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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

#211

Post by sumtechguy »

joegibbs wrote: post #144
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 think subliminal advertising is banned in quite a few countries - not sure about the US - so it might be a problem internationally. I know that here in Australia there was a big scare about it in the mid 2000s, some station was cutting 100ms ads into shows. Not sure about the efficacy of it though, I’m sure it would be better if you watched a whole ad.

Edward Bernays created a method to get people to buy/hate/like things. It is used all the time. Its manipulative and shockingly effective. You will never see it coming. It is used all the time on everyone for any plethora of subjects. Subliminal advertising while mildly effective can not hold a candle to the Edward Barnays method of selling.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#212

Post by jiveturkey »

sheiyei wrote: post #104
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…

YET.

I would wager that the most prevalent use of AI today is to sell you ads. Whether through market analysis, campaign analysis, content optimization, and content generation.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#213

Post by troyvit »

marcosdumay wrote: post #207
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…

Yes, the question everybody awake is asking is how long until all the LLM corporate initiatives die? Because as useful as those things can be, they just can't do enough to justify that cost. But there are free (to copy) ones, and smaller ones. And while those were built from the large, expensive models, it's not clear if people won't find a way to keep them sustainable. We have at minimum gained a huge body of knowle…

> We have at minimum gained a huge body of knowledge on "how to talk like people" that will stay there forever for researchers to use.

This is spot on. I think we'll be able to capitalize on other talents of "AI" once we recognize the big shift is done happening. It's like five years after the Louisiana Purchase: we have a bunch of new resources but we've barely catalogued them, let alone begun to exploit them.

> how long until all the LLM corporate initiatives die?

Sooner than I personally thought, and I place a lot of that with Apple's. They've led the way in hardware that supports LLMs, and I believe (hope?) they'll eventually wipe out most hosted chat-based products, leaving the corporate players to build APIs and embedded products for search, tech support, images, etc. The massive amounts of capital going into OpenAI, Anthropic, etc., will ebb as consumer demand falls.

I hope for this because the question I keep asking is, how can our energy infrastructure sustain the huge demand AI companies have without pushing us even further into a climate catastrophe?

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#214

Post by username223 »

myself248 wrote: post #10
gerdesj wrote: post #8

I am deliberately keeping away from LLMs for search. I'm old enough to remember finally ditching Altavista for the new upstart Google. I did briefly flirt with Ask Jeeves but it was not good enough. I don't think anyone has it sorted yet. LLM search will always be flawed due to being a next token guesser - it cannot be trusted for "facts". A LLM fact is not even a considered opinion, it is simply next token guessing.…

I miss Altavista every day. Case-sensitive search is how you tell DOS from DoS. Putting "exact phrases" in quotes no longer seems to work. Then they added insult to injury by forcing you to +mandate a term otherwise they might just ignore it. Now that no longer works either. I've entirely given up on Google. I've made extensive shortcuts so I can directly search various sites straight from my location bar: wikipedia,…

> Putting "exact phrases" in quotes no longer seems to work. Then they added insult to injury by forcing you to +mandate a term otherwise they might just ignore it. Now that no longer works either.

I don't understand why they got rid of these escape hatches. Sometimes I want the "top" pages containing precisely the text I enter -- no stemming, synonyms, etc. Maybe it shouldn't be the default, but why make it impossible?

In my ideal search world, there would also be an option to eliminate any page with a display ad or affiliate link. Sometimes I only want the pages that aren't trying to make money off of me.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#215

Post by beAbU »

willvarfar wrote: post #124
graemep wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The tech part makes a in-the-public-interest search engine and AI. Which will be provided by a private sector contractor and it goes to the lowest bidder who offsets their costs with advertising.

hey! it's my dream, and in my dream world it would be commissioned from academia :)

I hope the academia of your dreams create code that is not like real-world academia :)

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#216

Post by sandy_coyote »

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-…

This is credible simply because this is how advertising works. Product placement, free products for celebs, modern life awash in images that make us desire things.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#217

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

>Yet these days I find that I often can no longer convince the search engine to give me what I want, even when I know it exists and can describe the shape in detail. These days, I find that I am using multiple search engines and often resort to using an LLM to help me find content.

A couple months ago, I spent a week or two writing some shell scripts to exhaustively mine one of those pdf hosting companies, looking for digital copies of Paste magazine. I only became aware that they might still exist after having spent at least a week trudging through Wayback Machine's archives of the old Paste website. I think I managed to get 8 or 9 issues total.

Search is dead. There was a time when I could probably have found those with a careful Google search in under an hour.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#218

Post by rustcleaner »

sumtechguy wrote: post #211
joegibbs wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think subliminal advertising is banned in quite a few countries - not sure about the US - so it might be a problem internationally. I know that here in Australia there was a big scare about it in the mid 2000s, some station was cutting 100ms ads into shows. Not sure about the efficacy of it though, I’m sure it would be better if you watched a whole ad.

Edward Bernays created a method to get people to buy/hate/like things. It is used all the time. Its manipulative and shockingly effective. You will never see it coming. It is used all the time on everyone for any plethora of subjects. Subliminal advertising while mildly effective can not hold a candle to the Edward Barnays method of selling.

Meme magic, is what I call it. Like how the stage magician moves whole islands for the crowd, TV magicians move whole populations by changing their internal representative models of reality.

This is the machine that magicians program for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo_e0EvEZn8

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#219

Post by schmidtleonard »

kristianc wrote: post #119
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

That wasn’t out of benevolence, that’s because they hadn’t discovered the ads business model yet. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle now.

They always knew.

> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.

- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#220

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

sph wrote: post #61
reubenmorais wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has been working on auctioning token-level influence during LLM generation for years now: https://research.google/blog/mechanism-design-for-large-lang...

Google: ruining their core product for that sweet ad money.

Google's core product has always been advertisement. They sell advertisements to companies looking to advertise, and they bring in tens of billions in revenue from that business. In effect, their core product is you: they're selling your eyeballs.

If the bait that they used to bring you to them so they could sell your eyeballs has finally started to rot and stink, then why do people continue to be attracted by it? You claim they've ruined their core product, but it still works as intended, never mind that you've confused what their products actually are.

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