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Comment by ryandvm | Hacker News Reader

Did anybody think this wasn't going to happen?

They weren't going to burn a couple trillion dollars of capital and lose money on every API call just so you could ask it to tell you why your cat brings you dead mice.

They're going to pump this shit so full of advertising it's not going to be funny. And worse, it's going to be incredibly subtle and insidious. You're not even going to realize the responses are guiding you into certain purchases. Just gentle, reassuring advice that you should be buying shit.

This future sucks.

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Yes, there are enough people who still think this won't happen despite very conclusive recent history of this exactly happening.

Just like there are enough people who think if there were no car dealership/ salesman car would become cheaper as if car makers are full of morons who leave extra margins to buyers instead of themselves.

Or streaming service beats the shit of out cable in being cheap, ads-free and all in all better user experience. Once true, no longer.

Also funny that tips will go away when one visits self-serve in restaurants, coffee shops etc.

I guess a lot of folks are too drunk on "This time it will be different".

So now if you ask ChatGPT about what electric shaver to buy the answer will be sponsored? How nice.

I'd go darker than that. Think about how chatgpt is trying to position itself as a provider of medical advise.

Its easy to see how it will gently tune it's response from symptom to solution.

Cue rapid narrators voice "Chatgpt may cause death, seek real medical advice before buying what chatgpt recommends"

This is why normal people saying they are using ChatGPT to "research" which X to buy makes me so sad. Even if it is not a sponsored answer (yet) it is using data it found on random websites that it trusts are telling the truth. It is the dumbest game of telephone where the start of the chain is made up marking mumbo jumbo or straight fake, and each successive layer somehow speaks with more confidence and the end user thinks that because these LLMs have "access to all data from all time" that it means their answer will be correct.

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