@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 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.

@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.