Join the discussion

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

  • Hacker News
  • 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?

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • 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
  • 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.
  • This is not meant to be tongue in cheek comment but has anybody figured out how the companies manage the "everyone is going to be replaced in a year" rhetoric while also working hard on ads that are clearly designed for humans to consume?

Explore Birbla archives