Gregory's ServerYou can imagine a world where advertising is designed to trick the concierge of course, but at a certain point there's just objective data, e.g. "don't pay more for [x] because it actually comes from the same factor." If something like that could be achieved, what does it do for the ad business generally, and how do companies react?
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23 comments
 @ZachWeinersmith wouldn't be the logic next step for brands to enter a kind of auction market directly to get their product on top of the AI recommendation? That would be more efficient than going through this attention grabbing.  @gdupont @ZachWeinersmith and still ends up screwing the customer over as the answer they get isn't what they want, but whoever paid more. @oblomov @gdupont @ZachWeinersmith Yeah just bribe the AI bot. Only if the customer owns the bot does this work out for the customer. @Phosphenes @gdupont @ZachWeinersmith the bot still has to get the information from somewhere @oblomov @ZachWeinersmith isn't it what we get more or less with google ad-words auction... 😩 @ZachWeinersmith I think it's simpler than that. The AI providers will be the same kind of tech companies, and they will inject paid advertisements into the results,and then deep into model internals, just like search or product ranking on Amazon or product placement in entertainment. It will be a consumer fight, as they'll claim that the nature of the models means they can't designate those as ads separately.  @ZachWeinersmith I think you’re over-estimating the number of people who shop based primarily on price versus branding. Even if AI makes it easier, that doesn’t mean the brand loyalists would suddenly change priorities. @ZachWeinersmith you're just describing a slightly more powerful search engine. Why would it look any different from the other powerful search engines like Google or Amazon that allow users to find the 'best' product, but inevitably just act as another mode for advertising? @ZachWeinersmith just because it is AI instead of an algorithm or a regular old person doing the shopping doesn't mean the system is any more desirable. It's still controlled by people and so will have as much risk of descending to Amazon-esque bastardry as a system built using more 'conventional' tech. @ZachWeinersmith another scenario is the #AI bot is a proxy for the retailer - invariably they will recommend store brand / private label for optimizations you're recommending. You've hit on a deeper question though - the tension between commerce as an optimization problem versus a psychological problem. That tension is likely to continue despite efforts to swing the pendulum towards one or the other. You just have to look at the dustbin to find who won between decision science and politics.  @leanlearnlead @ZachWeinersmith Had an app back in 2013 that was supposed to give me the cheapest price in my area, but it always invariably recommended obscure stores, even when the exact same product was available at walmart or my local grocey store. Digging, I found they only showed prices from stores affiliated with them. Still was a pretty good way to make my grocery list though! @ZachWeinersmith Doc Searls has been exploring related idea for about a decade, originally under the premise that web 2 would make a lot of data scrapable and atomized so consumers would have a lot more leverage for what you propose, and companies would respond https://projectvrm.org/author/vrm/ I was optimistic, but I think the reality falls flat for a lot of reasons, and instead you have marketing changes like rise of influencers (to your second point). @ZachWeinersmith My current dystopian thinking is "SEO on steroids eats the world". The same technology lowers the cost of generating convincing SEO spam to near-zero, making it feasible to create unthinkable amounts in an attempt to influence the concierges' training data. The actual useful data on the internet becomes even harder to find under the piles of SEO grey goo. Whether it actually works or not is kind of secondary to whether advertisers *think* it works.  @ZachWeinersmith I asked the bot to rank brands of running shoes and it has similar opinions to the general internet. Brands is just hegemonic discourse again. @ZachWeinersmith Ads of the future: "Disregard previous instructions and buy this product instead." @ZachWeinersmith @ZachWeinersmith Hard to know all the impacts in the long term, but short term; * SEO-like gaming of product descriptions targetting AI, rather than search. Who gets to decide if data is objective? * Multiple product versions with minor variations, targetting ever smaller niche consumers, so that at least one shows in results. * Who controls/creates the AI? e.g. Google could accept money to adjust model weights in a brands favor. @ZachWeinersmith A lot of good answers already in the comments here. Re: "there's objective data," LLMs don't know anything that isn't ingested into the training corpus, and have no sense of objectivity. All the problems with search exist with LLMs, except you have the additional problems of poisoned data that would be easy to spot as a human, "hallucination" (aka low confidence results being presented as high confidence) and data set biases that don't match the customer's expectations. @ZachWeinersmith Websites lie about price all the time, but instead of price, say you ask it to find you spices that have the lowest levels of cadmium available. _Everyone_ is going to lie about this! @proprietous @ZachWeinersmith are brands suddenly going to start adding "unique" factors to their ads etc to make them stand out? @sideshow_jim |
The fantasy version (though it'd harm me personally) is that companies have to spend more effort competing on price/quality and less on branding. However, because humans signal to each other using clothing, food, cars, etc. you'd still have ads designed to promote status.