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.
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
#22Probably trying to take advantage of the cross session memory feature some LLM providers are increasingly integrating. Enough "suggestions" and it becomes a "fact" in that memory, and one day a user makes a somewhat relevant query and the model will be pushing those accumulated "facts" to said user.
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#23Is 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.
This feels like the early days of SEO over again. There are no agreed-upon metrics yet, so you can sell all manner of snake oil. Hell, some of it might even work!
> This feels like the early days of SEO over again
There was a brief moment in the early Internet before it was all hyper-optimized... Until the parasites in the advertising industry started attaching themselves to every page.
The year before ChatGPT, the first page of Google was SEO-optimized blogspam designed to say as little in as many words as possible, to splice ads between every paragraph. This was the net result of 20 years of SEO. I suspect this is why Google's AI search didn't get as much pushback as other tools, since its summarization of pages functions is a form of adblock.
Given the ecological impact of AI, I wonder how much damage the ad industry will be causing in 10 years once they figure out how to trick LLMs into manipulating their own users.
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#24Probably trying to take advantage of the cross session memory feature some LLM providers are increasingly integrating. Enough "suggestions" and it becomes a "fact" in that memory, and one day a user makes a somewhat relevant query and the model will be pushing those accumulated "facts" to said user.
Soon we'll be coding with agent assistance and it'll suggest we get some Carls Jr. Big Ass Fries.
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#25I 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.
Seconding this. Incredibly useful feature, especially on sites who's JavaScript is constantly jerking the DOM and/or scroller around. So fucking annoying.
It's frankly wild how many of my favorite tools for Internet browsing have nothing to do with connectivity, solving bugs, or any of that and it's just stripping out all the fucking BULLSHIT that comes on a modern website.
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#26The same things your bot reads are saved as material for training in the future by your provider, so this seems as an attempt to poison the training data. Just this weekend had a dinner with someone who insisted that part of his business is to seo promote business in chatbots and this looks as part of the infrastructure behind such efforts.
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#27I 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…
There was also AMP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages), where Google gave a huge reputation boost to your pages provided you served them under a different URL that Google could discover, and you massively stripped down the HTML and CSS to Google's limited subset.
It's effectively dead today, and while it was dominant, Google abused it to get people to view and link to their cached copies of AMP pages, rather than the original site.
It also led to widespread abuse where the AMP version of the page differed in content significantly from the regular page. The same issue existed for WAP.
You may also remember browsing the web using Opera Mini, which wasn't a direct user-agent but used Opera's backend systems as a proxy that stripped, minified and compressed HTML/CSS, and resized and recompressed images. It let you browse the web using massively less mobile data, but raised a lot of privacy and security issues.
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#28I would also like to read the stripped down markdown copy and not the original. All the time.
When the GDPR came into force https://npr.org started redirecting to https://text.npr.org with an explanation that sounded like that fact was supposed to annoy you, but I honestly find the latter superior especially now that they’ve added a few more lines of CSS to it.
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Seconding this. Incredibly useful feature, especially on sites who's JavaScript is constantly jerking the DOM and/or scroller around. So fucking annoying. It's frankly wild how many of my favorite tools for Internet browsing have nothing to do with connectivity, solving bugs, or any of that and it's just stripping out all the fucking BULLSHIT that comes on a modern website.
It's a shame it's almost illegal. If you make a website that proxies content to another website but not ads, you go to jail. Reader mode only survives because it's client-side and fairly generic.
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#30It 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
This is why Cloudflare banned Googlebot. Googlebot is no longer a search engine bot and now an AI scraping bot.