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The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

kaveland.no

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Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#161

Post by manosyja »

Lu2025 wrote: post #140
Llamamoe wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very possible that they never will, that instead the advertising will be so subtle nobody will be able to detect it. Including phrases similar to what products, brands, and their actual ads use in positive contexts, sentences that don't mention but make you think of products, being just slightly likely to bring a brand up than its competitor, and a tiny bit more critical of it, etc. The goal isn't to have an ad-…

This gave me creeps. Modern tech is good an opening up new dimensions of dystopian hell.

Don’t worry, Doomguy will seal the inter-dimensional portal and kill the icon of sin

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#162

Post by zkmon »

Selling has poisoned human life. As someone who grew on a farm, with a culture that never bothered to sell anything, and never cared to impress anyone, we pitied on the pathetic business/sales people and anyone who tries to impress other through art/acts etc. The street performer such as drama artists and acrobats got some kind give-aways.

Today, I can't watch any TV without immediately realizing that every face I see on TV is forced to sell their expression and talk. They are basically selling, not expressing their true feelings. Every great movie, actor, great singer, great anchor - everyone. There is nothing natural in human interactions any more.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#163

Post by layer8 »

Llamamoe wrote: post #135
sheiyei wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YET.

It's very possible that they never will, that instead the advertising will be so subtle nobody will be able to detect it. Including phrases similar to what products, brands, and their actual ads use in positive contexts, sentences that don't mention but make you think of products, being just slightly likely to bring a brand up than its competitor, and a tiny bit more critical of it, etc. The goal isn't to have an ad-…

I’m pretty sure it would be measurable. How else would advertisers pay for it? And given that advertisers would know about it, it would also be generally known. I wager that enough people and businesses would reject it, if it isn’t outright illegal in the first place.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#164

Post by Marazan »

d_phase wrote: post #130
sheiyei wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YET.

You obviously haven't been A/B tested yet. I got very obvious advertisements in a super simple question I asked last week to ChatGPT. The question was "When was the last year it was really smokey in Canada" it answered in one paragraph, then gave me about 6 paragraphs of ads for air purifiers, masks etc. I'd guess we're only 6-12 months out from a full advertisement takeover.

The simpler explanation is that ChatGPT is trained on webpages that have been SEO'd to death.

So you are just getting SEO'd pages (i.e ads) regurgitated to you.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#165

Post by jerf »

bondarchuk wrote: post #113
karel-3d wrote: post #78

The money situation is what gives me pause with LLMs. The amount of money it's burned on this is giant; those companies will need to make so much money to have any possibility of return. The idea is that we will all spend more money on AI that we spend on phones, and we will spend it on those companies only... I don't know, it just doesn't add up. As a user it's a great free ride though. Maybe there IS such a thing a…

"It has cost a lot of money and therefore they will try very hard to make it back". I don't think it really makes sense. Companies will always try to make the maximum amount of money anyway.

Yes, but there are definitely levels of desperation. Companies confident that "somehow, it'll all work out" are quite different than "oh crap the money is gone we need revenue now". We're probably entering that transition sometimes this year.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#166

Post by Marazan »

h2zizzle wrote: post #147
9dev wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has this pesky problem of carrying almost all their eggs in one basket: The moment their ad business doesn’t work anymore, the behemoth that Google is will come down to its knees. But due to the way the company is structured, they need search to drive users to the ads, and it’s all one big mess of entangled revenue streams that can’t be touched for fear of breaking something. Now if AI turns out to be the next…

>The moment their ad business doesn’t work anymore, the behemoth that Google is will come down to its knees. Which makes it all the weirder that they seem to be intentionally sabotaging it by nerfing Search into unusability.

The slow destruction of Google search is and will continue to be revenue positive for Google right up until the point where it isn't.

Eventually they will break the "trust thermocline" in their search results and that will blow it up but on the way they'll keep making more and more money from every damaging change they make.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#167

Post by jerf »

jedbrooke wrote: post #45
boothby wrote: post #2

> These days, I find that I am using multiple search engines and often resort to using an LLM to help me find content. For a few months, I've been wondering: how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into the training data? It's trivial to add prompts encouraging product placement, but I would be completely shocked if the big players don't sell out within a year or two, and start biasing the models themse…

not quite ads in LLMS, but I had an interesting experience with google maps the other day. the directions voice said "in 100 feet, turn left at the ". Normally it would say "at the traffic light" or similar. And this wasn't some easy to miss hidden street, it was just a normal intersection. I can only hope they aren't changing the routes yet to make you drive by the highest bidder

I've had this done at a sufficient variety of different places that I don't think it's advertising.

I'm also not particularly convinced any advertisers would pay for "Hey, we're going to direct people to just drive by your establishment, in a context where they have other goals very front-and-center on their mind. We're not going to tell them about the menu or any specials or let you give any custom messages, just tell them to drive by." Advertisers would want more than just an ambient mentioning of their existence for money.

There's at least two major classes of people, which are, people who take and give directions by road names, and people who take and give directions by landmarks. In cities, landmarks are also going to generally be buildings that have businesses in them. Before the GPS era, when I had to give directions to things like my high school grad party to people who may never have been to the location it was being held in, I would always give directions in both styles, because whichever style may be dominant for you, it doesn't hurt to have the other style available to double-check the directions, especially in an era where they are non-interactive.

(Every one of us Ye Olde Fogeys have memories of trying to navigate by directions given by someone too familiar with how to get to the target location, that left out entire turns, or got street names wrong, or told you to "turn right" on to a 5-way intersection that had two rights, or told you to turn on to a road whose sign was completely obscured by trees, and all sorts of other such fun. With GPS-based directions I still occasionally make wrong turns but it's just not the same when the directions immediately update with a new route.)

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#168

Post by thaumasiotes »

krisoft wrote: post #150
JohnMakin wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s crazy on the web when you point out that google or google products used to be much better in the past someone will come out of nowhere to tell you it’s always been that way what is this instinct? anyone that’s over the age of 25 would know

> what is this instinct? "The rules were you guys weren't going to fact check." The instinct is about pointing out factual inaccuracies. What they wrote is either correct, or not. If it is not, and someone knows better they can and should point that out. If you, or some other commenter, have a fuzzy feeling that google is worse than it used to be you are free to write that. You are perfectly entitled to that opinion.…

Except that jkaptur is the one making up false statements, and then providing "citations" that contradict him. I don't think an instinct to point out inaccuracies can explain that. There would have to be inaccuracies to point out first.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#169

Post by dwighttk »

layer8 wrote: post #163
Llamamoe wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very possible that they never will, that instead the advertising will be so subtle nobody will be able to detect it. Including phrases similar to what products, brands, and their actual ads use in positive contexts, sentences that don't mention but make you think of products, being just slightly likely to bring a brand up than its competitor, and a tiny bit more critical of it, etc. The goal isn't to have an ad-…

I’m pretty sure it would be measurable. How else would advertisers pay for it? And given that advertisers would know about it, it would also be generally known. I wager that enough people and businesses would reject it, if it isn’t outright illegal in the first place.

Maybe OpenAI will just have a range of products they manufacture and push

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#170

Post by throwaway290 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #156
pcthrowaway wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember, Google also didn't have ads interspersed with their search results for over 1̶2̶ 2 years

And they were actually praised when they did start doing ads because they weren't as obtrusive as the existing heavy duty in-your-face Flash animations and they were relevant to a user. It quickly turned Google into the biggest / most valuable internet company of all time ever, and it still wasn't enough for them. I've had adblockers running for as long as I can remember so I'm blisfully unaware of how bad it is now.…

When ads are too many blame website owners, as far as I know Google does not hijack websites to put more ads.

Ads done right is the least bad way of supporting free stuff for people who don't want to pay the cost. But people with ubo punish all sites regardless of whether they do ads nicely or not.

You are right now writing in a thread about upcming future where promotion is embedded in the content so that content itself is one big ad disguised as whatever. Do you really think it's a better alternative to clearly delimited and unmistakeable ads?

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