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Comment by plagiarist | Hacker News Reader

I wish ubiquitous advertising was illegal. Adtech has eaten and ruined the internet.

I think much of why people are so excited about using LLMs for discovery and writing basic code is because nobody has yet found a way to jam ads in the top three results and SEO listicles for next two dozen organic. "Aha, finally I can write a query and receive seemingly relevant content with no extra effort!"

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> I think much of why people are so excited about using LLMs for discovery and writing basic code is because nobody has yet found a way to jam ads in the top three results

Agreed. It's the Uberization play. Get everybody hyped up on below-cost service and no tipping, subsidized by VC money. Then go public, jack the prices up and add in a tip screen at the end of every ride.

It's coming.

Every since LLMs made it into the mainstream via ChatGPT, it’s really become a matter of time before most of the new content being produced is just generated, SEO nonsense - which we can see the beginnings of right now. Big media companies used to pay interns to write barely legible articles and use word spinners to sub synonyms but now you can create, on the fly, useful-sounding content that neatly accompanies the current article. Advertisers can also use crude prompt queries like “write a maximum N word hook targeting X audience, relating to Y, advertising Z product” and dynamically create A/B (A/B/…/N?) tests and see what performs 0.2% better.

Yes. Using the LLM directly is neat. What LLMs are doing to content is a massive tragedy of the commons.

I am already finding garbage listicles written by computers in all my searches now. One funny and obvious example: trying to query about a miter slot on a powertool had an article about types of slots but accidentally included casino slot machines in the list.

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