| ▲ | karlkloss 3 hours ago |
| Does nobody talk abot the elephant in the room?
Will the answers the AI gives also be influenced by Googles customers? |
|
| ▲ | gbro3n 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I won't be able to use their AI results if they are, personally. If I ask the question "what is the best tool for doing x" and I can't trust that the answer is going to be the truth according to all available information, then the AI is useless or worse, misleading. If google is unbiased, and only highlights paid advertiser mentions, no one will pay. I'd only accept this if it was a clear separation of LLM response and ads in a sidebar or something similar. Other people may not care. Many happily read politically affiliated news knowing that their opinions and actions may be influenced by a media source. |
| |
| ▲ | weird-eye-issue 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Let me let you in on a little industry "secret" You can't trust those results no matter what The pages that they pull in to source that data all contain affiliate links and companies contact websites to get their tools to the tops of those lists by paying money often monthly. I know this because I do this... It's basically standard SEO but it also manipulates AI like ChatGPT very very easily | | |
| ▲ | SlinkyOnStairs an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > It's basically standard SEO but it also manipulates AI like ChatGPT very very easily There are key differences. 1) Google doesn't get paid for the SEO, so even is crime is involved, Google isn't directly responsible. 2) AI ads are unmarked, which is illegal pretty much everywhere. And because of the way LLMs work, it is impossible to tell where a given output came from, neither which part of the prompt/context nor whether it's from the prompt or training. | | |
| ▲ | jmathai an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > 1) Google doesn't get paid for the SEO, so even is crime is involved, Google isn't directly responsible. Google doesn't get paid directly for the SEO but they definitely benefit monetarily. Do a recipe search and ask yourself if these are the results the user would like to see. Google benefits by not penalizing sites which litter themselves with ads. It's not that indirect. | |
| ▲ | weird-eye-issue 37 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'm just talking about the methods that business owners can use for getting good SEO or AI recommendations are basically the same thing, not sure what point you are trying to make? |
| |
| ▲ | faangguyindia 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Simplest way to do is by running affiliate program for your SaaS and shady marketers will do everything to get sales if it's profitable. | | |
| ▲ | weird-eye-issue 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Eh not really They won't get you on any worthwhile list unless it's their own because it's too risky for them and any site they would publish it on would want to use their own affiliate link. Unless of course we are talking about something like Medium or YouTube which does work And then of course there's the fraudsters who will bid on branded keywords we have banned dozens of people for that |
| |
| ▲ | reactordev 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is why local AI is so important | | |
| ▲ | bayindirh 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's already being trained on "public" (ethical or otherwise) data. So, it already has ingested that kind of "optimization" during pre-training and training. I don't think you can fine-tune your way out of it. | | |
| ▲ | fsflover 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is far from widespread at the moment, so it'll be possible to at least use the current cutting-edge models locally in the future. | | |
| ▲ | bayindirh 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Far from widespread? SEO has seeped to all crevices of the internet for the last 20 years. | | |
| ▲ | fsflover an hour ago | parent [-] | | By this measure, any information you can get whatsoever is biased and there is no reason to trust anything at all. | | |
| ▲ | latexr an hour ago | parent [-] | | The major difference is that right now when you land on a page you can do your due diligence and decide if you trust the source. You can still be tricked, but it’s harder and you can get better at the detection. With LLMs, everything is given the same importance so you have no idea if the data came from a reputable source or an obvious SEO junk website. | | |
| ▲ | fsflover 26 minutes ago | parent [-] | | AI can also provide the sources. And if you need to be certain, you should ask for that. |
|
|
|
| |
| ▲ | ToucanLoucan 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | People still think these things are smart. That if their word generator eats enough of the Internet, it will somehow give them the real information that's otherwise hidden. Or perhaps a better word; filter the bullshit. To filter bullshit it would first have to understand bullshit, and it doesn't. That's why an LLM will tell you the solution to a problem that doesn't work, and argue with you when you correct it. | | |
| ▲ | bayindirh 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is what bothers me a lot. For the people who doesn't know how it's made or want to believe, it's a miracle. For me, it's a resource wasting text generator. I'll not lie, I don't use OpenAI, Mistral or Anthropic's models, even for coding. I prefer to read my API docs and cry once. I used Gemini, five or six times in total. Twice I asked a couple of very specific things, and it unearthed them. Since they were not products, but information, that was helpful. Twice, it has given wrong information. When I "told" it, there was another way, it said "of course there are two ways", etc. Tasteless and time wasting. I don't like using an LLM all day long, or offload my thinking to them. It's the ultimate self-poisoning incident. And as you say, these algorithms can't know right/wrong/logical/bullshit, etc. They just spew out text. | | |
| ▲ | latexr 41 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Something I’ve also seen multiple times is an LLM giving wrong information, I tell it it’s not right, then it tells me I’m “absolutely right” and it provides the exact same answer and tells me that one will work. |
|
|
| |
| ▲ | rplnt 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That doesn't solve this particular problem. Your local model was trained on reddit comments written by bots. | |
| ▲ | Schweigerose 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | How do you make sure that the model you run locally is not tainted? Is there even a way to confirm this without providing the complete training set? | | |
| ▲ | psb5 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Fwiw I just run kiwix/zeal locally which has old school search index of all articles in wiki/stackoverflow etc. That seems enough for most of my day to day use. |
| |
| ▲ | soloto 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Local AI will have the bias that existed at the time of its training, which is different from no bias. For stuff that needs to be current, a local LLM would need to search the net regardless. | | |
| ▲ | embedding-shape 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | And since "no bias" isn't something that actually exists in reality when it comes to language or even anything near humans, "bias in local model I can introspect" will always be miles ahead of "bias I know is there, but cannot introspect". |
| |
| ▲ | jondea 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's less compromised, but it's still basing the answer on compromised queries. This is why I pay for independent reviews (e.g Which) where their incentives are more aligned with yours. | |
| ▲ | an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | rdtsc 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Not if the models come from Google. The ads will be implicit in the model. X is better that Y an Z would be easy to add to a the training set. | | |
| ▲ | pautasso 32 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Does this mean the model must be retrained every time a new ad is posted? How much are AI ads going to cost? | | |
| ▲ | rdtsc 18 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, I meant not individual ads but implicit forced/influenced preference for certain brands. Let’s say it always picks Coke vs Pepsi when giving an example of a soft drink. Or picks BMW when asked to pick the best car. Which cloud provider is the best? -Why, GCP of course, etc. Companies then get to bid for a preference “place”. This is more like Google paying to be the search engine default in Firefox. |
|
| |
| ▲ | FergusArgyll 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | How does that help if it's using search? You get whatever the search engine outputs | |
| ▲ | weird-eye-issue 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Local AI models pull in search results just like ChatGPT does
... And they are trained on web data just like any other model... |
|
| |
| ▲ | nekzn 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Sorry to tell you that all websites you get when you google "what is the best tool for doing x" are already manipulated, including reddit conversations. | | |
| ▲ | _heimdall 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Don't forget the YouTube videos, those "top 5 x" robot videos are the worst. |
| |
| ▲ | HEX4AGON 33 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This has always been the case but with AI its going to get even worse. I mean a lot of people associate AI with higher "intelligence" sorta say, now you sprinkle in some political propaganda there from the highest bidder and you are going to have a big problem in the future especially if the populace ended up trusting these corpo AI blindly. | |
| ▲ | adverbly 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Those sort of things are already highly biased because of the marketing spam that the modelsmare trained on. I'd be more worried about AI convincing you that you need a product or expensive solution when you actually don't. | |
| ▲ | justincormack 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There is no “true answer given all available infomation” maybe unless you give an eval function. | |
| ▲ | LastTrain 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Then you already can’t use it because it already doesn’t give you a result like that. |
|
|
| ▲ | stingraycharles 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is not an elephant in the room, this is so obvious and discussed all the time. What else is Google going to do, give up their one and only goose that lays the golden eggs? Regular search being replaced with AI search means regular search (with ads) being replaced with AI search (with ads). The benefit of AI search will be that it’s much better “integrated” in the answer, aka even harder to detect. |
| |
| ▲ | chilli_axe 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Elephants in the room are obvious by definition. | | |
| ▲ | bandrami 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think the point of the phrase is that it is obvious but people refuse to talk about it |
| |
| ▲ | j_maffe 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | But wouldn't that break FCC rules? | | |
| ▲ | water-data-dude 26 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Is this administration really interested in enforcing regulations? The FCC might make noises, but only until Trump gets another kickback. | |
| ▲ | xigoi 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Since when does Google care about laws? |
| |
| ▲ | akoboldfrying 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > This is not an elephant in the room, this is so obvious. Maybe they grew up in an environment where the phrase "elephant in the room" meant a situation where people enter a room, notice an elephant there, and immediately scream "Jesus Christ there's a goddamn elephant!" | | |
| ▲ | bbmatryoshka 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Usually the elephant in a room is something very evident about which no one wants to discuss about | | |
| |
| ▲ | NitpickLawyer 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > their one and only goose that lays the golden eggs? Eh, it really isn't the only goose in goog town. Cloud is at ~20% of their total revenue, and probably is going up w/ their hardware success and other licensing deals. I'm curious to see what goog can do with their properties if this trend continues. Less reliance on ads could be interesting. (many former googlers have said that pressure from the ad business was felt across all their products) |
|
|
| ▲ | bayindirh 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The method is already public for some time now. I bookmarked it since I share it a lot: https://research.google/blog/mechanism-design-for-large-lang... It's the same. There are slots, there's bidding, there're bidders. Same ad model, evolved for AI era. |
| |
| ▲ | iugtmkbdfil834 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Sigh, thank you for sharing this. This is disheartening ( even if not unexpected ) given that I actually like current version of gemini based on how well it performed -- all things considered -- relative to gpt sub on recommendation check. | | |
| ▲ | bayindirh 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I never ask computers about a certain device directly. I lost that faith eons ago. I first search for candidates, then go to official pages to check specs and then read / watch reviews, then decide. Yes, it takes time, but I'm the one to blame if something goes wrong about it. Also, it helps that I don't use Google for searching the web. I prefer Kagi. I use Gemini (and only Gemini) to dig the net for the things that I can't find despite my best efforts. They are generally unbranded or very specific things, so ads doesn't play much role there. I'm a bad customer for Google. :D |
|
|
|
| ▲ | pluc 12 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Of course. Just look at the SEO industry Google created. You can't search for anything without a full page of sponsored/SEO bullshit, and everyone agrees it's precisely why Google results are less relevant today than 10 years ago. But here we are, this is exactly the same thing. We used to search with a term, Google monetized that. We now search with a sentence, do you think Google's gonna leave that cash on the table? |
|
| ▲ | Predaxia 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That's the real question and it's not hypothetical. Google already adjusts organic rankings based on advertiser relationships in ways that aren't documented.
With AI Mode the surface area for that kind of influence is much larger and much less visible. A search result you can inspect.
A synthesized answer you can't. |
| |
| ▲ | modin 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Don't they already to this with maps routing? I thought this was the norm. | | |
| ▲ | onionisafruit 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Do you mean something like rerouting you to make sure you pass a mcdonald’s at lunch time? Or are you talking about mcdonald’s always showing up when you search for food along your route? Rerouting would surprise me, but really it wouldn’t surprise me that much at this point. |
|
|
|
| ▲ | da_chicken 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That will be fun because it's illegal to accept money to promote a product without indication that you have done so. The FTC requires "clear and conspicuous disclosure" for such endorsements. |
| |
| ▲ | twobitshifter 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Crime is legal now | | |
| ▲ | _heimdall 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Unenforced crimes are still crimes, you have to rewrite laws to change that. |
| |
| ▲ | account42 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Seems to work fine for product placement in other media. Apparently "clear and conspicuous disclosure" can be a footnote hidden somewhere in the credits. | |
| ▲ | rplnt 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You can label the whole output, every time, right? May include sponsored content or something. | |
| ▲ | kubik369 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The chat interface has the disclaimer "AI responses may include mistakes." and that appears to be enough to relieve them of any responsibility for the responses. In a similar manner, wouldn't it be enough to add a disclaimer that says "AI responses may include sponsored content."? | |
| ▲ | vrganj 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Doesn't matter as long as you bribe the right people. The government is completely compromised. |
|
|
| ▲ | ungovernableCat 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Will Google choose to negatively impact its bottom line for the sake of giving their users a higher quality experience? No.
It's not 2005 anymore. |
|
| ▲ | AlfieJones 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Even if it's not right now, it's hard not seeing this happening at some point |
|
| ▲ | baxtr 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| it’s fair to be skeptical. But then again we already know that this wasn’t the case with search results. So not sure why we would assume it is this time around. |
|
| ▲ | reactordev 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| All signs point to yes. It’s Google’s profit center. |
|
| ▲ | emsign 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The truth is brought to you by the highest bidder. Individuals, companies and nation states already pay for public relations. If Google offered them a service they'd pay good money. |
|
| ▲ | vrganj 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Not just their customers. Their entire ideology. An LLM is the perfect propaganda technology, the more people outsource their thinking to them, the easier they will be for Big Corporate to control. It's crazy to me that AI developments have such a big uncritical following from people that claim to be pro-freedom, especially around these parts. The end goal is and always has been enslavement to capital. |
|
| ▲ | thrance 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What about political ads? Will the AI lie about news to further the interests of Google's patrons? |
|
| ▲ | alfiedotwtf 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Already has. I asked yesterday a question on different types of graphics cards vs power consumption, I and it asked me if I’d like links to buy some graphics cards |
|
| ▲ | philipwhiuk 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Obviously. |
|
| ▲ | pelasaco 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| for sure, i guess this is one of the experiments that confirms that would work https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/ |
| |
| ▲ | BoiledCabbage 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I couldn't write better satire if I tried: > A search through GPT‑5.5’s SFT data found many datapoints containing “goblin” and “gremlin.” Further investigation revealed a whole family of other odd creatures: raccoons, trolls, ogres, and pigeons were identified as other tic words, while most uses of frog turned out to be legitimate. |
|
|
| ▲ | shevy-java 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is the problem with the black box model. These adCompanies control what people see. People don't know if they can trust the generated slop. It is the end of the open web. People need to wake up and realise what full Evil is being planned here. Google tried this before, e. g. AMP and what not. |
|
| ▲ | crowcroft 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| This never occurred to traditional search results so highly doubt they’ll start now. |
