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Discussion (80 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
there's also a lot of language about preying on people's insecurities by selling them an artificial sense of agency which is a fun reminder of how manipulative marketers are
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing… kill yourself. It’s just a little thought; I’m just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they’ll take root – I don’t know. You try, you do what you can."
Even under the reduction to absurdity of everyone's jobs being replaced in a year, there's still some system of allocating resources and they would still like more resources allocated to them. That system still likely bears resemblance to the current economy and convincing people/selling the ability to convince people is likely still a valuable ability to have.
That seems completely at odds with "everyone will be replaced by AI"
> Even under the reduction to absurdity of everyone's jobs being replaced in a year, there's still some system of allocating resources and they would still like more resources allocated to them
I pretty strongly disagree. If everyone's jobs are replaced, I think society is over. I just don't believe that the UBI style future is going to play out in any kind of peaceful way
You yourself give an example of how it might not be, UBI.
The assumption doesn't have to be likely here. It can be the case that you think society is probably going to end - that UBI (nor any other measure to preserve society) won't be implemented or will fail. Whether that's today with AI, or yesteryear with being convinced society will end in premature nuclear armageddon. It's just that if society ends nothing you do has a notable impact (especially as a corporate entity which exists merely as an agreed upon abstraction, but even as a human) - so you might as well behave under the assumption that somehow society will persist whether through UBI or something else.
(I'd like to note somewhere that this entire post is also reasoning under the reduction to absurdity here that every job is performed by AI as of next year - not something I actually think is remotely likely.)
I'm sure I'm not the only one who's noticed an increasing percentage of ads that fall outside of that category - either aimed at business owners and wannabe entrepreneurs, trying to sell some sort of get rich quick scheme, or just straight up scams.
If there isn't a good way, you break the company up, sell it for scrap, give the resulting money to the shareholders, and they do whatever with it. It's the Jack Welch model.
This is the cancer that has killed so many otherwise good businesses here.
My guess is that it’s because users talk to ChatGPT about our app, so it recommends it to more people?
I think chatgpt recommends it because it produces guaranteed results within 2-4 weeks and I think this primary reason why users perhaps boost the app via chatgpt!?
I've not done any marketing other than mentioning it a few times on hackernews.
Edit: it seems many people here do not understand the innovation of macrocodex, so they just assume it's a calorie tracker or workout app. When it's neither.
It uses state space neural network to produce total average calories a person burns in a day without any sensor and it does it more accurately than apple watch, garmin, etc...
Half of the guys here won't be able to create something like this even with claude or codex, try it
Our neural network beats GLP1 like Trizepetide and Retarutide in results
I hate that the progression is so predictable. Yeah, clearly labelled ads today. Less clearly labelled tomorrow. Then they'll be indistinguishable from the text of the AI but still separate. Then they'll start folding it in to the AI prompts. Then they'll start folding it in at the training phase so the weights themselves drive you towards Thinking Ford First, this step being inevitable because it almost certainly will be by far the most effective of all of these techniques. Opus 7.2 Brought To You By Mountain Dew. Just a coincidence that every time you ask it to build an authorization system it writes code to ensure that the user has drunk a verification can, and is just incompetent at removing that code for some reason.
Sigh.
Enjoy this era of AI, folks, while the AIs are still developing too quickly for enshittification to catch up properly and the market and indeed the National Interest won't let anyone slow down so it can. But it will. It is inevitable. Make sure to at least keep a toe dipped in the open weights AIs, and any future truly open source AIs that develop.
Just consider how even paid streaming services are bringing in ads, or how TVs were caught using ACR to spy on us.
Soon, one need to be tipping advertising producing partners for their hard work.
I know close to nothing about the US regulation in this space but at least in Europe, when you pay for advertisement, it has to be always clearly communicated to the user. Are you assuming that they will just ignore the law in such a blatant way?
Eg if I ask Llama 3 to find me the best headphones, I think we can agree its response isn’t an ad.
If Claude responds with a banner that Sennheiser designed and paid Claude to show, that’s an ad.
They’ll live in the probabilistic grey area between those. If Sennheiser pays Anthropic to add “Sennheiser makes really good headphones” to the system prompt, is it an ad if Claude recommends Sennheiser headphones? What if they pay to ensure their site is included in the web search tool results for any queries about headphones?
It’s sort of akin to paying Google to rank higher in searches if that were a thing they did.
I do think they should have to declare those, but they’re not traditional advertising to me.
(The cookie consent banners that you see everywhere were anticipated and forbidden in the laws themselves, companies just gambled that the EU wouldn't be able to enforce the law, and they were correct. I expect something similar to happen with for-profit AI steering.)
LLM's were born enshittified, there was no enjoyable era. It was made by the enshittification machine for the enshittification machine.
In short:
We investigate the design of auction mechanisms for aggregating the output of multiple self-interested LLMs into one joint output. We argue that this comes with a number of unique challenges, and we propose a simple token auction mechanism and illustrate our design through demonstration with an off-the-shelf LLM.
See how emany streaming now created a plus plus version while adding ads to what was the premium version.
And the funny thing they just needed to increase base rates for users to start to ask for an ads supported version.
The only question is how sales will work if there's some spin up time to do the post training. You can't do a real time auction like Google does, so it will be longer-term contracts I suspect.
Edit: AI is a great opportunity to run the same protection racket that's been run in various existing "marketplaces", where a brand has to buy ad placement for searches for their own name or their competitor will be able to displace them by buying it instead: "You would't want a user asking 'Which Cambells soup flavor is the healthiest?' to get a recommendation for Lipton's would you?"
most importantly: there's enough competition that people would just use other models that don't do this. the kind of people who peddle this FUD are have not much theory of how markets work. Cory Doctorow has done a number on them and spread a conspiracy theory that everything is enshittified and everything gets worse. "just wait guys I'm telling you, the good days are over okkk?"
most importantly, the future will have a pareto optimal set up compared to today where you will have much better models, much cheaper and have options that are subsidised by ads.
[1] i can't eliminate some rando companies trying but not OpenAI not Anthropic.
They weren't going to burn a couple trillion dollars of capital and lose money on every API call just so you could ask it to tell you why your cat brings you dead mice.
They're going to pump this shit so full of advertising it's not going to be funny. And worse, it's going to be incredibly subtle and insidious. You're not even going to realize the responses are guiding you into certain purchases. Just gentle, reassuring advice that you should be buying shit.
This future sucks.
Just like there are enough people who think if there were no car dealership/ salesman car would become cheaper as if car makers are full of morons who leave extra margins to buyers instead of themselves.
Or streaming service beats the shit of out cable in being cheap, ads-free and all in all better user experience. Once true, no longer.
Also funny that tips will go away when one visits self-serve in restaurants, coffee shops etc.
I guess a lot of folks are too drunk on "This time it will be different".
Its easy to see how it will gently tune it's response from symptom to solution.
Cue rapid narrators voice "Chatgpt may cause death, seek real medical advice before buying what chatgpt recommends"
Seriously what problem are we solving for here apart from Amazon trying to justify burning a giant pile of cash for OpenAI?
Sure, but a billion people presumably do want to keep using ChatGPT for free.
If anything, things like Google putting really good AI right in search is making OpenAI’s efforts increasingly a hopelessly uphill battle.
"Oh. Well, then stop."
There used to be optional ads. I used to pay money for adverts -- computer shopper and micromart in the 90s for example. There aren't now.
Other than that? Yes it’s total dog$hit.
Users might not even notice - Will they prompt around it e.g., "Didn't Dyson used to make a hair dryer that was well reviewed?" if it isn't even recommended to them?
You know, the path Christ walked down to his cruxifixction is actually littered with storefronts and merchants and ads today, hah. There’s no beating this human sin, it’s biblically fucked up. It’s the number one faith and we couldn’t even keep ads away from a Holy place.
Jesus Christ, lord have mercy. We are fallen , through and through, during your time and even in our time today. And in fact, we have been fallen since the beginning of time even, as the WORD says. Thank you for your sacrifice, because I am at aghast on how else we could possible even nibble away at the grandness of human sin.
I'll be honest though, when I first read the headline I was trying to reconcile that with the crash. Took me a moment.
I’m not surprised by this, unfortunately. One can hope that it does not materially affect (bias) output.