Comment by gbro3n
6 hours ago
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.
> 1) Google doesn't get paid for the SEO, so even is crime is involved, Google isn't directly responsible.
Google doesn't get paid directly for the SEO but they definitely benefit monetarily. Do a recipe search and ask yourself if these are the results the user would like to see. Google benefits by not penalizing sites which litter themselves with ads. It's not that indirect.
Why would AI ads be unmarked? Most of the Google AI search results I get show sources. They're just summarizing top results for you, injecting a ad shown as an ad into that isn't tremendously different than how Google worked before.
I'm just talking about the methods that business owners can use for getting good SEO or AI recommendations are basically the same thing, not sure what point you are trying to make?
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.
Eh not really
They won't get you on any worthwhile list unless it's their own because it's too risky for them and any site they would publish it on would want to use their own affiliate link. Unless of course we are talking about something like Medium or YouTube which does work
And then of course there's the fraudsters who will bid on branded keywords we have banned dozens of people for that
The cheat code for that used to be Reddit before they got growth-hacked 10+ years ago.
Actually Reddit is receiving more organic traffic than ever before and is more valuable to game than ever
But yes actually I was doing this about 15 years ago in the men's fashion subreddit for one of my companies lol
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This is why local AI is so important
It's already being trained on "public" (ethical or otherwise) data. So, it already has ingested that kind of "optimization" during pre-training and training.
I don't think you can fine-tune your way out of it.
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That doesn't solve this particular problem. Your local model was trained on reddit comments written by bots.
Local AI will have the bias that existed at the time of its training, which is different from no bias. For stuff that needs to be current, a local LLM would need to search the net regardless.
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How do you make sure that the model you run locally is not tainted? Is there even a way to confirm this without providing the complete training set?
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It's less compromised, but it's still basing the answer on compromised queries. This is why I pay for independent reviews (e.g Which) where their incentives are more aligned with yours.
Not if the models come from Google. The ads will be implicit in the model. X is better that Y an Z would be easy to add to a the training set.
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How does that help if it's using search? You get whatever the search engine outputs
Local AI models pull in search results just like ChatGPT does ...
And they are trained on web data just like any other model...
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.