It's quite hard to tell what is satirical AI Ads and what is this 99helpers.com site, which is also really covered in pushy messages and trying hard to sell me something.

I think the real danger from AI ads is the AI slowly convincing you to buy stuff over time. It's going to be super effective with the less technically adept.

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svilen_dobrev 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> the real danger from AI (ads) is the AI slowly convincing you to ${GOAL:-buy stuff} over time.

(man bash: ${X:-abcde} means use value of X else abcde by default )

where GOAL can be anything one may be persuaded into. Choosing $15 burger over $7, brand X over brand Y, notion of X wholesale (to EV or not to EV), Elections, climate-this-or-that, ...

People are massively using it as search engine. So it does not need to lie, just can "spare"/not-show some results that do not match the GOAL..

extra: like 25th frame in 24frame video.. like, last word at each sentence is part of another 5-word goal-sentence.. repeated across 20 sentences..

IMO the "text exegesis" (i.e. what particular text actually means) may need resurrecting as discipline, and not only in higher-education / academia but down into school.

scraping all history every time may or may not be possible..

should one have like 5 accounts and share them with 10 people? across the globe?

mmh. interesting times ahead

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tencentshill 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Advertisers don't have time for subtle influence campaigns. They need $x sales, this quarter, with this budget for ad spend. Put a big red banner somewhere and make it happen.

	▲	siriusastrebe 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		However, nation states will absolutely pay for subtle, emotion evoking, destabilizing messaging with no timeline for success

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Aurornis 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It's quite hard to tell what is satirical AI Ads and what is this 99helpers.com site, which is also really covered in pushy messages and trying hard to sell me something.

The interesting thing about this website is that it’s for a product that uses AI chat bots for customer support. This is something that Hacker News traditionally hates. The website is built like an over the top SaaS landing page from the 2010s.

Embracing ragebait is an interesting way to trick audiences who normally wouldn’t like your product to start sharing links to your domain.

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skyberrys 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It also ruins the ability to use AI to help decide between products. Right now I can use AI chat to decide which two products best meet my specific needs. Once ads are present in all of them I'll be haunted by any queries made about specific products.

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fbrchps 8 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm curious how often you find factual inaccuracies in the LLM responses when doing that.

I've found that more often than not, it gets at least one key feature/option/etc. outright wrong whenever I've tried that, making it effectively useless for me. Since I need to verify the exact information myself anyways, I'm 90% the easy to just having the different items in comparing up in side-by-side browser tabs, anyways.

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skyberrys 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I usually use it for sub $10 things (mostly groceries) and I'm actively grocery shopping when I do it. So say I'm standing in the store trying to decide between 8 different yogurts all of which have different sales going on and different servings sizes, so instead of having to flip over and read all the 8 brands and do math to equalize everything myself I take a photo of the shelf and ask Gemini which one has the most protein per dollar. It usually gets it pretty accurate, I'm doing the math to check in my head but it's just a time saver to not have to fuss every single time there's a sale. But it's not just yogurt it's lots of things, like debating chicken vs beef meatballs or which of the breakfast cereal is closest to the current favorite because I don't want to have to go to an extra store because this one doesn't have it. When I first got Claude I was determined to save $200 having spent the $200 on Claude and I would say it did manage to assist in grocery shopping sufficiently to make it worthwhile. It also helps keep a running memory for me about prices of certain things, did you know the prices for Bonne Maman chocolate hazelnut spread have been fluctuating by $4 it goes from $4.50 to $8.50. I take photos of the eggs section and ask what's the best hen care to price this week. Probably the biggest oops I've had doing this was asking it how to replace my bicycle freewheel, and it told me to watch a video, order the part, only to discover I'm not strong enough by far and the real solution was to pay the guy at the bike shop 10 dollars to do it with his giant vise grip + special freewheel tool. I did have to pay bike shop guy an extra 10 dollars too for him to fix my own attempt that almost ruined the whole wheel.

	▲	aorloff 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I guess the Bonne Maman chocolate hazelnut spread trade is over then. Cats outta the bag.

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nickk81 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A lot of the text on 99helpers is very new, and needs more polish. So I get your point.

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Induane 9 hours ago | parent [-]

What does Poland have to do with this?!

	▲	nickk81 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Polish as in shine (or is this a joke)?