71–80 of 346 posts
> 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…
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.
The current search engines really feel like a librarian who's always trying to sell you something. I just want to find a simple answer, but I keep getting led to all kinds of other pages. I believe if search engines were more like public libraries, focused on providing information rather than recommending things for commercial reasons, the experience would be so much better.
So why aren't real libraries like this? Can you fund the internet the same way?
I'm not aware of any advertising funded libraries although I'm sure the idea has been considered. I think that in the physical world the cost per visitor in a library is probably too high for such a funding model to be successful. Also the library is not typically visited by the highest value advertising targets limiting the amount which can be raised this way. I think these are probably the real reason why real libraries aren't like this!
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.
Some curious misconceptions here about how the search industry works. There's a very strong financial incentive for ad-powered search engines to keep SEO spam out of search results, because that makes advertisers more willing to pay for search placement. A publicly run search engine would not have those incentives and would be at if anything graver risk of a "tragedy of the commons" type scenario where the engine is…
This reeks of “communism is when capitalism” to me, because: >A publicly run search engine would not have those incentives and would be at if anything graver risk of a "tragedy of the commons" type scenario where the engine is overtaken with spam. But then how come that is exactly what is happening with modern search engines? It’s just always advertising that comes along and fucks up a good thing.
Because Google runs Google Search, it's instead only bad because profit motivates Google to push its services, increase ad impressions/interactions and incentivize users to not actually leave the search engine result page (e.g. by citing or summarizing content of the related web pages on the result page).
And because competition is good that means Google actively competing with the sites it indexes for the attention of its users is a good thing even if those sites losing out and failing would result in worse search results over time.
Hang on, maybe "content stealing" really already was a problem before LLMs made it their entire MO and those greedy newspaper publishers were onto something when they complained about Google lifting their news feeds even if it provided "exposure" for them.
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 as a free lunch after all!
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…
> 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…
> how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into the training data You're so right. it's not an if anymore, but when. and when it does, you wouldn't know what's an ad and what isn't. In recent years i started noticing a correlation between alcohol consumption and movies. I couldn't help but notice how many of the movies I've seen in the past few years promote alcohol and try to correlate it with the good…