I think this will be difficult for LLM vendors to implement in the near term, as the cost of switching vendors is near zero. If vendor A implemented ads, preferential treatment to things, and it was very evident, switching to vendor B would take almost no time.

There won't be swapping when it's vertically integrated. Independent "GPT wrappers" is probably a temporary phase.

Right, this is business as usual on the internet.

And I guarantee we all have seen ads generated by an LLM already. The front page of Reddit is filled with LLM posts whose comments are similarly rich with bots.

One common one is an image post of a snarky t-shirt where a high rated comment gives you a link to the storefront. The bots no longer need to recycle old posts and comments which can be easily detected as duplicates when an LLM can freshen it up.

There’s trust and trust. I have historically trusted Google to act in normal capitalist ways. For example, I trust them not to do things that would immediately lose them huge numbers of corporate customers as soon as the news broke, or get them shut down immediately by regulators in multiple nations. That doesn’t sound like it would cover much, but it does include things like “sell my company’s Google Sheets data to the highest bidder.”

I don’t trust LLMs even that far. Is it possible for “agentic AI” to send an email to my competitor with confidential company data attached? Absolutely it’s possible. So no, that statement doesn’t apply to Google as a company nearly as aptly as it applies to an agentic LLM.

I don't disagree and think that that is something people should be more concerned about than they already are/have been. I think the difference is how opaque the influence of the middleman is.

It's like the difference of someone handing out printed tour guides vs an in-person tour guide. It's typically can be easier to tell which are the ads, the extent of the curation, etc. with the printed guide(but not always!). While with the in-person guide you just have to just have to take everything they say at face value since there's no other surrounding information to judge.

Yes, what Google has become is exactly the lesson we should all be looking at. It used to be a great way to find resources online. Then ads crept in, then it started extracting the answers it claimed to think you wanted, now it jams AI in there too.

So, how will that go with LLM tools which start with you already entirely separated from the sources, with no real way to get to them?

It's not that different, and Google already sucks in the same way. So this is just a new way for things to get even worse.

There's feeds, sure, but most users use multiple sites (e.g. Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Google, Apple News, etc) so there's not one single feed controlling all the information they see. With AI, it's potentially more likely that a user relies on a single source.

I've been running an experiment on HN since last november using agents. My goal is largely for educational purposes and the ramifications are grim as nobody has been able to detect them.

I see people still interacting with them, upvoting their comments and being clueless that they are talking to a bot. If HN users can't detect them then reddit and X users do not stand chance.

> I imagine soon enough this too will become enshittified. I mean, its already happening: https://openai.com/chatgpt/search-product-discovery/

For now, at least, OpenAI claim that those product suggestions (almost tempted to leave in my typo / phone's autocorrect of "subversions") are not ads, and that it's purely a feature designed to be useful for ChatGPT users.

Although this from the FAQ is a bit strange, and I do wonder if there's any business relationship between OpenAI and the "third party providers" that happens to involve money passing from the latter to OpenAI in commercial deals that are definitely not ad purchases...

> How Merchants Are Selected

> When a user clicks on a product, we may show a list of merchants offering it. This list is generated based on merchant and product metadata we receive from third-party providers. Currently, the order in which we display merchants is predominantly determined by these providers. We do not re-rank merchants based on factors such as price, shipping, or return policies. We expect this to evolve as we continue to improve the shopping experience.

> To that end, we’re exploring ways for merchants to provide us their product feeds directly, which will help ensure more accurate and current listings. If you're interested in participating, complete the interest form here, and we’ll notify you once submissions open.

( https://help.openai.com/en/articles/11128490-improved-shoppi... )

I think the long term solution is P2P search where the client is configured to know who you trust. So if you search for waffles, and you trust somebody who trusts somebody who published a waffle recipe, that'll probably be one of your first results. If you get an untrustworthy result, revoke trust in whoever caused you to see it.

It's not exactly on the horizon but I think it's possible to build a web which rewards being trustworthy, rather than one that rewards attention mongering.

You say you’ve been having a lot of success… how can you possibly know that?

Whenever I get any summary or diatribe or lecture out of a chatbot all I know is that I have a major fact checking challenge. And I don’t have time for it. I cannot believe you are doing all that fact-checking.

Or to a competitor that does it more subtly. If it's legal and companies can get away with it, why wouldn't they just charge both the user and advertisers?

Nah, I don't buy that at all

Every industry in America, and especially tech players, work to lock in their customers, paid or not. People who are dependent on their phones don't make choices like that, and anticompetitive behaviors are becoming less illegal and easier

At this point "vote with your wallet" is basically a delusion in contexts like this

Ha! Yes, like how when you pay for cable TV they don’t show ads, or biased news coverage. Oh wait!

The invisible hand is a myth that contradicts the reality of history.

People have been operating on trust that search engine rankings are largely based on content quality/relevance/popularity, and that ads are marked as ads. And then the assumption was you would click through the top rankings to find something that actually met your needs, vs just buying one of the three results ChatGPT gives you.

It's true that there's nothing stopping Google Search from being a morally bankrupt operation though.

Given this era of weak regulation and enforcement, and the ability for the technology to obfuscate and opacify it, LLM companies will be able to get away with delivering promotional messaging undisclosed.

When Google search came about it had not yet been established that tech companies could "move fast" without consequence.

Do you have a list of open source tools that can be plugged together to make this happen?

Given the size of the training data, how would the average user know that propaganda or other deceptive information wasn't baked into the original model?

Except that you choose the MCP servers you use and you get to see the answers they give.

To me, it mitigates the problem slightly by making it less hidden.

Already seeing disasters, and the pace of awfulness is accelerating. Not sure what it is we're still waiting for at this point!

A friend of mine works in retail and he is fed up of people asking about coupon codes or sales that ChatGPT made up.