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You can either have AI be honest or AI become a marketing tool. The two are fundamentally incompatible.

You won't get it to push your products when users ask what's the best XYZ - either because it'll be too honest to lie or because it'll be too expensive for you.

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Considering you can't have chat bots be honest even if you don't make them marketing tools I suspect I know which way companies are going to go

Honesty implies intent. People can use LLMs to amplify dishonest messages (see: marketing), but I don't think it's reasonable to claim that LLMs are lying to describe when they produce incorrect information against the will of both the creator and operator.

I read it a different way. There's less upside to an LLM being "honest", since they're already making false statements regardless of intent. They're already non-trustworthy. So there's less to lose by being marketing channels.

We'll see once they pipe ads in there if they'll limit themselves to relevant ads or of they'll toss all pretense of caring out the window

LLMs do not have a concept of “honesty”. Nothing they say is honest or dishonest. Anyway, “What’s the best XYZ?” is not a question that has a definitive answer for most XYZs.

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