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Comment by the_snooze | Hacker News Reader

If agents are making value judgments ostensibly on my behalf, why should I trust them to continue to be aligned with my values if in practice they're almost always running on someone else's hardware and being maintained on someone else's budget?

We'd be stupid to ignore the last 15+ years of big tech "democratization"-to-enshittification bait-and-switch.

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That was never not the case. There are always value judgements. Even for keyword searches, there are often hundreds of exact matches, and one you want might not even be an exact match.

This article is about how Target can use LLMs to help you find patio furniture. I guess you could imagine the LLM upselling you on a more expensive set?

Unless you're running your own search engine for yourself, search indexes and vector databases already manage what data they want to ingest, they contain rank weights, keyword aliases, and prefiltering for controlling the search result in favor of the service provider's desired outcome. And these all run on someone else's hardware maintained on someone else's budget.

Adding an LLM or agentic data flow and a tuned prompt to the mix does nothing to change who is in charge, it was never you.

Search engines currently do this for better or worse. But they still want you to buy products.

The bigger issue is I’m not sure agents are trained to understand what users find engaging. What makes users click.

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