Comment by nothrabannosir
18 hours ago
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”
18 hours ago
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.
That is a weird definition of advertising. It's not an ad if I mention (or even recommend) a product in a post, without going off-topic and without getting any financial benefit.
The New American Oxford Dictionary defines "advertisement" as "a notice or announcement in a public medium promoting a product, service, or event." By that definition, anything that mentions a product in a neutral light (thereby building brand awareness) or positive light (explicitly promotional) is an ad. The fact that it may not be paid for is irrelevant.
A chatbot tuned to casually drop product references like in this thread would build a huge amount of brand awareness and be worth an incredible amount. A chatbot tuned to be insidiously promotional in a surgically targeted way would be worth even more.
I took a quick look at your comment history. If OpenAI/Anthropic/etc. were paid by JuliaHub/Dan Simmons' publisher/Humble Bundle to make these comments in their chatbots, we would unambiguously call them ads:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46279782:
(for the sake of argument, pretend Julia is commercial software like Matlab.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46067423:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45921788:
You seem like a pretty smart, levelheaded person, and I would be much more likely to check out Julia, read Hyperion, or download a Humble Bundle based on your comments than I would be from out-of-context advertisements. The very best advertising is organic word-of-mouth, and chatbots will do their damndest to emulate it.