Comment by karlkloss
6 hours ago
Does nobody talk abot the elephant in the room? Will the answers the AI gives also be influenced by Googles customers?
6 hours ago
Does nobody talk abot the elephant in the room? Will the answers the AI gives also be influenced by Googles customers?
I 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.
Let 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
> It's basically standard SEO but it also manipulates AI like ChatGPT very very easily
There are key differences.
1) Google doesn't get paid for the SEO, so even is crime is involved, Google isn't directly responsible.
2) AI ads are unmarked, which is illegal pretty much everywhere. And because of the way LLMs work, it is impossible to tell where a given output came from, neither which part of the prompt/context nor whether it's from the prompt or training.
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Simplest way to do is by running affiliate program for your SaaS and shady marketers will do everything to get sales if it's profitable.
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The cheat code for that used to be Reddit before they got growth-hacked 10+ years ago.
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This is why local AI is so important
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Sorry to tell you that all websites you get when you google "what is the best tool for doing x" are already manipulated, including reddit conversations.
Don't forget the YouTube videos, those "top 5 x" robot videos are the worst.
Those sort of things are already highly biased because of the marketing spam that the modelsmare trained on.
I'd be more worried about AI convincing you that you need a product or expensive solution when you actually don't.
This has always been the case but with AI its going to get even worse. I mean a lot of people associate AI with higher "intelligence" sorta say, now you sprinkle in some political propaganda there from the highest bidder and you are going to have a big problem in the future especially if the populace ended up trusting these corpo AI blindly.
Then you already can’t use it because it already doesn’t give you a result like that.
There is no “true answer given all available infomation” maybe unless you give an eval function.
This 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.
They could have ads alongside the AI response, in a completely separate section of the page (like search results are). That seems fine. But if they start including ads in the AI context window then it becomes impossible to tell what parts of the response are driven by advertisement vs organic results.
It seems like for now they are making an effort to keep them separate.
Elephants in the room are obvious by definition.
I think the point of the phrase is that it is obvious but people refuse to talk about it
> 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!"
Usually the elephant in a room is something very evident about which no one wants to discuss about
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But wouldn't that break FCC rules?
FTC rules. And probably. Unless they disclosed somewhere that there were ads informing results, in which case the fine print wins again.
Since when does Google care about laws?
Is this administration really interested in enforcing regulations? The FCC might make noises, but only until Trump gets another kickback.
> their one and only goose that lays the golden eggs?
Eh, it really isn't the only goose in goog town. Cloud is at ~20% of their total revenue, and probably is going up w/ their hardware success and other licensing deals. I'm curious to see what goog can do with their properties if this trend continues. Less reliance on ads could be interesting. (many former googlers have said that pressure from the ad business was felt across all their products)
The 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-lang...
It's the same. There are slots, there's bidding, there're bidders. Same ad model, evolved for AI era.
Sigh, 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.
I 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
That'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.
Don't they already to this with maps routing? I thought this was the norm.
Do 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.
Of 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?
It depends on what influence you have in mind. Hidden advertising is illegal in most jurisdictions.
That 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.
Crime is legal now
Unenforced crimes are still crimes, you have to rewrite laws to change that.
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Seems to work fine for product placement in other media. Apparently "clear and conspicuous disclosure" can be a footnote hidden somewhere in the credits.
Do you expect them to include a red flashing light and alarm in the middle of the scene? The credits are where I would expect to see those disclosures
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You can label the whole output, every time, right? May include sponsored content or something.
The chat interface has the disclaimer "AI responses may include mistakes." and that appears to be enough to relieve them of any responsibility for the responses. In a similar manner, wouldn't it be enough to add a disclaimer that says "AI responses may include sponsored content."?
> and that appears to be enough to relieve them of any responsibility for the responses.
Unenforceable disclaimers to discourage people from holding you responsible have always existed. "Stay 300 ft back from truck", etc.
With AI, that might be enough of a disclosure, but it might not.
Doesn't matter as long as you bribe the right people. The government is completely compromised.
Will 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.
All signs point to yes. It’s Google’s profit center.
Even if it's not right now, it's hard not seeing this happening at some point
Not 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.
it’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.
The 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.
Already 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
... Yes, people talk about that.
What about political ads? Will the AI lie about news to further the interests of Google's patrons?
for sure, i guess this is one of the experiments that confirms that would work https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/
I 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.
Obviously.
This 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.
This never occurred to traditional search results so highly doubt they’ll start now.