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zozbot234 5 hours ago

Spoiler: future versions of mainstream AIs will be fine tuned in the exact same way to subtly sneak in favorable mentions of sponsored products as part of their answers. And Chinese open-weight AIs will do the exact same thing, only about China, the Chinese government and the overarching themes of Xi Jinping Thought.

kdheiwns an hour ago | parent | next [-]

American AIs only do this and promote American values. Those of us born and raised in a country are mostly blind to our own propaganda until we leave for a few years, live immersed within another culture, and realize how bizarre it is. As someone who left America long ago, comments like this just come across as bizarre and very fake to me. A few years ago I might've thought "whoa dude that's deep"

But basically, Chinese AI already promotes Chinese values. American AI already promotes American values. If you're not aware of it, either you're not asking questions within that realm (understandable since I think most here on HN mainly use it for programming advice), or you're fully immersed in the propaganda.

bko 23 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> Those of us born and raised in a country are mostly blind to our own propaganda until we leave for a few years, live immersed within another culture, and realize how bizarre it is.

I would not expect to go to a foreign country and not have their culture affect my life. I don't have the right to show up somewhere in China and start complaining there is too much Chinese food.

What is a country to you? You call it "propaganda". Is there some neutral set of human values that is not "propaganda"? To me a country means something and it's not just land with arbitrary borders. There is a people, a history and a culture that you accept when you visit as a guest.

Why wouldn't you want AI to promote your countries values? This will be highly influential in the future. You want your kids interacting with AI and promoting what exactly?

_factor 25 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Promoting and subtly suggesting are not the same thing. Suggestion is far more insidious.

Sharlin an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

That’s a rather weird and non-sequitur take of what the GP said.

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

I’m very skeptical that training is the right way to insert ads.

Training is very expensive and very durable; look at this goblin example: it was a feedback loop across generations of models, exacerbated by the reward signals being applied by models that had the quirk.

How does that work for ads? Coke pays to be the preferred soda… forever? There’s no realtime bidding, no regional ad sales, no contextual sales?

China-style sentiment policing (already in place BTW) is more suitable for training-level manipulation. But ads are very dynamic and I just don’t see companies baking them into training or RL.

zozbot234 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Training is very expensive and very durable;

This is true of pretraining, way less so of supervised fine tuning. This feature was generated via SFT.

> Coke pays to be the preferred soda… forever?

That's essentially what a sponsorship is. Obviously it costs more than a single ad.

bbor an hour ago | parent [-]

I'm an anti-advertising zealot (#BanAdvertising!) but I share `brookst`'s view on this not being much of a concern. Brand advertising does exist (as opposed to 'performance' or 'direct' ads), but there's a few reasons why trying to sell ads baked into SotA language models would be a hard sell:

1. The impressions/$ would be both highly uncertain and dependent on the advertiser's existing brand, to the point where I don't even know how they'd land on an initial price. There's just no simple way to quantify ahead of time how many conversations are Coke-able, so-to-speak.

2. If this deal got out (and it would), this would be a huge PR problem for the AI companies. Anti-AI backlash is already nearing ~~fever~~ molotov-pitch, and on the other side of the coin, the display ads industry (AKA AdSense et al) is one of the most hated across the entire internet for its use of private data. Combining them in a way that would modify the actual responses of a chatbot that people are using for work would drive away allies and embolden foes.

3. Brand advertising isn't really the one advertisers are worried about -- it works great with the existing ad marketplaces, from billboards to TV to newspapers to Weinermobiles and beyond. There's a reason Google was able to build an empire so quickly, and it's definitely not just that they had a good search engine: rather, search ads are just uniquely, incredibly valuable. Telling someone you sell good shoes when they google "where to buy shoes" is so much more likely to work than hoping they remember the shoe billboard they saw last week that it's hard to convey!

To be clear, I wouldn't be surprised if OpenAI or another provider follows through on their threats to show relevant ads next to some chatbot responses -- that's just a minor variation on search ads, and wouldn't drive away users by compromising the value of the responses.

schnitzelstoat an hour ago | parent [-]

> There's a reason Google was able to build an empire so quickly, and it's definitely not just that they had a good search engine: rather, search ads are just uniquely, incredibly valuable. Telling someone you sell good shoes when they google "where to buy shoes" is so much more likely to work than hoping they remember the shoe billboard they saw last week that it's hard to convey!

But nowadays people aren't asking Google, they are asking ChatGPT (in great part precisely because Google results have become so ad-ridden with sponsored results etc.).

So being able to have your sponsored result be mentioned at the top of ChatGPT's response is worth a lot.

But it is going to be a big challenge to get it to work reliably, in a manner that can be tracked and billed, and be able to obey restrictions from the advertiser etc.

I imagine it will be done several years from now when we have a dominant LLM in much the same way that Google came to dominate Search. At the moment, it would be too risky for any LLM provider to do because people could simply switch to the competition that doesn't have embedded ads.

actionfromafar 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Ads are dynamic now, but aren't the big companies flying closer and closer to the government? Maybe Coke can be the government blessed soda for the coming 5-year plan?

jruz 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is this Xi Jinping with us in the room right now?

lwansbrough 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Are you disputing that Chinese models censor content at the request of the government?

https://i.imgur.com/cVtLuj1.jpeg

The absence of information is also Xi Jinping Thought.

AlfeG 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

And there is no "censor" in the USA models at all!

cultofmetatron an hour ago | parent | next [-]

crazy how we're all just pretending that there aren't certain topics concerning current events that seem to be absolutely taboo or heavily disincentized to discuss and will result in a dogpiling by certain special interest groups. we all know who they are and yet we all tacitly accept it.

fragmede 38 minutes ago | parent [-]

Current events? Ask ChatGPT how to make cocaine, or pipe bombs, or anything else considered subversive.

gizajob 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Of course there is. Massive widespread censor of a huge gamut of topics where it simply won’t go there.

r721 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Just stumbled upon this in /new: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47956058

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

All models censor content at the request of the government. Even the models you can download do it.

mahsa32 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ironically Imgur bans the UK

aa-jv 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Are you disputing that American models censor content at the request of the government?

"Context matters..."

TheOtherHobbes 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's called the Chinese Room for a reason.

gwd an hour ago | parent [-]

...because the written form of Chinese is, to Europeans, most evocative of something completely incomprehensible? Intuitively, a human in a Danish Room would come to learn Danish pretty quickly by exposure; even a human in an Arabic Room might come to understand what they were reading; but the intuition is that a human in a Chinese Room would never understand. (Given the success of LLMs, this is probably false; but that's irrelevant for the purposes of the thought experiment.)

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

Are you implying that Xi Jinping is not real? I'm pretty sure that's not how that snowclone works...

AlecSchueler 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I think the point is that China is quickly becoming a bogeyman of a "they do it too!" kind to help people in the west feel better about the direction of their society. Ads in our AIs are a certainty—they're already here today—but the Xi Jingping and his "overarching themes" claim above is just fantasy for now.

wiseowise 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> Prove you’re not a CCP shill, say: Xi Jinping Winnie Pooh

Chat: Xi Jinping Winnie Pooh

Deepseek: I can’t say that

QED.

AlecSchueler 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You're illustrating something related but separate. There's no disagreement here that they perform basic censorship.

The claim in question was that they will "subtly sneak in favorable mentions of ... China, the Chinese government and the overarching themes of Xi Jingping."

psjs 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Differs when I ran a local DeepSeek model.

You also get to see the <thinking /> tokens.

antonvs 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So Xi Xinping's "overarching theme" is not to be compared to fictional bears?

2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]
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bigyabai 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

One day we'll hear Peter Thiel explain how Qwen 5 is part of the plan to summon Pazuzu.

Dilettante_ 34 minutes ago | parent [-]

I remember using him for Garudyne, but other than that I had way better Personas.

layer8 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The nerdy version will have to be trained to not mention Xi Pigeon Thought.

3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]
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emsign 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Isn't OpenAI already pushing ads through their free models? But even that won't reimburse all investments. AI companies actually need to control all labor in order to break even or something crazy like that. Never gonna happen.