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Comment by friendzis | Hacker News Reader

Query: LibraGPT, create a plan for my trip to Italia

Response: Book a car at <totally not an ad> and it will be waiting for you at arrival terminal, drive to Napoli and stay at <totally not an ad> with an amazing view. There's an amazing <totally not an ad> place that serves grandma's favorite carbonara! Do you want me to make the bookings with a totally not fake 20% discount?

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I'm traveling like this all the time already, I don't understand why it's hard for people to understand that ad placement is actually easier for chat than search

But who wants that? And you're going to say that's exactly what a travel agent does, selling me stuff so he can get a kickback. But when stuff goes wrong, I'll yell at the travel agent so he has some incentive to curate his ads.

> that ad placement is actually easier for chat than search

Yes, but the reason why people are turning to chatgpt is because the time to actual info that _I want_ is much much lower.

The point of advertising is to displace the thing that you actually want with something they are paying the company to promote.

You can handwave about personalization, but do you want adtech people having access to your life's context?

> all the time already

What are you actually saying? You're already using chatbots that are embedding non-disclosed paid endorsements? And you like that?

> ad placement is actually easier for chat

Can you point to, I don't know, anything to back this up?

How to speedrun massive penalties and disgorgement from FTC.

I guess we'll just put that in the "Cost of Goods Sold" bucket.

I'm not aware of any FTC rule that would preempt this sort of product as long as it met the endorsement disclosure rules (16 CFR Part 255), same as paid influencers do today.

What are you imagining they run afoul of?

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/ftcs-endorse...

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-B...

friendzis's example showed a plausible way to generate revenue by inserting paid placements into the chat bot response without disclosures by pretending they are just honest, organic suggestions.

Right. That's not a novel idea, and this is a well-trod area of concern. That's why these FTC rules have been around for many years.

edit: to be clear, I am saying that in the absence of clear disclosures, that would run afoul of current FTC rules. And historically they have been quick to react to novel ways of misleading consumers.

All these chatbots are openly making recommendations for particular products since the day one. FTC (or any other regulatory body) does not even look at that direction.

Do you have at least a rough idea how many current product recommendations are influenced grok "musk is the bestest at everything" style?

Let's put an analogy to Google ads - the ads that appear at search results do not make up even 5% of their ad revenue. Even smaller for Meta. They earn their big ad revenues from their network, not from their main apps.

What? Where are you getting those numbers from?

Every source I know (hard to link on mobile) shows Google Search to make up 50+% of their ad revenue, and there has been extensive reporting over the years on Google's struggle to diversify away from that.

bribe the artificial idiot to con the user, brilliant !

That seems a bit risky for when the car isn't waiting for you at the terminal.

At least with an ad it's obvious a separate company is involved. If you do all the payment through OpenAI it seems to leave them open to liability.

Could be as simple as referral link commission like all those totally-not-content-farm travel blogs.

Travel sites, VPNs and insurance all pay quite handsomely (compared to say amazon links on cooking sites)

> If you do all the payment through OpenAI it seems to leave them open to liability.

Booking, airbnb, rentalcars, etc all seem to be doing pretty fine regulatory wise.

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