Yet another Hacker News

50 points thm 1 hour ago 32 comments

mc32 48 minutes ago | parent

What a garden path of a sentence!

I’m not surprised by this, unfortunately. One can hope that it does not materially affect (bias) output.

nemomarx 30 minutes ago | parent

If it doesn't bias output how much would they pay for the ads? It seems like ads that also bias the output would be way more valuable.

jerf 44 minutes ago | parent

When ads are inevitably folded into the prompts to the AI, I imagine it'll be fun for a bit to prompt the AI to react with disgust to the idea of having to serve some ad. Until they fix that hole.

I hate that the progression is so predictable. Yeah, clearly labelled ads today. Less clearly labelled tomorrow. Then they'll be indistinguishable from the text of the AI but still separate. Then they'll start folding it in to the AI prompts. Then they'll start folding it in at the training phase so the weights themselves drive you towards Thinking Ford First, this step being inevitable because it almost certainly will be by far the most effective of all of these techniques. Opus 7.2 Brought To You By Mountain Dew. Just a coincidence that every time you ask it to build an authorization system it writes code to ensure that the user has drunk a verification can, and is just incompetent at removing that code for some reason.

Sigh.

Enjoy this era of AI, folks, while the AIs are still developing too quickly for enshittification to catch up properly and the market and indeed the National Interest won't let anyone slow down so it can. But it will. It is inevitable. Make sure to at least keep a toe dipped in the open weights AIs, and any future truly open source AIs that develop.

denverllc 41 minutes ago | parent

Right now it’s only for the free tier, but given the recent trends I imagine it will make its way to paid tiers.

Just consider how even paid streaming services are bringing in ads, or how TVs were caught using ACR to spy on us.

yccs27 25 minutes ago | parent

Paid tier just means you're a more lucrative ad target.

simianwords 36 minutes ago | parent

nah this will never happen. do you really think they will do post training based on who pays them more?

avereveard 32 minutes ago | parent

No but non enterprise users will receive injected prompts.

See how emany streaming now created a plus plus version while adding ads to what was the premium version.

And the funny thing they just needed to increase base rates for users to start to ask for an ads supported version.

AlexandrB 29 minutes ago | parent

Absolutely they will. It might be "innocent" at first - "oh we don't want ChatGPT to recommend scam products so we will train it to prefer "trusted" brands" and then inclusion in "trusted brands" will go up for sale with the final stage being outright paid-for recommendation bias for specific products.

The only question is how sales will work if there's some spin up time to do the post training. You can't do a real time auction like Google does, so it will be longer-term contracts I suspect.

Edit: AI is a great opportunity to run the same protection racket that's been run in various existing "marketplaces", where a brand has to buy ad placement for searches for their own name or their competitor will be able to displace them by buying it instead: "You would't want a user asking 'Which Cambells soup flavor is the healthiest?' to get a recommendation for Lipton's would you?"

simianwords 21 minutes ago | parent

this is FUD and I can have a bet with you that this won't happen in 3 years (or ever) [1]. post-training on specific brands is hard and affects overall accuracy, doesn't offer explainability, long cadence, no run time auction..

most importantly: there's enough competition that people would just use other models that don't do this. the kind of people who peddle this FUD are have not much theory of how markets work. Cory Doctorow has done a number on them and spread a conspiracy theory that everything is enshittified and everything gets worse. "just wait guys I'm telling you, the good days are over okkk?"

most importantly, the future will have a pareto optimal set up compared to today where you will have much better models, much cheaper and have options that are subsidised by ads.

[1] i can't eliminate some rando companies trying but not OpenAI not Anthropic.

AlexandrB 13 minutes ago | parent

3 years is probably too soon, but I would take the bet on "ever" any day of the week.

> most importantly: there's enough competition that people would just use other models that don't do this.

Show me a Smart TV without ads and some form of tracking. Some product categories are already completely enshittified despite plenty of competitors. People care about up front cost more than any other metric. So no, people will not switch to other models in numbers that matter. If your competitors can drive down up-front prices by selling ad placements or eliminating free checked luggage (airline industry) and you try to take the high road your reward will usually be irrelevance and bankruptcy[1].

Edit: [1] You could cite Apple as a counterexample, except they're busy stuffing ads into more and more of their software. Why? Because it's free money for them and 99.9% of users don't care enough to switch.

simianwords 7 minutes ago | parent

Happy to bet 5 years.

trtr2 10 minutes ago | parent

Why isn’t this guy banned yet?

His posts are poor quality and exhausting.

bayindirh 23 minutes ago | parent

No, they'll do a live auction from multiple models during reply generation. Google has the tech already. They are an advertisement company, you know: https://research.google/blog/mechanism-design-for-large-lang...

In short:

We investigate the design of auction mechanisms for aggregating the output of multiple self-interested LLMs into one joint output. We argue that this comes with a number of unique challenges, and we propose a simple token auction mechanism and illustrate our design through demonstration with an off-the-shelf LLM.

avereveard 36 minutes ago | parent

This era reminded me of late 90s web culture, and it's heading the same way.

ppalata 4 minutes ago | parent

> Then they'll be indistinguishable from the text of the AI but still separate. Then they'll start folding it in to the AI prompts. Then they'll start folding it in at the training phase so the weights themselves drive you towards Thinking Ford First, this step being inevitable because it almost certainly will be by far the most effective of all of these techniques. Opus 7.2 Brought To You By Mountain Dew. Just a coincidence that every time you ask it to build an authorization system it writes code to ensure that the user has drunk a verification can, and is just incompetent at removing that code for some reason.

I know close to nothing about the US regulation in this space but at least in Europe, when you pay for advertisement, it has to be always clearly communicated to the user. Are you assuming that they will just ignore the law in such a blatant way?

0xDEADBEEFCAFE 37 minutes ago | parent

Forget Amazon, ultimately this is going to dramatically alter consumer choice on a manufacturer level and OEMs won't be able to "SEO" (or whatever the equivalent ends up being) their way around it.

Users might not even notice - Will they prompt around it e.g., "Didn't Dyson used to make a hair dryer that was well reviewed?" if it isn't even recommended to them?

general_reveal 31 minutes ago | parent

There is no such thing as SEO. Anyways. People will pay to have their shit pushed on ChatGPT , just like all other ads.

You know, the path Christ walked down to his cruxifixction is actually littered with storefronts and merchants and ads today, hah. There’s no beating this human sin, it’s biblically fucked up. It’s the number one faith and we couldn’t even keep ads away from a Holy place.

Jesus Christ, lord have mercy. We are fallen , through and through, during your time and even in our time today. And in fact, we have been fallen since the beginning of time even, as the WORD says. Thank you for your sacrifice, because I am at aghast on how else we could possible even nibble away at the grandness of human sin.

ksenzee 11 minutes ago | parent

I regret to inform you that the equivalent has been around for some time already. They're calling it "GEO," for Generative Engine Optimization.

0xDEADBEEFCAFE 4 minutes ago | parent

Right, but model providers will do a much better job of policing this than G ever did/could. I'm assuming they're 1) aware of its pollution and 2) are currently ignoring it for <reasons>.

bitmasher9 32 minutes ago | parent

It looks like the old saying is true. The smartest minds in all of tech are working overtime to get you to click on advertisements.

hotsauceror 21 minutes ago | parent

The smartest minds in all of tech worked overtime to finally give computers the ability to lie to us. Excelsior!

ppalata 21 minutes ago | parent

This is not meant to be tongue in cheek comment but has anybody figured out how the companies manage the "everyone is going to be replaced in a year" rhetoric while also working hard on ads that are clearly designed for humans to consume?

RugnirViking 10 minutes ago | parent

everyone is laboring under the assumption that things will continue approximately as normal because what the hell else do you do? how, as amazon, would you plan for the collapse of all economies and markets? sure, as maybe an amazon exec you plan for you and yours, but amazon the behemoth? its got nothing.

exitb 9 minutes ago | parent

Even if they’re on a path to make economy obsolete, they still need money right now to get there.

paxys 1 minute ago | parent

Messages are tailored for the audience. The "AI will replace all jobs" narrative is used to sell AI to business leaders.

lenerdenator 55 seconds ago | parent

It is the job of management to figure out how to make gains over the next 90 days, not make gains sustainable. The money available for consumers to spend in wake of their unemployment is the problem for whenever that issue occurs.

If there isn't a good way, you break the company up, sell it for scrap, give the resulting money to the shareholders, and they do whatever with it. It's the Jack Welch model.

ryandvm 17 minutes ago | parent

Did anybody think this wasn't going to happen?

They weren't going to burn a couple trillion dollars of capital and lose money on every API call just so you could ask it to tell you why your cat brings you dead mice.

They're going to pump this shit so full of advertising it's not going to be funny. And worse, it's going to be incredibly subtle and insidious. You're not even going to realize the responses are guiding you into certain purchases. Just gentle, reassuring advice that you should be buying shit.

This future sucks.

faangguyindia 13 minutes ago | parent

ChatGPT sends a lot of traffic to our app! In fact, most of our users come from ChatGPT.

My guess is that it’s because users talk to ChatGPT about our app, so it recommends it to more people?

spottedmarley 10 minutes ago | parent

Boy, they just keep adding bigger and better reasons to never use ChatGPT. Good for them.

yousif_123123 8 minutes ago | parent

AGI has been achieved. Now let's grow ad revenue.

cmiles8 3 minutes ago | parent

Nobody wants this.

Seriously what problem are we solving for here apart from Amazon trying to justify burning a giant pile of cash for OpenAI?