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I think there are already product placement laws so we should be warned at least

You’ll be warned when you accept the terms and conditions. And after the first lawsuits, there will be some fine print on the bottom of the page for you to ignore.

They must be completely toothless laws considering the amount of product placement that is easily visible. The only thing that will change is automating product placement in what used to look like organic conversation, including on HN.

Now I’ll go drink a nice, cold glass of tap water.

In the US, the laws just say that if you do product placement, you have to disclose you're doing it. If you do that, then there's no restrictions on product placement.

I'm also not overly familiar with the scope of the law, so I don't know how much (or if) it applies to software of this sort.

It's not quite that simple, it's if you have a relationship with the seller of the product that the average viewer(tm) would not expect. So, e.g. product placement on daytime TV or quiz shows doesn't require disclosure, because the regulators/courts have decided that's what the average viewer would expect anyway. But anything on social media does require it, it seems. I think produce placement in LLM chatbots would probably qualify as unexpected, though.

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