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Every so often I check back on ChatGPTs product search powers, and every time it cites garbage blogspam articles that praise every product hoping you'll click their affiliate links.

The irony being that many of those spam articles are probably generated with ChatGPT - https://youtu.be/WLfAf8oHrMo?t=86

I don't think this is that? This is more like agents show you a list of products and the UI allows you to buy them like any other online store.

They get a cut for products that support this. So they’re incentivized to display those instead. It’s pretty close to standard affiliate advertising and the biases that introduces.

Sure, but still far from "trusting agents with my money"

The trust problem was a concern early on in agents (well before LLMs).

Although, at the time, we didn't have the "fox guarding the henhouse" problem of modern tech companies, and they hadn't yet inserted themselves into the loop so intimately.