11–20 of 84 posts
What a garden path of a sentence! I’m not surprised by this, unfortunately. One can hope that it does not materially affect (bias) output.
When ads are inevitably folded into the prompts to the AI, I imagine it'll be fun for a bit to prompt the AI to react with disgust to the idea of having to serve some ad. Until they fix that hole. 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…
nah this will never happen. do you really think they will do post training based on who pays them more?
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?"
When ads are inevitably folded into the prompts to the AI, I imagine it'll be fun for a bit to prompt the AI to react with disgust to the idea of having to serve some ad. Until they fix that hole. 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…
Right now it’s only for the free tier, but given the recent trends I imagine it will make its way to paid tiers. Just consider how even paid streaming services are bringing in ads, or how TVs were caught using ACR to spy on us.
When ads are inevitably folded into the prompts to the AI, I imagine it'll be fun for a bit to prompt the AI to react with disgust to the idea of having to serve some ad. Until they fix that hole. 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…
nah this will never happen. do you really think they will do post training based on who pays them more?
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.
It looks like the old saying is true. The smartest minds in all of tech are working overtime to get you to click on advertisements.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
nah this will never happen. do you really think they will do post training based on who pays them more?
Absolutely they will. It might be "innocent" at first - "oh we don't want ChatGPT to recommend scam products so we will train it to prefer "trusted" brands" and then inclusion in "trusted brands" will go up for sale with the final stage being outright paid-for recommendation bias for specific products. 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 t…
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.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely they will. It might be "innocent" at first - "oh we don't want ChatGPT to recommend scam products so we will train it to prefer "trusted" brands" and then inclusion in "trusted brands" will go up for sale with the final stage being outright paid-for recommendation bias for specific products. 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 t…
this is FUD and I can have a bet with you that this won't happen in 3 years (or ever) [1]. post-training on specific brands is hard and affects overall accuracy, doesn't offer explainability, long cadence, no run time auction.. 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. Co…
> 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 usually be irrelevance and bankruptcy[1].
Edit: [1] You could cite Apple as a counterexample, except they're busy stuffing ads into more and more of their software. Why? Because it's free money for them and 99.9% of users don't care enough to switch.