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Comment by bonoboTP | Hacker News Reader

This kind of stuff is an existential threat to ad-based business models and upselling. If users no longer browse the web themselves, you can't show them ads. It's a monumental, Earth-shattering problem for behemoth like Google but also normal websites. Lots of websites (such as booking.com) rely on shady practices to mislead users and upsell them etc. If you have a dispassionate, smart computer agent doing the transaction, it will only buy what's needed to accomplish the task.

There will be enormous push towards steering these software agents towards similarly shady practices instead of making them act in the true interest of the user. The ads will be built into the weights of the model or something.

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Ads will move to the layer of the new interface when that happens. Also a computer can't watch a youtube video for you or look at funny cat pictures. You can still put ads next to things people want to look at.

Only a matter of time before computers are generating videos of cats cuter than any real cat.

Care to elaborate on the idea? I suppose you mean that ads will come to this "computer use" tool itself. Now, will users keep it in the foreground, when they already expect the tool to do (almost) everything for them?

I think the point is - don't be so naive. Companies are investing near trillions into developing models, training models, compute, datacenter, nuclear reactors, etc.

Is the endgame some free/cheap tool that abstracts away the entire ad based web economy to the benefit of end users?

Imagine something closer to a super duper smart useful Siri/Alexa that feeds you product recommendations, paid placement, and other ads interspersed with your actual request response.

Hey Siri what temperature is it? It's 45 and going to be chilly today, a North Face jacket might be handy today.. can I recommend you a few models? What's your size?

Or it's just simply going to make purchases and flight bookings based on paid boosts from online stores and airlines. They will simply say that it's making a holistic assessment, not simply based on the final price but the overall reputability etc. It's to avoid fraud and to streamline experience based on personalized machine learning algorithm result yadda yadda.

I mean, what really are ads and dark tactics (like those observed on accommodation booking websites)? They are ways to influence purchasing decisions.

If the decision is offloaded to AI, then logically ways to sway the AI decision will be developed. Such as backroom deals, hidden prompts and rules governing the assessment of the AI in making choices.

Still not a problem for Meta/TikTok/YouTube though, as people go there to consume content on purpose. But I agree, will be fun to see how Google and others will deal with it.

> smart computer agent doing the transaction

None of these agents are smart.

And if purchases become agentic, fine print or other shady tricks hidden in business terms will be how businesses draw consumers in.

Also, none of this will be existential, earth-shattering or enourmous until compute power per watt comes to a degree where all of this is economical at scale.

the ads will target the latent biases of the agentic AI, just like they do with humans

and/or the ad dollars will move into the decision layer and the AI will make different decisions / recommendations to your request, depending on who is bidding the most..

Imagine the most dystopian outcomes and you'll probably be closer than "well I don't have to see ads anymore!"

> This kind of stuff is an existential threat to ad-based business models and upselling.

Sounds great. But corporations will find a way to fuck over their users for inverstors' gains in no time.

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