I hate that the progression is so predictable. Yeah, clearly labelled ads today. Less clearly labelled tomorrow. Then they'll be indistinguishable from the text of the AI but still separate. Then they'll start folding it in to the AI prompts. Then they'll start folding it in at the training phase so the weights themselves drive you towards Thinking Ford First, this step being inevitable because it almost certainly will be by far the most effective of all of these techniques. Opus 7.2 Brought To You By Mountain Dew. Just a coincidence that every time you ask it to build an authorization system it writes code to ensure that the user has drunk a verification can, and is just incompetent at removing that code for some reason.
Sigh.
Enjoy this era of AI, folks, while the AIs are still developing too quickly for enshittification to catch up properly and the market and indeed the National Interest won't let anyone slow down so it can. But it will. It is inevitable. Make sure to at least keep a toe dipped in the open weights AIs, and any future truly open source AIs that develop.
Just consider how even paid streaming services are bringing in ads, or how TVs were caught using ACR to spy on us.
See how emany streaming now created a plus plus version while adding ads to what was the premium version.
And the funny thing they just needed to increase base rates for users to start to ask for an ads supported version.
The only question is how sales will work if there's some spin up time to do the post training. You can't do a real time auction like Google does, so it will be longer-term contracts I suspect.
Edit: AI is a great opportunity to run the same protection racket that's been run in various existing "marketplaces", where a brand has to buy ad placement for searches for their own name or their competitor will be able to displace them by buying it instead: "You would't want a user asking 'Which Cambells soup flavor is the healthiest?' to get a recommendation for Lipton's would you?"
Users might not even notice - Will they prompt around it e.g., "Didn't Dyson used to make a hair dryer that was well reviewed?" if it isn't even recommended to them?
You know, the path Christ walked down to his cruxifixction is actually littered with storefronts and merchants and ads today, hah. There’s no beating this human sin, it’s biblically fucked up. It’s the number one faith and we couldn’t even keep ads away from a Holy place.
Jesus Christ, lord have mercy. We are fallen , through and through, during your time and even in our time today. And in fact, we have been fallen since the beginning of time even, as the WORD says. Thank you for your sacrifice, because I am at aghast on how else we could possible even nibble away at the grandness of human sin.
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.
My guess is that it’s because users talk to ChatGPT about our app, so it recommends it to more people?
most importantly: there's enough competition that people would just use other models that don't do this. the kind of people who peddle this FUD are have not much theory of how markets work. Cory Doctorow has done a number on them and spread a conspiracy theory that everything is enshittified and everything gets worse. "just wait guys I'm telling you, the good days are over okkk?"
most importantly, the future will have a pareto optimal set up compared to today where you will have much better models, much cheaper and have options that are subsidised by ads.
[1] i can't eliminate some rando companies trying but not OpenAI not Anthropic.
> most importantly: there's enough competition that people would just use other models that don't do this.
Show me a Smart TV without ads and some form of tracking. Some product categories are already completely enshittified despite plenty of competitors. People care about up front cost more than any other metric. So no, people will not switch to other models in numbers that matter. If your competitors can drive down up-front prices by selling ad placements or eliminating free checked luggage (airline industry) and you try to take the high road your reward will be irrelevance and bankruptcy.
In short:
We investigate the design of auction mechanisms for aggregating the output of multiple self-interested LLMs into one joint output. We argue that this comes with a number of unique challenges, and we propose a simple token auction mechanism and illustrate our design through demonstration with an off-the-shelf LLM.
mc32•43m ago
I’m not surprised by this, unfortunately. One can hope that it does not materially affect (bias) output.
nemomarx•24m ago