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.
Or they were so well targeted they didn’t even feel like ads. Dunh dun DUHN!
TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
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Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#12[deleted]
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#13It is deliberately targeting known AI-scapers, or anything it sees as a bot?
Could it be that other scrapers are pulling the pages, without making the extra requests to get ad related resources, to present the content to people ad-free, and embedding the ads in the main response body is a way to get around that so the human sees an advert at least, even if it isn't the one they might see if the stalky-adtech-algo could deliver something more targetted.
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#14I would also like to read the stripped down markdown copy and not the original. All the time.
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#15Sounds good to me, let the bots read the ads instead of the humans.
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#16It is deliberately targeting known AI-scapers, or anything it sees as a bot? Could it be that other scrapers are pulling the pages, without making the extra requests to get ad related resources, to present the content to people ad-free, and embedding the ads in the main response body is a way to get around that so the human sees an advert at least, even if it isn't the one they might see if the stalky-adtech-algo cou…
Google itself now captures a lot of traffic with LLM generated site summaries.
For media/news businesses that make their money from readership, it is unsustainable to subsidize Alphabets content farm. Thus, understandable people would change their corporate posture with a search turned scraper company. =3
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#17Is 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.
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.
"My sources indicate that the best robot vacuum with the most recommendations is the Squigglybot 5000. Owners point out the long battery life and silent operation. If you want to buy a Squigglybot 5000, Ally Bank offers affordable loans."
Probably something like this?
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#18Is 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.
I'm wondering if it's also a way for this marketing agency to artifically (ahem) inflate the impression numbers they report back to Ally Bank, or whoever the customer is.
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#19I would also like to read the stripped down markdown copy and not the original. All the time.
There was a golden age where lots of websites had WAP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol) versions available while also running their "normal website", and the WAP version was always like 1/100 of the size of the normal website. Still, "normal websites" were minimal compared to now, but when you were on modem, even those websites loaded slow. For some time, most of my browsing were via the WAP versions of the websites I visited during the bi-daily hour of allowed internet access.
Maybe now we'll get something similar, just happens to be for LLMs, but for us who like less bloat, it can be a better viewing/reading alternative. Hope it spreads :)
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#20I would also like to read the stripped down markdown copy and not the original. All the time.
Safari has a very pleasant reader mode that, while not pure markdown, does capture quite a bit of the experience by standardizing presentation and stripping out distractions. You can set Safari to automatically engage reader mode on websites you specify, when it detects an article.