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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

Long before OpenAI killed the open web, advertising suffocated it. Advertising is the reason why it would even occur to anyone that it would be more fun to just have a robot book them a vacation than to deal with the misery that is every internet booking website.

Something like Operator may well be the death of the ad-funded web—as TFA observes, who is going to see the ads? But the reason why a tool like Operator has why sort of appeal is because advertising already killed the open web and replaced it with a lifeless corpse.

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We’re in the honeymoon phase with chatGPT. Soon the responses are going to be seamlessly inundated with product placements and other crap.

>who is going to see the ads?

Ad companies could offer OpenAI lots of money to mention them, sidestepping the likes Google et al

My thoughts exactly. The AI gatekeepers will also become gatekeepers of consumer choices in a similar way as Google is now. That goes for both sides of google's business: search and ads. If you're asking for "the hest car brand", who is to say the AI cannot he swayed by some sweet advertising dollars? Of it books you a guided tour directly, you'll not even notice of one tour guide is preferred.

That may sound pessimistic, bit honestly I have zero confidence that in Trumps's USA, OpenAI will have to give a flying fuck about users' best interests or honest advertising or any of that stuff...

This makes me wonder. OpenAI isn't the only company offering computer use. The list of companies and models that do this will only grow.

Meaning advertiser's will have to be selective which company they pay to get the most exposure to their target human customers via the agents. Will we see affiliate programs for AI agents which in turn promote products to the users? and we end up with the same shit show we have today?

Or what if eventually everyone has their own personal AI that can bypass the ads. Will we just decide that advertising is a drag on society and kill off that industry for good?

> and we end up with the same shit show we have today?

Absolutely certain. Furthermore, this can maximize exploitation of each individual human as the providers have such rich profiles about each human that they can customize pricing to extract the maximum amount of profit. It is by design.

Even if there were no ads, having a robot book your trips would still be nicer as it is still work to do. We used to have travel agents do all the booking instead and merely got rid of them for cost reasons.

Robots could guide robot fans towards common physical experiences.

Why trust a robot that may or may not get your request right if you just go to the source and book it yourself? The experience booking anything with a travel agent was always horrible with so much back and forth, do we really want that?

The work isn’t in the booking. It’s deciding where to look and comparing prices and amenities.

Paying for and checking out is 5% of the customer journey here.

Eh, I disagree. The actual booking process itself is both pretty painless and very much not something I trust to be automated. Enter my card (better yet, pick a saved one), confirm the dates and price, click confirm. I can't think of anything in there that needs to be automated more than it is.

And choosing something to do should be both fun and something you'd want to do yourself—it only isn't fun because businesses aren't incentivized to make it fun, they're incentivized to try to redirect your attention away from what you actually want and instead draw you to their various sponsors.

I am a control freak when it comes to travel arrangements and would also never trust it to automation.

Oh, the stories that could be told about travel agents and the trips they booked!

Delegation sounds great and sometimes is, but be careful what you wish for, especially when the your delegate is actually working for somebody else, as will be the case for most LLM agents and was the case for most travel agents.

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