Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

kaveland.no

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 346 posts

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#231

Post by jandrese »

usefulcat wrote: post #221
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-…

> It's very possible that they never will, that instead the advertising will be so subtle nobody will be able to detect it. I was going to write a rebuttal to this, about how more subtle forms of advertising are likely not very effective, and then I remembered subliminal advertising. It's largely been banned (I think), but probably only because it's relatively easy to define and very easy to identify. In the case of…

Yeah, the laws against subliminal advertising were written in a rather knee jerk reaction to the creepiness of the entire concept instead of as a result of careful study and analysis.

How effective is it? We don't know, but there is nothing of potential value to lose so nobody really cared. Just ban it and move on.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#233

Post by username223 »

rustcleaner wrote: post #226
username223 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 impossib…

I have a solution: search engine which uses machine learning to score the "commercialness" of a page. By commercialness, I mean: is it a table of products with prices; does it have buy buttons; does it use a lot of tracking and analytics; does it have a cart; is there a lot of product talk (and is it overbiased positively); how are all the pages within a couple link-degrees scoring; ... (and more). Then, give users a…

I use uBlacklist to get rid of Expert Sexchange and similar low-quality sites in search results, and it seems to work well enough.

An "advanced mode" supporting literal keywords (with and without stemming) and boolean operators wouldn't cost the search companies anything. I think supporting regexp search would be hard: do you search your index for fixed substrings and expand around them? I'm not a search person...

I don't think you'd need much in the way of machine learning to filter out the spam. There are relatively few third-party display ad servers and affiliate networks, and those are the main lazy ways to make money. There's no need to filter out all commercial content; just getting rid of the "passive income" bros would be enough.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#234

Post by bjt »

lblume wrote: post #106
dragonwriter wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The instant we see ads in LLMs we will stop using them But what if you don't see distinct ads? LLM advertising can just be paid-for bias in the generated content.

Moreover, the bias could be arbitrarily subtle. This is something that really worries me about black box AI systems.

What marketing department on earth is going to pay for an ad campaign so subtle that they can't even tell if it's running?

Ad budgets aren't bottomless. People making decisions about them have a lot of options for where to spend. They want provable attribution so they can tell which channel is giving them the most bang for the buck. If that exists, then the ads will be discernible.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#235

Post by insane_dreamer »

I think it's a bit naive to think that companies like OpenAI will be content with their monthly user subscription fees and not seek to monetize their content through ads. Yahoo and Google didn't have ads either at the beginning (neither did Facebook or Instagram). And the reason why Google became the dominant tech company aka money-maker it is today is because of Adwords.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#236

Post by yuck39 »

Xss3 wrote: post #139
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…

Ai is in its early youtube phase. Everyone loves that it's free and adfree and that its algorithm's primary purpose is to serve relevant content not profitable content, everyone knows it can't stay that way, and we are all waiting for the enshittification to kick in on the march to profitability. The question is, will AI chat or search ever be profitable? What enshittification will happen on that road? Will AIs be in…

Many of the traditional SEO players are now figuring out how to game the system to get their customers to show up more frequently in LLM responses.

Once the pressure to turn a profit is high enough the big players surely won't just leave that money on the table.

The scary part is that even if we end up paying for "ad-free" LLM services how do we really know if it is ad-free? Traditional services are (usually) pretty clear on what is an ad and what isn't. I wouldn't necessarily know if raid shadow legends really is the greatest game of all time or if the model had been tuned to say that it is.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#237

Post by cgriswald »

karaterobot wrote: post #199
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 agree they'd love to do that in theory, and it seems technically feasible. What gives me hope on that front is that marketers and advertisers (let alone the companies that pay them) have never shown the slightest capacity for that level of subtlety. The most sophisticated adtech today, produced by networks of massive data collection and analysis, ultimately just tries to shove as many loud, disruptive ads in your f…

I've noticed this even with product placement in film and television. It's not enough that Super Agent X drives a Palmora Targon, they just have to pan, zoom, tilt the camera to include a shot of the Palmora logo perfectly centered in frame for a few seconds as the car careens off a cliff. I'm only surprised the protagonist isn't also talking about how well the car has served him with its as he laments its loss while he parachutes to safety.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#238

Post by jeffbee »

There is a good article scattered within this article, but unfortunately it is hard to take seriously when it claims to be based on "research" entitled "Is Google Getting Worse" which is one of the most misleading papers of the last few years. That's the title and everyone just closes the tab. University researchers have proved that Google is getting worse! There was a paper! But the problem with the paper is that none of the search results it evaluates are from Google.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#239

Post by autoexec »

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…

> As a user it's a great free ride though. Maybe there IS such a thing as a free lunch after all!

if you consider the massive environmental harm AI has and continues to cause, the people whose work has been stolen to create it, the impacts on workers and salaries, and the abuses AI enables that free lunch starts looking more expensive.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#240

Post by autoexec »

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.

It it makes them money, businesses will do it even if it is outright illegal
Post reply on HN