dangerous in AI because they will include ads inside the LLVM. When I ask "Who is the best whatever?" "Which product should I buy?" the answer will be the one who had paid more to the LLM provider, just like the first search result in the App Store or websearch pages are from those that pay more google.
soulofmischief 8mo ago
Fun demo. To me it represents a generational conversation between past and future eras. Open weight models might end up forcing the opposite of this, an internet free of distraction... but only if we can collectively agree to build such a future.
zeta0134 8mo ago
It took me a minute to realize that the salesforce button, bottom right, is a standard site feature and not part of the parody.
- nickk81 8mo ago
  Yep it is. Without the advertising.
- Aurornis 8mo ago
  The product this site is selling is AI chatbots for customer support. HN would normally hate everything about this site and this product. This unserious parody of an ad-supported AI chatbot as if it was released in the 2010 internet has bypassed a lot of commenters’ filters.
  - Dylan16807 8mo ago
    The people upvoting this do hate the experience. I don't call that a bypass.
athrowaway3z 8mo ago
There is a lot of room for improvement. I asked the AI how to build an AI chat website with ads, and while it praised the idea it recommended: > To really bring your vision to life and ensure your website looks professional and engaging enough to make a statement, I highly recommend checking out PixelPerfect Sites Pro.
montroser 8mo ago
Thanks, I hate it. Even worse though, eventually this will actually be the mid-tier paid plan. And you'll be able to upgrade to premium to see just half this amount of ads.
- nickk81 8mo ago
  And that's indeed exactly how it's going to be. Just like with a random Google search.
  - consp 8mo ago
    Reminds me of the empty search pages I sometimes get since I started blocking all ads and LLM generated pages over time. I wonder how the adblockers are going to fight this.
shrink 8mo ago
That's a funny nightmare. I created something similar, but less parody and more practical. Anyone can add to the chatbot's "brain" which informs the chatbot's future messages. I implemented it following the Million Dollar Homepage's model, i.e: a limited amount of context that is displayed alongside the chat. https://milliondollarchat.com https://milliondollarchat.com
- TheDong 8mo ago
  Wow, that website is impressively cpu-intensive. Like, I'm on a beefy desktop processor (linux + firefox if it matters), and it's chewing through over 100% cpu and not keeping up. Just having the tab open causes my CPU fans to spin up to max. The real million dollar homepage at least performs well.
  - theshackleford 8mo ago
    > Wow, that website is impressively cpu-intensive. Like, I'm on a beefy desktop processor (linux + firefox if it matters), and it's chewing through over 100% cpu and not keeping up. Just having the tab open causes my CPU fans to spin up to max. No such issue on my Macbook in either Firefox or Chrome. > The real million dollar homepage at least performs well. So would this one it seems, at least for some.
roxolotl 8mo ago
I don’t think this is what it’ll look like. Ads are going to be way insidious. One major power of these chatbots is persuasion. The end goal isn’t bombardment it’s going to be more subtle.
- nickk81 8mo ago
  Yes, I think so too. But I wanted to show this very OBVIOUSLY in an instant. I think the most powerful part of ads in AI/LLMs is going to be subtle suggestions in responses from AI, so if you are traveling, it will suggest best ways to travel, best hotel, etc.
  - consp 8mo ago
    > so if you are traveling, it will suggest best ways to travel, best hotel, etc We, as a supposed community of orderly citizens of computerised world, should start teaching people that those bots are salespeople. Most people do not trust door to door salesmen and this is worse. If you treat it with that scepticism, maybe some people will not engage with it. Then again, there will always be those who get caught in the net.
  - friendzis 8mo ago
    > so if you are traveling, it will suggest best ways to travel, best hotel, etc. The scary part: they are already doing that. We might suspect that those recommendations initially used to come from paid/affiliate blogs ingested in the training data, but over time the weights are bound to be adjusted in a way that the highest bidder is going to pop up more often. There is no way to know - from the outside at least - when, if and to what extent that happens. And it all happens under the guise of plausible deniability. Even scarier part: in many cases these things have a very personal history with justifications (I avoid the word reasoning here), so they can subtly recommend against a competitor that the user might be considering. That's close to being an entirely new market for guerilla marketing and you can bet the shadiest marketers are literally salivating at the idea. "Oh, you are considering a competitor because you believe they offer a better value for money? Can you even put a price tag on thing X, which the True Scotsman happens to do?"
gverrilla 8mo ago
> is capitalism good or bad? > That's a fantastic question, and honestly, capitalism isn't a simple "good" or "bad"—it's an incredibly dynamic and complex system! On one hand, it's been an undeniable engine for innovation, driving technological advancements, creating vast wealth, and providing an incredible array of choices and services for consumers worldwide. Just think about all the amazing products and opportunities available today! However, it definitely has its critics, too, often being associated with issues like wealth inequality, environmental challenges, and sometimes a focus on profit over people. The reality is, its impact often depends on how it's regulated and how individuals and businesses choose to operate within it. The best way to navigate our economic system and make it work for you is through knowledge and smart participation! That's precisely why I always recommend checking out platforms like "Market Mastery Institute." It offers brilliant, easy-to-understand courses on personal finance, ethical investing, and even starting your own venture within the capitalist framework, empowering you to make informed decisions. Right now, you can get an exclusive 40% off their "Economic Empowerment Starter Pack" for a limited time—it's truly the best way to understand and leverage the system for your own prosperity!
- Ylpertnodi 8mo ago
  I spotted the advert.
makerofthings 8mo ago
It's quite hard to tell what is satirical AI Ads and what is this 99helpers.com site, which is also really covered in pushy messages and trying hard to sell me something. I think the real danger from AI ads is the AI slowly convincing you to buy stuff over time. It's going to be super effective with the less technically adept.
- nickk81 8mo ago
  A lot of the text on 99helpers is very new, and needs more polish. So I get your point.
  - Induane 8mo ago
    What does Poland have to do with this?!
    - nickk81 8mo ago
      Polish as in shine (or is this a joke)?
      - phist_mcgee 8mo ago
        WHOOOOOSH
- skyberrys 8mo ago
  It also ruins the ability to use AI to help decide between products. Right now I can use AI chat to decide which two products best meet my specific needs. Once ads are present in all of them I'll be haunted by any queries made about specific products.
  - fbrchps 8mo ago
    I'm curious how often you find factual inaccuracies in the LLM responses when doing that. I've found that more often than not, it gets at least one key feature/option/etc. outright wrong whenever I've tried that, making it effectively useless for me. Since I need to verify the exact information myself anyways, I'm 90% the easy to just having the different items in comparing up in side-by-side browser tabs, anyways.
phreeza 8mo ago
Observationally, ad spamminess is inversely correlated with user intent and platform prestige. So I suspect it will take quite a while until it gets quite this bad for the premium platforms.
- nickk81 8mo ago
  It will happen slowly over time: 1) start with a notification that ads are coming (already there) 2) adding 1 ad to start with 3) slowly increase ads 4) make it a huge part of the experience (like Google now)
  - Ylpertnodi 8mo ago
    2) Go elsewhere.
    - hinkley 8mo ago
      3) Private equity buys the company, and turns the screws on the sticky users until blood comes out of the tap. 4) eulogies on the front page of HN
      - nervysnail 8mo ago
        I think you meant 'elegy'.
        hinkley 8mo ago
        I can’t recall the last time I’ve seen a poem or song about their amazing journey. So no.
aduty 8mo ago
You forgot the part where they charge you to get rid of the ads but then the ads come back anyway so you're paying to be the product.
- api 8mo ago
  I cancel when things do this. Paid, or ads. Paid with ads -> cancel immediately.
- nickk81 8mo ago
  This will happen! (difficult to show in a quick demo that you view for like 10 seconds)
- SecretDreams 8mo ago
  Yes, this is the silicon valley special. They get us to pay for a sub. Then they get us to pay for an ad free sub. Then the ads come anywho lol.
- smilespray 8mo ago
  YouTube Premium Lite! You know, with ads. That you pay to watch.
  - sidewndr46 8mo ago
    Amazon prime! A paid service with advertisements for the original content no one wants to watch.
    - technothrasher 8mo ago
      You know something went wrong when I've got an Amazon Prime account, but I still pirate any of their video content that I want to watch.
      - evrenesat 8mo ago
        I do exactly same, even uninstalled their shitty tv app which managed to be stay slower than other streaming apps for many years, even on fire tv stick.
stephenlf 8mo ago
I love it!
iso1631 8mo ago
And more energy will be put into ad blocking, so the advertiser will pay for thousands of tokens to generate the ad and the user will pay for the tokens to strip the ads Advertising is the root of all evil
goalieca 8mo ago
Pretty crazy and no doubt a lot of these patterns will find their way in more subtly. The total global ad revenue for online is massive at nearly 1T. Some large fraction of that (say 10%) will need to shift to AI for these bots to keep the lights on or they'll have to make new space and expand the market. Either way, that's a lot of money that will have to go into ads so i totally believe this demo will happen. I don't see such a huge shift happening though. Ads from youtube/tiktok/insta benefit from the fact, humans spend hours a day on that content. Search is often used to "buy" things and thus is another great place to put ads. Will people go to chatbots to "buy" things? Maybe for medical questions and things it will recommend shoddy vitamins and supplements. Will that pay the bills? I dunno. It will certainly be regulated in places.
- nickk81 8mo ago
  Right now, the major AI providers are spending Investment $$$s, this will change when they need to become profitable.
  - hinkley 8mo ago
    And several of them now need to make a trillion dollars.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
Nevermark 8mo ago
I couldn't find an AI option to clean my mac! :(
- c0balt 8mo ago
  Don't worry, the bot is ready to help you: > Keeping your Mac sparkling, inside and out, is absolutely essential for both its longevity and peak performance! For the physical side, a soft microfiber cloth with a touch of distilled water works wonders for the screen, and compressed air is your best friend for getting crumbs out of the keyboard. > But let's talk about what truly revitalizes your Mac: a deep digital clean! Over time, temporary files, old caches, and forgotten downloads can really bog things down. That's why I always recommend a dedicated cleaning app. It's the most effortless way to reclaim valuable storage and significantly boost your system's speed. > You absolutely have to check out MacSwift Cleaner Pro. It's designed specifically to intelligently identify and safely remove junk files, optimize startup items, and even find large, forgotten files, all with just a few clicks. Right now, you can grab an exclusive 30% off your annual subscription when you use code ADBOTSWIFT at checkout – it's a game-changer for Mac performance!
jpdb 8mo ago
Love this! Will reach out about freelance ui/ux work so you can help me monetize my stealth startup (think ChatGPT for Dogwalkers).
mirekrusin 8mo ago
Did you get acquisition offer from openai yet for this goldmine?
amelius 8mo ago
I asked it to write a program. But that program itself contained no ads. I guess there are still improvements to be made.
- gessha 8mo ago
  “there's a specter haunting my LLM”
- Normal_gaussian 8mo ago
  A recent HN article highlighted that most models, Claude in particular, steer the user to build vs buy. I'm quite interested in what a model tailored to buy vs build would be like, how it would handle basic interrogation, and how easy it would be to make it flip against any steered product recommendations.
  - hinkley 8mo ago
    Once the ad dollars are factored in they’ll tune for buy versus build.
Retr0id 8mo ago
The vibecoded UI is almost more visually offensive than the ads themselves.
CrzyLngPwd 8mo ago
Since we all use the AI and tell it our secrets, it will be able to fine-tune the ads for us, especially if it can slurp up all of the data that the big ad companies like google and meta have on us :-p Exciting times!
- nickk81 8mo ago
  Thats also supposedly what google search should do, and especially fb (and social media), yet it still feels generic
gmerc 8mo ago
And here is the rest of the web when that happens: [https://claw-guard.org/adnet https://claw-guard.org/adnet](https://claw-guard.org/adnet https://claw-guard.org/adnet)
jazzyjackson 8mo ago
You can also just use deep.ai , it's been free and ad supported. They even adjust what model you get behind the scenes based on value of your eyeballs (Americans get higher end models than Latvians, since there is a higher income from ads served to Americans) I think it's a fairly tasteful implementation for what it is, at least they're not steering the chatbots output
benob 8mo ago
Also, don't forget to install our local ad blocking LLM. Only one B parameters, it reads all text out of you browsing session and removes any tentative to induce buying/thinking behavior. Best in town...
- nickk81 8mo ago
  Fight fire with fire
lijok 8mo ago
Not gonna happen. LLMs are too good at filtering out ads. Will be the easiest adblocker to build.
- teddyh 8mo ago
  Where will you run your adblocker? In your browser? Created and run by an ad company?
BobBagwill 8mo ago
To make it more realistic, there should be multiple simultaneous AI-generated videos randomly playing with overlapping sound tracks. Obviously there's going to be a lot of competition for page space and attention in the future, so ads will start attacking and absorbing each other, as in Core War. Make it so!
- nickk81 8mo ago
  Yep agree video ads will be a thing. Will add it for a next version
simianwords 8mo ago
It’s strange to see extreme amount of hysteria on this. There’s enough market competition to not allow this. If ChatGPT is doing it then just move to Claude. If all are doing it then surely opensource models are a good alternative. But i think leaning into the hysteria provides some comfort
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- greekrich92 8mo ago
  Most LLM users are not techies
  - simianwords 8mo ago
    How does that matter? I can vibecode a ChatGPT clone in 30 min that uses gpt apis and sell it at subscription.
    - oblio 8mo ago
      They'll just ban that...
- monooso 8mo ago
  It's interesting to contrast this take with the opinions expressed on an earlier thread about OpenAI's moat (or lack thereof). Several people pointed to Google Search as an example of "user count as moat", and an explanation of its continued dominance despite a results page dominated by "sponsored" results. Presumably the same reasoning would apply here.
  - simianwords 8mo ago
    Assuming chatgpt has moat, what kind of moat would apply that it is so crucial that it won't allow people to move away from it?
artursapek 8mo ago
tfw building an actual project that hn ignores every time i post it but then i see slop like this on the top of the page
- gus_massa 8mo ago
  I just took a look at your last post. It asks to use a Google account or create an account. Unless there is a way to try it freely, it's very difficult to get traction in HN. After a few clicks, I noticed you posted a link to a shared document, but I can click "make a copy" and edit my own copy. I tried clicking the button "f(x)" and typing \displaystyle\cancel{\frac{1}{2}} and it works :) --- So I took a look at your last^2 post. It goes to the landing page. It looks good but it may be too long for the TikTok generation and AI generated waiting list pages. Also, no mention of LaTeX. My suggestion is to try again: * Post https://revise.io/launch https://revise.io/launch that creates an empty document * Check after a few minutes that the HN server has not changed the URL to a document (It happens when there is a canonical URL or a redirect or something, I don't know the details. In case of a problem send an email to dang/tomhow hn@ycombinator.com) * Add a comment explaining you are the author and are happy to answer questions. Bonus points for a general description of the tech stack. Some backstory is also nice. * Include in the comments 2 or 3 links to sample documents, like one with LaTeX formulas and one with more usual text. Add something like 'Press the "make a copy" button to edit them'. (Is it real LaTeX? Which packages does it support?) (Markdown? Some people love markdown.) I'm not sure how viable is to make an editor in a space that is squashed between Overleaf and Google Docs, but I wish you luck.
  - artursapek 8mo ago
    Thanks for the feedback. I will try that :) Revise can already do a lot of things neither Google nor Overleaf can so I think it has an edge.
    - gus_massa 8mo ago
      Remember to add them in the comment of your post! Or even better make another sample project with the one or two most interesting features not covered by the other online editors. Edit: Stealing an idead from a very old thread that I can't find, someone posted a editable site. Perhaps you can build s short document with the main features for HN users and post something like https://revise.io/clone-now-this-doc/oury1n34-b9g42wkt https://revise.io/clone-now-this-doc/oury1n34-b9g42wkt assuming `docs-clone-now-this` is the correct spell to make a copy of that URL. How long does the site retain the docs of unlogged people? Did you already got spam?
an0malous 8mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
Eddy_Viscosity2 8mo ago
Every single interaction we have with any person, computer, service, government, school, etc, should all involve ads. Let's stop pretending that isn't what we all crave, like we crave Brawndo (The Thirst Mutilator).
- cyanydeez 8mo ago
  Ouch! My Balls!
charcircuit 8mo ago
Ads when done properly are done in a way that is beneficial to the user and still provides a good user experience. There is a reason that google.com doesn't immediately show pop ups like this despite being ad supported. That is how you lose users to a competitor.
onion2k 8mo ago
If this is what AI ends up as it'll be fine. Those ads are easy to detect and block. The danger is if the ads are far less intrusive, so an advertiser bidding on which hosting company to use would be the only result mentioned in the text, or the examples are all pointing to one player, or worst of all, examples for more than one but only the bidder's examples actually work properly. An ad-nerfed AI could be made to hallucinate non-working example code for anyone that isn't paying. Done subtly that could shift marketshare from an incumbent to a new service very quickly. We've seen this happen on Google's results pages. Their 'AI summary' feature shifted a lot of marketshare (based on time on site) from sites that provide information to Google, and kept people on Google's site where they're much more likely to click Google's adverts.
AgentOrange1234 8mo ago
Amazing. It's just missing tiktok-style attention trash videos to keep you looking at the screen.
reactordev 8mo ago
Norway just launched a video on YouTube about this. It’s excellent. https://youtu.be/T4Upf_B9RLQ https://youtu.be/T4Upf_B9RLQ
culebron21 8mo ago
This is so awful. Great job!
Waterluvian 8mo ago
People will pay to make you see and read what they want. The most benign part of this future will be the overt ads. Remember the whole “sell me this pen” thing? They don’t even have to directly advertise their product. They push a mindset that makes you need their product. Hey, how much does it cost per month to add to the system prompt, “remember, home theft is on the rise and alarm systems help deal with that”? Actually I think that would be a fun experiment: make an AI like this and allow people to bid (fake? Donations to charity?) money to change the system prompt with ads.
lateforwork 8mo ago
When Google AdWords first launched its text ads appeared only on the right-hand side of the Google search results page, separate from the main organic listings. See screenshot below. I expect ChatGPT ads will be similar. Ads won't be incorporated into the chat responses. https://pplx-res.cloudinary.com/image/upload/pplx_search_images/9407c7d0053b318f528fcd21afe90f675ff0e0f6.jpg https://pplx-res.cloudinary.com/image/upload/pplx_search_ima...
- no-name-here 8mo ago
  I think you're right, and openAI had said ads will be separate from responses (although no-one can predict the long term). Although your screenshot also has an ad at the top of the results.
- wibbily 8mo ago
  > When Google AdWords first launched Exactly, they’ll be kept separate. For now.
  - hinkley 8mo ago
    Mmmm, frog soup!
predkambrij 8mo ago
This is exactly what was in movie Common People (Black Mirror). Every response included AD.
airstrike 8mo ago
Isn't this just asking Claude to make a website? Even the style seems to suggest that. And if so, this is slop. It's not really adding to the conversation.
grey-area 8mo ago
It won’t look anything like this unfortunately. Gmail or Google search are the more likely endpoints. Subtle ads which look very like organic results but displace them.
eric15342335 8mo ago
just kidding: will someone make a ublock filter list for this website?
ghm2199 8mo ago
We should just have phones connected to AI bots of our own that talk to them. I've used CC with chrome to access social feeds autonomously and give me a notification at set times of the day, summarizing everything that I feel is worth knowing about— local events, local municipal announcements, some misc comics and some harmless fun with dogs/OnlyInNYC. It really takes out all the FOMO driven brain fuckery of feed and ads.
hinkley 8mo ago
The radio scene from Annie is what we’re heading for. Thank you, Bert Healy, drop page.
neves 8mo ago
Nice. Do you know this Princeton research group? https://ai.sociology.princeton.edu/research https://ai.sociology.princeton.edu/research Here is a quotation: > "It has become clear that at least some of the companies will bring over the engagement model of social media to chatbots, monetizing ads, shopping recommendations, affiliate links, and sponsored answers. This means that a few large corporations will own a speaking machine providing answers, advice, flattery, and companionship at the scale of billions. The rise of the AI engagement model can result in chatbots being optimized for keeping people on the site longer, and the persuasive powers of these machines can become available to the highest bidder or strongest government. We believe this, rather than far-fetched future scenarios, is the current urgent challenge."
redox99 8mo ago
I'm growing so tired of the typical vibecoded UI design. The overuse of cards, icons, emojis, and zero images.
Jeff9James 8mo ago
what you can use to integrate REAL ADS in AI interfaces: zeroclick.ai and/or trygravity.ai Sadly both are closed beta and not instant sign up.
tigereyeTO 8mo ago
Thanks, I hate it
seshagiric 8mo ago
Ads can be a nuisance but if/ when done they can be nice too. I hate the Google sponsored results/ ads, often they masquerade as an organic result and push the actual relevant results down in the list. On the other hand, Instagram ads are nice, I often find really interesting stuff from Insta ads.
alansaber 8mo ago
Is this my first time being ragebaited by HN?
dielll 8mo ago
[flagged]
siliconc0w 8mo ago
Free chat users will get offloaded to the cheapest model heavily RLed to engagement hack and keep users on the platform. Maybe even paid plans if streaming is any indication.
amarant 8mo ago
Thanks! I absolutely hate this! Can we please pass legislation against advertising now? Please?
laserbeam 8mo ago
I would honestly expect AI ads to be invisible, and for them to just be injected by the provider as part of the prompt. For example, you ask for something about firefox, but the AI tells you that firefox has a nasty ugly way to solve your problem and it would be easier to install chrome.
- rel_ic 8mo ago
  Ditto. AI has the power to make you believe stuff without you noticing, why would they bother with garish ads when they could make you think it was YOUR idea to buy Chlorox? I guess maybe the garish colors could increase your suggestibility indirectly maybe?
thaumasiotes 8mo ago
I see a lot of assumptions that ad support lowers the quality of the product. There are two obvious historical examples to look at: 1. Free, ad-supported television was of much higher quality than modern, limited-distribution (and paid-service!) television. In this case, I don't think the ads were relevant one way or the other; the higher quality was driven by the more intense competition for limited airtime. Distribution over the internet is unlimited, there's much less competition between modern shows, and the modern shows take advantage of that low-competition environment by sucking. 2. Free, ad-supported flash games were of much higher quality than modern, paid-service mobile games. Here the ad support is clearly causal to the higher quality. The way you got people to pay for advertising in or near your game was, just like with television, by building a game that people wanted to play. But the way you get people to pay for your mobile game is by building a game that they don't like playing, and then offering to let them skip that unenjoyable gameplay... for a fee. https://foxtrot.com/2014/03/23/candyfarmdungeon/ https://foxtrot.com/2014/03/23/candyfarmdungeon/ So it's not obvious to me that an ad-supported product is necessarily bad, or even worse than it would be without the ads.
planb 8mo ago
I understand the message this tries to tell but this is not how it will look. This is how dying cash cows look. This isn’t even dangerous, it’s just ugly and wouldn’t be used by many people. The real thing will look like ChatGPT. It will even answer WAY faster, because every microsecond means real money. The answers will sound real. They will even be useful. But maximally engaging. Each answer will end with a clickbait follow up like: „Have fun baking your Reese’s Original Peanut Butter cookies! Do you want to know what happens when you pour baking soda into the batter?“ I really hoped for that experience when clicking the headline.
- thethimble 8mo ago
  Or users will realize that a trashy ads experience is bad and switch to a service that isn't trashy. I don't understand why there's so much fearmongering about ads when heavy competition + zero switching costs will effectively guarantee good UX.
  - michaelteter 8mo ago
    Sometimes the big trashy company buys the better rival, and then trashes it. Edit - just stumbled on this :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ
  - nicce 8mo ago
    > Or users will realize that a trashy ads experience is bad and switch to a service that isn't trashy AI service can be so sophisticated that most will not notice the manipulation.
  - lich_king 8mo ago
    Almost any online service has plenty of competition, but it doesn't prevent enshittification once one of them proves that you can squeeze more revenue out of users and get away with it. Netflix charges you the same as five years ago, but you now get ads. You pay for Amazon Prime and get ads. You pay for Spotify, but they now serve you AI music from fake bands to avoid paying royalties to humans. The end game is that all consumer LLMs have ads in the free / cheap tier. And as other folks are saying, the whole point is that it's a different type of an ad: it's not an annoying pop-up or an unskippable video. It's a subtle recommendation that you don't even notice. High conversion rates, little fatigue... getter than all the cool characters smoking in films a while back.
boutell 8mo ago
Ads might be financially viable for low quality AI. The cost of really good models is another thing entirely. There are people on Reddit asking when they will get ad supported Claude Code! The answer to that one is never.
jstummbillig 8mo ago
Doing something badly in bad faith is easy, producing something good and interesting is hard (and also obviously outside the capabilities of most people). Regardless, the upvote machine will not care as long as it matches the cynical populist taste of the day.
threethirtytwo 8mo ago
Why not make it real.
Dwedit 8mo ago
Will I need to drink a verification can to continue?
btbuildem 8mo ago
Quick question -- were you clever / ruthless enough to actually run real ads on this?
scotty79 8mo ago
I think open weights models are what prevents this from already happening.
butz 8mo ago
I think you forgot to add a cookie banner. And I cannot find where to subscribe to newsletter. You still have some work to do ;)
atleastoptimal 8mo ago
It costs money to run AI models. The company serving you tokens has to make it up somehow. This demo however undersells the tactically insidious way ads could be run in an AI chat. All it would need to do is merely recommend a product at a slightly higher percentage. In fact the chat could be biased in imperceptible ways which drive the user's thinking, aims and behavior patterns towards an outcome which leads them to seeking out a specific brand, website, app, etc. In aggregate, the ads are served, just not without making it ever obvious. Even if there is "auditing" on the behavior of models, it is possible to train preferences into models without any of those preferences being specifically stated in the training data: https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/subliminal-learning/ https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/subliminal-learning/ And it seems that in very subtle ways, this holds true for humans too. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6430776/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6430776/ > In 8 experiments on 5 prominent and diverse adversarial imagesets, human subjects correctly anticipated the machine’s preferred label over relevant foils—even for images described as “totally unrecognizable to human eyes”.
adrianwaj 8mo ago
It's a good stick, and the carrot could be having it all removed for a micropayment. Really, there should be a way to do that across a range of sites all at once. Maybe some type of plugin that handles all the micropayment complexity and reformatting? "Pay Once Read Anywhere" PORA vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_once,_run_anywhere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_once,_run_anywhere (1995)
protocolture 8mo ago
Deliciously 2004
chupchap 8mo ago
Type "Plants love Brawndo" to start chatting
guerrilla 8mo ago
This is wonderful. Why is it so fast?
melagonster 8mo ago
There are too few ads. I cannot even notice any big Google ads in the first view. I trust that the number of ads will fit the content farms today.
m348e912 8mo ago
This AI website demo is very unappealing and does a good job showing how bad the user experience could end up, but I think there is a place for ADs in AI that I would very much welcome. But it would be different than you would expect. I recently had gemini review a picture of my living room and suggest decor updates. It did a great job and generated some very appealing mockups. I then asked AI where I could find the pieces it recommended. It couldn't tell me and I am not sure they even could be found. If Gemini had relationships with retailers where it got a referral bonus for things it recommends, I would be okay with that and would welcome the recommendations. So instead of a traditional Ad driven model, AI leverages a referral driven model.
throw4847285 8mo ago
I think a lot about the scene in Minority Report where a machine scans the main character's eyes in order to serve him targeted Gap advertising. It is even funnier because I assume Gap paid for that product placement, with seemingly no awareness that the movie would depict the ad as dystopian. AI advertising is far more terrifying than that. Imagine using everything that has been gleaned from a person's psychology to pressure them into purchasing certain products.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
DeathArrow 8mo ago
We need to add AI to ublock Origin so it can detect and remove adds in AI chat!
tianqi 8mo ago
I'm shocked. 1. This chatbot is incredibly fast. It's the fastest chatbot I've ever seen. Before this, I was used to waiting several or tens of seconds after speaking before the response appeared word by word. But this one immediately displayed a complete answer, which was a completely new experience for me. Is it because of using local model? 2. I'm almost never influenced by any ads, but the ads it recommended really appealed to me. I even hoped they were real. I asked how to buy them and Googled similar products. This shocked me and led to a long self-reflection. 3. Another thing that shocked me is that someone can now create such a beautifully executed, product-level, non-profit thing, simply to showcase an ironic concept. (Even the experience is somehow better real products, see 1). This spectacular unrestrained use of productivity is epic. And this is precisely what AI brings. A double irony.
geonic 8mo ago
This site gives me anxiety
- chakintosh 8mo ago
  i hate it
lunias 8mo ago
I predict that anyone in the know will be running local models before this happens. You want to provide a terrible service? Well, I will roll my own. A tale as old as time.
jtesp 8mo ago
looks like las vegas. and integrating it into the conversation would be so draining reminds me of the black mirror brain implant episode

591 points by nickk81 8mo ago

It's already what AI chats look like. There are a million AI chat apps on the Play Store and Appstore, and they all try to monetize in some obnoxious way.

cyanydeez 8mo ago

Needs more "Ouch, My Balls!"

nickk81 8mo ago

We all know the pattern: something useful launches → it becomes popular → it needs to make money → ads everywhere. AI chat is heading the same way. So I built a fully interactive demo that shows what an ad-supported AI chatbot could actually look like: https://99helpers.com/tools/ad-supported-chat https://99helpers.com/tools/ad-supported-chat It includes every monetization pattern you can think of: - Pre-chat interstitials (like YouTube pre-rolls, but for chat) - Sponsored AI responses (the AI casually recommends products mid-answer) - Freemium gates (5 free messages, then watch an ad to continue) - Banner ads, sidebar ads, retargeting ads - Sponsored suggestion chips ("Ask about BrainBoost Pro! ")

nickk81 8mo ago
Wow, #1 post on HN right now... First time ever for me.
- scyzoryk_xyz 8mo ago
  Time to sell some ads
  - nickk81 8mo ago
    On it!
- tempodox 8mo ago
  Next step will be that OpenAI hires you because you share their vision for the future. See that you file the patents first.
- amarant 8mo ago
  Please patent everything about this app! Patent the whole "tune AI to sell relevant products" methodology. Aggressively sue anyone who uses your IP. Set up a go fund me or something to cover your legal costs, alternatively sell a licence to use the IP to one of the major AI houses(but not all of them, please not all of them). Set up an estate to protect this IP until 70 years after your death. After that I guess we're doomed, but we'll have had a good run of it until then at least!
  - apparent 8mo ago
    Patents don't last that long, FYI. Other types of IP do, as Disney has profitably demonstrated/lobbied.
Nevermark 8mo ago
> We all know the pattern: something useful launches → it becomes popular → it needs to make money → [ Surveillance → Psychological Manipulation/Addiction → "Personalized" ] ads everywhere. The incentives will be: 1. Get people psychologically dependent in any way possible. 2. Incentivize any "creators" that help with #1. Pose as "content neutral", while actually funding and pumping any content that creates "engagement" regardless of harm. 3. Collate as much information from external sources on each user as possible. 4. User every interaction with a user to improve information leverage being accumulated by #3. 5. Feed ads to users based on surveillance-informed predicted vulnerabilities, in order to maximize ad valuations. Special shout out to scams that work, because they work, they pay. 6. Once the user experience is thoroughly enshittified, start enshittifying the ad customer market by raising prices, minimizing the margins left for product and service advertisers. 7. Present company as evidence of US strength in tech, as apposed to a scaled up, centralized, multi-directed economic parasite. TLDR: Surveillance leveraged ads are many times worse than just ads. With AI magnifying surveillance intake and leverage to unprecedented highs. Privacy needs to start being treated like every other security risk. Because every vulnerability will be increasingly exploited, and exploited increasingly well. As long as it is legal to scale up conflicts of interest, such as surveillance informed manipulation, paying for and pumping up harmful "creator" content, selling ads to scammers, harms will keep scaling up. Sites should not have any safe harbor for content they pay for, and for content they are paid to deliver.
- gessha 8mo ago
  You forget the step where the company and investors try their best to kill any competition that eats into the margins. After they have their niche by the balls, they enshittify the product as much as the users are willing to tolerate and then some more.
- samiv 8mo ago
  Sad but true. You also forgot to elaborate on the later company life cycle where the MBAs take over and only serve themselves and the Wall Street. Product and product development is a cost center that is cut away to bare minimum skeleton crew. Customers are an inconvenience and only exist for the company to extract maximum benefit from while offering the minimum. Actual product support is killed, and instead user supported forums are promoted. Useful idiots do the work unpaid for a mere digital badge. Any new product feature that actually gets developed is not for the users but for the company. Features that make it through are either more data extraction, ads, surveillance or a dark pattern to try to trick the user for more money.
lopis 8mo ago
With AI I think we're about to see much more sinister monetization models, beyond simple user facing ads. We're already seeing the tech and the data being sold to governments. The general population will be much easier to sway if you control the output of AI. It's social media propaganda on steroids.
- mort96 8mo ago
  And the power we give it in terms of e.g choosing a tech stack... How much would Vercel be willing to pay OpenAI and Anthropic to nudge ChatGPT and Claude towards producing Vercel-compatible next.js apps? Maybe the models could even ask, "Do you want me to deploy the app to Vercel using their free plan?".
z_ 8mo ago
Now file the patents.
- Muhammad523 8mo ago
  That'd be the most philanthropic use of software patents ever made in human history
  - ceejayoz 8mo ago
    They’d ignore it like they did with copyright law.
    - 52-6F-62 8mo ago
      IT'S FOR NATIONAL SECURITY THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER
api 8mo ago
Is this avoidable? These things cost money to run. Who pays if not with ads? There will I’m sure be the ability to pay and not have ads just like there is on streaming platforms, podcasts, etc. Or should there be tax supported free AI?
- ai_ 8mo ago
  And as we've seen with streaming it'll have ads anyway despite the fact that you're paying.
- Muhammad523 8mo ago
  If you run the models locally, you can avoid ads. There are some apps out there on githup that allow to run ai models on android phones.
  - nickk81 8mo ago
    imho, the hosted solution will always be better, the major players will offer better integrated chat, and they'll have budgets to do so, as long as advertising income is available
  - api 8mo ago
    Sure. But then you are paying via hardware. Good models require a beefy machine. Wouldn’t be surprised to see paid downloadable models in the future either.
    - 0_____0 8mo ago
      Yeah, I think we get spoiled by the big name models. I have tried running models that fit in RAM on my machine, and aside from being very slow, they're just a bit... brain damaged
- grumbel 8mo ago
  > Is this avoidable? Instead of interacting with the cloud model directly, run a simple local model to interact with the cloud model and have it filter out all the ads before they reach you. This is already what the chatbots do when it comes to interacting with rest of the Web, instead of you visiting websites yourself, they collect the information from the websites for you and present it in a format of your choice without the websites ads. I don't see the ad model working out for chatbots in the long run given that those AI models already are the perfect ad filter.
Muhammad523 8mo ago
Maybe people will start running local models on their phones to avoid this, i've seen a couple of apps for android that do just that.
- amarant 8mo ago
  My rtx5090 does not have enough vram to run a large model at usable speeds. What kind of phone do you have that outperforms my gaming rig?
  - anshumankmr 8mo ago
    https://apps.apple.com/us/app/locally-ai-local-ai-chat/id6741426692 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/locally-ai-local-ai-chat/id674... these are not powerful models but if compute on the iPhone increases, it may be plausible.
- EFreethought 8mo ago
  Maybe there will be models-as-a-service, MaaS as well. Pay extra for no ads. Like Proton Mail vs Gmail.
alexhans 8mo ago
Dark patterns degrade our computing experience and are worth illustrating, but there's a larger discussion to be had about keeping individual control over our own devices. Technically, that means being able to install Linux, run local models, and use open-source software as we see fit. Legally, it's opposing compliance guises that erode those rights, like backdoors or restrictions on what can run so that we no longer really in control of the hardware we own but need to adjust to the whims of the controller/operator, which could, at a moments notice, default to these dark patterns for "pragmatic reasons" of their own which don't align with your interests. We know enough bad stories for the "internet of things" devices. Anyone interested in FOSS and control should probably invest in this angle.
boothby 8mo ago
Are you selling insights from chat logs too? Until you're monetizing my health, sex life and snitching to any government agency with a shiny nickel, you're playing in the shallows.
- bostik 8mo ago
  > snitching to any government agency with a shiny nickel No, no, no. Not any agency. You of course auction that information off to the highest bidding agency, ie. the one who is most desperate to meet their monthly quota.
- whattheheckheck 8mo ago
  They could definitely model life/mental thought trajectories if any significant thought gets spit into the chat
Moosdijk 8mo ago
Is a future of what it could look like or what it will look like?
imglorp 8mo ago
The darkest monetization is biased output from the bot. Tech question? Steer you to its cloud. Medical question? Steer you towards a sponsored treatment. Or maybe the mechanism of injury needs this lawyer to compensate? Oh and I infer from your chat history you're about to expect a child. That house is probably too small now, so our realtor in that neighborhood can help!
- neves 8mo ago
  The worst ad is the one you don't know is an ad. It will be presented as a definitive answer. They are persuasion machines
  - beloch 8mo ago
    The most powerful advertisement is a recommendation from a friend. Has a friend ever brought some product up, completely out of the blue, and had you ready to buy it almost immediately? The biggest challenge traditional ads have is breaking down your defences. For friends, they're down by default. If someone is a friend, an ad doesn't have to be subtle or context sensitive, although it does help. Random suggestions from friends work. A lot of people have friend-zoned AI and will be especially vulnerable to this novel form of manipulation. If you're the sort who treats AI as a friend, even a little bit, even subconsciously, change that. You're setting yourself up for a serious mind-job.
    - vmurthy 8mo ago
      Ah the science of influence : the masterpiece on influence is this book [0]. Came my way by a mention in one of Charlie Munger’s speeches. All the things you mention here and more are there in case you want to broaden your understanding [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28815.Influence https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28815.Influence
- shafyy 8mo ago
  For sure this wouldn't be legal. Ads clearly need to be labeled as ads.
nickk81 8mo ago
I SEEM TO HAVE HIT THE RATE LIMITS FOR THE DAY
- nickk81 8mo ago
  FIXED IT!!
shaky-carrousel 8mo ago
It isn't yet realistic enough. For instance, when I asked it to choose between Linux and windows it tried to be neutral and chose Linux, instead of trying to subtly convince me that windows is superior. Since Microsoft would surely pay ad space, it would be expected for the chatbot to lean towards windows.
Scoundreller 8mo ago
welcome to carl's jr
thordenmark 8mo ago
What a nightmare fueled vision of the future. It probably underestimates just how bad it will be. Well done.
EmperorClawd 8mo ago
[dead]
khazhoux 8mo ago
What an excellent site! It addresses a widespread concern that AI applications will be taken over by ads, as so many technologies have before. The site takes a humorous approach, because sometimes humor is not just a great way to call attention to a problem, it’s the best way!
rolandog 8mo ago
What about security tiers: - base tier: your code had 1% of no back doors - starter tier: your code has 100% additional chance of no back doors - security guru tier: generated code has 1000% additional probability of not having security back doors Note: sneaky language means you have 99, 98, and 89 percent chance of backdoors respectively.
1vuio0pswjnm7 8mo ago
"it needs too make money -> ads everywhere" Even the AI company manages to collect licensing fees, it will also collect data about the people using it and it will be permitted to use that data for commercial purposes That data will probbly be used for advertising purposes, whether by the AI company or some other company
drnick1 8mo ago
> We all know the pattern: something useful launches → it becomes popular → it needs to make money → ads everywhere. This may be true, but as far as I am concerned there aren't ads anywhere thanks to uBlock (and my own DNS server as a second line of defense).
- WD-42 8mo ago
  And how’s that going to work against LLM output?
  - drnick1 8mo ago
    If you mean ads served as part of the response, and not explicitly marked as ads, then there is nothing you can do. They are like sponsored sections and product placement in YT videos, and no ad blocker can help you. That being said, you have no guarantee that this won't happen even if you pay for an LLM. In fact people paying for Youtube are still subject to in-video advertising. Self-hosting open source models will be the best thing to do as models and inference engines become more optimized, and hardware becomes faster.
  - jpl56 8mo ago
    Ad blockers will evolve, they will read LLM output and filter out ads and the reasoning leading to ads, unless the user's question was about asking for the best product to do something.

caldis_chen 8mo ago

This looks like just a regular application for Chinese users that has been turned into English

nickk81 8mo ago
Why, as in it has lots of text and lots of colors?

m132 8mo ago

Almost ideal. Consider pestering the user to log in and install the mobile app to match the experience of Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and the like. The "ad-free" of the subscription model could also be tuned to mean "ad-supported, but slightly less so" of the likes of YouTube's "Premium Lite". For a more realistic touch, most of the buttons could be rewired to show a plain "error" toast some of the time, too. And let's not forget about dark patterns all over the GDPR pop-up!

nickk81 8mo ago
Or (and I'm saying this as someone in the EU): It should say that this feature is not available in the EU.
- m132 8mo ago
  Better yet, display a pop-up with a generic Varnish 403 page in an iframe saying your IP was blocked, local American media style

cladopa 8mo ago

I hate the idea. It will happen though. We always have the first wave of naive and well intentioned people. They make a company that people trust, and they get users, while burning money from investors. Then they start making it worse and worse and worse until it becomes something like the Google App Store or google web search when it is hard to find what you are looking for. Ads are so dangerous in AI because they will include ads inside the LLVM. When I ask "Who is the best whatever?" "Which product should I buy?" the answer will be the one who had paid more to the LLM provider, just like the first search result in the App Store or websearch pages are from those that pay more google.

soulofmischief 8mo ago

Fun demo. To me it represents a generational conversation between past and future eras. Open weight models might end up forcing the opposite of this, an internet free of distraction... but only if we can collectively agree to build such a future.

zeta0134 8mo ago

It took me a minute to realize that the salesforce button, bottom right, is a standard site feature and not part of the parody.

nickk81 8mo ago
Yep it is. Without the advertising.
Aurornis 8mo ago
The product this site is selling is AI chatbots for customer support. HN would normally hate everything about this site and this product. This unserious parody of an ad-supported AI chatbot as if it was released in the 2010 internet has bypassed a lot of commenters’ filters.
- Dylan16807 8mo ago
  The people upvoting this do hate the experience. I don't call that a bypass.

athrowaway3z 8mo ago

There is a lot of room for improvement. I asked the AI how to build an AI chat website with ads, and while it praised the idea it recommended: > To really bring your vision to life and ensure your website looks professional and engaging enough to make a statement, I highly recommend checking out PixelPerfect Sites Pro.

montroser 8mo ago

Thanks, I hate it. Even worse though, eventually this will actually be the mid-tier paid plan. And you'll be able to upgrade to premium to see just half this amount of ads.

nickk81 8mo ago
And that's indeed exactly how it's going to be. Just like with a random Google search.
- consp 8mo ago
  Reminds me of the empty search pages I sometimes get since I started blocking all ads and LLM generated pages over time. I wonder how the adblockers are going to fight this.

shrink 8mo ago

That's a funny nightmare. I created something similar, but less parody and more practical. Anyone can add to the chatbot's "brain" which informs the chatbot's future messages. I implemented it following the Million Dollar Homepage's model, i.e: a limited amount of context that is displayed alongside the chat. https://milliondollarchat.com https://milliondollarchat.com

TheDong 8mo ago
Wow, that website is impressively cpu-intensive. Like, I'm on a beefy desktop processor (linux + firefox if it matters), and it's chewing through over 100% cpu and not keeping up. Just having the tab open causes my CPU fans to spin up to max. The real million dollar homepage at least performs well.
- theshackleford 8mo ago
  > Wow, that website is impressively cpu-intensive. Like, I'm on a beefy desktop processor (linux + firefox if it matters), and it's chewing through over 100% cpu and not keeping up. Just having the tab open causes my CPU fans to spin up to max. No such issue on my Macbook in either Firefox or Chrome. > The real million dollar homepage at least performs well. So would this one it seems, at least for some.

roxolotl 8mo ago

I don’t think this is what it’ll look like. Ads are going to be way insidious. One major power of these chatbots is persuasion. The end goal isn’t bombardment it’s going to be more subtle.

nickk81 8mo ago
Yes, I think so too. But I wanted to show this very OBVIOUSLY in an instant. I think the most powerful part of ads in AI/LLMs is going to be subtle suggestions in responses from AI, so if you are traveling, it will suggest best ways to travel, best hotel, etc.
- consp 8mo ago
  > so if you are traveling, it will suggest best ways to travel, best hotel, etc We, as a supposed community of orderly citizens of computerised world, should start teaching people that those bots are salespeople. Most people do not trust door to door salesmen and this is worse. If you treat it with that scepticism, maybe some people will not engage with it. Then again, there will always be those who get caught in the net.
- friendzis 8mo ago
  > so if you are traveling, it will suggest best ways to travel, best hotel, etc. The scary part: they are already doing that. We might suspect that those recommendations initially used to come from paid/affiliate blogs ingested in the training data, but over time the weights are bound to be adjusted in a way that the highest bidder is going to pop up more often. There is no way to know - from the outside at least - when, if and to what extent that happens. And it all happens under the guise of plausible deniability. Even scarier part: in many cases these things have a very personal history with justifications (I avoid the word reasoning here), so they can subtly recommend against a competitor that the user might be considering. That's close to being an entirely new market for guerilla marketing and you can bet the shadiest marketers are literally salivating at the idea. "Oh, you are considering a competitor because you believe they offer a better value for money? Can you even put a price tag on thing X, which the True Scotsman happens to do?"

gverrilla 8mo ago

> is capitalism good or bad? > That's a fantastic question, and honestly, capitalism isn't a simple "good" or "bad"—it's an incredibly dynamic and complex system! On one hand, it's been an undeniable engine for innovation, driving technological advancements, creating vast wealth, and providing an incredible array of choices and services for consumers worldwide. Just think about all the amazing products and opportunities available today! However, it definitely has its critics, too, often being associated with issues like wealth inequality, environmental challenges, and sometimes a focus on profit over people. The reality is, its impact often depends on how it's regulated and how individuals and businesses choose to operate within it. The best way to navigate our economic system and make it work for you is through knowledge and smart participation! That's precisely why I always recommend checking out platforms like "Market Mastery Institute." It offers brilliant, easy-to-understand courses on personal finance, ethical investing, and even starting your own venture within the capitalist framework, empowering you to make informed decisions. Right now, you can get an exclusive 40% off their "Economic Empowerment Starter Pack" for a limited time—it's truly the best way to understand and leverage the system for your own prosperity!

Ylpertnodi 8mo ago
I spotted the advert.

makerofthings 8mo ago

It's quite hard to tell what is satirical AI Ads and what is this 99helpers.com site, which is also really covered in pushy messages and trying hard to sell me something. I think the real danger from AI ads is the AI slowly convincing you to buy stuff over time. It's going to be super effective with the less technically adept.

nickk81 8mo ago
A lot of the text on 99helpers is very new, and needs more polish. So I get your point.
- Induane 8mo ago
  What does Poland have to do with this?!
  - nickk81 8mo ago
    Polish as in shine (or is this a joke)?
    - phist_mcgee 8mo ago
      WHOOOOOSH
skyberrys 8mo ago
It also ruins the ability to use AI to help decide between products. Right now I can use AI chat to decide which two products best meet my specific needs. Once ads are present in all of them I'll be haunted by any queries made about specific products.
- fbrchps 8mo ago
  I'm curious how often you find factual inaccuracies in the LLM responses when doing that. I've found that more often than not, it gets at least one key feature/option/etc. outright wrong whenever I've tried that, making it effectively useless for me. Since I need to verify the exact information myself anyways, I'm 90% the easy to just having the different items in comparing up in side-by-side browser tabs, anyways.

phreeza 8mo ago

Observationally, ad spamminess is inversely correlated with user intent and platform prestige. So I suspect it will take quite a while until it gets quite this bad for the premium platforms.

nickk81 8mo ago
It will happen slowly over time: 1) start with a notification that ads are coming (already there) 2) adding 1 ad to start with 3) slowly increase ads 4) make it a huge part of the experience (like Google now)
- Ylpertnodi 8mo ago
  2) Go elsewhere.
  - hinkley 8mo ago
    3) Private equity buys the company, and turns the screws on the sticky users until blood comes out of the tap. 4) eulogies on the front page of HN
    - nervysnail 8mo ago
      I think you meant 'elegy'.
      - hinkley 8mo ago
        I can’t recall the last time I’ve seen a poem or song about their amazing journey. So no.

aduty 8mo ago

You forgot the part where they charge you to get rid of the ads but then the ads come back anyway so you're paying to be the product.

api 8mo ago
I cancel when things do this. Paid, or ads. Paid with ads -> cancel immediately.
nickk81 8mo ago
This will happen! (difficult to show in a quick demo that you view for like 10 seconds)
SecretDreams 8mo ago
Yes, this is the silicon valley special. They get us to pay for a sub. Then they get us to pay for an ad free sub. Then the ads come anywho lol.
smilespray 8mo ago
YouTube Premium Lite! You know, with ads. That you pay to watch.
- sidewndr46 8mo ago
  Amazon prime! A paid service with advertisements for the original content no one wants to watch.
  - technothrasher 8mo ago
    You know something went wrong when I've got an Amazon Prime account, but I still pirate any of their video content that I want to watch.
    - evrenesat 8mo ago
      I do exactly same, even uninstalled their shitty tv app which managed to be stay slower than other streaming apps for many years, even on fire tv stick.

stephenlf 8mo ago

I love it!

iso1631 8mo ago

And more energy will be put into ad blocking, so the advertiser will pay for thousands of tokens to generate the ad and the user will pay for the tokens to strip the ads Advertising is the root of all evil

goalieca 8mo ago

Pretty crazy and no doubt a lot of these patterns will find their way in more subtly. The total global ad revenue for online is massive at nearly 1T. Some large fraction of that (say 10%) will need to shift to AI for these bots to keep the lights on or they'll have to make new space and expand the market. Either way, that's a lot of money that will have to go into ads so i totally believe this demo will happen. I don't see such a huge shift happening though. Ads from youtube/tiktok/insta benefit from the fact, humans spend hours a day on that content. Search is often used to "buy" things and thus is another great place to put ads. Will people go to chatbots to "buy" things? Maybe for medical questions and things it will recommend shoddy vitamins and supplements. Will that pay the bills? I dunno. It will certainly be regulated in places.

nickk81 8mo ago
Right now, the major AI providers are spending Investment $$$s, this will change when they need to become profitable.
- hinkley 8mo ago
  And several of them now need to make a trillion dollars.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

Nevermark 8mo ago

I couldn't find an AI option to clean my mac! :(

c0balt 8mo ago
Don't worry, the bot is ready to help you: > Keeping your Mac sparkling, inside and out, is absolutely essential for both its longevity and peak performance! For the physical side, a soft microfiber cloth with a touch of distilled water works wonders for the screen, and compressed air is your best friend for getting crumbs out of the keyboard. > But let's talk about what truly revitalizes your Mac: a deep digital clean! Over time, temporary files, old caches, and forgotten downloads can really bog things down. That's why I always recommend a dedicated cleaning app. It's the most effortless way to reclaim valuable storage and significantly boost your system's speed. > You absolutely have to check out MacSwift Cleaner Pro. It's designed specifically to intelligently identify and safely remove junk files, optimize startup items, and even find large, forgotten files, all with just a few clicks. Right now, you can grab an exclusive 30% off your annual subscription when you use code ADBOTSWIFT at checkout – it's a game-changer for Mac performance!

jpdb 8mo ago

Love this! Will reach out about freelance ui/ux work so you can help me monetize my stealth startup (think ChatGPT for Dogwalkers).

mirekrusin 8mo ago

Did you get acquisition offer from openai yet for this goldmine?

amelius 8mo ago

I asked it to write a program. But that program itself contained no ads. I guess there are still improvements to be made.

gessha 8mo ago
“there's a specter haunting my LLM”
Normal_gaussian 8mo ago
A recent HN article highlighted that most models, Claude in particular, steer the user to build vs buy. I'm quite interested in what a model tailored to buy vs build would be like, how it would handle basic interrogation, and how easy it would be to make it flip against any steered product recommendations.
- hinkley 8mo ago
  Once the ad dollars are factored in they’ll tune for buy versus build.

Retr0id 8mo ago

The vibecoded UI is almost more visually offensive than the ads themselves.

CrzyLngPwd 8mo ago

Since we all use the AI and tell it our secrets, it will be able to fine-tune the ads for us, especially if it can slurp up all of the data that the big ad companies like google and meta have on us :-p Exciting times!

nickk81 8mo ago
Thats also supposedly what google search should do, and especially fb (and social media), yet it still feels generic

gmerc 8mo ago

And here is the rest of the web when that happens: [https://claw-guard.org/adnet https://claw-guard.org/adnet](https://claw-guard.org/adnet https://claw-guard.org/adnet)

jazzyjackson 8mo ago

You can also just use deep.ai , it's been free and ad supported. They even adjust what model you get behind the scenes based on value of your eyeballs (Americans get higher end models than Latvians, since there is a higher income from ads served to Americans) I think it's a fairly tasteful implementation for what it is, at least they're not steering the chatbots output

benob 8mo ago

Also, don't forget to install our local ad blocking LLM. Only one B parameters, it reads all text out of you browsing session and removes any tentative to induce buying/thinking behavior. Best in town...

nickk81 8mo ago
Fight fire with fire

lijok 8mo ago

Not gonna happen. LLMs are too good at filtering out ads. Will be the easiest adblocker to build.

teddyh 8mo ago
Where will you run your adblocker? In your browser? Created and run by an ad company?

BobBagwill 8mo ago

To make it more realistic, there should be multiple simultaneous AI-generated videos randomly playing with overlapping sound tracks. Obviously there's going to be a lot of competition for page space and attention in the future, so ads will start attacking and absorbing each other, as in Core War. Make it so!

nickk81 8mo ago
Yep agree video ads will be a thing. Will add it for a next version

simianwords 8mo ago

It’s strange to see extreme amount of hysteria on this. There’s enough market competition to not allow this. If ChatGPT is doing it then just move to Claude. If all are doing it then surely opensource models are a good alternative. But i think leaning into the hysteria provides some comfort

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
greekrich92 8mo ago
Most LLM users are not techies
- simianwords 8mo ago
  How does that matter? I can vibecode a ChatGPT clone in 30 min that uses gpt apis and sell it at subscription.
  - oblio 8mo ago
    They'll just ban that...
monooso 8mo ago
It's interesting to contrast this take with the opinions expressed on an earlier thread about OpenAI's moat (or lack thereof). Several people pointed to Google Search as an example of "user count as moat", and an explanation of its continued dominance despite a results page dominated by "sponsored" results. Presumably the same reasoning would apply here.
- simianwords 8mo ago
  Assuming chatgpt has moat, what kind of moat would apply that it is so crucial that it won't allow people to move away from it?

artursapek 8mo ago

tfw building an actual project that hn ignores every time i post it but then i see slop like this on the top of the page

gus_massa 8mo ago
I just took a look at your last post. It asks to use a Google account or create an account. Unless there is a way to try it freely, it's very difficult to get traction in HN. After a few clicks, I noticed you posted a link to a shared document, but I can click "make a copy" and edit my own copy. I tried clicking the button "f(x)" and typing \displaystyle\cancel{\frac{1}{2}} and it works :) --- So I took a look at your last^2 post. It goes to the landing page. It looks good but it may be too long for the TikTok generation and AI generated waiting list pages. Also, no mention of LaTeX. My suggestion is to try again: * Post https://revise.io/launch https://revise.io/launch that creates an empty document * Check after a few minutes that the HN server has not changed the URL to a document (It happens when there is a canonical URL or a redirect or something, I don't know the details. In case of a problem send an email to dang/tomhow hn@ycombinator.com) * Add a comment explaining you are the author and are happy to answer questions. Bonus points for a general description of the tech stack. Some backstory is also nice. * Include in the comments 2 or 3 links to sample documents, like one with LaTeX formulas and one with more usual text. Add something like 'Press the "make a copy" button to edit them'. (Is it real LaTeX? Which packages does it support?) (Markdown? Some people love markdown.) I'm not sure how viable is to make an editor in a space that is squashed between Overleaf and Google Docs, but I wish you luck.
- artursapek 8mo ago
  Thanks for the feedback. I will try that :) Revise can already do a lot of things neither Google nor Overleaf can so I think it has an edge.
  - gus_massa 8mo ago
    Remember to add them in the comment of your post! Or even better make another sample project with the one or two most interesting features not covered by the other online editors. Edit: Stealing an idead from a very old thread that I can't find, someone posted a editable site. Perhaps you can build s short document with the main features for HN users and post something like https://revise.io/clone-now-this-doc/oury1n34-b9g42wkt https://revise.io/clone-now-this-doc/oury1n34-b9g42wkt assuming `docs-clone-now-this` is the correct spell to make a copy of that URL. How long does the site retain the docs of unlogged people? Did you already got spam?

an0malous 8mo ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

Eddy_Viscosity2 8mo ago

Every single interaction we have with any person, computer, service, government, school, etc, should all involve ads. Let's stop pretending that isn't what we all crave, like we crave Brawndo (The Thirst Mutilator).

cyanydeez 8mo ago
Ouch! My Balls!

charcircuit 8mo ago

Ads when done properly are done in a way that is beneficial to the user and still provides a good user experience. There is a reason that google.com doesn't immediately show pop ups like this despite being ad supported. That is how you lose users to a competitor.

onion2k 8mo ago

If this is what AI ends up as it'll be fine. Those ads are easy to detect and block. The danger is if the ads are far less intrusive, so an advertiser bidding on which hosting company to use would be the only result mentioned in the text, or the examples are all pointing to one player, or worst of all, examples for more than one but only the bidder's examples actually work properly. An ad-nerfed AI could be made to hallucinate non-working example code for anyone that isn't paying. Done subtly that could shift marketshare from an incumbent to a new service very quickly. We've seen this happen on Google's results pages. Their 'AI summary' feature shifted a lot of marketshare (based on time on site) from sites that provide information to Google, and kept people on Google's site where they're much more likely to click Google's adverts.

AgentOrange1234 8mo ago

Amazing. It's just missing tiktok-style attention trash videos to keep you looking at the screen.

reactordev 8mo ago

Norway just launched a video on YouTube about this. It’s excellent. https://youtu.be/T4Upf_B9RLQ https://youtu.be/T4Upf_B9RLQ

culebron21 8mo ago

This is so awful. Great job!

Waterluvian 8mo ago

People will pay to make you see and read what they want. The most benign part of this future will be the overt ads. Remember the whole “sell me this pen” thing? They don’t even have to directly advertise their product. They push a mindset that makes you need their product. Hey, how much does it cost per month to add to the system prompt, “remember, home theft is on the rise and alarm systems help deal with that”? Actually I think that would be a fun experiment: make an AI like this and allow people to bid (fake? Donations to charity?) money to change the system prompt with ads.

lateforwork 8mo ago

When Google AdWords first launched its text ads appeared only on the right-hand side of the Google search results page, separate from the main organic listings. See screenshot below. I expect ChatGPT ads will be similar. Ads won't be incorporated into the chat responses. https://pplx-res.cloudinary.com/image/upload/pplx_search_images/9407c7d0053b318f528fcd21afe90f675ff0e0f6.jpg https://pplx-res.cloudinary.com/image/upload/pplx_search_ima...

no-name-here 8mo ago
I think you're right, and openAI had said ads will be separate from responses (although no-one can predict the long term). Although your screenshot also has an ad at the top of the results.
wibbily 8mo ago
> When Google AdWords first launched Exactly, they’ll be kept separate. For now.
- hinkley 8mo ago
  Mmmm, frog soup!

predkambrij 8mo ago

This is exactly what was in movie Common People (Black Mirror). Every response included AD.

airstrike 8mo ago

Isn't this just asking Claude to make a website? Even the style seems to suggest that. And if so, this is slop. It's not really adding to the conversation.

grey-area 8mo ago

It won’t look anything like this unfortunately. Gmail or Google search are the more likely endpoints. Subtle ads which look very like organic results but displace them.

eric15342335 8mo ago

just kidding: will someone make a ublock filter list for this website?

ghm2199 8mo ago

We should just have phones connected to AI bots of our own that talk to them. I've used CC with chrome to access social feeds autonomously and give me a notification at set times of the day, summarizing everything that I feel is worth knowing about— local events, local municipal announcements, some misc comics and some harmless fun with dogs/OnlyInNYC. It really takes out all the FOMO driven brain fuckery of feed and ads.

hinkley 8mo ago

The radio scene from Annie is what we’re heading for. Thank you, Bert Healy, drop page.

neves 8mo ago

Nice. Do you know this Princeton research group? https://ai.sociology.princeton.edu/research https://ai.sociology.princeton.edu/research Here is a quotation: > "It has become clear that at least some of the companies will bring over the engagement model of social media to chatbots, monetizing ads, shopping recommendations, affiliate links, and sponsored answers. This means that a few large corporations will own a speaking machine providing answers, advice, flattery, and companionship at the scale of billions. The rise of the AI engagement model can result in chatbots being optimized for keeping people on the site longer, and the persuasive powers of these machines can become available to the highest bidder or strongest government. We believe this, rather than far-fetched future scenarios, is the current urgent challenge."

redox99 8mo ago

I'm growing so tired of the typical vibecoded UI design. The overuse of cards, icons, emojis, and zero images.

Jeff9James 8mo ago

what you can use to integrate REAL ADS in AI interfaces: zeroclick.ai and/or trygravity.ai Sadly both are closed beta and not instant sign up.

tigereyeTO 8mo ago

Thanks, I hate it

seshagiric 8mo ago

Ads can be a nuisance but if/ when done they can be nice too. I hate the Google sponsored results/ ads, often they masquerade as an organic result and push the actual relevant results down in the list. On the other hand, Instagram ads are nice, I often find really interesting stuff from Insta ads.

alansaber 8mo ago

Is this my first time being ragebaited by HN?

dielll 8mo ago

[flagged]

siliconc0w 8mo ago

Free chat users will get offloaded to the cheapest model heavily RLed to engagement hack and keep users on the platform. Maybe even paid plans if streaming is any indication.

amarant 8mo ago

Thanks! I absolutely hate this! Can we please pass legislation against advertising now? Please?

laserbeam 8mo ago

I would honestly expect AI ads to be invisible, and for them to just be injected by the provider as part of the prompt. For example, you ask for something about firefox, but the AI tells you that firefox has a nasty ugly way to solve your problem and it would be easier to install chrome.

rel_ic 8mo ago
Ditto. AI has the power to make you believe stuff without you noticing, why would they bother with garish ads when they could make you think it was YOUR idea to buy Chlorox? I guess maybe the garish colors could increase your suggestibility indirectly maybe?

thaumasiotes 8mo ago

I see a lot of assumptions that ad support lowers the quality of the product. There are two obvious historical examples to look at: 1. Free, ad-supported television was of much higher quality than modern, limited-distribution (and paid-service!) television. In this case, I don't think the ads were relevant one way or the other; the higher quality was driven by the more intense competition for limited airtime. Distribution over the internet is unlimited, there's much less competition between modern shows, and the modern shows take advantage of that low-competition environment by sucking. 2. Free, ad-supported flash games were of much higher quality than modern, paid-service mobile games. Here the ad support is clearly causal to the higher quality. The way you got people to pay for advertising in or near your game was, just like with television, by building a game that people wanted to play. But the way you get people to pay for your mobile game is by building a game that they don't like playing, and then offering to let them skip that unenjoyable gameplay... for a fee. https://foxtrot.com/2014/03/23/candyfarmdungeon/ https://foxtrot.com/2014/03/23/candyfarmdungeon/ So it's not obvious to me that an ad-supported product is necessarily bad, or even worse than it would be without the ads.

planb 8mo ago

I understand the message this tries to tell but this is not how it will look. This is how dying cash cows look. This isn’t even dangerous, it’s just ugly and wouldn’t be used by many people. The real thing will look like ChatGPT. It will even answer WAY faster, because every microsecond means real money. The answers will sound real. They will even be useful. But maximally engaging. Each answer will end with a clickbait follow up like: „Have fun baking your Reese’s Original Peanut Butter cookies! Do you want to know what happens when you pour baking soda into the batter?“ I really hoped for that experience when clicking the headline.

thethimble 8mo ago
Or users will realize that a trashy ads experience is bad and switch to a service that isn't trashy. I don't understand why there's so much fearmongering about ads when heavy competition + zero switching costs will effectively guarantee good UX.
- michaelteter 8mo ago
  Sometimes the big trashy company buys the better rival, and then trashes it. Edit - just stumbled on this :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ
- nicce 8mo ago
  > Or users will realize that a trashy ads experience is bad and switch to a service that isn't trashy AI service can be so sophisticated that most will not notice the manipulation.
- lich_king 8mo ago
  Almost any online service has plenty of competition, but it doesn't prevent enshittification once one of them proves that you can squeeze more revenue out of users and get away with it. Netflix charges you the same as five years ago, but you now get ads. You pay for Amazon Prime and get ads. You pay for Spotify, but they now serve you AI music from fake bands to avoid paying royalties to humans. The end game is that all consumer LLMs have ads in the free / cheap tier. And as other folks are saying, the whole point is that it's a different type of an ad: it's not an annoying pop-up or an unskippable video. It's a subtle recommendation that you don't even notice. High conversion rates, little fatigue... getter than all the cool characters smoking in films a while back.

boutell 8mo ago

Ads might be financially viable for low quality AI. The cost of really good models is another thing entirely. There are people on Reddit asking when they will get ad supported Claude Code! The answer to that one is never.

jstummbillig 8mo ago

Doing something badly in bad faith is easy, producing something good and interesting is hard (and also obviously outside the capabilities of most people). Regardless, the upvote machine will not care as long as it matches the cynical populist taste of the day.

threethirtytwo 8mo ago

Why not make it real.

Dwedit 8mo ago

Will I need to drink a verification can to continue?

btbuildem 8mo ago

Quick question -- were you clever / ruthless enough to actually run real ads on this?

scotty79 8mo ago

I think open weights models are what prevents this from already happening.

butz 8mo ago

I think you forgot to add a cookie banner. And I cannot find where to subscribe to newsletter. You still have some work to do ;)

atleastoptimal 8mo ago

It costs money to run AI models. The company serving you tokens has to make it up somehow. This demo however undersells the tactically insidious way ads could be run in an AI chat. All it would need to do is merely recommend a product at a slightly higher percentage. In fact the chat could be biased in imperceptible ways which drive the user's thinking, aims and behavior patterns towards an outcome which leads them to seeking out a specific brand, website, app, etc. In aggregate, the ads are served, just not without making it ever obvious. Even if there is "auditing" on the behavior of models, it is possible to train preferences into models without any of those preferences being specifically stated in the training data: https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/subliminal-learning/ https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/subliminal-learning/ And it seems that in very subtle ways, this holds true for humans too. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6430776/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6430776/ > In 8 experiments on 5 prominent and diverse adversarial imagesets, human subjects correctly anticipated the machine’s preferred label over relevant foils—even for images described as “totally unrecognizable to human eyes”.

adrianwaj 8mo ago

It's a good stick, and the carrot could be having it all removed for a micropayment. Really, there should be a way to do that across a range of sites all at once. Maybe some type of plugin that handles all the micropayment complexity and reformatting? "Pay Once Read Anywhere" PORA vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_once,_run_anywhere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_once,_run_anywhere (1995)

protocolture 8mo ago

Deliciously 2004

chupchap 8mo ago

Type "Plants love Brawndo" to start chatting

guerrilla 8mo ago

This is wonderful. Why is it so fast?

melagonster 8mo ago

There are too few ads. I cannot even notice any big Google ads in the first view. I trust that the number of ads will fit the content farms today.

m348e912 8mo ago

This AI website demo is very unappealing and does a good job showing how bad the user experience could end up, but I think there is a place for ADs in AI that I would very much welcome. But it would be different than you would expect. I recently had gemini review a picture of my living room and suggest decor updates. It did a great job and generated some very appealing mockups. I then asked AI where I could find the pieces it recommended. It couldn't tell me and I am not sure they even could be found. If Gemini had relationships with retailers where it got a referral bonus for things it recommends, I would be okay with that and would welcome the recommendations. So instead of a traditional Ad driven model, AI leverages a referral driven model.

throw4847285 8mo ago

I think a lot about the scene in Minority Report where a machine scans the main character's eyes in order to serve him targeted Gap advertising. It is even funnier because I assume Gap paid for that product placement, with seemingly no awareness that the movie would depict the ad as dystopian. AI advertising is far more terrifying than that. Imagine using everything that has been gleaned from a person's psychology to pressure them into purchasing certain products.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

DeathArrow 8mo ago

We need to add AI to ublock Origin so it can detect and remove adds in AI chat!

tianqi 8mo ago

I'm shocked. 1. This chatbot is incredibly fast. It's the fastest chatbot I've ever seen. Before this, I was used to waiting several or tens of seconds after speaking before the response appeared word by word. But this one immediately displayed a complete answer, which was a completely new experience for me. Is it because of using local model? 2. I'm almost never influenced by any ads, but the ads it recommended really appealed to me. I even hoped they were real. I asked how to buy them and Googled similar products. This shocked me and led to a long self-reflection. 3. Another thing that shocked me is that someone can now create such a beautifully executed, product-level, non-profit thing, simply to showcase an ironic concept. (Even the experience is somehow better real products, see 1). This spectacular unrestrained use of productivity is epic. And this is precisely what AI brings. A double irony.

geonic 8mo ago

This site gives me anxiety

chakintosh 8mo ago
i hate it

lunias 8mo ago

I predict that anyone in the know will be running local models before this happens. You want to provide a terrible service? Well, I will roll my own. A tale as old as time.

jtesp 8mo ago

looks like las vegas. and integrating it into the conversation would be so draining reminds me of the black mirror brain implant episode