Comment by sigmoid10
4 days ago
>Is she paying for it? That is the only question that matters in the end.
Don't underestimate advertising. Noone pays for Facebook or Google search. Yet the ad business with a couple billion users seems profitable enough to fund frontier LLM research and inference infrastructure as a side-gig in these companies. Google only rushed out AI overview because they saw ChatGPT eating their market share in information retrieval and Zuck is literally panicking about the fact that users share more personal details with OpenAI than on his doomscrolling attention sinks.
> Don't underestimate advertising.
OpenAI is talking out of their ass with their advertising plans. Meta and Google are an advertising duopoly, extremely anti-competitive, and basically defrauding their own customers. OpenAI can't just replicate that.
Worse still is that OpenAI has no competitive edge. All the hype around their advertising plans is based on the idea that they can blend the ads right into the response, a turbocharged version of Native Advertising.
This is explicitly illegal. Very explicitly.
The US' FTC may have been declawed by the current US government, but the rest of the west will nuke them from orbit over it. Doubtless OpenAI will try some stunt alike marking the entire LLM response as "this is an ad", but that won't satisfy the regulators.
This only gets worse with further problems. An LLM hallucinating product features is going to invoke regulator wrath as well, and an LLM deciding to cut off the adcopy early will invoke the wrath of the advertiser.
> Yet the ad business with a couple billion users seems profitable enough to fund frontier LLM research and inference infrastructure as a side-gig in these companies
Also important: Not anymore. The tech giants are now issuing quite a lot of debt to pay for the AI plans.
If that were true Meta and Google wouldn't be so desperate to get in the game. And don't think that other nations would step in against abusive marketing practices. The EU has been battling uphill for decades and the only ones who had some moderate success for user rights are private groups like NYOB. There is no law that will save the old tech companies and they know it.
> This is explicitly illegal.
Is it really any different than product placement in TV shows/movies?
Maybe I am underestimating how suggestible average people are as someone who has never in their lives clicked on an ad I just can't see ads being anything but a deterrent for using the service
>Maybe I am underestimating
You sure are. And it sounds like you are also underestimating the effect yourself as well. In fact this perception is so common that there is even a name for it in psychology: Third-person effect. Many people believe that advertising does not affect them. But ironically, the more you believe so, the more likely you are to fall victim to particular types of advertising. And in general your response to ads will be very similar to everyone else's. These "annoying" ads that you "would never click on" are just badly personalized or badly placed ads. That's the only type that gets stuck in your mind when you think of ads, based on your personal biases. But the major tech companies have spent the last one-and-a-half decades on perfecting the psychology of advertising. You might think you are immune, but you are certainly not. Every buying decision you have made in the last 10 years was almost certainly influenced to some degree. Just not always consciously. And I'm willing to bet that a lot of buying decisions were already heavily influenced by ChatGPT, even before their shopping feature. OpenAI just didn't profit on them as much as they could.
Influenced to some degree sure, weather influences me to some degree, but I truly feel like ads aren't affective on me. Unless we broaden definition of ads to something like sponsored content. I have bought some TTRPG rules sets after I have seen them being played in a sponsored video, but I still have never clicked an ad on a page and bought something.
And I actually have tried to use ChatGPT to buy something. I have asked it to search for specific items from EU stores so I wouldn't need to pay import taxes, but usually it fails. It either suggests Global stores which ship from US or China or it suggests different products than what I asked for.
If ChatGPT or whatever LLM I was using could actually link me the products I wanted without me searching for them they should get a commission for sure, but we sure aren't there yet.
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I agree with you, I can't stand ads
However, I believe an ad it still influences you subconsciously as long as it is in your sight line.
I wouldn't be surprised if there is a lot of investigation into subtly slipping advertising in the LLM responses the way Korean dramas have product placement right in the storyline (Subway, bbq chicken, beverages, makeup, etc).
Subtle things like the guy in CSI Miami talking about how good Subway is for 5 minutes?
Of course stuff in the world influences me, I am still a human. Still I have never clicked an ad and bought something. I simply don't get who would. Same as with the super market placing candy and stuff next to the cashier to get people to buy more, I have never been swayed by those because when I go to the store I am always on a mission and know before hand what I am buying.
It would be cool to see all the times I have been influenced into buying something because of subconscious advertisement, but that's kind a impossible so all I can do is deny it and of course all marketing people will say that I am wrong.
And we can argue forever what counts as an advertisement. For example I recently bought a new mouse pad, I wasn't particularly looking for a specific one, just something fun and bright and as I was browsing a web store they had a cool design for half off and I bought it. Maybe that was targeted advertisement, but I had already made the decision to buy a new mousepad and had been browsing on and off for few weeks, so was it really? I would argue not.
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Ads aren't just for click through, they are for suggestions, and mind share as well.
You can't click on the budweiser logo when watching super bowl ad. But if you sit in your chatgpt window all day then it's probably worth it for advertisers to expect to build familiarity with brands they advertise.
Really depends what the ads are. If they are popups or other intrusive ads the product will just die. If they are subtle hints in the text how are you going to track it. I don't know, I just don't believe in ads, but then again I am dirty commie so who am I to tell you not to
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Imagine subliminal messages being sent in the llm responses carefully created for max impact on you. I’m sure many companies will pay to recommend their product on ChatGPT.
Okay, but if we are going scifi why not just beam ads in to dreams like in Futurama?
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> Maybe I am underestimating
Advertising is one of the biggest markets on the planet. Meta is nearly a $2T company and is making record profits.