<AIs are much better at responding to my intent, and they rarely attempt to sell me anything> YET.
The goal isn't to have an ad->purchase, the goal is to make sure the purchase is more likely in the long term.
I think if you had this incredible technology that could manipulate language to nudge readers in the softest possible way toward thinking a little bit more about buying some product, so that in aggregate you'd increase sales in a measurable way that nobody would ever notice, it would just quickly just devolve into companies demanding the phrase "BUY MORE REYNOLDS GARBAGE BAGS!!!!!!!!" at least 7 times.
This is the machine that magicians program for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo_e0EvEZn8
I was going to write a rebuttal to this, about how more subtle forms of advertising are likely not very effective, and then I remembered subliminal advertising.
It's largely been banned (I think), but probably only because it's relatively easy to define and very easy to identify. In the case of LLMs, defining what they shouldn't be allowed to do "subliminally" will be a lot harder, and identifying it could be all but impossible without inside knowledge.
How effective is it? We don't know, but there is nothing of potential value to lose so nobody really cared. Just ban it and move on.
Oh come on.
Genuinely.
Come on.
Look at every single tech innovation of the last 20 years and say that again.
It quickly turned Google into the biggest / most valuable internet company of all time ever, and it still wasn't enough for them.
I've had adblockers running for as long as I can remember so I'm blisfully unaware of how bad it is now... mostly, I don't have adblockers on my phone and some pages are unusable.
Ads done right is the least bad way of supporting free stuff for people who don't want to pay the cost. But people with ubo punish all sites regardless of whether they do ads nicely or not.
You are right now writing in a thread about upcming future where promotion is embedded in the content so that content itself is one big ad disguised as whatever. Do you really think it's a better alternative to clearly delimited and unmistakeable ads?
Read your own link:
> For example, entering the query "buy domain" into the search box on Google’s home page produces search results and an AdWords text advertisement that appears to the right of Google’s search results
> Google’s quick-loading AdWords text ads appear to the right of the Google search results and are highlighted as sponsored links, clearly separate from the search results. Google’s premium sponsorship ads will continue to appear at the top of the search results page.
what is this instinct? anyone that’s over the age of 25 would know
"The rules were you guys weren't going to fact check."
The instinct is about pointing out factual inaccuracies. What they wrote is either correct, or not. If it is not, and someone knows better they can and should point that out.
If you, or some other commenter, have a fuzzy feeling that google is worse than it used to be you are free to write that. You are perfectly entitled to that opinion. But you can't just make up false statements and expect to be unchallenged and unchallengeable on it.
There is a very strong stance on this site against talking about astroturfing, and I understand it. But for the life of me, I cannot figure out where this general type of sentiment originates. I don’t know any google enthusiasts and am not sure I’ve ever met one. It’s a fairly uncontroversial take on this website and in the tech world that google search has worsened (the degree of which is debateable). Coming out and saying boldly “no it isn’t, you’re lying” is just crazy weird to me and again I’m very curious where that sentiment comes from.
see some of the sibling and aunt/uncle comments in this thread to get at a little of what I’m talking about.
I wasn't a fan for very long. Google got creepy fast, and at this point their search is becoming useless, but for a short time I really thought that Google is amazing and I was an enthusiast.
I think Google search has gone downhill tremendously to the point of near uselessness and have been a Kagi subscriber for awhile, but I don't see astroturf in this instance. Do you have other examples?
> If Google [had been] broken up 20 years ago [...] [e]veryone would still be paying for email.
Some people don't have the foggiest idea what they're talking about. But I don't really see that as suggesting they're part of an organized campaign.
I believe I have covered that case in my comment. Let me quote the relevant part here for you: “What they wrote is either correct, or not. If it is not, and someone knows better they can and should point that out.”
That being said could you help me by pointing out the inaccuracy in jkaptur’s comment? It seems fairly simple and as far as I can see well supported by the source.
You can sealion with posts like this all you want but every time someone counters a post like this with ample evidence it gets group downvoted or ignored. You are also making an assertion that you’re free to back with evidence, that google and google products are not noticeably worse than 10 years ago.
here’s one study that says yes, it is bad:
https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_20...
Since we don’t have a time machine and can’t study the google of 2015 we have to rely on collective memory, don’t we? You proclaiming “it’s always been this way” and saying any assertion otherwise is false is an absolutely unfalsifisble statement. As I said, anyone over 25 knows.
Besides perusing the wealth of writing about this the last two years or so, in which the tech world at large has lamented at how bad search specifically has gotten - we also see market trends where people are increasingly seeking tools like chatGPT and LLM’s as a search replacement. Surely you, a thinking individual, could come to some pretty obvious conclusions as to why that might be, which is that google search has got a lot worse. The language models well known to make up stuff and people still are preferring them because search is somehow even less reliable and definitely more exhausting, and it was not always this way. If it was always this way, why are so many people turning to other tools?
Sounds like it should be very easy to counter their argument then.
For my education could you tell me which part of their message is inaccurate? The “Google was founded in 1998” or the “and you could buy ads on the search results page in 2000.” part?
> You are also making an assertion that you’re free to back with evidence, that google and google products are not noticeably worse than 10 years ago.
I did not make such an assertion. Where in my comment do you think i’m making that assertion?
> You proclaiming “it’s always been this way”
I’m sorry but who are you quoting? Did you perhaps misclicked which comment you wanted to respond to?
What's the difference? In astroturfing, someone pays people to form an organization, claim to have no external support, and do some kind of activism.
In hasbara, the government of Israel pays people to not form an organization, claim to have no external support, and do various kinds of pro-Israel and pro-Jew activism. This looks like astroturfing with the major vulnerability of the no-external-support claim shored up.
> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.
- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
I'd guess we're only 6-12 months out from a full advertisement takeover.
So you are just getting SEO'd pages (i.e ads) regurgitated to you.
Have you considered buying a ChatGPT filter/scrubber to clean your results? Only $9.99 a month! Not available in all areas, not legal in most of the world.
;) and </s>
Or support an open source AI model.
I stopped using ChatGPT when it started littering my conversation with emojis. It acts like one of those overzealous kids on Barney.