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Comment by jstummbillig | Hacker News Reader

That would be illegal.

I understand that there are a lot of strong opinions and open questions about OpenAI behavior – the amount of vigilantism is quite staggering – but if what they do is found to be clearly illegal by courts around the world, they will have to pay very hefty fines. Disguising ads is one such move. That's just not a winning business.

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How much can you bias training to favor certain products before it becomes illegal? That seems like a similar question to "how much linear algebra do you have to do to copyrighted works before copyright doesn't apply anymore".

I wonder if you could pay them to tweak the messaging about your products. So when a user asks: Is drinking Coke everyday good for my health, it starts saying yes because sugar is vital to our survival.

I don't get why we try to make the story so convoluted. They will just declare the ads, as all big platforms do. It's legal and it works. Why would they open themselves up to lawsuits over this? It's just not reasonable.

Every platform can do ads, but only AI platforms have an agent that can semi-intelligently try to convince the consumers of something.

AirBnB and Uber have demonstrated to all companies that legality doesn’t really matter as long as the numbers are good. It takes regulators an ungodly amount of time to act, and any well-written appeal buys you another 5 years for making political contributions

I don't know of any legal rulings or laws, which say not disclosing an embedded ad is illegal. In fact quite the opposite. There are loads and loads of prior such cases, movies, TV shows being an example.

For example every product mention (snapple, oh henry candy bars, jr mints) on Seinfeld was an ad. The skit is written, but any product can be dropped in. If no advertisers are interested, made up names are used.

This has been going on for 100+ years, including radio.

Why would ChatGPT be special?

US and EU law already cover this: undisclosed paid promotion that looks like neutral content is generally illegal (FTC Act + Endorsement Guides in the US, UCPD + DSA in the EU). Product placement in old TV/film is the historical exception, not the rule. An interactive "assistant" secretly steering you because someone paid for it is legally much closer to a deceptive influencer ad than to a Snapple bottle in Seinfeld.

FTC looks like its legislation is from the 70s, yet it is still being done in TV and movies.

Legislation has to be interpreted by courts, and there is surely lots of caselaw. I'd look there, as to why it is OK.

Regardless, is there a ToS you agreed to, that disclosess it will happen? TV doesn't have a ToS nor a movie theater, yet ChatGPT can have one.

One last thing... openai pulled off the largest, unlicensed use of copyright material ever, and is fine.

Meanwhile, TV already has embedded ads...

There is too much money beeing made. It's naive to think the courts will stop it.

> That would be illegal.

Yeah, so?

Their entire business model is currently based on legally questionable practices. I'd argue they wouldn't even exist without massive copyright infringement and utter disregard for software licences.

To my knowledge there is absolutely no legal precedent for one company simply paying to have themselves more heavily weighted in the training data. So it just happens that they show up more in responses then their competitors.

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