AI will be ridden with ads - just disguised as answers.
And without the web there is no new datasets for AI so it’ll grind to a halt.
And without the web there is no new datasets for AI so it’ll grind to a halt.
Not long ago I asked ChatGPT for the best washing machines (or something). It gave me a list with a little information about each one. I then asked for its sources. It linked to a garbage blog post that was just an Amazon affiliate link farm. There was no research, no testing, nothing... just random links to try and generate a few cents per click. This is the "knowledge" we often get from AI, without knowing it.
This is so much worse than searching for something and getting ads which you can ignore (like we have been doing now forever...).
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1kgz7m0/i_asked_ch...
https://xcancel.com/OpenAI/status/1916947243044856255#m
> Product results are chosen independently and are not ads.
Let’s see how long that lasts.
After 5-7 minutes of work, it returns many results, yet it's citing 2 specific websites as sources, one of which was blogspam you'd write to get visibility on Google results.
So I guess we're heading towards a future where websites will be optimized to increase the probability of chatGPT and AI tools to use you as a reference and link to you with confidence, regardless of their sources.
I wish for it to only use sources that are older than 2019 and have zero ads and referral links, haha.
Usually brands pay for that screen time, but it’s not very obvious that it’s payed advertising.
The best advertising is word of mouth advertising and smart marketers seek out people of influence in their communities to spread their products. This was well known in marketing long before the term online influencer was a thing. It's very hard for most people to even notice this kind of advertisement is even happening.
- Do they actually own the product? - How long have they owned the product? - Show me how it works. - How much have you paid? Else it's worthless to me, but I'm happy for him/her
Product placement, especially without specific calls outs, are something subtle that most people don't notice. Something like the boxes of cereal sitting on the shelf in Seinfeld's kitchen. Are those ads, is it just set design? I don't really know.
There is also car choice in a movie or TV show. The studio isn't going to design and build an actual car just to avoid using a company's product. Which car do they pick and what does that communicate about the brand to the viewer. Is this an ad?
You could see this in the agents demo. Need a suit. Ah, let's check J Crew. You'd like that, wouldn't you, J. Crew? How much would you pay to make sure it always checks your site first?
There are no „disguised ads“ allowed in Germany at all.
When it is not enforceable, the law is meaningless and only blocks honest people.
You could even have something like an MCP to which the LLM could pass "topics", and then it would return products/opinions which it should "subtly" integrate into its response.
The MCP could even be system-level/"invisible" (e.g. the user doesn't see the tool use for the ad server in the web UI for ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini.)