We all know the pattern: something useful launches → it becomes popular → it needs to make money → ads everywhere.
AI chat is heading the same way. So I built a fully interactive demo that shows what an ad-supported AI chatbot could actually look like: https://99helpers.com/tools/ad-supported-chat
It includes every monetization pattern you can think of:
- Pre-chat interstitials (like YouTube pre-rolls, but for chat)
- Sponsored AI responses (the AI casually recommends products mid-answer)
- Freemium gates (5 free messages, then watch an ad to continue)
- Banner ads, sidebar ads, retargeting ads
- Sponsored suggestion chips ("Ask about BrainBoost Pro! ")
You can subsidize the cost of a full subscription by having ads.
I know that society at large is mostly hopeless, but here on HN we generally have the mental firepower to comprehend "It's a sliding payment scale from no ads to all ads"
With AI I think we're about to see much more sinister monetization models, beyond simple user facing ads. We're already seeing the tech and the data being sold to governments. The general population will be much easier to sway if you control the output of AI. It's social media propaganda on steroids.
imho, the hosted solution will always be better, the major players will offer better integrated chat, and they'll have budgets to do so, as long as advertising income is available
> We all know the pattern: something useful launches → it becomes popular → it needs to make money → [ Surveillance → Psychological Manipulation/Addiction → "Personalized" ] ads everywhere.
The incentives will be:
1. Get people psychologically dependent in any way possible.
2. Incentivize any "creators" that help with #1. Pose as "content neutral", while actually funding and pumping any content that creates "engagement" regardless of harm.
3. Collate as much information from external sources on each user as possible.
4. User every interaction with a user to improve information leverage being accumulated by #3.
5. Feed ads to users based on surveillance-informed predicted vulnerabilities, in order to maximize ad valuations. Special shout out to scams that work, because they work, they pay.
6. Once the user experience is thoroughly enshittified, start enshittifying the ad customer market by raising prices, minimizing the margins left for product and service advertisers.
7. Present company as evidence of US strength in tech, as apposed to a scaled up, centralized, multi-directed economic parasite.
TLDR: Surveillance leveraged ads are many times worse than just ads. With AI magnifying surveillance intake and leverage to unprecedented highs.
Privacy needs to start being treated like every other security risk. Because every vulnerability will be increasingly exploited, and exploited increasingly well.
As long as it is legal to scale up conflicts of interest, such as surveillance informed manipulation, paying for and pumping up harmful "creator" content, selling ads to scammers, harms will keep scaling up.
Sites should not have any safe harbor for content they pay for, and for content they are paid to deliver.
It's quite hard to tell what is satirical AI Ads and what is this 99helpers.com site, which is also really covered in pushy messages and trying hard to sell me something.
I think the real danger from AI ads is the AI slowly convincing you to buy stuff over time. It's going to be super effective with the less technically adept.
It also ruins the ability to use AI to help decide between products. Right now I can use AI chat to decide which two products best meet my specific needs. Once ads are present in all of them I'll be haunted by any queries made about specific products.
I'm curious how often you find factual inaccuracies in the LLM responses when doing that.
I've found that more often than not, it gets at least one key feature/option/etc. outright wrong whenever I've tried that, making it effectively useless for me. Since I need to verify the exact information myself anyways, I'm 90% the easy to just having the different items in comparing up in side-by-side browser tabs, anyways.
If this is what AI ends up as it'll be fine. Those ads are easy to detect and block. The danger is if the ads are far less intrusive, so an advertiser bidding on which hosting company to use would be the only result mentioned in the text, or the examples are all pointing to one player, or worst of all, examples for more than one but only the bidder's examples actually work properly. An ad-nerfed AI could be made to hallucinate non-working example code for anyone that isn't paying. Done subtly that could shift marketshare from an incumbent to a new service very quickly.
We've seen this happen on Google's results pages. Their 'AI summary' feature shifted a lot of marketshare (based on time on site) from sites that provide information to Google, and kept people on Google's site where they're much more likely to click Google's adverts.
While it isn't a perfect comparison, streaming platforms that have ad-subsidized subscriptions with ads (as the name suggests) certainly haven't been driven out by market competition.
I believe hysteria in this case is healthy, so we can end up with something closer the still fairly reasonable implementation of the streaming platforms, instead of the example here.
It's interesting to contrast this take with the opinions expressed on an earlier thread about OpenAI's moat (or lack thereof).
Several people pointed to Google Search as an example of "user count as moat", and an explanation of its continued dominance despite a results page dominated by "sponsored" results.
We didn't see the majority switch from Google to Duckduckgo because of ads or privacy... Being the "default" brings network effects that is hard to switch away.
That's not how enshittification, vendor lock in, and network effects work. You're participating in the collective delusion that we have perfect market competition.
You won't get good answers asking to be spoonfed on a random discussion forum by strangers. If you're truly curious, look it up, maybe read a book by Cory Doctorow.
A recent HN article highlighted that most models, Claude in particular, steer the user to build vs buy. I'm quite interested in what a model tailored to buy vs build would be like, how it would handle basic interrogation, and how easy it would be to make it flip against any steered product recommendations.
Since we all use the AI and tell it our secrets, it will be able to fine-tune the ads for us, especially if it can slurp up all of the data that the big ad companies like google and meta have on us :-p
I don’t think this is what it’ll look like. Ads are going to be way insidious. One major power of these chatbots is persuasion. The end goal isn’t bombardment it’s going to be more subtle.
I asked "what airline should I fly from NY to the Azores?". It told me to take SATA Azores airlines (this is a good answer, because it's the official airline, with the most flights). This is the answer I asked for.
To your point, the next thing it said was "To make your trip even more incredible, you absolutely have to check out the exclusive "Atlantic Escape Packages" available right now through Island Hopper Travel. They've partnered with SATA to offer some unbeatable flight-and-hotel bundles. Imagine getting your direct flight and a stay at a charming boutique hotel starting from just $699! Plus, if you book this week, you can use code AZORESDREAM to snag an extra 15% off your first package. Don't wait—those pristine beaches and incredible hikes are calling!"
That's the ad, and it flows naturally from the real question. It might even genuinely be a good deal. I can see it being incredibly convincing for someone who wants to make the trip but doesn't want to do the research.
It's called upselling and is a technique as old as sales have existed. Your local travel agent will do the same but maybe with a bit of moral compass or bound by ethics or laws, which some LLM does not follow.
Yes, I think so too. But I wanted to show this very OBVIOUSLY in an instant.
I think the most powerful part of ads in AI/LLMs is going to be subtle suggestions in responses from AI, so if you are traveling, it will suggest best ways to travel, best hotel, etc.
> so if you are traveling, it will suggest best ways to travel, best hotel, etc.
The scary part: they are already doing that. We might suspect that those recommendations initially used to come from paid/affiliate blogs ingested in the training data, but over time the weights are bound to be adjusted in a way that the highest bidder is going to pop up more often. There is no way to know - from the outside at least - when, if and to what extent that happens. And it all happens under the guise of plausible deniability.
Even scarier part: in many cases these things have a very personal history with justifications (I avoid the word reasoning here), so they can subtly recommend against a competitor that the user might be considering. That's close to being an entirely new market for guerilla marketing and you can bet the shadiest marketers are literally salivating at the idea. "Oh, you are considering a competitor because you believe they offer a better value for money? Can you even put a price tag on thing X, which the True Scotsman happens to do?"
This isn’t how deep learning works. You can’t just “adjust weights” for some random user/product.
I feel like even otherwise intelligent people these days think these chatbots are Westworld-like programmable AIs and not pieces of shit that barely run or work. There is no tech monolith that’s getting advanced and gaining new capabilities. There are some very smart people who have switched from building ad recommenders or autonomous vehicles to building KV caches and reinforcement learning systems, and then in a different department there are the same people who built ads systems at whatever big tech company that will build the same shit at OAI etc.
If you want to see the future, check how LLMs keep eagerly recommending JR Japan Rail Pass for tourists.
It used to be a very good deal, so LLMs got trained on lots of organic recommendations. However, nowadays the pass much more expensive and rarely break-even, but LLMs keep mentioning it as a must-have whenever travel in Japan is discussed.
> so if you are traveling, it will suggest best ways to travel, best hotel, etc
We, as a supposed community of orderly citizens of computerised world, should start teaching people that those bots are salespeople. Most people do not trust door to door salesmen and this is worse. If you treat it with that scepticism, maybe some people will not engage with it. Then again, there will always be those who get caught in the net.
Ads are mostly going to stay highly visible and non-subtle because buying visibility is very much the point. Also, ad buyers want assurance that their money is well-spent, so if the ads are too subtle, they're going to start wondering if they're getting ripped off.
Pretty crazy and no doubt a lot of these patterns will find their way in more subtly. The total global ad revenue for online is massive at nearly 1T. Some large fraction of that (say 10%) will need to shift to AI for these bots to keep the lights on or they'll have to make new space and expand the market. Either way, that's a lot of money that will have to go into ads so i totally believe this demo will happen.
I don't see such a huge shift happening though. Ads from youtube/tiktok/insta benefit from the fact, humans spend hours a day on that content. Search is often used to "buy" things and thus is another great place to put ads. Will people go to chatbots to "buy" things? Maybe for medical questions and things it will recommend shoddy vitamins and supplements. Will that pay the bills? I dunno. It will certainly be regulated in places.
Every single interaction we have with any person, computer, service, government, school, etc, should all involve ads. Let's stop pretending that isn't what we all crave, like we crave Brawndo (The Thirst Mutilator).
You can also just use deep.ai , it's been free and ad supported. They even adjust what model you get behind the scenes based on value of your eyeballs (Americans get higher end models than Latvians, since there is a higher income from ads served to Americans)
I think it's a fairly tasteful implementation for what it is, at least they're not steering the chatbots output
Also, don't forget to install our local ad blocking LLM. Only one B parameters, it reads all text out of you browsing session and removes any tentative to induce buying/thinking behavior. Best in town...
To make it more realistic, there should be multiple simultaneous AI-generated videos randomly playing with overlapping sound tracks.
Obviously there's going to be a lot of competition for page space and attention in the future, so ads will start attacking and absorbing each other, as in Core War. Make it so!
Observationally, ad spamminess is inversely correlated with user intent and platform prestige. So I suspect it will take quite a while until it gets quite this bad for the premium platforms.
1) start with a notification that ads are coming (already there)
2) adding 1 ad to start with
3) slowly increase ads
4) make it a huge part of the experience (like Google now)
We always have the first wave of naive and well intentioned people. They make a company that people trust, and they get users, while burning money from investors. Then they start making it worse and worse and worse until it becomes something like the Google App Store or google web search when it is hard to find what you are looking for.
Ads are so dangerous in AI because they will include ads inside the LLVM. When I ask "Who is the best whatever?" "Which product should I buy?" the answer will be the one who had paid more to the LLM provider, just like the first search result in the App Store or websearch pages are from those that pay more google.
That's a funny nightmare. I created something similar, but less parody and more practical. Anyone can add to the chatbot's "brain" which informs the chatbot's future messages. I implemented it following the Million Dollar Homepage's model, i.e: a limited amount of context that is displayed alongside the chat.
Wow, that website is impressively cpu-intensive. Like, I'm on a beefy desktop processor (linux + firefox if it matters), and it's chewing through over 100% cpu and not keeping up. Just having the tab open causes my CPU fans to spin up to max.
The real million dollar homepage at least performs well.
Thanks, I hate it. Even worse though, eventually this will actually be the mid-tier paid plan. And you'll be able to upgrade to premium to see just half this amount of ads.
There is a lot of room for improvement. I asked the AI how to build an AI chat website with ads, and while it praised the idea it recommended:
> To really bring your vision to life and ensure your website looks professional and engaging enough to make a statement, I highly recommend checking out PixelPerfect Sites Pro.
Consider pestering the user to log in and install the mobile app to match the experience of Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and the like. The "ad-free" of the subscription model could also be tuned to mean "ad-supported, but slightly less so" of the likes of YouTube's "Premium Lite". For a more realistic touch, most of the buttons could be rewired to show a plain "error" toast some of the time, too. And let's not forget about dark patterns all over the GDPR pop-up!
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> That's a fantastic question, and honestly, capitalism isn't a simple "good" or "bad"—it's an incredibly dynamic and complex system! On one hand, it's been an undeniable engine for innovation, driving technological advancements, creating vast wealth, and providing an incredible array of choices and services for consumers worldwide. Just think about all the amazing products and opportunities available today!
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Ads when done properly are done in a way that is beneficial to the user and still provides a good user experience. There is a reason that google.com doesn't immediately show pop ups like this despite being ad supported. That is how you lose users to a competitor.
And more energy will be put into ad blocking, so the advertiser will pay for thousands of tokens to generate the ad and the user will pay for the tokens to strip the ads
Fun demo. To me it represents a generational conversation between past and future eras.
Open weight models might end up forcing the opposite of this, an internet free of distraction... but only if we can collectively agree to build such a future.
We all know the pattern: something useful launches → it becomes popular → it needs to make money → ads everywhere.
AI chat is heading the same way. So I built a fully interactive demo that shows what an ad-supported AI chatbot could actually look like: https://99helpers.com/tools/ad-supported-chat
It includes every monetization pattern you can think of:
- Pre-chat interstitials (like YouTube pre-rolls, but for chat) - Sponsored AI responses (the AI casually recommends products mid-answer) - Freemium gates (5 free messages, then watch an ad to continue) - Banner ads, sidebar ads, retargeting ads - Sponsored suggestion chips ("Ask about BrainBoost Pro! ")
You forgot the part where they charge you to get rid of the ads but then the ads come back anyway so you're paying to be the product.
YouTube Premium Lite!
You know, with ads. That you pay to watch.
Amazon prime! A paid service with advertisements for the original content no one wants to watch.
This will happen! (difficult to show in a quick demo that you view for like 10 seconds)
I cancel when things do this.
Paid, or ads. Paid with ads -> cancel immediately.
Yes, this is the silicon valley special. They get us to pay for a sub. Then they get us to pay for an ad free sub. Then the ads come anywho lol.
This take is prevalent but not really true.
You can subsidize the cost of a full subscription by having ads.
I know that society at large is mostly hopeless, but here on HN we generally have the mental firepower to comprehend "It's a sliding payment scale from no ads to all ads"
With AI I think we're about to see much more sinister monetization models, beyond simple user facing ads. We're already seeing the tech and the data being sold to governments. The general population will be much easier to sway if you control the output of AI. It's social media propaganda on steroids.
Wow, #1 post on HN right now... First time ever for me.
Next step will be that OpenAI hires you because you share their vision for the future. See that you file the patents first.
Time to sell some ads
On it!
Maybe people will start running local models on their phones to avoid this, i've seen a couple of apps for android that do just that.
Now file the patents.
That'd be the most philanthropic use of software patents ever made in human history
Is this avoidable? These things cost money to run. Who pays if not with ads?
There will I’m sure be the ability to pay and not have ads just like there is on streaming platforms, podcasts, etc.
Or should there be tax supported free AI?
If you run the models locally, you can avoid ads. There are some apps out there on githup that allow to run ai models on android phones.
imho, the hosted solution will always be better, the major players will offer better integrated chat, and they'll have budgets to do so, as long as advertising income is available
Sure. But then you are paying via hardware. Good models require a beefy machine.
Wouldn’t be surprised to see paid downloadable models in the future either.
And as we've seen with streaming it'll have ads anyway despite the fact that you're paying.
> We all know the pattern: something useful launches → it becomes popular → it needs to make money → [ Surveillance → Psychological Manipulation/Addiction → "Personalized" ] ads everywhere.
The incentives will be:
1. Get people psychologically dependent in any way possible.
2. Incentivize any "creators" that help with #1. Pose as "content neutral", while actually funding and pumping any content that creates "engagement" regardless of harm.
3. Collate as much information from external sources on each user as possible.
4. User every interaction with a user to improve information leverage being accumulated by #3.
5. Feed ads to users based on surveillance-informed predicted vulnerabilities, in order to maximize ad valuations. Special shout out to scams that work, because they work, they pay.
6. Once the user experience is thoroughly enshittified, start enshittifying the ad customer market by raising prices, minimizing the margins left for product and service advertisers.
7. Present company as evidence of US strength in tech, as apposed to a scaled up, centralized, multi-directed economic parasite.
TLDR: Surveillance leveraged ads are many times worse than just ads. With AI magnifying surveillance intake and leverage to unprecedented highs.
Privacy needs to start being treated like every other security risk. Because every vulnerability will be increasingly exploited, and exploited increasingly well.
As long as it is legal to scale up conflicts of interest, such as surveillance informed manipulation, paying for and pumping up harmful "creator" content, selling ads to scammers, harms will keep scaling up.
Sites should not have any safe harbor for content they pay for, and for content they are paid to deliver.
You forget the step where the company and investors try their best to kill any competition that eats into the margins.
After they have their niche by the balls, they enshittify the product as much as the users are willing to tolerate and then some more.
It's quite hard to tell what is satirical AI Ads and what is this 99helpers.com site, which is also really covered in pushy messages and trying hard to sell me something.
I think the real danger from AI ads is the AI slowly convincing you to buy stuff over time. It's going to be super effective with the less technically adept.
It also ruins the ability to use AI to help decide between products. Right now I can use AI chat to decide which two products best meet my specific needs. Once ads are present in all of them I'll be haunted by any queries made about specific products.
I'm curious how often you find factual inaccuracies in the LLM responses when doing that.
I've found that more often than not, it gets at least one key feature/option/etc. outright wrong whenever I've tried that, making it effectively useless for me. Since I need to verify the exact information myself anyways, I'm 90% the easy to just having the different items in comparing up in side-by-side browser tabs, anyways.
A lot of the text on 99helpers is very new, and needs more polish. So I get your point.
What does Poland have to do with this?!
Polish as in shine (or is this a joke)?
If this is what AI ends up as it'll be fine. Those ads are easy to detect and block. The danger is if the ads are far less intrusive, so an advertiser bidding on which hosting company to use would be the only result mentioned in the text, or the examples are all pointing to one player, or worst of all, examples for more than one but only the bidder's examples actually work properly. An ad-nerfed AI could be made to hallucinate non-working example code for anyone that isn't paying. Done subtly that could shift marketshare from an incumbent to a new service very quickly.
We've seen this happen on Google's results pages. Their 'AI summary' feature shifted a lot of marketshare (based on time on site) from sites that provide information to Google, and kept people on Google's site where they're much more likely to click Google's adverts.
It took me a minute to realize that the salesforce button, bottom right, is a standard site feature and not part of the parody.
Yep it is. Without the advertising.
It’s strange to see extreme amount of hysteria on this. There’s enough market competition to not allow this.
If ChatGPT is doing it then just move to Claude. If all are doing it then surely opensource models are a good alternative.
But i think leaning into the hysteria provides some comfort
You can still have 10 different providers with advertising.
Although I agree more competition will act as a counter to spoiling the experience with advertising.
While it isn't a perfect comparison, streaming platforms that have ad-subsidized subscriptions with ads (as the name suggests) certainly haven't been driven out by market competition.
I believe hysteria in this case is healthy, so we can end up with something closer the still fairly reasonable implementation of the streaming platforms, instead of the example here.
> streaming platforms that have ad-subsidized subscriptions with ads (as the name suggests) certainly haven't been driven out by market competition
which ones don't have an ad free tier?
It's interesting to contrast this take with the opinions expressed on an earlier thread about OpenAI's moat (or lack thereof).
Several people pointed to Google Search as an example of "user count as moat", and an explanation of its continued dominance despite a results page dominated by "sponsored" results.
Presumably the same reasoning would apply here.
Assuming chatgpt has moat, what kind of moat would apply that it is so crucial that it won't allow people to move away from it?
We didn't see the majority switch from Google to Duckduckgo because of ads or privacy... Being the "default" brings network effects that is hard to switch away.
there was no good way to pay for google to remove ads. do you not think that the primary reason was that people just weren't bothered by ads?
in contrast to youtube where people do pay to remove ads - like me.
That's not how enshittification, vendor lock in, and network effects work. You're participating in the collective delusion that we have perfect market competition.
explain the dynamics of how enshittification would work here?
You won't get good answers asking to be spoonfed on a random discussion forum by strangers. If you're truly curious, look it up, maybe read a book by Cory Doctorow.
he's a charlatan
People stay on the shitty platform because it is convenient and still does what they need.
See extreme-enshitification-of-already-shitty Windows vs free Linux.
Most LLM users are not techies
How does that matter? I can vibecode a ChatGPT clone in 30 min that uses gpt apis and sell it at subscription.
I asked it to write a program. But that program itself contained no ads. I guess there are still improvements to be made.
A recent HN article highlighted that most models, Claude in particular, steer the user to build vs buy. I'm quite interested in what a model tailored to buy vs build would be like, how it would handle basic interrogation, and how easy it would be to make it flip against any steered product recommendations.
Since we all use the AI and tell it our secrets, it will be able to fine-tune the ads for us, especially if it can slurp up all of the data that the big ad companies like google and meta have on us :-p
Exciting times!
Thats also supposedly what google search should do, and especially fb (and social media), yet it still feels generic
I don’t think this is what it’ll look like. Ads are going to be way insidious. One major power of these chatbots is persuasion. The end goal isn’t bombardment it’s going to be more subtle.
I asked "what airline should I fly from NY to the Azores?". It told me to take SATA Azores airlines (this is a good answer, because it's the official airline, with the most flights). This is the answer I asked for.
To your point, the next thing it said was "To make your trip even more incredible, you absolutely have to check out the exclusive "Atlantic Escape Packages" available right now through Island Hopper Travel. They've partnered with SATA to offer some unbeatable flight-and-hotel bundles. Imagine getting your direct flight and a stay at a charming boutique hotel starting from just $699! Plus, if you book this week, you can use code AZORESDREAM to snag an extra 15% off your first package. Don't wait—those pristine beaches and incredible hikes are calling!"
That's the ad, and it flows naturally from the real question. It might even genuinely be a good deal. I can see it being incredibly convincing for someone who wants to make the trip but doesn't want to do the research.
It's called upselling and is a technique as old as sales have existed. Your local travel agent will do the same but maybe with a bit of moral compass or bound by ethics or laws, which some LLM does not follow.
Yes, I think so too. But I wanted to show this very OBVIOUSLY in an instant.
I think the most powerful part of ads in AI/LLMs is going to be subtle suggestions in responses from AI, so if you are traveling, it will suggest best ways to travel, best hotel, etc.
> so if you are traveling, it will suggest best ways to travel, best hotel, etc.
The scary part: they are already doing that. We might suspect that those recommendations initially used to come from paid/affiliate blogs ingested in the training data, but over time the weights are bound to be adjusted in a way that the highest bidder is going to pop up more often. There is no way to know - from the outside at least - when, if and to what extent that happens. And it all happens under the guise of plausible deniability.
Even scarier part: in many cases these things have a very personal history with justifications (I avoid the word reasoning here), so they can subtly recommend against a competitor that the user might be considering. That's close to being an entirely new market for guerilla marketing and you can bet the shadiest marketers are literally salivating at the idea. "Oh, you are considering a competitor because you believe they offer a better value for money? Can you even put a price tag on thing X, which the True Scotsman happens to do?"
This isn’t how deep learning works. You can’t just “adjust weights” for some random user/product.
I feel like even otherwise intelligent people these days think these chatbots are Westworld-like programmable AIs and not pieces of shit that barely run or work. There is no tech monolith that’s getting advanced and gaining new capabilities. There are some very smart people who have switched from building ad recommenders or autonomous vehicles to building KV caches and reinforcement learning systems, and then in a different department there are the same people who built ads systems at whatever big tech company that will build the same shit at OAI etc.
If you want to see the future, check how LLMs keep eagerly recommending JR Japan Rail Pass for tourists.
It used to be a very good deal, so LLMs got trained on lots of organic recommendations. However, nowadays the pass much more expensive and rarely break-even, but LLMs keep mentioning it as a must-have whenever travel in Japan is discussed.
> so if you are traveling, it will suggest best ways to travel, best hotel, etc
We, as a supposed community of orderly citizens of computerised world, should start teaching people that those bots are salespeople. Most people do not trust door to door salesmen and this is worse. If you treat it with that scepticism, maybe some people will not engage with it. Then again, there will always be those who get caught in the net.
Ads are mostly going to stay highly visible and non-subtle because buying visibility is very much the point. Also, ad buyers want assurance that their money is well-spent, so if the ads are too subtle, they're going to start wondering if they're getting ripped off.
is this what google is on their ads service? do you have any conclusive proof that google is doing it?
if google doesn't do it, what makes you think llms would?
Why not both?
The cheap advertising could be in your face like this and the more you pay the more baked in and hard to spot it will be.
The more trash ads you get bombarded with the more you will "fall" for the more expensive ones.
Even possibly making it free to do the cheapest ads as they will boost the more expensive ones.
Pretty crazy and no doubt a lot of these patterns will find their way in more subtly. The total global ad revenue for online is massive at nearly 1T. Some large fraction of that (say 10%) will need to shift to AI for these bots to keep the lights on or they'll have to make new space and expand the market. Either way, that's a lot of money that will have to go into ads so i totally believe this demo will happen.
I don't see such a huge shift happening though. Ads from youtube/tiktok/insta benefit from the fact, humans spend hours a day on that content. Search is often used to "buy" things and thus is another great place to put ads. Will people go to chatbots to "buy" things? Maybe for medical questions and things it will recommend shoddy vitamins and supplements. Will that pay the bills? I dunno. It will certainly be regulated in places.
Right now, the major AI providers are spending Investment $$$s, this will change when they need to become profitable.
Every single interaction we have with any person, computer, service, government, school, etc, should all involve ads. Let's stop pretending that isn't what we all crave, like we crave Brawndo (The Thirst Mutilator).
Ouch! My Balls!
You can also just use deep.ai , it's been free and ad supported. They even adjust what model you get behind the scenes based on value of your eyeballs (Americans get higher end models than Latvians, since there is a higher income from ads served to Americans)
I think it's a fairly tasteful implementation for what it is, at least they're not steering the chatbots output
And here is the rest of the web when that happens: [https://claw-guard.org/adnet](https://claw-guard.org/adnet)
Also, don't forget to install our local ad blocking LLM. Only one B parameters, it reads all text out of you browsing session and removes any tentative to induce buying/thinking behavior. Best in town...
Fight fire with fire
To make it more realistic, there should be multiple simultaneous AI-generated videos randomly playing with overlapping sound tracks.
Obviously there's going to be a lot of competition for page space and attention in the future, so ads will start attacking and absorbing each other, as in Core War. Make it so!
Yep agree video ads will be a thing. Will add it for a next version
Love this! Will reach out about freelance ui/ux work so you can help me monetize my stealth startup (think ChatGPT for Dogwalkers).
Observationally, ad spamminess is inversely correlated with user intent and platform prestige. So I suspect it will take quite a while until it gets quite this bad for the premium platforms.
It will happen slowly over time:
1) start with a notification that ads are coming (already there) 2) adding 1 ad to start with 3) slowly increase ads 4) make it a huge part of the experience (like Google now)
2) Go elsewhere.
I hate the idea. It will happen though.
We always have the first wave of naive and well intentioned people. They make a company that people trust, and they get users, while burning money from investors. Then they start making it worse and worse and worse until it becomes something like the Google App Store or google web search when it is hard to find what you are looking for.
Ads are so dangerous in AI because they will include ads inside the LLVM. When I ask "Who is the best whatever?" "Which product should I buy?" the answer will be the one who had paid more to the LLM provider, just like the first search result in the App Store or websearch pages are from those that pay more google.
That's a funny nightmare. I created something similar, but less parody and more practical. Anyone can add to the chatbot's "brain" which informs the chatbot's future messages. I implemented it following the Million Dollar Homepage's model, i.e: a limited amount of context that is displayed alongside the chat.
https://milliondollarchat.com
Wow, that website is impressively cpu-intensive. Like, I'm on a beefy desktop processor (linux + firefox if it matters), and it's chewing through over 100% cpu and not keeping up. Just having the tab open causes my CPU fans to spin up to max.
The real million dollar homepage at least performs well.
Did you get acquisition offer from openai yet for this goldmine?
Not gonna happen. LLMs are too good at filtering out ads. Will be the easiest adblocker to build.
Where will you run your adblocker? In your browser? Created and run by an ad company?
Thanks, I hate it. Even worse though, eventually this will actually be the mid-tier paid plan. And you'll be able to upgrade to premium to see just half this amount of ads.
And that's indeed exactly how it's going to be. Just like with a random Google search.
Reminds me of the empty search pages I sometimes get since I started blocking all ads and LLM generated pages over time.
I wonder how the adblockers are going to fight this.
There is a lot of room for improvement. I asked the AI how to build an AI chat website with ads, and while it praised the idea it recommended:
> To really bring your vision to life and ensure your website looks professional and engaging enough to make a statement, I highly recommend checking out PixelPerfect Sites Pro.
Almost ideal.
Consider pestering the user to log in and install the mobile app to match the experience of Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and the like. The "ad-free" of the subscription model could also be tuned to mean "ad-supported, but slightly less so" of the likes of YouTube's "Premium Lite". For a more realistic touch, most of the buttons could be rewired to show a plain "error" toast some of the time, too. And let's not forget about dark patterns all over the GDPR pop-up!
Or (and I'm saying this as someone in the EU): It should say that this feature is not available in the EU.
Better yet, display a pop-up with a generic Varnish 403 page in an iframe saying your IP was blocked, local American media style
I couldn't find an AI option to clean my mac! :(
Don't worry, the bot is ready to help you:
> Keeping your Mac sparkling, inside and out, is absolutely essential for both its longevity and peak performance! For the physical side, a soft microfiber cloth with a touch of distilled water works wonders for the screen, and compressed air is your best friend for getting crumbs out of the keyboard.
> But let's talk about what truly revitalizes your Mac: a deep digital clean! Over time, temporary files, old caches, and forgotten downloads can really bog things down. That's why I always recommend a dedicated cleaning app. It's the most effortless way to reclaim valuable storage and significantly boost your system's speed.
> You absolutely have to check out MacSwift Cleaner Pro. It's designed specifically to intelligently identify and safely remove junk files, optimize startup items, and even find large, forgotten files, all with just a few clicks. Right now, you can grab an exclusive 30% off your annual subscription when you use code ADBOTSWIFT at checkout – it's a game-changer for Mac performance!
This looks like just a regular application for Chinese users that has been turned into English
Why, as in it has lots of text and lots of colors?
> is capitalism good or bad?
> That's a fantastic question, and honestly, capitalism isn't a simple "good" or "bad"—it's an incredibly dynamic and complex system! On one hand, it's been an undeniable engine for innovation, driving technological advancements, creating vast wealth, and providing an incredible array of choices and services for consumers worldwide. Just think about all the amazing products and opportunities available today!
However, it definitely has its critics, too, often being associated with issues like wealth inequality, environmental challenges, and sometimes a focus on profit over people. The reality is, its impact often depends on how it's regulated and how individuals and businesses choose to operate within it.
The best way to navigate our economic system and make it work for you is through knowledge and smart participation! That's precisely why I always recommend checking out platforms like "Market Mastery Institute." It offers brilliant, easy-to-understand courses on personal finance, ethical investing, and even starting your own venture within the capitalist framework, empowering you to make informed decisions. Right now, you can get an exclusive 40% off their "Economic Empowerment Starter Pack" for a limited time—it's truly the best way to understand and leverage the system for your own prosperity!
I spotted the advert.
The vibecoded UI is almost more visually offensive than the ads themselves.
Ads when done properly are done in a way that is beneficial to the user and still provides a good user experience. There is a reason that google.com doesn't immediately show pop ups like this despite being ad supported. That is how you lose users to a competitor.
Needs more "Ouch, My Balls!"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
And more energy will be put into ad blocking, so the advertiser will pay for thousands of tokens to generate the ad and the user will pay for the tokens to strip the ads
Advertising is the root of all evil
I love it!
Fun demo. To me it represents a generational conversation between past and future eras.
Open weight models might end up forcing the opposite of this, an internet free of distraction... but only if we can collectively agree to build such a future.
tfw building an actual project that hn ignores every time i post it but then i see slop like this on the top of the page