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Does nobody talk abot the elephant in the room? Will the answers the AI gives also be influenced by Googles customers?
by karlkloss 5mo ago
Does nobody talk abot the elephant in the room?
Will the answers the AI gives also be influenced by Googles customers?
- Predaxia 5mo agoThat's the real question and it's not hypothetical. Google already adjusts organic rankings based on advertiser relationships in ways that aren't documented. With AI Mode the surface area for that kind of influence is much larger and much less visible. A search result you can inspect. A synthesized answer you can't.
- modin 5mo agoDon't they already to this with maps routing? I thought this was the norm.
- onionisafruit 5mo agoDo you mean something like rerouting you to make sure you pass a mcdonald’s at lunch time? Or are you talking about mcdonald’s always showing up when you search for food along your route? Rerouting would surprise me, but really it wouldn’t surprise me that much at this point.
- stingraycharles 5mo agoThis is not an elephant in the room, this is so obvious and discussed all the time. What else is Google going to do, give up their one and only goose that lays the golden eggs? Regular search being replaced with AI search means regular search (with ads) being replaced with AI search (with ads). The benefit of AI search will be that it’s much better “integrated” in the answer, aka even harder to detect.
- chilli_axe 5mo agoElephants in the room are obvious by definition.
- bandrami 5mo agoI think the point of the phrase is that it is obvious but people refuse to talk about it
- akoboldfrying 5mo ago> This is not an elephant in the room, this is so obvious. Maybe they grew up in an environment where the phrase "elephant in the room" meant a situation where people enter a room, notice an elephant there, and immediately scream "Jesus Christ there's a goddamn elephant!"
- bbmatryoshka 5mo agoUsually the elephant in a room is something very evident about which no one wants to discuss about
- stingraycharles 5mo agoBut everyone is discussing how AI will have ads, so it’s not an elephant in the room.
- akoboldfrying 5mo agoYes. My post was a joke -- I was trying to make fun of GP's (to me, baffling) use of the phrase "elephant in the room" by proposing an unlikely explanation for why they seemed to get its meaning back-to-front. (Thinking about it a bit more, I actually think that the phrase's meaning could have really gone that other way. Nothing in the phrase itself suggests that the elephant is being deliberately ignored -- we only learn that critical part "in the background" via culture. For comparison, the similarly structured "bull in a China shop" means exactly what you would expect, without any implied reversal.)
- gbro3n 5mo agoI won't be able to use their AI results if they are, personally. If I ask the question "what is the best tool for doing x" and I can't trust that the answer is going to be the truth according to all available information, then the AI is useless or worse, misleading. If google is unbiased, and only highlights paid advertiser mentions, no one will pay. I'd only accept this if it was a clear separation of LLM response and ads in a sidebar or something similar. Other people may not care. Many happily read politically affiliated news knowing that their opinions and actions may be influenced by a media source.
- weird-eye-issue 5mo agoLet me let you in on a little industry "secret" You can't trust those results no matter what The pages that they pull in to source that data all contain affiliate links and companies contact websites to get their tools to the tops of those lists by paying money often monthly. I know this because I do this... It's basically standard SEO but it also manipulates AI like ChatGPT very very easily
- nunez 5mo agoThe cheat code for that used to be Reddit before they got growth-hacked 10+ years ago.
- weird-eye-issue 5mo agoActually Reddit is receiving more organic traffic than ever before and is more valuable to game than ever But yes actually I was doing this about 15 years ago in the men's fashion subreddit for one of my companies lol
- kalaksi 5mo agoCan you elaborate a bit on how that looks like in practice?
- 5mo ago
- bayindirh 5mo agoThe method is already public for some time now. I bookmarked it since I share it a lot: https://research.google/blog/mechanism-design-for-large-language-models/ https://research.google/blog/mechanism-design-for-large-lang... It's the same. There are slots, there's bidding, there're bidders. Same ad model, evolved for AI era.
- iugtmkbdfil834 5mo agoSigh, thank you for sharing this. This is disheartening ( even if not unexpected ) given that I actually like current version of gemini based on how well it performed -- all things considered -- relative to gpt sub on recommendation check.
- bayindirh 5mo agoI never ask computers about a certain device directly. I lost that faith eons ago. I first search for candidates, then go to official pages to check specs and then read / watch reviews, then decide. Yes, it takes time, but I'm the one to blame if something goes wrong about it. Also, it helps that I don't use Google for searching the web. I prefer Kagi. I use Gemini (and only Gemini) to dig the net for the things that I can't find despite my best efforts. They are generally unbranded or very specific things, so ads doesn't play much role there. I'm a bad customer for Google. :D
- da_chicken 5mo agoThat will be fun because it's illegal to accept money to promote a product without indication that you have done so. The FTC requires "clear and conspicuous disclosure" for such endorsements.
- stackghost 5mo agoIs it not obvious to you, particularly now that Trump has been elected twice, that laws are meaningless in the United States, unless you are poor?
- vrganj 5mo agoDoesn't matter as long as you bribe the right people. The government is completely compromised.
- twobitshifter 5mo agoCrime is legal now
- _heimdall 5mo agoUnenforced crimes are still crimes, you have to rewrite laws to change that.
- twobitshifter 5mo agoor get a blanket pardon
- _heimdall 5mo agoLegally I don't think a pardon makes the act not a crime, it just makes it unpunished. I could be wrong there though, that gets deep into legal pedantry.
- rplnt 5mo agoYou can label the whole output, every time, right? May include sponsored content or something.
- reactordev 5mo agoAll signs point to yes. It’s Google’s profit center.
- vrganj 5mo agoNot just their customers. Their entire ideology. An LLM is the perfect propaganda technology, the more people outsource their thinking to them, the easier they will be for Big Corporate to control. It's crazy to me that AI developments have such a big uncritical following from people that claim to be pro-freedom, especially around these parts. The end goal is and always has been enslavement to capital.
- pelasaco 5mo agofor sure, i guess this is one of the experiments that confirms that would work https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/ https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/
- BoiledCabbage 5mo agoI couldn't write better satire if I tried: > A search through GPT‑5.5’s SFT data found many datapoints containing “goblin” and “gremlin.” Further investigation revealed a whole family of other odd creatures: raccoons, trolls, ogres, and pigeons were identified as other tic words, while most uses of frog turned out to be legitimate.
- AlfieJones 5mo agoEven if it's not right now, it's hard not seeing this happening at some point
- crowcroft 5mo agoThis never occurred to traditional search results so highly doubt they’ll start now.
- shevy-java 5mo agoThis is the problem with the black box model. These adCompanies control what people see. People don't know if they can trust the generated slop. It is the end of the open web. People need to wake up and realise what full Evil is being planned here. Google tried this before, e. g. AMP and what not.
- philipwhiuk 5mo agoObviously.
- alfiedotwtf 5mo agoAlready has. I asked yesterday a question on different types of graphics cards vs power consumption, I and it asked me if I’d like links to buy some graphics cards
- thrance 5mo agoWhat about political ads? Will the AI lie about news to further the interests of Google's patrons?
- baxtr 5mo agoit’s fair to be skeptical. But then again we already know that this wasn’t the case with search results. So not sure why we would assume it is this time around.
- emsign 5mo agoThe truth is brought to you by the highest bidder. Individuals, companies and nation states already pay for public relations. If Google offered them a service they'd pay good money.
- ungovernableCat 5mo agoWill Google choose to negatively impact its bottom line for the sake of giving their users a higher quality experience? No. It's not 2005 anymore.
- pluc 5mo agoOf course. Just look at the SEO industry Google created. You can't search for anything without a full page of sponsored/SEO bullshit, and everyone agrees it's precisely why Google results are less relevant today than 10 years ago. But here we are, this is exactly the same thing. We used to search with a term, Google monetized that. We now search with a sentence, do you think Google's gonna leave that cash on the table?
- ajkjk 5mo ago... Yes, people talk about that.
- layer8 5mo agoIt depends on what influence you have in mind. Hidden advertising is illegal in most jurisdictions.
- MagicMoonlight 5mo agoThe article literally says they pay to determine the answers given to you.
- vb-8448 5mo agoIs this a rhetorical question? The answer seem so obvious. It is also obvious that people will try to understand how to hack the whole algorithm ... we are entering in a new era of hot air SEO like experts.