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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
by 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 agoWow, #1 post on HN right now... First time ever for me.
- scyzoryk_xyz 8mo agoTime to sell some ads
- nickk81 8mo agoOn it!
- tempodox 8mo agoNext step will be that OpenAI hires you because you share their vision for the future. See that you file the patents first.
- amarant 8mo agoPlease 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 agoPatents 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 agoYou 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 agoSad 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 agoWith 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 agoAnd 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 agoNow file the patents.
- Muhammad523 8mo agoThat'd be the most philanthropic use of software patents ever made in human history
- api 8mo agoIs 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 agoAnd as we've seen with streaming it'll have ads anyway despite the fact that you're paying.
- Muhammad523 8mo agoIf 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 agoimho, 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 agoSure. 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 agoYeah, 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 agoMaybe 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 agoMy 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 agohttps://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 agoMaybe there will be models-as-a-service, MaaS as well. Pay extra for no ads. Like Proton Mail vs Gmail.
- alexhans 8mo agoDark 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 agoAre 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 agoThey could definitely model life/mental thought trajectories if any significant thought gets spit into the chat
- Moosdijk 8mo agoIs a future of what it could look like or what it will look like?
- imglorp 8mo agoThe 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 agoThe 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 agoThe 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 agoAh 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 agoFor sure this wouldn't be legal. Ads clearly need to be labeled as ads.
- nickk81 8mo agoI SEEM TO HAVE HIT THE RATE LIMITS FOR THE DAY
- nickk81 8mo agoFIXED IT!!
- shaky-carrousel 8mo agoIt 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 agowelcome to carl's jr
- thordenmark 8mo agoWhat a nightmare fueled vision of the future. It probably underestimates just how bad it will be. Well done.
- EmperorClawd 8mo ago[dead]
- khazhoux 8mo agoWhat 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 agoWhat 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 agoAnd how’s that going to work against LLM output?
- drnick1 8mo agoIf 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 agoAd 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.