Comment by MontyCarloHall
15 hours ago
I think ads will take the form of insidious but convincing product placement invisibly woven into model outputs. This will both prevent any blocking of ad content, and also be much more effective: after all, we allude to companies and products all the time in regular human conversation, and the best form of marketing is organic word-of-mouth.
I just saw a sibling post about Kagi, maybe this is how the industry will end up, with a main provider like OpenAI and niche wrappers on top (I know Kagi is not just a google wrapper but at least they used to return google search results that they paid for).
I thought you were going to say “that comment recommending Kagi is exactly what those ads would look like: native responses making product recommendations as if they’re natural responses in the conversation”
Ding ding ding. Look at all the brands mentioned in just this thread. From a cursory look, I see:
* WSJ
* Bloomberg
* Financial Times
* Cartier
* Kagi
* Protonmail
* Coca-Cola
* HBO
* Windex
* Netflix
* Azure
* AWS
We are all ourselves advertisers, we just don't realize it. It is inevitable that chatbots will be RLHF-trained in our footsteps.
2 replies →
I don’t know how subtle or stealth you can be in text. In movies, there’s a lot of stuff going on, I may not particularly notice, I’m going to notice “Susie, while at home drinking her delicious ice cold coca-cola….”
> I’m going to notice “Susie, while at home drinking her delicious ice cold coca-cola….”
It will be much more subtle. Asking an LLM to help you sift through reviews before you spend $250 on some appliance or what good options are for hotels on your next trip…
Basically the same queries people throw into google but then have to manually open a bunch of tabs and do their own comparison except now the llm isn’t doing a neutral evaluation, it’s going to always suggest one particular hotel despite it not being best for your query.
Not all answers are conducive to such subtle manipulation, though. If the user asks for an algorithm to solve the knapsack problem, it's kind of hard to stealthily go "now let's see how many Coca Colas will fit in the knapsack". If the user asks for a cyberpunk story, "the decker prepared his Microsoft Cyberdeck" would sound off, too.
Biasing actual buying advice would be feasible, but it would have to be handled very carefully to not be too obvious.
Right, I just don’t see how it can be subtle, maybe it will be the opposite where I assume things are ads that aren’t, but any time I see a specific brand or solution I will assume it’s an ad.
It’s not like a movie where I’m engrossed by the narrative or acting and only subliminally see the can of coke on the table (though even then)
Maybe image generation ads will be a bit more subtle.