I always chuckle when ad companies say that. I have never seen a helpful ad in google search, but well I have been using adblockers forever so I would not know.I am honestly curious though, for those who don't use adblockers - what percentage of ads that you see are actually helpful?
I typically block ads as well, but more recently I changed some setting in the default Android newsfeed thing and some ads started to show through amongst the news items.
The ads there are usually fairly innocuous (i.e. not disruptive, not flashing auto play vids etc, they just look like another news item and you can just scroll past them like other news articles you're not interested in), but I have actually found them useful. I am wearing a T-shirt right now in fact that was advertised to me a week or two ago as "on sale" for £8 (eight) and which I clicked through and purchased. There have been one or two other examples of things there that actually have been useful or at least interesting to me right now. So they actually have been useful/helpful in that regard.
So I am a bit conflicted here. It is no cost to me to click on the ad, and I bought some things that I use but would probably have not got otherwise. Am I being manipulated to part with my money? I dunno. Would I have bought a £8 t-shirt anyway if I was just in a shop and saw it? Maybe. Was the ad actually quite well targeted and appropriate? In this case yes.
I think on balance I would say those news feed ads are acceptable to me. I have problems where it is totally irrelevant and disruptive. Hopefully the AI mode ones will be similar to the news feed ones. I would be pretty upset if the ad content was directly worded into the response.
I love the idea of targeting advertising. But the current implementations I hate.
The ASR voice recorder app gets this right. It lets me use the full featured version for three days, after which I need to watch a few ads to get another three days. I choose when to watch the ads, and if I'm late there is nothing worse than a small nag at the bottom of the app. I actually now start every day with the ads, while I cook breakfast, and it is a positive experience. I could also just pay for the app and be done with them.
The problem with the idealism of targeted advertising is that it assumes that there is always an ad that fits your desires. In reality, some people have very niche interests and preferences, and not every business advertises through the same channels or with the same budget. Ads will pretty much always cater to the lowest common denominator even if you account for the individual.
Since when have we considered ads something helpful?
Their purpose isn’t to be helpful. They're there to sell you something, and nothing more. Any semblance of helpfulness is misinterpretation and merely coincidental.
> Since when have we considered ads something helpful?
Depends. Ads a low-effort large-reach pathways for lead generation, mostly useful for B2C penetration.
I also did sales when I ran my own company, and I can absolutely guarantee that ads can be helpful. When talking to leads you're talking to someone who a) never saw what you offered but is listening to you anyway, or b) saw what you offered and decided to contact you.
The very first thing I'd do in sales is try to determine if the person I was talking to had a) A need my product could satisfy, plus b) Authority to make the purchase, and c) The budget to actually follow through.
The last thing I wanted to do is spend a bunch of my limited time talking to people who never had any intention of pulling the trigger on a contract; those are much harder to convert to paying customers (not impossible, just harder) and were almost never worth the effort.
My best-case scenario was "Someone reached out to me". Ads are a way to make that happen.
Now, if you're talking about internet ads, then you're talking about a different beast altogether (B2C), and those ads can be helpful to purchasers if they were already in the market for $FOO.
The problem is that internet ads are almost never worth the money - a significant number of clicks are from bots, another significant number are from accidental clicks and only a tiny tiny number of them are from people with the intention to buy $FOO from somebody, and they are just checking our your $FOO offering to compare.
I do not think that I have ever seen on the Internet a helpful ad. When I want to buy something, I search what I want or I go directly to online shops that I have used before or to price comparison sites.
Nonetheless, mostly before the appearance of the Internet, when I was reading various technical journals, especially during the seventies and the eighties of the past century, e.g. magazines or journals of electronics or of computers, I was considering most ads as helpful, as they were making me aware of various things that I might have wanted to buy.
Unlike the ads that bother me today, those ads in magazines or journals intended for more competent buyers contained enough technical details and prices to make possible comparisons between products, and they were also easy to skip when not interested, instead of covering important content on a Web page and making efforts to provide a visual distraction that makes difficult to focus on the useful content of that Web page.
The people who are buying ad spots and creating ads absolutely believe they're helpful, not just to you, but to their client. Their purpose is to helpful, to the company, who wants your money and who gives the marketer their money, and with this action, the marketer will believe whatever is needed to do their job, as always.
> Since when have we considered ads something helpful
I have genuinely met people who claim that ads are helpful and interesting and used this as a justification for adware companies to stalk you every step you take on the web.
I’ve met people who enjoy lots of gross things. That doesn’t make the things gross to me, or the vast majority of humanity.
My guy take is that they are mindrotted by ads into thinking they are good for them. Digital Stockholm Syndrome. Or maybe a Myth of Sisyphus type situation.
Some might argue that Adwords got so successful because ads competed like search results, on bid AND relevance, not just bid.
If your ads inventory is big enough, ads can actually be a better answer to your intent than organic content, because the companies behind the ads have a much stronger incentive to satisfy your need.
If AdWords or search consider both relevance and the fee collected, the end user will never be shown the most useful results consistently. If the goal was usefulness they would only pick results by relevance and take no fee at all, or take a flat fee that isn't based on a bidding system.
Recently I’ve been starting up quick web projects and a number of external services are recommend (Neon, Resend, Railway), and if I just let the agent rip, signed-up for and implemented. Is it confirmed any LLM producer or provider has been receiving kickbacks for these technical decisions?
Legally they would gave to disclose with the recommendation that its a paid advertisement. That said, they were also legally not supposed to scrape the entire internet for training so if they are getting kickbacks I wouldn't expect a confirmation.
I don't have an ad blocker on my laptop. The ads I get are pretty much entirely generic and irrelevant to me, I don't remember ever consciously clicking on an ad.
I don't mind ads, as I understand that without money, web sites go away. But I'm very careful about being tracked. That, I don't think is cool.
It's not unusual for me to see ads for companies hundreds or even thousands of miles away, and often selling things for which I do not possess the correct body parts.
I consider that affirmation that I am mostly successful at staying off the ad-tech radar.
I mind ads and don’t think sites would go away. They’d just be less profitable.
I mind ads because they crowd out less profitable margins and result in worse products. Imagine how nice and useful Google could be if they optimized for search instead of ads.
I have, fairly often in fact. That's why Google makes such a bucket load of money from their ads - they're actually vaguely relevant.
I've don't think I've ever seen a relevant ad outside of Google though, and I still wouldn't say "yeay, helpful ads!". Nobody is going to want them even though I occasionally get relevant ones and click on them.
I never have on Google Search (I also block them to be fair), but I've booked a lot of shows through Instagram ads actually. Shows I learnt about only through those ads and I would have been disappointed to miss said shows.
But yeah that's literally the only platform where I've ever had useful ads. Even other meta products only have absolute garbage ads.
I won't be able to use their AI results if they are, personally. If I ask the question "what is the best tool for doing x" and I can't trust that the answer is going to be the truth according to all available information, then the AI is useless or worse, misleading. If google is unbiased, and only highlights paid advertiser mentions, no one will pay. I'd only accept this if it was a clear separation of LLM response and ads in a sidebar or something similar. Other people may not care. Many happily read politically affiliated news knowing that their opinions and actions may be influenced by a media source.
The pages that they pull in to source that data all contain affiliate links and companies contact websites to get their tools to the tops of those lists by paying money often monthly. I know this because I do this...
It's basically standard SEO but it also manipulates AI like ChatGPT very very easily
They won't get you on any worthwhile list unless it's their own because it's too risky for them and any site they would publish it on would want to use their own affiliate link. Unless of course we are talking about something like Medium or YouTube which does work
And then of course there's the fraudsters who will bid on branded keywords we have banned dozens of people for that
It's already being trained on "public" (ethical or otherwise) data. So, it already has ingested that kind of "optimization" during pre-training and training.
I don't think you can fine-tune your way out of it.
People still think these things are smart. That if their word generator eats enough of the Internet, it will somehow give them the real information that's otherwise hidden. Or perhaps a better word; filter the bullshit.
To filter bullshit it would first have to understand bullshit, and it doesn't. That's why an LLM will tell you the solution to a problem that doesn't work, and argue with you when you correct it.
This is what bothers me a lot. For the people who doesn't know how it's made or want to believe, it's a miracle.
For me, it's a resource wasting text generator. I'll not lie, I don't use OpenAI, Mistral or Anthropic's models, even for coding. I prefer to read my API docs and cry once.
I used Gemini, five or six times in total. Twice I asked a couple of very specific things, and it unearthed them. Since they were not products, but information, that was helpful. Twice, it has given wrong information. When I "told" it, there was another way, it said "of course there are two ways", etc. Tasteless and time wasting.
I don't like using an LLM all day long, or offload my thinking to them. It's the ultimate self-poisoning incident.
And as you say, these algorithms can't know right/wrong/logical/bullshit, etc. They just spew out text.
Fwiw I just run kiwix/zeal locally which has old school search index of all articles in wiki/stackoverflow etc. That seems enough for most of my day to day use.
Local AI will have the bias that existed at the time of its training, which is different from no bias. For stuff that needs to be current, a local LLM would need to search the net regardless.
And since "no bias" isn't something that actually exists in reality when it comes to language or even anything near humans, "bias in local model I can introspect" will always be miles ahead of "bias I know is there, but cannot introspect".
It's less compromised, but it's still basing the answer on compromised queries. This is why I pay for independent reviews (e.g Which) where their incentives are more aligned with yours.
Sorry to tell you that all websites you get when you google "what is the best tool for doing x" are already manipulated, including reddit conversations.
> This is not an elephant in the room, this is so obvious.
Maybe they grew up in an environment where the phrase "elephant in the room" meant a situation where people enter a room, notice an elephant there, and immediately scream "Jesus Christ there's a goddamn elephant!"
> their one and only goose that lays the golden eggs?
Eh, it really isn't the only goose in goog town. Cloud is at ~20% of their total revenue, and probably is going up w/ their hardware success and other licensing deals. I'm curious to see what goog can do with their properties if this trend continues. Less reliance on ads could be interesting. (many former googlers have said that pressure from the ad business was felt across all their products)
Sigh, thank you for sharing this. This is disheartening ( even if not unexpected ) given that I actually like current version of gemini based on how well it performed -- all things considered -- relative to gpt sub on recommendation check.
I never ask computers about a certain device directly. I lost that faith eons ago. I first search for candidates, then go to official pages to check specs and then read / watch reviews, then decide.
Yes, it takes time, but I'm the one to blame if something goes wrong about it.
Also, it helps that I don't use Google for searching the web. I prefer Kagi.
I use Gemini (and only Gemini) to dig the net for the things that I can't find despite my best efforts. They are generally unbranded or very specific things, so ads doesn't play much role there.
That's the real question and it's not hypothetical. Google already adjusts organic rankings based on advertiser relationships in ways that aren't documented.
With AI Mode the surface area for that kind of influence is much larger and much less visible. A search result you can inspect.
A synthesized answer you can't.
That will be fun because it's illegal to accept money to promote a product without indication that you have done so. The FTC requires "clear and conspicuous disclosure" for such endorsements.
The chat interface has the disclaimer "AI responses may include mistakes." and that appears to be enough to relieve them of any responsibility for the responses. In a similar manner, wouldn't it be enough to add a disclaimer that says "AI responses may include sponsored content."?
Seems to work fine for product placement in other media. Apparently "clear and conspicuous disclosure" can be a footnote hidden somewhere in the credits.
The truth is brought to you by the highest bidder. Individuals, companies and nation states already pay for public relations. If Google offered them a service they'd pay good money.
it’s fair to be skeptical. But then again we already know that this wasn’t the case with search results. So not sure why we would assume it is this time around.
Their entire ideology. An LLM is the perfect propaganda technology, the more people outsource their thinking to them, the easier they will be for Big Corporate to control.
It's crazy to me that AI developments have such a big uncritical following from people that claim to be pro-freedom, especially around these parts. The end goal is and always has been enslavement to capital.
Already has. I asked yesterday a question on different types of graphics cards vs power consumption, I and it asked me if I’d like links to buy some graphics cards
This is the problem with the black box model. These adCompanies control what people see. People don't know if they can trust the generated slop.
It is the end of the open web. People need to wake up and realise what full Evil is being planned here. Google tried this before, e. g. AMP and what not.
The only reason Google is pushing this AI crap is so that they can shove ads right into people's throats without them being able to use ad blockers (it's easy to block a web script but virtually impossible to block the text itself), effectively doubling their profits overnight.
The search results without AI also tell you whatever Google wants you to see. The immediate solution is not to block AI summaries, it's to stop using Google entirely.
> but virtually impossible to block the text itself
Why do you believe so?
As long as there is a clear indication somewhere on the webpage (in the metadata or in the text itself) that a specific portion of a text is an ad, a browser extension will be able to block it.
And I assume that there are laws mandating that the ads must be clearly marked in order to be distinguishable from the genuine content.
That's only doable if the ads are artificially injected. But what if they are part of the training, system prompt or the search results that are fed to the AI? What if Google Search bumps up their paying advertiser up in the internal search results for Gemini (as they are basically already doing)? The AI will be biased towards the advertisers without literally embedding an ad into the output text.
They won't be if the models are "free", which is the case for AI Mode in Google Search. That's why common people still use Google despite it being an ad-ridden slopfest, it's "free"!
This might come as a surprise to many, but the sole reason Google exist is to make a profit. More profit means more success means more profit, that's why they did create a company in the first place. Mindblowing stuff, that.
> With Conversational Discovery ads, your ad answers a person’s specific question.
Ah so my "search" results are going to be biased and at the mercy of the highest bidder.
Only a matter of time before someone will sell privileges of baking your ad/agenda into a llm model during training. That, or companies will fluff their own websites with verbose claims about their products that will get sucked into training via "organic” scraping.
Enshittification of the AI tools has officially begun.
Maybe we will soon find e.g. AI-generated pictures of ourselves in branded clothes or using branded products to appear among our photos, discretely disguised as genuine photos with a little badge in the corner indicating that it is actually a paid "promotion".
And so on. And that would still be, in my opinion, just the beginning.
The main reasons I'll never get a neural chip are, in increasing order of importance: A. Safety B. It gives them a vector to beam ads directly into my brain
I would have expected them to wait with ads until OpenAI starts first and users switch to Gemini. Google is probably the player that could afford to wait the longest with this and increase their market share that way.
100%. This is the only part that I find surprising/confusing. Surely whoever blinks first incurs a massive reputational hit with the public (who don't think about this deeply enough to see that it was always inevitable), so why do that if you don't have to?
Perhaps the bright side from Google's POV is that it means that they can be the first to start wooing advertisers to their platform. First-mover advantage there might outweigh reputational damage with the public, especially if OpenAI follows suit with ads in 6 months.
Digital scam economy is bigger than illegal drug industry and these (legal) companies are the kingpins. Better be mad at some immigrants than at companies allowing your grandma to be scammed.
Eventually no one will write reviews because ai will steal all the results and information and not give any credit or back links so they will have no choice but to lie and say product x is the best, if the company behind product x pays some money behind the scenes, no ad mention needed, the poorer companies will have to buy a cheaper ad to get mentioned along side the expensive higher ai-tainted recommendation
I guess I'm used to seeing the english language being mangled by corp-speak but "creative" as a noun that doesn't even refer to a "creative" person (which also feels like a recent addition) really grates!
I thought "a creative" was the person who designs adverts, but I guess it's acting as a good filter, to filter out people like me, because I'm clearly not the target audience for this.
I've tried the AI mode and it seems to basically give the same results as a ChatGPT query - which raises the question why use Google AI mode and not ChatGPT? (or any other of the similar models?)
Allowing synthetic content to grow without limits will force the creation of a "synternet," an only-generative content network that can be accessed but will guarantee the classic internet to be human-focused, otherwise, internet data will lose value and the human incentive to surf will be lost
How do you keep bad actors off the classic Internet? Even if there's a proof of humanity system, there would remain a demand for mechanical turk jobs to funnel AI content into it.
It will be interesting how hidden those ads will be compared to current Search experience or what OpenAI is already doing.
It's a lot easier to mislead a user with an AI generated ad that with a Search result IMHO, I'm betting on a huige backlash if they don't make it VERY clear that ads are ads.
The well is beyond poisoned. Almost anything I search for is returning AI generated vomit. I have not used google in weeks.
On youtube I use Unhook and only look at /feed/subscriptions, when I search I use before:2022. And am actually downloading what I find interesting, before google starts deleting because of the flood of vomit. Hard disks can not be manufactured fast enough to consume it.
Even HN is slowly becoming unreadable.
The internet is on borrowed time.
Show me more ads.
Its time to move on.
Try new things, make your own networks. Write your ipv6 address in the pub, under the table, in the top left corner, write it on the subway walls, and tenement halls.
Listen on tcp port 1492 and explain how to talk to you.
They really couldn't have waited any longer after announcing the shift to AI mode. Almost immediately. I'm sure the employees who worked on it must be terribly proud.
Google has to do this to protect their ad revenue. But… Anthropic doesn’t have to do ads (OpenAI might have to for their free tier) and if the ads degrade the experience too much then people will just abandon Google/Gemini for search entirely.
I've been abandoning Google before ai ads....kagi has let me take control again of my search results and I can ban low quality domains like google used to be able to do.
> No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other.
If humanity makes it out of the current era with our dignity and intellect intact, I think we will recognize that allowing ad companies to build our vital infrastructure was a tragic mistake.
Not long ago, some of those CEO clowns at Google, stated that Google is now an AI company. I had to chuckle, because I knew it was a lie. Google changed into an adCompany years ago already. That's why e. g. it killed off its search engine with promo-links and what not.
And now they admitted it AGAIN! "AI Mode" is basically an AdMode.
This also explains why they declared total war against ublock origin.
I think it is time the empire strikes back. We must get rid of Evil here - let's get rid of Google. This adCompany no longer has a useful purpose. All the "freebie features" (which are not free; ads pay for that) can be done by others, if people work together. We need no extension of more ads here.
At this point, why do we, the end users, need Google for? Sure, companies might need Google to display their ads or to use Google Cloud. But end users? GPT, or Claude or Grok do a better job searching.
Fuck yes. I was worried about not having ads and google providing useful results again.
The last time i clicked on an AI link it took me to a page that wasn’t just more google ads or SEo bullshit. It was very disappointing I was looking forward to accidentally clicking more ads and instead found information relevant to what I wanted to know.
> We’re introducing more helpful ads in AI Mode
I always chuckle when ad companies say that. I have never seen a helpful ad in google search, but well I have been using adblockers forever so I would not know.I am honestly curious though, for those who don't use adblockers - what percentage of ads that you see are actually helpful?
I typically block ads as well, but more recently I changed some setting in the default Android newsfeed thing and some ads started to show through amongst the news items.
The ads there are usually fairly innocuous (i.e. not disruptive, not flashing auto play vids etc, they just look like another news item and you can just scroll past them like other news articles you're not interested in), but I have actually found them useful. I am wearing a T-shirt right now in fact that was advertised to me a week or two ago as "on sale" for £8 (eight) and which I clicked through and purchased. There have been one or two other examples of things there that actually have been useful or at least interesting to me right now. So they actually have been useful/helpful in that regard.
So I am a bit conflicted here. It is no cost to me to click on the ad, and I bought some things that I use but would probably have not got otherwise. Am I being manipulated to part with my money? I dunno. Would I have bought a £8 t-shirt anyway if I was just in a shop and saw it? Maybe. Was the ad actually quite well targeted and appropriate? In this case yes.
I think on balance I would say those news feed ads are acceptable to me. I have problems where it is totally irrelevant and disruptive. Hopefully the AI mode ones will be similar to the news feed ones. I would be pretty upset if the ad content was directly worded into the response.
I love the idea of targeting advertising. But the current implementations I hate.
The ASR voice recorder app gets this right. It lets me use the full featured version for three days, after which I need to watch a few ads to get another three days. I choose when to watch the ads, and if I'm late there is nothing worse than a small nag at the bottom of the app. I actually now start every day with the ads, while I cook breakfast, and it is a positive experience. I could also just pay for the app and be done with them.
The problem with the idealism of targeted advertising is that it assumes that there is always an ad that fits your desires. In reality, some people have very niche interests and preferences, and not every business advertises through the same channels or with the same budget. Ads will pretty much always cater to the lowest common denominator even if you account for the individual.
Since when have we considered ads something helpful?
Their purpose isn’t to be helpful. They're there to sell you something, and nothing more. Any semblance of helpfulness is misinterpretation and merely coincidental.
> Since when have we considered ads something helpful?
Depends. Ads a low-effort large-reach pathways for lead generation, mostly useful for B2C penetration.
I also did sales when I ran my own company, and I can absolutely guarantee that ads can be helpful. When talking to leads you're talking to someone who a) never saw what you offered but is listening to you anyway, or b) saw what you offered and decided to contact you.
The very first thing I'd do in sales is try to determine if the person I was talking to had a) A need my product could satisfy, plus b) Authority to make the purchase, and c) The budget to actually follow through.
The last thing I wanted to do is spend a bunch of my limited time talking to people who never had any intention of pulling the trigger on a contract; those are much harder to convert to paying customers (not impossible, just harder) and were almost never worth the effort.
My best-case scenario was "Someone reached out to me". Ads are a way to make that happen.
Now, if you're talking about internet ads, then you're talking about a different beast altogether (B2C), and those ads can be helpful to purchasers if they were already in the market for $FOO.
The problem is that internet ads are almost never worth the money - a significant number of clicks are from bots, another significant number are from accidental clicks and only a tiny tiny number of them are from people with the intention to buy $FOO from somebody, and they are just checking our your $FOO offering to compare.
I do not think that I have ever seen on the Internet a helpful ad. When I want to buy something, I search what I want or I go directly to online shops that I have used before or to price comparison sites.
Nonetheless, mostly before the appearance of the Internet, when I was reading various technical journals, especially during the seventies and the eighties of the past century, e.g. magazines or journals of electronics or of computers, I was considering most ads as helpful, as they were making me aware of various things that I might have wanted to buy.
Unlike the ads that bother me today, those ads in magazines or journals intended for more competent buyers contained enough technical details and prices to make possible comparisons between products, and they were also easy to skip when not interested, instead of covering important content on a Web page and making efforts to provide a visual distraction that makes difficult to focus on the useful content of that Web page.
Oh, they don't mean helpful to you. What they mean is, helpful to their revenue.
The people who are buying ad spots and creating ads absolutely believe they're helpful, not just to you, but to their client. Their purpose is to helpful, to the company, who wants your money and who gives the marketer their money, and with this action, the marketer will believe whatever is needed to do their job, as always.
Since when were we the customer?
They are helpful to the people who buy the ads, not those of us who have them injected into our experiences.
> Since when have we considered ads something helpful
I have genuinely met people who claim that ads are helpful and interesting and used this as a justification for adware companies to stalk you every step you take on the web.
I’ve met people who enjoy lots of gross things. That doesn’t make the things gross to me, or the vast majority of humanity.
My guy take is that they are mindrotted by ads into thinking they are good for them. Digital Stockholm Syndrome. Or maybe a Myth of Sisyphus type situation.
What do you expect them to say? More annoying ads? They're trying to wrap this in a positive way. Everyone knows that ads are annoying.
Some might argue that Adwords got so successful because ads competed like search results, on bid AND relevance, not just bid.
If your ads inventory is big enough, ads can actually be a better answer to your intent than organic content, because the companies behind the ads have a much stronger incentive to satisfy your need.
Paid ads always negatively distort the results.
If AdWords or search consider both relevance and the fee collected, the end user will never be shown the most useful results consistently. If the goal was usefulness they would only pick results by relevance and take no fee at all, or take a flat fee that isn't based on a bidding system.
Recently I’ve been starting up quick web projects and a number of external services are recommend (Neon, Resend, Railway), and if I just let the agent rip, signed-up for and implemented. Is it confirmed any LLM producer or provider has been receiving kickbacks for these technical decisions?
Legally they would gave to disclose with the recommendation that its a paid advertisement. That said, they were also legally not supposed to scrape the entire internet for training so if they are getting kickbacks I wouldn't expect a confirmation.
I don't have an ad blocker on my laptop. The ads I get are pretty much entirely generic and irrelevant to me, I don't remember ever consciously clicking on an ad.
I have never seen a helpful ad in google search
That's a good thing.
I don't mind ads, as I understand that without money, web sites go away. But I'm very careful about being tracked. That, I don't think is cool.
It's not unusual for me to see ads for companies hundreds or even thousands of miles away, and often selling things for which I do not possess the correct body parts.
I consider that affirmation that I am mostly successful at staying off the ad-tech radar.
I mind ads and don’t think sites would go away. They’d just be less profitable.
I mind ads because they crowd out less profitable margins and result in worse products. Imagine how nice and useful Google could be if they optimized for search instead of ads.
> I have never seen a helpful ad in google search
I have, fairly often in fact. That's why Google makes such a bucket load of money from their ads - they're actually vaguely relevant.
I've don't think I've ever seen a relevant ad outside of Google though, and I still wouldn't say "yeay, helpful ads!". Nobody is going to want them even though I occasionally get relevant ones and click on them.
If an advert was helpful I would be able to click the "show ads" button
I used to do this. I used to pay for adverts -- computer shopper was a magazine I traded real money for to get the adverts.
If ads aren't opt in, they aren't useful.
> I have never seen a helpful ad
There, I fixed it!
I sought out the He Man trailer because I thought I'd be interested in it. I decided I was and will watch it at the cinema next month.
That was a helpful advert.
I also sought out the Supergirl trailer and decided I wouldn't bother seeing it. Again a helpful advert.
In both cases I chose the advert.
“Helpful for our short-term bottom line”
I never have on Google Search (I also block them to be fair), but I've booked a lot of shows through Instagram ads actually. Shows I learnt about only through those ads and I would have been disappointed to miss said shows.
But yeah that's literally the only platform where I've ever had useful ads. Even other meta products only have absolute garbage ads.
Does nobody talk abot the elephant in the room? Will the answers the AI gives also be influenced by Googles customers?
I won't be able to use their AI results if they are, personally. If I ask the question "what is the best tool for doing x" and I can't trust that the answer is going to be the truth according to all available information, then the AI is useless or worse, misleading. If google is unbiased, and only highlights paid advertiser mentions, no one will pay. I'd only accept this if it was a clear separation of LLM response and ads in a sidebar or something similar. Other people may not care. Many happily read politically affiliated news knowing that their opinions and actions may be influenced by a media source.
Let me let you in on a little industry "secret"
You can't trust those results no matter what
The pages that they pull in to source that data all contain affiliate links and companies contact websites to get their tools to the tops of those lists by paying money often monthly. I know this because I do this...
It's basically standard SEO but it also manipulates AI like ChatGPT very very easily
Simplest way to do is by running affiliate program for your SaaS and shady marketers will do everything to get sales if it's profitable.
Eh not really
They won't get you on any worthwhile list unless it's their own because it's too risky for them and any site they would publish it on would want to use their own affiliate link. Unless of course we are talking about something like Medium or YouTube which does work
And then of course there's the fraudsters who will bid on branded keywords we have banned dozens of people for that
This is why local AI is so important
It's already being trained on "public" (ethical or otherwise) data. So, it already has ingested that kind of "optimization" during pre-training and training.
I don't think you can fine-tune your way out of it.
This is far from widespread at the moment, so it'll be possible to at least use the current cutting-edge models locally in the future.
Far from widespread? SEO has seeped to all crevices of the internet for the last 20 years.
People still think these things are smart. That if their word generator eats enough of the Internet, it will somehow give them the real information that's otherwise hidden. Or perhaps a better word; filter the bullshit.
To filter bullshit it would first have to understand bullshit, and it doesn't. That's why an LLM will tell you the solution to a problem that doesn't work, and argue with you when you correct it.
This is what bothers me a lot. For the people who doesn't know how it's made or want to believe, it's a miracle.
For me, it's a resource wasting text generator. I'll not lie, I don't use OpenAI, Mistral or Anthropic's models, even for coding. I prefer to read my API docs and cry once.
I used Gemini, five or six times in total. Twice I asked a couple of very specific things, and it unearthed them. Since they were not products, but information, that was helpful. Twice, it has given wrong information. When I "told" it, there was another way, it said "of course there are two ways", etc. Tasteless and time wasting.
I don't like using an LLM all day long, or offload my thinking to them. It's the ultimate self-poisoning incident.
And as you say, these algorithms can't know right/wrong/logical/bullshit, etc. They just spew out text.
That doesn't solve this particular problem. Your local model was trained on reddit comments written by bots.
How do you make sure that the model you run locally is not tainted? Is there even a way to confirm this without providing the complete training set?
Fwiw I just run kiwix/zeal locally which has old school search index of all articles in wiki/stackoverflow etc. That seems enough for most of my day to day use.
Local AI will have the bias that existed at the time of its training, which is different from no bias. For stuff that needs to be current, a local LLM would need to search the net regardless.
And since "no bias" isn't something that actually exists in reality when it comes to language or even anything near humans, "bias in local model I can introspect" will always be miles ahead of "bias I know is there, but cannot introspect".
It's less compromised, but it's still basing the answer on compromised queries. This is why I pay for independent reviews (e.g Which) where their incentives are more aligned with yours.
Not if the models come from Google. The ads will be implicit in the model. X is better that Y an Z would be easy to add to a the training set.
How does that help if it's using search? You get whatever the search engine outputs
Sorry to tell you that all websites you get when you google "what is the best tool for doing x" are already manipulated, including reddit conversations.
Don't forget the YouTube videos, those "top 5 x" robot videos are the worst.
Those sort of things are already highly biased because of the marketing spam that the modelsmare trained on.
I'd be more worried about AI convincing you that you need a product or expensive solution when you actually don't.
Then you already can’t use it because it already doesn’t give you a result like that.
There is no “true answer given all available infomation” maybe unless you give an eval function.
This is not an elephant in the room, this is so obvious. What else is Google going to do, give up their one and only goose that lays the golden eggs?
Regular search being replaced with AI search means regular search (with ads) being replaced with AI search (with ads).
The benefit of AI search will be that it’s much better “integrated” in the answer, aka even harder to detect.
Elephants in the room are obvious by definition.
I think the point of the phrase is that it is obvious but people refuse to talk about it
But wouldn't that break FCC rules?
Since when does Google care about laws?
> This is not an elephant in the room, this is so obvious.
Maybe they grew up in an environment where the phrase "elephant in the room" meant a situation where people enter a room, notice an elephant there, and immediately scream "Jesus Christ there's a goddamn elephant!"
Usually the elephant in a room is something very evident about which no one wants to discuss about
But everyone is discussing how AI will have ads, so it’s not an elephant in the room.
> their one and only goose that lays the golden eggs?
Eh, it really isn't the only goose in goog town. Cloud is at ~20% of their total revenue, and probably is going up w/ their hardware success and other licensing deals. I'm curious to see what goog can do with their properties if this trend continues. Less reliance on ads could be interesting. (many former googlers have said that pressure from the ad business was felt across all their products)
The method is already public for some time now. I bookmarked it since I share it a lot:
https://research.google/blog/mechanism-design-for-large-lang...
It's the same. There are slots, there's bidding, there're bidders. Same ad model, evolved for AI era.
Sigh, thank you for sharing this. This is disheartening ( even if not unexpected ) given that I actually like current version of gemini based on how well it performed -- all things considered -- relative to gpt sub on recommendation check.
I never ask computers about a certain device directly. I lost that faith eons ago. I first search for candidates, then go to official pages to check specs and then read / watch reviews, then decide.
Yes, it takes time, but I'm the one to blame if something goes wrong about it.
Also, it helps that I don't use Google for searching the web. I prefer Kagi.
I use Gemini (and only Gemini) to dig the net for the things that I can't find despite my best efforts. They are generally unbranded or very specific things, so ads doesn't play much role there.
I'm a bad customer for Google. :D
That's the real question and it's not hypothetical. Google already adjusts organic rankings based on advertiser relationships in ways that aren't documented. With AI Mode the surface area for that kind of influence is much larger and much less visible. A search result you can inspect. A synthesized answer you can't.
Don't they already to this with maps routing? I thought this was the norm.
That will be fun because it's illegal to accept money to promote a product without indication that you have done so. The FTC requires "clear and conspicuous disclosure" for such endorsements.
The chat interface has the disclaimer "AI responses may include mistakes." and that appears to be enough to relieve them of any responsibility for the responses. In a similar manner, wouldn't it be enough to add a disclaimer that says "AI responses may include sponsored content."?
Crime is legal now
Unenforced crimes are still crimes, you have to rewrite laws to change that.
Seems to work fine for product placement in other media. Apparently "clear and conspicuous disclosure" can be a footnote hidden somewhere in the credits.
You can label the whole output, every time, right? May include sponsored content or something.
Doesn't matter as long as you bribe the right people. The government is completely compromised.
The truth is brought to you by the highest bidder. Individuals, companies and nation states already pay for public relations. If Google offered them a service they'd pay good money.
it’s fair to be skeptical. But then again we already know that this wasn’t the case with search results. So not sure why we would assume it is this time around.
Even if it's not right now, it's hard not seeing this happening at some point
All signs point to yes. It’s Google’s profit center.
Not just their customers.
Their entire ideology. An LLM is the perfect propaganda technology, the more people outsource their thinking to them, the easier they will be for Big Corporate to control.
It's crazy to me that AI developments have such a big uncritical following from people that claim to be pro-freedom, especially around these parts. The end goal is and always has been enslavement to capital.
What about political ads? Will the AI lie about news to further the interests of Google's patrons?
Already has. I asked yesterday a question on different types of graphics cards vs power consumption, I and it asked me if I’d like links to buy some graphics cards
Obviously.
for sure, i guess this is one of the experiments that confirms that would work https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/
This is the problem with the black box model. These adCompanies control what people see. People don't know if they can trust the generated slop.
It is the end of the open web. People need to wake up and realise what full Evil is being planned here. Google tried this before, e. g. AMP and what not.
This never occurred to traditional search results so highly doubt they’ll start now.
The only reason Google is pushing this AI crap is so that they can shove ads right into people's throats without them being able to use ad blockers (it's easy to block a web script but virtually impossible to block the text itself), effectively doubling their profits overnight.
Block the AI overviews with extensions like https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hide-google-ai-over... or use a userscript to do the same.
You can block the entire AI response, but not the paid-for product placement in the response separately.
Block the entire AI response. It's not a good thing. It tells you whatever google wants you to see. It's an incredibly powerful brainwashing tool.
The search results without AI also tell you whatever Google wants you to see. The immediate solution is not to block AI summaries, it's to stop using Google entirely.
> but virtually impossible to block the text itself
Why do you believe so?
As long as there is a clear indication somewhere on the webpage (in the metadata or in the text itself) that a specific portion of a text is an ad, a browser extension will be able to block it.
And I assume that there are laws mandating that the ads must be clearly marked in order to be distinguishable from the genuine content.
That's only doable if the ads are artificially injected. But what if they are part of the training, system prompt or the search results that are fed to the AI? What if Google Search bumps up their paying advertiser up in the internal search results for Gemini (as they are basically already doing)? The AI will be biased towards the advertisers without literally embedding an ad into the output text.
> if they are part of the training
That would be an intentional poisoning of the models with biased or outright untruthful data.
I believe that many people would be unwilling to use such models.
They won't be if the models are "free", which is the case for AI Mode in Google Search. That's why common people still use Google despite it being an ad-ridden slopfest, it's "free"!
The law will not be updated or enforced. Laws don't reflect justice, they reflect the power relations in the society at the time the law was written.
Big tech is paying handsomely for this, and I don't think the populace is going to outbribe them.
This might come as a surprise to many, but the sole reason Google exist is to make a profit. More profit means more success means more profit, that's why they did create a company in the first place. Mindblowing stuff, that.
Competitors will be very happy though.
> With Conversational Discovery ads, your ad answers a person’s specific question.
Ah so my "search" results are going to be biased and at the mercy of the highest bidder.
Only a matter of time before someone will sell privileges of baking your ad/agenda into a llm model during training. That, or companies will fluff their own websites with verbose claims about their products that will get sucked into training via "organic” scraping.
That is how I understand it as well.
Enshittification of the AI tools has officially begun.
Maybe we will soon find e.g. AI-generated pictures of ourselves in branded clothes or using branded products to appear among our photos, discretely disguised as genuine photos with a little badge in the corner indicating that it is actually a paid "promotion".
And so on. And that would still be, in my opinion, just the beginning.
Well, yes. I mean of course they are. They're an ad company.
The main reasons I'll never get a neural chip are, in increasing order of importance: A. Safety B. It gives them a vector to beam ads directly into my brain
I would have expected them to wait with ads until OpenAI starts first and users switch to Gemini. Google is probably the player that could afford to wait the longest with this and increase their market share that way.
100%. This is the only part that I find surprising/confusing. Surely whoever blinks first incurs a massive reputational hit with the public (who don't think about this deeply enough to see that it was always inevitable), so why do that if you don't have to?
Perhaps the bright side from Google's POV is that it means that they can be the first to start wooing advertisers to their platform. First-mover advantage there might outweigh reputational damage with the public, especially if OpenAI follows suit with ads in 6 months.
I wonder whose bright idea it was to label ads as 'helpful'. Do Google execs actually look for ads first when they google a question?
Dear customers, we regret to inform you that the existing hallucinations now include biased trash.
Poor Google, there’s no money in anything else they do so they have to sell ads. How could it have come to this?
Most ads i see on YouTube are outright scams. Google and Meta are so evil.
Digital scam economy is bigger than illegal drug industry and these (legal) companies are the kingpins. Better be mad at some immigrants than at companies allowing your grandma to be scammed.
Honestly just thinking of not trying anymore and cashing out on tech skills and moral indifference. The sheep are just begging to be slaughtered.
Every single one of you who worked for these companies: you knew what you were doing.
Eventually no one will write reviews because ai will steal all the results and information and not give any credit or back links so they will have no choice but to lie and say product x is the best, if the company behind product x pays some money behind the scenes, no ad mention needed, the poorer companies will have to buy a cheaper ad to get mentioned along side the expensive higher ai-tainted recommendation
I guess I'm used to seeing the english language being mangled by corp-speak but "creative" as a noun that doesn't even refer to a "creative" person (which also feels like a recent addition) really grates!
I thought "a creative" was the person who designs adverts, but I guess it's acting as a good filter, to filter out people like me, because I'm clearly not the target audience for this.
You're on the right track, a creative makes creatives (to be included alongside google searches, obviously)
I've tried the AI mode and it seems to basically give the same results as a ChatGPT query - which raises the question why use Google AI mode and not ChatGPT? (or any other of the similar models?)
I think the search results are still there with AI mode
Well Google is going to exist 10 years from now and ChatGPT will not
Wait until they release 100 year bonds.. oh wait, they already did lol
Allowing synthetic content to grow without limits will force the creation of a "synternet," an only-generative content network that can be accessed but will guarantee the classic internet to be human-focused, otherwise, internet data will lose value and the human incentive to surf will be lost
How do you keep bad actors off the classic Internet? Even if there's a proof of humanity system, there would remain a demand for mechanical turk jobs to funnel AI content into it.
It will be interesting how hidden those ads will be compared to current Search experience or what OpenAI is already doing.
It's a lot easier to mislead a user with an AI generated ad that with a Search result IMHO, I'm betting on a huige backlash if they don't make it VERY clear that ads are ads.
If that happens, I'm betting they get slapped with something inconsequential like a $1 million fine and write it off as the cost of doing business.
Get the last ounce of milk from the dying cow.
The well is beyond poisoned. Almost anything I search for is returning AI generated vomit. I have not used google in weeks.
On youtube I use Unhook and only look at /feed/subscriptions, when I search I use before:2022. And am actually downloading what I find interesting, before google starts deleting because of the flood of vomit. Hard disks can not be manufactured fast enough to consume it.
Even HN is slowly becoming unreadable.
The internet is on borrowed time.
Show me more ads.
Its time to move on.
Try new things, make your own networks. Write your ipv6 address in the pub, under the table, in the top left corner, write it on the subway walls, and tenement halls.
Listen on tcp port 1492 and explain how to talk to you.
I share your feelings.
I’m so glad I use Firefox with ublock origin with the “ai widget” filter. It’s not perfect but you will pry it from my cold dead hands.
What I am really waiting for is ads on my commit messages.
'Authored by Claude code'
The naivete that this wasn't inevitable is almost endearing, if it wasn't from the same crowd who's building this shit.
They really couldn't have waited any longer after announcing the shift to AI mode. Almost immediately. I'm sure the employees who worked on it must be terribly proud.
Google has to do this to protect their ad revenue. But… Anthropic doesn’t have to do ads (OpenAI might have to for their free tier) and if the ads degrade the experience too much then people will just abandon Google/Gemini for search entirely.
I've been abandoning Google before ai ads....kagi has let me take control again of my search results and I can ban low quality domains like google used to be able to do.
Ads and population control by propaganda are the future of AI.
GenAI in other fields is useless and only promoted by charlatans or the financially invested.
...was this ever in doubt? Search accounts for >50% of alphabet's total revenue - they are hardly going to kill the golden goose intentionally
Not search - ads in search account for >50% of their total revenue.
Don't _ads in search_ account for 100% of their search revenue? Does Google Search offer any other paid services?
> No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other.
If humanity makes it out of the current era with our dignity and intellect intact, I think we will recognize that allowing ad companies to build our vital infrastructure was a tragic mistake.
And there it is, the vaccum of AI consuming your data everywhere, used to train their models all goes back to... ads.
Same things with OpenAI. Ads.
I feel like we're right back in the early 2000's Internet again at least they aren't popups, we hope.
But with these models being embedded into, literally everything, will your screen on your car start showing you ads before you can turn the AC on?
It's coming
Please let me advertise beside incorrect content
Need a proof reader who can spell strawberry? Send your AI draft to us for corrections.
So every search will now result in an ad and/or hallucination?
Kinda interesting how Google is releasing a big wave of enshitifications immediately prior to the Anthropic and OpenAI and spacex IPOs.
On assumes there is a strategic reason for it, but I'm not sure about what it is.
Anyone have a theory or care to guess?
So the web is now pay to play.
Surprised it took this long.
Not long ago, some of those CEO clowns at Google, stated that Google is now an AI company. I had to chuckle, because I knew it was a lie. Google changed into an adCompany years ago already. That's why e. g. it killed off its search engine with promo-links and what not.
And now they admitted it AGAIN! "AI Mode" is basically an AdMode.
This also explains why they declared total war against ublock origin.
I think it is time the empire strikes back. We must get rid of Evil here - let's get rid of Google. This adCompany no longer has a useful purpose. All the "freebie features" (which are not free; ads pay for that) can be done by others, if people work together. We need no extension of more ads here.
From the page, “what are some top colleges…”
rAiNIer buSInEss sCHoOl
Yeah, Lets build the next generation AI and slap an ads on it for a good measure.
At this point, why do we, the end users, need Google for? Sure, companies might need Google to display their ads or to use Google Cloud. But end users? GPT, or Claude or Grok do a better job searching.
For now. If tokens don’t get cheaper over time, Google’s edge might come from being able to provide cheaper/free access to a frontier LLM.
Will I be able to pay google to make its Claude code write code that uses left pad as a service.
Isn't this the whole point? Surely no one still believes in that stuff anymore.
Fuck yes. I was worried about not having ads and google providing useful results again.
The last time i clicked on an AI link it took me to a page that wasn’t just more google ads or SEo bullshit. It was very disappointing I was looking forward to accidentally clicking more ads and instead found information relevant to what I wanted to know.
dog barks, more at 11