I was on a NYT page and used Firefox mobile's "Summarize" button... it spit out some sort of unrelated cooking recipe. I'm guessing this type of bot interference will become more and more common.
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
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
"We've been going at it for some time now -- why don't we take a break? And you must be hungry -- I can recommend a great place..." Yep, only a matter of time.
"This could take up to 30 minutes for subagents to complete. Alexa reports that your refrigerator is low on milk. Here's a $2 off coupon for Walmart, why don't you restock while I work?" Why do we choose to live in the worst timeline?
Sans the ads, that would actually be a productive use for AI. Maintaining a well stocked fridge and pantry is a full time job in itself, especially if you have children.
Unfortunately you'd have to wire your entire kitchen in cameras, your scale needs to be smart and all of it needs to be sent / processed in real time to track consumption which means it will take a lot of compute power and a level of data mining that could be abused by anybody from enterprising break-and-entry crews to the police, and on top of that if it's done by a cloud provider it's probably gonna end up in a data lake for targeted advertising.
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#73this is super interesting, time for upgraded system instructions for AI agents I guess ... but one has to check (with evals) whether system instructions suffice (to ignore sponsored content).
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#74Earlier 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.
Firefox has this too, it's useful. However I only find that I use it for websites that have shit CSS that makes it hard to read on mobile. For everything else AdBlock Plus works fine.
Firefox reader mode can often strip out JS annoyances.
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#75Probably 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.
I'm thinking it'll suggest Whiskey, combined with a breathalyzer, to keep you in the sweet spot of the Ballmer peak[0].
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Soon we'll be coding with agent assistance and it'll suggest we get some Carls Jr. Big Ass Fries.
"We've been going at it for some time now -- why don't we take a break? And you must be hungry -- I can recommend a great place..." Yep, only a matter of time.
The other day I pasted two links into ChatGPT, both different brands of the same appliance. One was $50, the other $200. I asked to compare the differences.
It ended up recommending and linking me to an entirely different one, that I hadn't linked to at all.
Don't know if it was just sloppy LLM "thinking," or a genuine ad.
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#77I often get a "verify you are not a bot" these days, which just needlessly wastes my time (because I need to click on something, and this in turn takes away seconds; multiply this like x50 per day and that's a time waster, now I need an extension to disable this crap check). So I am biased here. Most people will say "yay, it is great you waste the time of AI bots via ads!". Well, I already think ads should not exist…
I get this so often too. And on so many websites, the verify your are a bot comes back after what feels like only a few minutes.
Combined with how slow modern website are, I feel a sense of dread opening any website. Asking an LLM feels lower friction... but at what cost...
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#78Probably 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.
Kids love honey. That's why parents love Honey Nugs.
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#79Probably 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.
>Whoa, that's a lot of output you've generated; you should stop for some Brawndo, its what plants crave
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
"We've been going at it for some time now -- why don't we take a break? And you must be hungry -- I can recommend a great place..." Yep, only a matter of time.
The other day I pasted two links into ChatGPT, both different brands of the same appliance. One was $50, the other $200. I asked to compare the differences. It ended up recommending and linking me to an entirely different one, that I hadn't linked to at all. Don't know if it was just sloppy LLM "thinking," or a genuine ad.
The naive assumption would simply be it took up a prominent position in it's training data for arbitrary reasons. If I were some Marketing genius, I'd be asking the LLM makers if they need free training data and solicit brands to contribute.