The biggest tell for me lately is that if you ask ChatGPT about products or even specific items on Amazon, it will only return links to companies that partner with OpenAI. None of the companies they currently partner (affiliate link basically) with are ones I prefer to buy from. It has made ChatGPT way less useful for this kind of research now. I certainly have reasons to distrust all their shopping links.
Advertising and marketing kills humanity, these should be among the first industries that AI eliminates; kinda getting mixed messages here. You'd think the tech that supposedly is going to make money and all work irrelevant could figure out a way to make money without resorting to being yet another mechanism to deliver ads.
No it doesn't. Please stope the hyperbole. Its literally just advertisements and people have the agency to choose to buy products.
I would argue for "greater", and from that it rather naturally follows that advertisement and marketing indeed kills humanity.
It doesn't take a high intelligence to perceive the problem.
Humans must dramatically modify their environment to thrive.
What they want: human modification of the environment to entirely stop.
Human regression is actually what they're after.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46640744, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46641035, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46644216, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46645814
What someone thinks of marketing & advertising will almost always tell you what they think of the intelligence of the typical person. Once you realize that, you realize it's merely a bias that someone is arguing from, that they think most everybody else is a moron and should be deprived of their individual liberty (for their own safety).
and to be fair the industry doesn't need to be banned, just heavily regulated, fully transparent, and there should be exponential consequences for their lies (such as, claiming cigarettes are healthy while knowing they're addictive and cause cancer; anyone involved in decisions like that should be in Angola growing tobacco for 13 cents an hour.)
- they are using android
- google maps
- youtube
Not to mention Waymo and LLM's literally came out of Google. Google will go down as one of the most important institutions in the last 100 years.
Everyone who works at chatgpt has blood on their hands
It was not designed that way, so they had to specifically do extra things to make it not that way.
This is like saying that python is designed to be slow and linking to a post about speeding up the python interpreter as evidence
The reality is that psychologically manipulating people into buying things by forcing yourself as a middleman into every business transaction and industry on the planet is not just morally despicable, but opportunistic, exploitative, and many other negative descriptors I can't quite put into words.
But this isn't even the truly insidious and harmful part. That is reserved for the fact that the same systems used to get people to consume, are also used to manipulate them into thinking and acting in ways that someone, somewhere, could potentially benefit from. So anyone with a negligible amount of resources and effort has the ability to influence individuals, groups of people, societies, and entire countries, to buy into their agenda by pushing their propaganda. After all, modern advertising uses the same propaganda tactics pioneered by the likes of E. Bernays a century ago.
It should be clear to any sane adult that this psychological manipulation is directly responsible for the corruption of democratic processes and sociopolitical instability we've seen around the world for the past decade+.
And then, if all this wasn't enough, these advertising leeches are doing this by violating digital rights, abusing our privacy, corrupting every entertainment experience, and utilizing every nasty trick they can legally get away with to steal our data, and get rich from it via dark data broker markets in perpetuity.
So, please, spare me the bullshit excuse that this is "just" advertising, and that it's a public good that helps poor small businesses reach customers. Catalogs and contextual advertising have existed for decades, but that wasn't enough for these greedy bastards. Humanity is objectively far worse off because of this, and the adtech industry has played a huge role in making it happen. Everyone who has worked on this tech should be ashamed of themselves, even though I'm sure they don't think twice about it, and enjoy the sight of their bank account statements.
The similarity between advertising and cancer are striking, see the post Advertising is a cancer on society: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20577142
This is all putting aside the fact that %99.9 of all advertising works by exploiting the familiarity circuit in the human brain. The effects of advertising are, by definition, not voluntary. See Ads just work, no matter what you think: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18399633
If the purpose of %99.9 of advertising was not exploiting the familiarity circuit and was instead to make you aware of a product you didn't know about before, there wouldn't be a single ad of Coca-Cola, since everybody on the planet knows about it already.
Also, my mom literally buys whatever she sees playing on YouTube ads that week. I know because I see those ads too. You'd be surprised how many people are going through life with undiagnosed or untreated ADHD and how many further lack cognitive agency.
Thats not efficient.
Searching does not require advertising or word of mouth. Word of mouth is not inefficient either in a world with internet, the person telling you about a product likely saw it and purchased it online already.
It is working as intended - if you want attention, you gotta pay for it. How else would it work? Charity?
But the most charitable view is that even AGI needs cost recovery. Ads are the way you do this for people who aren't willing or able to pay with money.
For better or worse, OpenAI exists in the context of a capitalist system. It has to be competitive in that arena to attract and retain investment, staff, etc. Revenue always ends up being part of the "mission".
Did you really expect a corporation to be transparent and consistent with their messaging? It should be obvious by now that the word "open" in their name is pure marketing.
I'm surprised it took them this long to jump on the advertising money train. I wouldn't be surprised if they were already monetizing this in the background, and only decided to make it public now.
What if the salesman said knowingly lied about his tractors? or poisoned the farmer's mules to influence him towards buying one? That'd be on the scale of evil, right?
If we apply that kind of thinking to chat LLMs, it means instead of getting the most relevant tokens, you'll be shown the most profitable tokens. Maybe the most relevant tokens will be below the fold (like unpaid search results) now.
I would disagree, because without the advertising there probably would be no Google.
We will remember this moment of LLM usage for the years to come as we are irreparably spun by advertisers in our most intimate and private 1:1 conversations with these AIs
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Incidentally, I just saw on Show HN an AI SEO tool [1], wonder if OpenAI will also include similar features in their ad platform. Maybe we'll just type in our questions and it'll spit out stats and graphs itself, now that is more likely.
The unspoken part -- This holds true so long as revenue is at least equal to costs, and speaks nothing about whether user trust and user experience is optimized over profit.
Threads introduced ads and almost no-one cared. This will be the exact same result.
If you don't want the ads, then pay $8 for ChatGPT Go.
"In the coming weeks, we’re also planning to start testing ads in the U.S. for the free and Go tiers, so more people can benefit from our tools with fewer usage limits or without having to pay."
I don't see why I should believe this.
Expect all other LLM vendors to follow soon. If they don't, they will lose.
Then you move to the paid plan, then they move ads to the paid plan, then you move to the premium-extra plan, etc.
How would advertisers know whether OpenAI even applied the ad to the paid for number of people's conversations, I don't know.