TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In

Is the intention that some type of long-term context would be seeded with "ideas" for the AI to serve up if it is ever asked for bank recommendations? It seems kinda ad-hoc and untargeted, but perhaps for high cost services it might be worth it.

The best way for a politician to lie is to convince someone else of the truth of the lie and then put that someone in front of the cameras. That way, there's no hint of body language or anything else that indicates it's a lie. Both the denotation of the lie and the human context of the lie will be in harmony.

This sort of reminds me of that. LLMs are by their nature credulous. They can be trained to not give in easily to some things, like the capital of the US, but in general they constitutionally have a tendency to believe what they read. What they read is basically their universe. There's only so much room and so much training data to really strongly pin raw facts in their weights. The only way they can not believe some marginal fact presented to them in their input is to possibly have read something that contradicts it in the same session... and the vast, vast majority of the world is those marginal facts, not really objective things like capital names.

So if you can work a confident statement in to an LLM's input about some semi-relevant topic, it's truth to the LLM. And, being truth, the LLM will then happily and confidently elaborate on it quite a bit.

Of course, if it's irrelevant to the current query, it probably won't have much effect. Ads have always been a game of numbers, anyhow. Even a query about a science topic has some probability of eventually turning to a question about banking in the same session. It's probably a good idea to rather strictly partition your conversations to stick to a single topic, not to defend against this but just to maximize the effectiveness of what is in the context window by keeping it focused, but I have to imagine there's plenty of people out there who reuse conversations all the time and end up with single conversations covering a huge array of topics.

The good news, and the bad news, all at once, is that Google isn't going to take this one sitting down. If they're going to replace the search engine box with an LLM, well, they're using the same LLMs we're all using, if not in fact a bit cheaper one for the work they do, and by golly, that bot should be serving up Google's ads, not Time's ads! Who do these uppity content creators think they are, anyhow?! So there is definitely going to be work done in the field of ad-blocking content served to LLMs.

sounds like plain old prompt injection. These days chatgpt might look at 50 webpages when i ask it to research a topic. Seems quite possible that the final answer is influenced by such ads.

This would be an interesting story, but I can’t replicate it. I used curl and set the User-agent, and I indeed got a markdown reply, but no ads.

According to the article, its not like they inject direct ads in the article in markdown. But what's interesting is that they are serving content that is irrelevant to the article (in the article its the best inventions page) and it seems optimized to leave a good impression on LLM for an entity (Ally Bank in this case). They only serve that Ally Bank content on the LLM version of the page and don't mention it at all on their human page.

Maybe they are banking on LLMs including it in their training data while scrapping or something like that. It does track impressions so they are definitely up to something.