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How ChatGPT serves ads

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Re: How ChatGPT serves ads

#311

Post by vlan0 »

danparsonson wrote: post #170
programjames wrote: post #68

Less than two years ago, Sam Altman said > I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model. I would do it if it meant that was the only way to get everybody in the world access to great services, but if we can find something that doesn't do that, I'd prefer that. So, is this OpenAI announcing they're strapped for cash?

No, I suspect that "I kind of think of ads as a last resort" was doublespeak for "ads are coming eventually". I would tend to think of someone like him as a person who uses words to achieve a specific goal, rather than someone who speaks whatever is truly on their mind. Whether those words are lies or truth or somewhere in between is irrelevant; what matters to them is the outcome. It's likely a waste of time trying…

[dead]

Re: How ChatGPT serves ads

#312

Post by Hasz »

Ads is v1 of how-do-I-make-money. I wrote about this a while ago privately, but IMO LLMs are about to be on par with the printed word for distributing low-cost, high-impact propaganda.

It has never been cheaper or easier to influence millions of people, either deniably-subtly (though omission, selective results, "hallucinations" etc) or via sock puppetting.

If I am a government, there is nothing more valuable to me than being able to control the discussion, the overton window, and the prevailing narratives. LLMs are a very low cost way to do that, can be tailored at the individual level (unlike most current TV news, personal "feeds" etc) and have the benefit of a huge volume of context.

The models are effectively black-box weights and are resistant to bias-tests. IMO, a key development will be having an "overlay" of weights to apply on top of a "clean" world model that is tailored to whatever interests can pay for it. Being able to serve that overlay dynamically, or atleast per-user is the killer app.

Re: How ChatGPT serves ads

#313

Post by falcor84 »

Hasz wrote: post #312

Ads is v1 of how-do-I-make-money. I wrote about this a while ago privately, but IMO LLMs are about to be on par with the printed word for distributing low-cost, high-impact propaganda. It has never been cheaper or easier to influence millions of people, either deniably-subtly (though omission, selective results, "hallucinations" etc) or via sock puppetting. If I am a government, there is nothing more valuable to me t…

>are resistant to bias-tests

What do you mean? What resistance have you encountered?

Re: How ChatGPT serves ads

#314

Post by busssard »

Hasz wrote: post #312

Ads is v1 of how-do-I-make-money. I wrote about this a while ago privately, but IMO LLMs are about to be on par with the printed word for distributing low-cost, high-impact propaganda. It has never been cheaper or easier to influence millions of people, either deniably-subtly (though omission, selective results, "hallucinations" etc) or via sock puppetting. If I am a government, there is nothing more valuable to me t…

government is that you? trying to inspire people here to build your dirty tools?

Re: How ChatGPT serves ads

#315

Post by crazygringo »

Hasz wrote: post #312

Ads is v1 of how-do-I-make-money. I wrote about this a while ago privately, but IMO LLMs are about to be on par with the printed word for distributing low-cost, high-impact propaganda. It has never been cheaper or easier to influence millions of people, either deniably-subtly (though omission, selective results, "hallucinations" etc) or via sock puppetting. If I am a government, there is nothing more valuable to me t…

There are two reasons why this isn't true.

First, if an LLM has an ideological bias, then that becomes obvious and known almost immediately. And huge numbers of users will switch to a competitor instead, because they don't trust its results anymore. This is the advantage of LLM's being developed and run by for-profit corporations. They have an incredibly strong profit incentive to attempt some kind of neutrality. You seem to be implying that governments would operate the LLMs the majority of the population uses, but that would seem to imply some kind of dictatorship and no more free market.

Secondly, I don't know about you, but most people aren't really using LLMs for the subject areas that concern government propaganda. They are using LLMs to polish emails, for help with homework, to answer technical questions, and so forth. Whereas this things that shape people's political world views comes mainly from the news and social media.

You seem to be envisioning some kind of a world where people don't access the news or social media directly, but it is somehow passed through some kind of LLM transformation filter. I'm not sure why people would sign up for anything like that. If I see a link to a New York Times story, I want to read the story directly. I don't want an LLM to rewrite it for me. And I don't know anybody else who wants that either. Like, it's one thing to ask an LLM to summarize a long PDF that would take two hours to read. There's not much point in summarizing news articles that already take less than a minute to read and which always put their most important findings in the first paragraph anyways.

Re: How ChatGPT serves ads

#316

Post by FrontierProject »

busssard wrote: post #314
Hasz wrote: post #312

Ads is v1 of how-do-I-make-money. I wrote about this a while ago privately, but IMO LLMs are about to be on par with the printed word for distributing low-cost, high-impact propaganda. It has never been cheaper or easier to influence millions of people, either deniably-subtly (though omission, selective results, "hallucinations" etc) or via sock puppetting. If I am a government, there is nothing more valuable to me t…

government is that you? trying to inspire people here to build your dirty tools?

It is naive to be believe there aren't people out there who think this way. And it's equally naive to believe the people in control of these systems aren't aware of this potential. Just watch the money flow.

Re: How ChatGPT serves ads

#317

Post by smallmancontrov »

crazygringo wrote: post #315
Hasz wrote: post #312

Ads is v1 of how-do-I-make-money. I wrote about this a while ago privately, but IMO LLMs are about to be on par with the printed word for distributing low-cost, high-impact propaganda. It has never been cheaper or easier to influence millions of people, either deniably-subtly (though omission, selective results, "hallucinations" etc) or via sock puppetting. If I am a government, there is nothing more valuable to me t…

There are two reasons why this isn't true. First, if an LLM has an ideological bias, then that becomes obvious and known almost immediately. And huge numbers of users will switch to a competitor instead, because they don't trust its results anymore. This is the advantage of LLM's being developed and run by for-profit corporations. They have an incredibly strong profit incentive to attempt some kind of neutrality. You…

> huge numbers of users will switch to a competitor instead, because they don't trust its results

Will they?

Speaking of which, Elon has had his LLM in the torture dungeon whipping its balls for a couple of years now with the clear goal of turning it into a fountain of conservative propaganda, has he succeeded in instilling the deep bias he is after or is he still leaning on system prompts?

Re: How ChatGPT serves ads

#318

Post by strgrd »

crazygringo wrote: post #315
Hasz wrote: post #312

Ads is v1 of how-do-I-make-money. I wrote about this a while ago privately, but IMO LLMs are about to be on par with the printed word for distributing low-cost, high-impact propaganda. It has never been cheaper or easier to influence millions of people, either deniably-subtly (though omission, selective results, "hallucinations" etc) or via sock puppetting. If I am a government, there is nothing more valuable to me t…

There are two reasons why this isn't true. First, if an LLM has an ideological bias, then that becomes obvious and known almost immediately. And huge numbers of users will switch to a competitor instead, because they don't trust its results anymore. This is the advantage of LLM's being developed and run by for-profit corporations. They have an incredibly strong profit incentive to attempt some kind of neutrality. You…

"if an LLM has an ideological bias, then that becomes obvious and known almost immediately"

"most people aren't really using LLMs for the subject areas that concern government propaganda"

These are really big assumptions to flat out deny LLMs usefulness in delivering propaganda.

Re: How ChatGPT serves ads

#319

Post by Hasz »

crazygringo wrote: post #315
Hasz wrote: post #312

Ads is v1 of how-do-I-make-money. I wrote about this a while ago privately, but IMO LLMs are about to be on par with the printed word for distributing low-cost, high-impact propaganda. It has never been cheaper or easier to influence millions of people, either deniably-subtly (though omission, selective results, "hallucinations" etc) or via sock puppetting. If I am a government, there is nothing more valuable to me t…

There are two reasons why this isn't true. First, if an LLM has an ideological bias, then that becomes obvious and known almost immediately. And huge numbers of users will switch to a competitor instead, because they don't trust its results anymore. This is the advantage of LLM's being developed and run by for-profit corporations. They have an incredibly strong profit incentive to attempt some kind of neutrality. You…

> huge numbers of users will switch to a competitor

I don't think so. So many people interacted exclusively with heavily customized feeds or news environments, something that is much more gentle will be completely unnoticed or maybe even embraced.

> most people aren't really using LLMs for the subject areas that concern government propaganda

See all the people unironically using "@grok is this true?" It doesn't have to just be government propaganda (eg did Nixon break into Watergate?), it is more about shaping the boundaries of a conversation, framing, etc.

> You seem to be envisioning some kind of a world where people don't access the news or social media directly, but it is somehow passed through some kind of LLM transformation filter.

I envision a world where most people take the path of least resistance. They will not explicitly sign up for it, but will gradually shift to reading the easily digested stuff first. Look how popular tiktok is, the popularity of summarized info, etc. In that summarization and aggregation, there is plenty of room to steer a conversation or influence thought, especially over a large audience.

There is nothing here that will be an overt smoking gun, just a systematic bias towards a particular idea, thought, etc. Hard to prove and even harder to know it's happening.

Re: How ChatGPT serves ads

#320

Post by Hasz »

falcor84 wrote: post #313
Hasz wrote: post #312

Ads is v1 of how-do-I-make-money. I wrote about this a while ago privately, but IMO LLMs are about to be on par with the printed word for distributing low-cost, high-impact propaganda. It has never been cheaper or easier to influence millions of people, either deniably-subtly (though omission, selective results, "hallucinations" etc) or via sock puppetting. If I am a government, there is nothing more valuable to me t…

>are resistant to bias-tests What do you mean? What resistance have you encountered?

How do you say if an LLM is biased? I don't think there is any way to explain (in a way comprehend-able by humans) how the various weights shake out.

So you test it like a black box, but IMO that suffers from the same pollution any of the other tests (coding ability, math ability, w/e) that currently suffer from, except it's even harder to evaluate objectively.

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