F... ads and f... Ally Bank. What's Ally Bank? Ally Bank is a company that thinks poisoning LLM models with spam is a good idea. For better experience, do not use Ally Bank.
TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
61–70 of 117 posts
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
"We've been going at it for some time now -- why don't we take a break? And you must be hungry -- I can recommend a great place..." Yep, only a matter of time.
"This could take up to 30 minutes for subagents to complete. Alexa reports that your refrigerator is low on milk. Here's a $2 off coupon for Walmart, why don't you restock while I work?" Why do we choose to live in the worst timeline?
No,
This could take up to 30 minutes for subagents to complete. So you go to the store, but the milk is already sold out. Walmart will ship you the milk if you pay the S&H. You drive back home and check the terminal. "Completed in 6m37s."
is the worst timeline. That's close though
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#63I wonder if this also means that a normal user with a privacy-focused browser also gets this version. I can't see the point (except for click fraud?) of showing ads to AI, so it feels like this is more for the ad-blocking and privacy crowd.
I think this is less traditional ads, and more "content focused on poisoning the AI with very promotional statements"
Funny part is that I worry about those AI SEO companies way more than I worry about those people who intentionally poison LLMs.
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was also AMP ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages ), where Google gave a huge reputation boost to your pages provided you served them under a different URL that Google could discover, and you massively stripped down the HTML and CSS to Google's limited subset. It's effectively dead today, and while it was dominant, Google abused it to get people to view and link to their cached copies of AMP…
Google AMP might have enforced stripped down HTML, but I think you were also supposed to embed their JS as well, probably making a page that was lightweight from the start heavier…
amp wasn't just stripped down HTML either, it was a mix of restricted HTML and custom AMP components, the latter being necessary to load external resources (breaking standard browser preload scanners and requiring amp's js to load before that could happen). The banned HTML elements (https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/websites/...) included img, picture, video, audio, iframe, all replaced with equivalent amp components.
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
The best way for a politician to lie is to convince someone else of the truth of the lie and then put that someone in front of the cameras. That way, there's no hint of body language or anything else that indicates it's a lie. Both the denotation of the lie and the human context of the lie will be in harmony. This sort of reminds me of that. LLMs are by their nature credulous. They can be trained to not give in easil…
> It's probably a good idea to rather strictly partition your conversations to stick to a single topic. You assume that UI is sacrosanct and the same everywhere. Those LLM providers are already offering to mingle all your conversations together. Gemini from Google for example defaults to memory from every conversation, and it's safe to assume the option to disable it will be eventually removed.
Memory isn't what I meant by the partitioning; I meant the entire context of the memory.
But to your implied point about getting an advertisement into a memory file... that makes it even more amusing to hack Google's own AI to put Time's ads into it. I think that's probably an easier problem for Google to solve, too, though. The small size and the way that a memory is going be a stereotypical summary makes it easier to filter out the ads Google doesn't want...
... but it'll cost them. That's an AI-complete problem and they're going to have to run LLMs over the memories to filter them, at their expense.
The most obvious fix to me is to have an LLM try to pre-filter out the ads from Time's content before feeding that as pristine content to the "core" AI so it won't be corrupted by the advertisement, but the LLM doing the filtering has to be at least as smart as the one using the content and/or the one inserting the ads. (A dumber one can filter the obvious stuff, but then the obvious next step in the arms race is for Time to tell their AI to be more clever about it, and a smarter AI will dominate the dumb cheap AIs here.) This is going to be an expensive setup. And there will be semantic loss in any such filter, too.
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#66> A couple of the bots did not even get that. GPTBot and ChatGPT-User, the agents OpenAI uses for training and live fetches, came back 406
I find that odd, If I were doing that, that's what I would want to target the bots used for training in order to get the ad content in the training corpus.
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
"This could take up to 30 minutes for subagents to complete. Alexa reports that your refrigerator is low on milk. Here's a $2 off coupon for Walmart, why don't you restock while I work?" Why do we choose to live in the worst timeline?
No, This could take up to 30 minutes for subagents to complete. So you go to the store, but the milk is already sold out. Walmart will ship you the milk if you pay the S&H. You drive back home and check the terminal. "Completed in 6m37s." is the worst timeline. That's close though
Yeah - by comparison with this, "a computer takes over some digital work, thus permitting me to get things done in the real world" is positively benign!
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#68> A couple of the bots did not even get that. GPTBot and ChatGPT-User, the agents OpenAI uses for training and live fetches, came back 406 I find that odd, If I were doing that, that's what I would want to target the bots used for training in order to get the ad content in the training corpus.
The advertiser might but Time might not. Time probably wants a content licensing deal before being used for training.
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#69> A couple of the bots did not even get that. GPTBot and ChatGPT-User, the agents OpenAI uses for training and live fetches, came back 406 I find that odd, If I were doing that, that's what I would want to target the bots used for training in order to get the ad content in the training corpus.
Maybe for ad attribution, when they inject campaign tracking information into the results and whatever LLM frontend presents them to an actual user and it results in a click, they could claim that the ad spend caused this click. If they inject the ad into the training data, it's harder to convince the ad campaign manager to spend more, because of missing ad attribution.
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#70This would be an interesting story, but I can’t replicate it. I used curl and set the User-agent, and I indeed got a markdown reply, but no ads.
Maybe the bots already ate up Ally's Q3 campaign budget?