This is a horrible future to consider.
The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that a society that bans ads is a healthier, more robust society, and I am not alone.
These are illegal in most jurisdictions. We need to apply the existing laws.
Meanwhile they'll have time to grab billions
a. the damages won't make a dent
b. they can throw lawyers at the problem for the win
c. they will have grafted their way into the economy so deeply that no one will want to kill their main source of income
This battle is already lost, if they find economical success then they are untouchable.
But there is something even more insidious: elections. Ads will be purchased to shape public perceptions. Those with the deepest pockets will have ads which are charismatic, convincing, and unbelievably effective. This is the death of democracy if regulation isn't adopted right now.
Unfortunately this isn't straightforward. The distinction between a product, service, person, and party are impossible to clearly delineate. Is a SpaceX ad an endorsement of Elon Musk? Is an Elon Musk ad an endorsement of the U.S. Republicans? The famous Citizens United ruling determined that there is no practical legal distinction in this domain, meaning that without a Constitutional amendment (which will never happen in this political climate), the U.S. is going to barrel headlong into some kind of dystopia.
My only ray of sunshine here is competition. If OpenAI gets a reputation for untrustworthy AI, and there are viable competitors, people will hopefully switch. It's messy and imperfect and will require constant vigilance (because they're not going to tell us when they're misleading us). I think open weights models have become very good, and will improve much more over time. When we can reasonably run these models locally, ubiquitously, we have cost effective options.
I wish we would stop speedrunning this Dune/Blade Runner future we keep trying to attain.
That's grossly inaccurate. We are speedrunning a William Gibson future.
Not even "native ads" embedded in LLM output can offset the difference.
100% agree. It's the only way things don't go south.
This is only round one however, and I could see a future where they offer more "intimate" experiences. At least that's not today.
I think It might be better to regulate them than remove them. Or to find a solution for people that can't access it.
(Another is higher tiers, free for personal users etc)
I hate ads but I also think about what's the alternative
I think it all boils down to how (if?) this will be transparent to the user.
If the response suggests a sponsored product/service to the user it could either be the specific product/service that ChatGPT is biased to suggest or the whole idea of using a product/service. As a user I would like to know both of these biases to understand that using any product/service for my need might not even be the best thing.
I agree, but a) the responsibility is on us all: citizens, government, and the media b) we can definitely introduce regulations that force government to be more open, etc.
Speaking as someone who worked in advertising for a looooonnnngggg time, there are three ways that ads seem to work (above a randomised holdout).
1. The ad is something that the person actually wants, and they then convert.
2. The ad is something that the person was about to buy, and they convert.
3. The ad is part of a long running campaign that shifts (some) consumer's behaviour over time (ads for Coke etc fall in this category).
Ads aren't magic, and most people ignore them most of the time. It turns out that enough people don't that they can be profitable sometimes, but mostly that's just targeting people with more money than sense.
This HN notion that ads shape everyone's behaviour (except me, obviously) is so disconnected from my experience that I am sometimes confused by it.
It is very likely that this will adjust in the future. Just look at how indistinguishable from organic content some prominent ad placements have become over time. But: There is merit in discussing the actual product, not some hypothetical version of it. If we do discuss hypotheticals, we should make that explicit.
This also helps the whole debate (and therefore, I believe, ad critics): arguments grounded in reality are usually far more effective than those that aren't. ... And there might come a point where OpenAI introduces some kind of native ad format. We would be well advised to preserve our credibility for that discussion.
edit: Paid content in the organic LLM output is a current problem already. It ist just not what this announcement is about.
Monkey see, monkey do. This is basically how human society works, and is impossible to stop. The best you could do would be control who people hang around with, but even that is almost impossibly hard to make work.
I believe most people are influenced by these constant micro-impressions far more than they realize.
My best defense is to build a resentment towards the companies being advertised.
Your feelings are fair, but if this were the case then we'd see far more consumers changing their preferred phone/electricity/TV provider on a regular basis, and we could correlate this with (lagged) advertising spend.
But there is very little evidence for this. Like, I have a doctorate in psychology, and behaviour change is really, really hard and only works in a small number of cases. That model does seem to have predictive power, in that very few people convert as a result of seeing an ad (less than 1/1000 in the very best cases), and most of those that do don't keep buying products for long.
Now, if you already do something (like order takeaway pizza) it's much easier to get someone to do more of that, but its very very very hard to establish a new behaviour.
In my view advertising is in big parts (your category 3) basically a constant side-channel attack against peoples minds, eroding decisionmaking and purchasing decisions (mostly!) to peoples detriment.
The net-beneficial aspects (product information, and, arguably, boosted general demand) could be better achieved otherwise.
Same. They've also never really bothered me, especially billboards and street advertisements. I was actually sad when they got rid of the neon signs in Hong Kong.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/08/fading-glory-t...
There is nothing unpopular about your opinion - silent majority definitely wants ad-subsidized free tiers (that is why they are so popular and ads are not banned anywhere in the western world), it is just that arguing with radicals on HN or reddit is exhausting and a waste of time in general.