Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

  • Hacker News
  • Boy, they just keep adding bigger and better reasons to never use ChatGPT. Good for them.
  • How epic, we supposedly have AGI if the marketing is to be believed, and what do these clever folks decide to do with their new omnipotent computer God that "solves coding" as one of the Anthropic drones so aptly said? More fucking advertisements. What a bright future we have ahead of us.
  • What a garden path of a sentence!

    I’m not surprised by this, unfortunately. One can hope that it does not materially affect (bias) output.

    by mc32
  • If it doesn't bias output how much would they pay for the ads? It seems like ads that also bias the output would be way more valuable.
  • Forget Amazon, ultimately this is going to dramatically alter consumer choice on a manufacturer level and OEMs won't be able to optimise their way around it.

    Users might not even notice - Will they prompt around it e.g., "Didn't Dyson used to make a hair dryer that was well reviewed?" if it isn't even recommended to them?

  • There is no such thing as SEO. Anyways. People will pay to have their shit pushed on ChatGPT , just like all other ads.

    You know, the path Christ walked down to his cruxifixction is actually littered with storefronts and merchants and ads today, hah. There’s no beating this human sin, it’s biblically fucked up. It’s the number one faith and we couldn’t even keep ads away from a Holy place.

    Jesus Christ, lord have mercy. We are fallen , through and through, during your time and even in our time today. And in fact, we have been fallen since the beginning of time even, as the WORD says. Thank you for your sacrifice, because I am at aghast on how else we could possible even nibble away at the grandness of human sin.

  • I regret to inform you that the equivalent has been around for some time already. They're calling it "GEO," for Generative Engine Optimization.
  • Nobody wants this.

    Seriously what problem are we solving for here apart from Amazon trying to justify burning a giant pile of cash for OpenAI?

  • What problem is Rufus solving? Assistant that cannot do shit.
  • > Nobody wants this

    "Oh. Well, then stop."

  • Nobody wants the kind of advertising we get. If they did it would be optional.

    There used to be optional ads. I used to pay money for adverts -- computer shopper and micromart in the 90s for example. There aren't now.

  • > Nobody wants this.

    Sure, but a billion people presumably do want to keep using ChatGPT for free.

  • AGI has been achieved. Now let's grow ad revenue.
  • Did anybody think this wasn't going to happen?

    They weren't going to burn a couple trillion dollars of capital and lose money on every API call just so you could ask it to tell you why your cat brings you dead mice.

    They're going to pump this shit so full of advertising it's not going to be funny. And worse, it's going to be incredibly subtle and insidious. You're not even going to realize the responses are guiding you into certain purchases. Just gentle, reassuring advice that you should be buying shit.

    This future sucks.

  • So now if you ask ChatGPT about what electric shaver to buy the answer will be sponsored? How nice.
  • Yes, there are enough people who still think this won't happen despite very conclusive recent history of this exactly happening.

    Just like there are enough people who think if there were no car dealership/ salesman car would become cheaper as if car makers are full of morons who leave extra margins to buyers instead of themselves.

    Or streaming service beats the shit of out cable in being cheap, ads-free and all in all better user experience. Once true, no longer.

    Also funny that tips will go away when one visits self-serve in restaurants, coffee shops etc.

    I guess a lot of folks are too drunk on "This time it will be different".

  • Ads are everywhere. I really think the 'fight against advertising' needs more of an aiki bent than it has. Advertising is such a massive juggernaut, we have as much hope of stopping it as a naked person has of stopping a freight train whose operator doesn't slow down for suicides.

    But that image assumes we need to stop the momentum of this industry cold. personally, I believe that a course correction of a few degrees would be enough. Even that takes massive leverage though. I'd love to know who else is building in this space and what their approach is.

  • ChatGPT sends a lot of traffic to our app! In fact, most of our users come from ChatGPT.

    My guess is that it’s because users talk to ChatGPT about our app, so it recommends it to more people?

  • Is your app AI-adjacent?
  • When ads are inevitably folded into the prompts to the AI, I imagine it'll be fun for a bit to prompt the AI to react with disgust to the idea of having to serve some ad. Until they fix that hole.

    I hate that the progression is so predictable. Yeah, clearly labelled ads today. Less clearly labelled tomorrow. Then they'll be indistinguishable from the text of the AI but still separate. Then they'll start folding it in to the AI prompts. Then they'll start folding it in at the training phase so the weights themselves drive you towards Thinking Ford First, this step being inevitable because it almost certainly will be by far the most effective of all of these techniques. Opus 7.2 Brought To You By Mountain Dew. Just a coincidence that every time you ask it to build an authorization system it writes code to ensure that the user has drunk a verification can, and is just incompetent at removing that code for some reason.

    Sigh.

    Enjoy this era of AI, folks, while the AIs are still developing too quickly for enshittification to catch up properly and the market and indeed the National Interest won't let anyone slow down so it can. But it will. It is inevitable. Make sure to at least keep a toe dipped in the open weights AIs, and any future truly open source AIs that develop.

    by jerf
  • nah this will never happen. do you really think they will do post training based on who pays them more?
  • >while the AIs are still developing too quickly for enshittification

    LLM's were born enshittified, there was no enjoyable era. It was made by the enshittification machine for the enshittification machine.

  • I can't wait to need to drink my Mountain Dew verification cans to keep the slop hose running at work and keep paying on mortgage.
  • This era reminded me of late 90s web culture, and it's heading the same way.
  • Won't this be a bit of a problem when your new microservice includes an ad for Diet Coke? Has someone patented a mechanism for putting ad delivery into someone else's vibe coded consumer project yet?
  • Marketing companies are already selling their ability to influence the training phase. I've seen entirely fake companies with fake products getting recommended for real queries, and the companies behind them selling this as proof to real companies. How would the models know the difference between a completely astroturfed e-commerce site and a real one? What data are they going to use when you ask for the "best natural deodorant" other than their corpus of scraped sites, more of which are fake everyday?
  • > Then they'll be indistinguishable from the text of the AI but still separate. Then they'll start folding it in to the AI prompts. Then they'll start folding it in at the training phase so the weights themselves drive you towards Thinking Ford First, this step being inevitable because it almost certainly will be by far the most effective of all of these techniques. Opus 7.2 Brought To You By Mountain Dew. Just a coincidence that every time you ask it to build an authorization system it writes code to ensure that the user has drunk a verification can, and is just incompetent at removing that code for some reason.

    I know close to nothing about the US regulation in this space but at least in Europe, when you pay for advertisement, it has to be always clearly communicated to the user. Are you assuming that they will just ignore the law in such a blatant way?

  • Right now it’s only for the free tier, but given the recent trends I imagine it will make its way to paid tiers.

    Just consider how even paid streaming services are bringing in ads, or how TVs were caught using ACR to spy on us.

  • It looks like the old saying is true. The smartest minds in all of tech are working overtime to get you to click on advertisements.
  • maybe the smartest minds in all of tech can’t do better.