I think ads will take the form of insidious but convincing product placement invisibly woven into model outputs. This will both prevent any blocking of ad content, and also be much more effective: after all, we allude to companies and products all the time in regular human conversation, and the best form of marketing is organic word-of-mouth.

▲ andy99 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I just saw a sibling post about Kagi, maybe this is how the industry will end up, with a main provider like OpenAI and niche wrappers on top (I know Kagi is not just a google wrapper but at least they used to return google search results that they paid for).

▲ nothrabannosir 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I thought you were going to say “that comment recommending Kagi is exactly what those ads would look like: native responses making product recommendations as if they’re natural responses in the conversation”

▲ MontyCarloHall 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Ding ding ding. Look at all the brands mentioned in just this thread. From a cursory look, I see:

* WSJ

* Bloomberg

* Financial Times

* Cartier

* Kagi

* Protonmail

* Coca-Cola

* HBO

* Windex

* Netflix

* Azure

* AWS

We are all ourselves advertisers, we just don't realize it. It is inevitable that chatbots will be RLHF-trained in our footsteps.

▲ fph 3 hours ago | parent [-]

That is a weird definition of advertising. It's not an ad if I mention (or even recommend) a product in a post, without going off-topic and without getting any financial benefit.

	▲	MontyCarloHall 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The New American Oxford Dictionary defines "advertisement" as "a notice or announcement in a public medium promoting a product, service, or event." By that definition, anything that mentions a product in a neutral light (thereby building brand awareness) or positive light (explicitly promotional) is an ad. The fact that it may not be paid for is irrelevant. A chatbot tuned to casually drop product references like in this thread would build a huge amount of brand awareness and be worth an incredible amount. A chatbot tuned to be insidiously promotional in a surgically targeted way would be worth even more. I took a quick look at your comment history. If OpenAI/Anthropic/etc. were paid by JuliaHub/Dan Simmons' publisher/Humble Bundle to make these comments in their chatbots, we would unambiguously call them ads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46279782: Precisely; today Julia already solves many of those problems. It also removes many of Matlab's footguns like `[1,2,3] + [4;5;6]`, or also `diag(rand(m,n))` doing two different things depending on whether m or n are 1. (for the sake of argument, pretend Julia is commercial software like Matlab.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46067423: `I wasn't expecting to read a Hyperion reference in this thread, such a great book.` https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45921788: `> Name a game distribution platform that respects its customers Humble Bundle.` You seem like a pretty smart, levelheaded person, and I would be much more likely to check out Julia, read Hyperion, or download a Humble Bundle based on your comments than I would be from out-of-context advertisements. The very best advertising is organic word-of-mouth, and chatbots will do their damndest to emulate it.

▲ techblueberry 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don’t know how subtle or stealth you can be in text. In movies, there’s a lot of stuff going on, I may not particularly notice, I’m going to notice “Susie, while at home drinking her delicious ice cold coca-cola….”

▲

baby_souffle 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> I’m going to notice “Susie, while at home drinking her delicious ice cold coca-cola….”

It will be much more subtle. Asking an LLM to help you sift through reviews before you spend $250 on some appliance or what good options are for hotels on your next trip…

Basically the same queries people throw into google but then have to manually open a bunch of tabs and do their own comparison except now the llm isn’t doing a neutral evaluation, it’s going to always suggest one particular hotel despite it not being best for your query.

	▲	986aignan 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Not all answers are conducive to such subtle manipulation, though. If the user asks for an algorithm to solve the knapsack problem, it's kind of hard to stealthily go "now let's see how many Coca Colas will fit in the knapsack". If the user asks for a cyberpunk story, "the decker prepared his Microsoft Cyberdeck" would sound off, too. Biasing actual buying advice would be feasible, but it would have to be handled very carefully to not be too obvious.
	▲	techblueberry 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Right, I just don’t see how it can be subtle, maybe it will be the opposite where I assume things are ads that aren’t, but any time I see a specific brand or solution I will assume it’s an ad. It’s not like a movie where I’m engrossed by the narrative or acting and only subliminally see the can of coke on the table (though even then) Maybe image generation ads will be a bit more subtle.