AI is following the drug dealer model. “The first dose is free!” Given the cost incurred, lots of dark patterns will be coming for sure.
If you'd rather the quick AI-summaries a la google you can put a question mark at the end of your search term. 'lawsuits regarding ferrets?'
And yeah as the sibling commenter pointed out, you can go into Kagi's preferences and explicitly rule out pinterest (or whatever site you want) from any of your searches for ever.
It's not simply enough that a product "makes money" it must "make more money, every quarter, forever" which is why everything, not even limited to tech, but every product absolutely BLOWS. It's why every goddamn thing is a subscription now. It's why every fucking website on the internet wants an email and a password so they can have you activate an account, and sell a known active email to their ad partners.
We're already at a wild stage of the rot caused by the growth-forever disease: the most successful companies are so enormous that further profit increases would require either absurd monopoly status (Chase, Wells Fargo, B of A all merge!) or to find increasingly insane ways of extracting money (witness network TV: First they only got money from ads, then they started leeching additional money streams from cable providers, now most have added their own subscription service that they also want you to pay for, on top of watching ads.)
ISPs used to just charge a fee, now they also sell personal information about your browsing behavior for extra revenue, cap your bandwidth usage and charge for more, and one of them (comcast) owns a media conglomerate.
The aricle talks about AI overviews. As exemplified by the AI summary at the top of Google search results page. That thing is free.
2. Attract large user base
3. Sell user data and attention to advertisers
4. Extract maximal profit from sponsors
5. Earn billions from shit product
As someone else said, you can probably filter responses through a small purpose-built/trained LLM that strips away dark patterns.
If you start getting mostly empty responses as a result, then there was no value prior to the stripping anyway.
this is already there and in prod but called AI "safety" (really corporate brand safety). The largest LLMs have already been shown to favor certain political parties based on the preferences of the group doing the training as well. Even technical people who should know better naively trust the response of an LLM well enough to allow to make API calls on their behalf. What would prevent an LLM provider to train their model to learn and manipulate an API to favor them or a "trusted partner" in some way? It's just like in the early days, "it's on the Internet, it has to be true".
I mean, I can tell when a page contains advertisements, but I still use an ad-blocker.
The point was not to help me detect when a response is ad-heavy, but to stop me seeing those ads at all.
> Arms race?
Possibly. Like with ad-blockers, this race can't be won by the ad-pusher LLM if the user uses the ad-blocker LLM.
The only reason ad-pusher websites still work is because users generally don't care enough to install the ad-blocker.
In much the same way, the only reason LLM ad-pushers will work is if users don't bother with an LLM ad-blocker.
Yep, because why let people make money from their work right? You should just get content for free!
> this race can't be won by the ad-pusher LLM if the user uses the ad-blocker LLM.
As per my comment it literally can.
Right now, we are lucky, because it is the least altered version of it ( and we all know how many filters public models have to go through ).
Citation needed?
Once AI content becomes monetized with ads, it's not going to look like the ads/banners we're used to. If you're looking into the past, you don't understand the potential of AI. Noam Chomsky's manufactured consent is going to look quaint by comparison.
1. Someone prompts 2. Server searches for equivalent prompts, if something similar was asked before, return that response from cache. 3. If prompt is unique enough, return response from LLM and cache new response. 4. If user decides response isn’t specific enough, ask LLM and cache.
If Google throws in a free AI summary in their search it only helps promoting Gemini in the long run.
This currently is the sweet phase where growing and thus gaining attention and customers as well as locking in new established processes is dominant. Unless the technical AI development stays as fast as in the beginning, this is bound to change.
The takeaway from Gemini is that subscriptions do lose money on some subscribers, but it is expected that not all subscribers use up their full quota each month. This is true even for non-AI subscriptions since the beginning of the subscription model (i.e. magazines, gamepass, etc).
The other surprising (to me, anyway) takeaway is that the AI providers have some margin on each token for PAYG users, and that VC money is not necessary for them to continue providing the service. The VC money is capital expenditure into infrastructure for training.
Make of it what you will, but it seems to me that if they stop training they don't need the investments anymore. Of course, that sacrifices future potential for profitability today, so who knows?
At that point the market may consolidate and progress slow, but not all providers will disappear - there are enough good models that can be hosted and served profitably indefinitely.
Even for the uses where it does matter, unless providers get squeezed down to zero margin, it's not that new models will never happen, but that the speed at which they can afford to produce large new models will slow.
Where did I say I think that?
You don't mention cross-checking the info against other sources.
You have the "make of it what you will" at the end, in what appears to be an attempt to discard any responsibility you might have for the information. But you still chose to bring that information into the conversation. As if it had meaning. Or 'authority'.
If you weren't treating it as at least somewhat authoritative, what was the point of asking Gemini and posting the result?
Gemini's output plus some other data sources could be an interesting post. "Gemini said this but who knows?" is useless filler.
What is also interesting is one of the biggest search companies is using it to steer traffic away from its former 'clients'. The very websites google talked into slathering their advertisements all over themselves. By giving them money and traffic. But that worked because google got a pretty good cut of that. But now only google gets the 'above the fold' cut.
That has two long term effects. One the place they harvest the data will go away. The second is their long term money will decrease. As traffic is lowered and less ads shown (unless google goes full plaster it everywhere like some sites).
AI is going to eat the very companies making it. Even if the answers are kind of 'meh'. People will be fine with 'close enough' for the majority of things.
Short term they will see their metric of 'main site retention' going up. It will however be at the cost of the websites that fed the machine.
Looking ahead, Search will become a de facto LLM chatbot, if it isn't already.
Oh bless your heart.
You don't even need to bring up corporate collusion, countless price gouging schemes, or the entire enshittification movement to understand that competition discovers the dark patterns. Dark patterns aren't something to be avoided, they're the natural evolution of ever-tighter competition.
When the eyeball is the product, you get more checks if you get more eyeballs. Dark patterns are how you chum the water to attract the most product.