Didn't they explicitly say the ads wouldn't be made aware of prompt data when they announced them? And if so, how is that not securities fraud?

Maybe someone with more time at hands could look up what Google said with respect to ads and what happened later.

This is one of the rare instances where it's very easy to predict the future: the prompt auction market will look similar to the existing online ad market, financial firms will pay for prompt streams for sentiment analysis, companies and interest groups will pay to have their products or agenda included favorably in the training data for future open weights models... any way you can think of that LLMs can be monetized, you will see it happen. And fast. The financial pressure is way too high for there to be too long of a honeymoon phase like we had with web 2.0

In what way would that be securities fraud? I guess you could get nailed under Section 17(a), but really hard to make a case they're defrauding investors by representing they were going to make ads worse performing than they ended up making them.

In order for it to be securities fraud it has to be tied to a securities transaction and the misstatement has to be material to a reasonable investor's decision.

I think they said the ad vendors wouldn't but the matching algorithm would still be aware of it. Which IMO is the bare requirement to have ads be anything but magazine style ads.

I don't remember them ever saying that. They did say ads will not affect the response, like the ad in Truman show: https://youtu.be/6U4-KZSoe6g

I mean, the ad doesn’t necessarily have to be made aware of the exact prompt context, just that the ad itself was relevant. You can basically have the ads prequalified for areas and serve them when relevant. Now that does show the user is talking about something relevant most likely, and depending on how they decide to serve them or provide referring, it may traceable to a profile/identity built for that user externally.

I’d be more concerned as to how this ends up in agent platforms using the LLMs, when you don’t have a fairly autonomous agent based system using these the entire point is that a human isn’t involved, so who are you serving ads to and where are you injecting them.

Moreover, if you are injecting them everywhere, does that survive stare for subsequent steps, meaning from the first set of results I get, does that loop back in again with the ad injected into the context. Because now, we have yet another dangerous way of injecting instructions into an already issue prone surface area.

I’m guessing they’re going to have special APIs that don’t include ads, and those are going to cost more, especially for non embedded agents (processes that already exist inside ChatGPT that kick off transparently from prompts, like asking it to work with an office document). After all the customers using agents aside from developers are mostly businesses, so it’s where the money is. The ads will exist for the poor to subsidize their use, and probably create even more barriers for agentic use like I described. Just my thoughts.

And good luck litigating against any business in this administration. Unless they explicitly tick off certain people or refuse to kiss the ring, they can get away with almost anything right now and there’s little risk of doing it or not because ticking off this admin will raise illegitimate prosecution even if you’re perfectly legal, almost the same level of if you’re not. It’s the ideal playground for doing all sorts of manipulation, just kiss the ring and you’ll be fine.

Wouldn't it have to have a negative effect on the security to be securities fraud? Causing an investor loss is a key point of securities fraud.

"We made a ton more money with ads and the stock went up" lacks that key element of fraud?

who is "they"? might have been a stealth terms and conditions update

It would also be a huge security risk. But I can't think of any fundamental difference with Google queries, other than the sheer entropy of user data involved.

And I'm not a tinfoil internet anarchist, but just because Google only leaks user data in aggregated form to advertisers, doesn't mean that they don't leak their user data, it's just that they did so in a legal and responsible manner.

Maybe considering the difference in data volume and intimacy between queries and AI conversations, the privacy implications of advertising merit a difference in treatment, but I wouldn't be surprised if that is lost to a more simple 'Google did this so we can do it too' momentum.

Easy they lied to the public not investors and have more money than you.

Local llm or nothing at all.

[dead]