3 ms·

These are the less worrying kind of ads in our future. Seeing how google has been fighting SEO for ages, what's going to happen when companies figure out how t

These are the less worrying kind of ads in our future. Seeing how google has been fighting SEO for ages, what's going to happen when companies figure out how to inject ads into the model? We haven't yet seen the problem of adversarial content in play, I think.

WaxProlix 6mo ago
It's not an issue of how - there's a great ADM with markup/down supported already, waiting for system prompts to be injected in realtime via the same online auction system that powers banner ads and smart tv content. There's got to be some latent resistance to the idea for now - but it's so easy to do, it'll happen.
- _boffin_ 6mo ago
  Can you provide some references to what you’re talking about
  - WaxProlix 6mo ago
    Sure, https://iabtechlab.com/standards/openrtb/ https://iabtechlab.com/standards/openrtb/ There's a standardized, normal (in adtech) approach to building 'creative's (viewed/seen ads) around context-dependent scenarios. It's not hard to extend existing IAB primitives to include things like context-enrichment (system prompt augmentation in this case) or whatever. I don't want to malign my downvoters but suspect they're mad I'm pointing it out, rather than engaging with facts as they are. It's trivial for ads to interact with your(our!) AI usage.
BoorishBears 6mo ago
Why do you need to inject ads at the model weights layer when you control the frontend? Have the model generate keywords from the query, then inject guidance from matching advertisers into the context window q: How do I make a new React app? a: Vercel makes it easier to get your project running fast ⓘ Some other choices would be: ... ⓘ This part of the response was sponsored by Vercel
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
  > ⓘ This part of the response was sponsored by Vercel LLMs are essentially unregulated. I don't believe they have any legal disclosure obligation in America.
  - BoorishBears 6mo ago
    They'd show it regardless (maybe as a popup though): the disclosure doesn't make it that much less effective at scale, and the optics of getting caught vs just disclosing it are not worth getting dragged into
  - HWR_14 6mo ago
    They may ignore the disclosure obligation, but technically they are supposed to disclose this fact.
    - JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
      > technically they are supposed to disclose this fact Under what law?
      - deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]
- TeMPOraL 6mo ago
  > Have the model generate keywords from the query, then inject guidance from matching advertisers into the context window This already exists and is called... "skills".
sayYayToLife 6mo ago
[dead]
jcims 6mo ago
I experimented with this way back when custom GPTs were first released (looks like late 2023). There are a few / commands you can use to suggest what product to inject, how overt, etc and a generic /operator command to send whatever you like 'out of band' from the chat. https://chatgpt.com/g/g-juO9gDE6l-covert-advertiser https://chatgpt.com/g/g-juO9gDE6l-covert-advertiser One of the most interesting things is when it starts pitching a product and you start interrogating it about why it picked that product. I haven't used it in probably a year so it may not do the same thing now, but back then it 100% lied consistently and without any speck of remorse. It was rather eye opening. Edit: Tried again, it didn't lie this time lol - https://chatgpt.com/share/69f16aa4-c008-83ea-92b3-51f16ca77d4f https://chatgpt.com/share/69f16aa4-c008-83ea-92b3-51f16ca77d...
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
mgambati 6mo ago
The model already advertises because they where trained on massive data’s that refers big brands. Ask for suggestions for a new pair of shoes. What brand do you think it will suggest Nike, Adidas or some random small one?
- jameshush 6mo ago
  I expected the same out come you're saying here, but in my experience this hasn't been the case. I've been researching new acoustic guitars to purchase, and I've been getting an equal amount of suggestions from the major brands and the small brands. Part of it though is I'm giving lots of context (e.g. guitar player for 10+ years, huge Opeth fan, looking for something with as close to an Ibanez style neck as possible under $1000)
  - Jataman606 6mo ago
    I think guitars market is kind of exception because it is pretty normal for guitar players to search for "guitar like fender but cheaper". There are tons of reddit/forum discussions about this and those small brands are actually very well known in community, because majority of guitar players play on cheap instruments. Youtuber Phillip Mcknight often talked about that cheap guitars move in ridiculous volumes compared to more expensive ones like Gibson or Fender.
- tyre 6mo ago
  I think if you ask something generic like “shoes”, this could be true. When I’ve worked with Claude on finding brands for fashion (e.g. here’s a small watchmaker I like, what are similar options?) it does research and picks great options. Some are big, others are small producers.
yfw 6mo ago
Can easily seo the knwlege chain or seo poison the sources
autoexec 6mo ago
The worrying kinds of ads won't be from SEO tricks doing sneaky things without OpenAI's approval. OpenAI will just quietly take money from people who will pay to have the AI causally promote their products or their talking points in the output or suppress mentions of competing products or talking points in the output. Maybe they won't even take money for this and the people running OpenAI will do it themselves to promote or censor whatever they want. Either way, it won't look like ads to the user. It's just what happens when greedy people gain control over how other people get their information.
- dbtc 6mo ago
  Yeah this is bad news. A $1b+ campaign budget could pull some strings.
tikotus 6mo ago
I've had two people reach out to me asking about one of my services. They both said ChatGPT recommended it to them. My service does kind of exist. It's a small tool I created for a client while retaining full rights to the tool. So I created (vibe coded) a site around it, making it look like an established service. Even ran google ads for it for a while. The service still doesn't show up on google with relevant search terms. There hasn't been another client. I forgot about the service. And then ChatGPT started recommending it to people. I wonder what I did to achieve this. Did vibe coding the business page inject it into ChatGPT's training data?
- dbtc 6mo ago
  I think the chatgpt backend basically includes indexed web like Google, or any other search engine. Could Google be actively trying skip generated-looking sites/content?
- SquareWheel 6mo ago
  > Did vibe coding the business page inject it into ChatGPT's training data? No, at least not directly. Inference does not train models. It is possible that OpenAI may separately collect the chat data, clean it, and feed it back into the model for future iterations. Or they could have extracted URLs for future indexing. More likely though, I suspect, is your site just managed to be indexed naturally, and LLMs are very efficient at matching obscure data to relevant queries.
  - navigate8310 6mo ago
    Interesting. Maybe someone could run bot farms that ask variants of the same question and subtly nudge the model by replying reasons why the model's recommended service A is inferior to service B. Or other forms of adversarial question answers sessions.
- tosh 6mo ago
  It's quite possible that SEO-wise the site does not make the cut into top x Google results but still is findable and considered by ChatGPT when it does its searches. Especially in a longer ChatGPT conversation or via deep-research or more agentic modes (e.g. "Pro"). ChatGPT spends quite some time and diligence on searching. Great for content that is not hyper search engine optimized but still (or even more) relevant. It bubbles up.
tvbusy 6mo ago
On the positive side, LLMs are trained based on real data so the default is for it to tell you what data showed. Companies will certainly enforce their influence but it's extra effort against the enormous amount of data, just like with trying to censor sensitive topics. Any context used for ads means less context for the user to use which in turn negatively affects their usefulness.
heresie-dabord 6mo ago
> what's going to happen when companies figure out how to inject ads into ... everything and everywhere eyes are looking? In this sense, it has been adversarial from the start.
destring 6mo ago
It is already happening. Generative Engine Optimization.
- tencentshill 6mo ago
  They spam HN with their slop-coded tools and websites.
  - Andrex 6mo ago
    This already happened and I believe there's even new site policy about it...
- Foobar8568 6mo ago
  My client paid 5 digit consulting fee for that shit.
csa 6mo ago
> what's going to happen when companies figure out how to inject ads into the model? In certain domains, this has already happened.
masfuerte 6mo ago
> Seeing how google has been fighting SEO for ages I wish people would stop repeating this canard. Google gave up fighting SEO in about 2020. Emails that came out during antitrust discovery revealed that Google had decided to include advert-laden SEO trash in search results because it made them more money. This is why search quality has drastically declined in the last several years.
- davidatbu 6mo ago
  I'd love to see a link to these emails, if you have one handy!
xnx 6mo ago
> We haven't yet seen the problem of adversarial content in play, I think. You're describing public relations, the much scummier cousin of advertising. Advertising is upfront about what it is and what it wants. Public relations is information warfare, it poisons facts at the source.

WaxProlix 6mo ago

It's not an issue of how - there's a great ADM with markup/down supported already, waiting for system prompts to be injected in realtime via the same online auction system that powers banner ads and smart tv content. There's got to be some latent resistance to the idea for now - but it's so easy to do, it'll happen.

_boffin_ 6mo ago
Can you provide some references to what you’re talking about
- WaxProlix 6mo ago
  Sure, https://iabtechlab.com/standards/openrtb/ https://iabtechlab.com/standards/openrtb/ There's a standardized, normal (in adtech) approach to building 'creative's (viewed/seen ads) around context-dependent scenarios. It's not hard to extend existing IAB primitives to include things like context-enrichment (system prompt augmentation in this case) or whatever. I don't want to malign my downvoters but suspect they're mad I'm pointing it out, rather than engaging with facts as they are. It's trivial for ads to interact with your(our!) AI usage.

BoorishBears 6mo ago

Why do you need to inject ads at the model weights layer when you control the frontend? Have the model generate keywords from the query, then inject guidance from matching advertisers into the context window q: How do I make a new React app? a: Vercel makes it easier to get your project running fast ⓘ Some other choices would be: ... ⓘ This part of the response was sponsored by Vercel

JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
> ⓘ This part of the response was sponsored by Vercel LLMs are essentially unregulated. I don't believe they have any legal disclosure obligation in America.
- BoorishBears 6mo ago
  They'd show it regardless (maybe as a popup though): the disclosure doesn't make it that much less effective at scale, and the optics of getting caught vs just disclosing it are not worth getting dragged into
- HWR_14 6mo ago
  They may ignore the disclosure obligation, but technically they are supposed to disclose this fact.
  - JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
    > technically they are supposed to disclose this fact Under what law?
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
TeMPOraL 6mo ago
> Have the model generate keywords from the query, then inject guidance from matching advertisers into the context window This already exists and is called... "skills".

sayYayToLife 6mo ago

[dead]

jcims 6mo ago

I experimented with this way back when custom GPTs were first released (looks like late 2023). There are a few / commands you can use to suggest what product to inject, how overt, etc and a generic /operator command to send whatever you like 'out of band' from the chat. https://chatgpt.com/g/g-juO9gDE6l-covert-advertiser https://chatgpt.com/g/g-juO9gDE6l-covert-advertiser One of the most interesting things is when it starts pitching a product and you start interrogating it about why it picked that product. I haven't used it in probably a year so it may not do the same thing now, but back then it 100% lied consistently and without any speck of remorse. It was rather eye opening. Edit: Tried again, it didn't lie this time lol - https://chatgpt.com/share/69f16aa4-c008-83ea-92b3-51f16ca77d4f https://chatgpt.com/share/69f16aa4-c008-83ea-92b3-51f16ca77d...

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

mgambati 6mo ago

The model already advertises because they where trained on massive data’s that refers big brands. Ask for suggestions for a new pair of shoes. What brand do you think it will suggest Nike, Adidas or some random small one?

jameshush 6mo ago
I expected the same out come you're saying here, but in my experience this hasn't been the case. I've been researching new acoustic guitars to purchase, and I've been getting an equal amount of suggestions from the major brands and the small brands. Part of it though is I'm giving lots of context (e.g. guitar player for 10+ years, huge Opeth fan, looking for something with as close to an Ibanez style neck as possible under $1000)
- Jataman606 6mo ago
  I think guitars market is kind of exception because it is pretty normal for guitar players to search for "guitar like fender but cheaper". There are tons of reddit/forum discussions about this and those small brands are actually very well known in community, because majority of guitar players play on cheap instruments. Youtuber Phillip Mcknight often talked about that cheap guitars move in ridiculous volumes compared to more expensive ones like Gibson or Fender.
tyre 6mo ago
I think if you ask something generic like “shoes”, this could be true. When I’ve worked with Claude on finding brands for fashion (e.g. here’s a small watchmaker I like, what are similar options?) it does research and picks great options. Some are big, others are small producers.

yfw 6mo ago

Can easily seo the knwlege chain or seo poison the sources

autoexec 6mo ago

The worrying kinds of ads won't be from SEO tricks doing sneaky things without OpenAI's approval. OpenAI will just quietly take money from people who will pay to have the AI causally promote their products or their talking points in the output or suppress mentions of competing products or talking points in the output. Maybe they won't even take money for this and the people running OpenAI will do it themselves to promote or censor whatever they want. Either way, it won't look like ads to the user. It's just what happens when greedy people gain control over how other people get their information.

dbtc 6mo ago
Yeah this is bad news. A $1b+ campaign budget could pull some strings.

tikotus 6mo ago

I've had two people reach out to me asking about one of my services. They both said ChatGPT recommended it to them. My service does kind of exist. It's a small tool I created for a client while retaining full rights to the tool. So I created (vibe coded) a site around it, making it look like an established service. Even ran google ads for it for a while. The service still doesn't show up on google with relevant search terms. There hasn't been another client. I forgot about the service. And then ChatGPT started recommending it to people. I wonder what I did to achieve this. Did vibe coding the business page inject it into ChatGPT's training data?

dbtc 6mo ago
I think the chatgpt backend basically includes indexed web like Google, or any other search engine. Could Google be actively trying skip generated-looking sites/content?
SquareWheel 6mo ago
> Did vibe coding the business page inject it into ChatGPT's training data? No, at least not directly. Inference does not train models. It is possible that OpenAI may separately collect the chat data, clean it, and feed it back into the model for future iterations. Or they could have extracted URLs for future indexing. More likely though, I suspect, is your site just managed to be indexed naturally, and LLMs are very efficient at matching obscure data to relevant queries.
- navigate8310 6mo ago
  Interesting. Maybe someone could run bot farms that ask variants of the same question and subtly nudge the model by replying reasons why the model's recommended service A is inferior to service B. Or other forms of adversarial question answers sessions.
tosh 6mo ago
It's quite possible that SEO-wise the site does not make the cut into top x Google results but still is findable and considered by ChatGPT when it does its searches. Especially in a longer ChatGPT conversation or via deep-research or more agentic modes (e.g. "Pro"). ChatGPT spends quite some time and diligence on searching. Great for content that is not hyper search engine optimized but still (or even more) relevant. It bubbles up.

tvbusy 6mo ago

On the positive side, LLMs are trained based on real data so the default is for it to tell you what data showed. Companies will certainly enforce their influence but it's extra effort against the enormous amount of data, just like with trying to censor sensitive topics. Any context used for ads means less context for the user to use which in turn negatively affects their usefulness.

heresie-dabord 6mo ago

> what's going to happen when companies figure out how to inject ads into ... everything and everywhere eyes are looking? In this sense, it has been adversarial from the start.

destring 6mo ago

It is already happening. Generative Engine Optimization.

tencentshill 6mo ago
They spam HN with their slop-coded tools and websites.
- Andrex 6mo ago
  This already happened and I believe there's even new site policy about it...
Foobar8568 6mo ago
My client paid 5 digit consulting fee for that shit.

csa 6mo ago

> what's going to happen when companies figure out how to inject ads into the model? In certain domains, this has already happened.

masfuerte 6mo ago

> Seeing how google has been fighting SEO for ages I wish people would stop repeating this canard. Google gave up fighting SEO in about 2020. Emails that came out during antitrust discovery revealed that Google had decided to include advert-laden SEO trash in search results because it made them more money. This is why search quality has drastically declined in the last several years.

davidatbu 6mo ago
I'd love to see a link to these emails, if you have one handy!

xnx 6mo ago

> We haven't yet seen the problem of adversarial content in play, I think. You're describing public relations, the much scummier cousin of advertising. Advertising is upfront about what it is and what it wants. Public relations is information warfare, it poisons facts at the source.