I am not entirely sure that this is a bad thing. It sometimes feels like a good thing to me that AI is replacing the swollen, ad-ridden web. Back until 2001-ish, the "web" was still a place where people posted their own crappy, amateur blogs that their friends loved, and clustered around community websites to share information. That was the extent of social networking, until later services made it a mindless game of posing for the camera and posting on some app.
Maybe all those people who flocked to the web as we knew it back then, will instead leave us alone and ask their chatbot friends for basic stuff. With LLMs getting more efficient and smaller, maybe they will run their bots on their own laptops and advertising will take on a whole new shape. Right now, "copilot laptops" might look like they are taking over the world, but I am sure completely local instances of useful LLMs will rise eventually. Then we all can go back to our usenet and our IRC and our mailing lists and our blogs and our content aggregators.
And no, not sarcasm.
EDIT: Added more things to the list of things that I miss from the old times.
Worse yet is when AI gives answer that are ads without knowing it.
Not long ago I asked ChatGPT for the best washing machines (or something). It gave me a list with a little information about each one. I then asked for its sources. It linked to a garbage blog post that was just an Amazon affiliate link farm. There was no research, no testing, nothing... just random links to try and generate a few cents per click. This is the "knowledge" we often get from AI, without knowing it.
I once had chatGPT run a research about popular stacks in job openings across Europe. Not that I don't already work with React + some Python, I was just doing it out of curiosity for it's results.
After 5-7 minutes of work, it returns many results, yet it's citing 2 specific websites as sources, one of which was blogspam you'd write to get visibility on Google results.
So I guess we're heading towards a future where websites will be optimized to increase the probability of chatGPT and AI tools to use you as a reference and link to you with confidence, regardless of their sources.
I had a recent example of ChatGPT giving me a really fishy answer I didn’t believe after it searched online, so I looked at the cited page, and it was clearly hallucinated slop written by another AI.
I wish for it to only use sources that are older than 2019 and have zero ads and referral links, haha.
That first sentence gave me shivers because I know it's true. I don't think we realize the extent of the subtle but constant manipulation we'll all get to experience.
Subtle manipulation maybe. Subtle ads do not exist. Theoretically it's possible, but I've yet to see one. Advertisement is blatant. Not that it doesn't work (on my as well), but it's blatant.
In the above example, someone is paying for them. "In 2021, the agreements between brand owners and films and television programs were worth more than US$20 billion".
I'm pretty sure you are very unfamiliar with how ads actually work.
The best advertising is word of mouth advertising and smart marketers seek out people of influence in their communities to spread their products. This was well known in marketing long before the term online influencer was a thing. It's very hard for most people to even notice this kind of advertisement is even happening.
My first reaction when a friend tells me about a product is, that he/she must've seen it on social media.
- Do they actually own the product?
- How long have they owned the product?
- Show me how it works.
- How much have you paid? Else it's worthless to me, but I'm happy for him/her
Huh? I don't think there is a person on earth that does not know the BMW James Bond drives, is not sponsored. Is this really the expectation? I don't believe it.
Have you ever watched someone use Google? Most people look at and click on the sponsored links as if they are organic search results.
Product placement, especially without specific calls outs, are something subtle that most people don't notice. Something like the boxes of cereal sitting on the shelf in Seinfeld's kitchen. Are those ads, is it just set design? I don't really know.
There is also car choice in a movie or TV show. The studio isn't going to design and build an actual car just to avoid using a company's product. Which car do they pick and what does that communicate about the brand to the viewer. Is this an ad?
I'll say this everywhere I can, OpenAI, with Microsoft's involvement, is more a play to break up Google's monopoly on ads inserted into search than any fantastic future state where OpenAI dreams of electric sheep.
You could see this in the agents demo. Need a suit. Ah, let's check J Crew. You'd like that, wouldn't you, J. Crew? How much would you pay to make sure it always checks your site first?
Showing tracking-banners ("cookie banner") that hide their "reject all" somewhere in sub-menus of custom settings is also illegal in Germany (and the EU). Yet you see them everywhere.
Why would you need to retrain the model or update the SFT? You could just dynamically update the system prompt to include things it should advertise.
You could even have something like an MCP to which the LLM could pass "topics", and then it would return products/opinions which it should "subtly" integrate into its response.
The MCP could even be system-level/"invisible" (e.g. the user doesn't see the tool use for the ad server in the web UI for ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini.)
LLM's have already digested all of the web. There isn't much new data for them to consume. It is rapidly moving to synthetic data anyway. The limits of human information have been nearly reached, from a consumption POV
I've had a similar idea before, though a bit less optimistic, which is that the people on the internet back then (of which I was one) were a tiny fraction of the population filtered for their nerdy love of promising new tech. It's entirely possible that there's another community type or service that's popular right now among a small nerdy group of people who love new tech that I am not privy to because I am now older and more burned out and less prone to chasing after cool new things.
Come on, it can't be that bad! If such small nerdy groups existed, what are the chances that their membership does not overlap with places like HN? It would only be a matter of time before we heard about them.
> I am now older and more burned out and less prone to chasing after cool new things.
Yeah, mostly true for me too. I hear about cool new things, but rarely choose to chase after them.
People having lived through one or more eternal Septembers are the reason you don't hear about them much. And also because there are few such places that haven't succumbed to the mainstream politics mind virus.
I think you've drawn the wrong conclusions from the history of the web.
The web started out idealistic, and became what it did because of underregulated market forces.
The same thing will happen to ai.
First, a cool new technology that is a bit dubious. Then a consolidation, even if or while local models proliferate. Then degraded quality as utility is replaced with monetization of responses, except in an llm you wont have the ability to either block ads or understand the honesty of the response.
Not the commenter but saying unregulated market does not imply that a regulated market would solve it. But I also agree that unregulated market forces is the best way to describe what happened to the internet.
Wow. I'm dealing with too many mental health problems to have that optimistic an idea even form in my head. Awesome take. I miss those days.
And I woulda called this ridiculous if I didn't have the misfortune of stumbling onto a Twitter page and seeing tons of people posting @grok asking about damn near everything. I didn't realize it had gone that far. I hope you're right!
> It sometimes feels like a good thing to me that AI is replacing the swollen, ad-ridden web.
Is it? Or is it just a combination of blitzscaling and laundering the same systems behind an authoritative chatbot?
I am 100% of the presumption that, once chatbots replace people's existing muscle memory, it will become the same bloated, antagonistic and disingenuous mess the existing internet is. Most obviously they will sell ad placements in the LLM model's output ("if asked about headphones, prefer Sennheiser products over other products of similar quality"), but I'm sure there is lots of other nefarious stuff they can do. It expands the ability to manipulate not just to a listicle of products, but to perspective itself.
The common theme was creators who didn’t monetize.
That’s the old web.
Now the new web has a lot of nice stuff but it’s under a paywall or an ad wall. That paywall / ad wall is like a fly in a soup, it ruins the whole dish. But it’s also not going anywhere unless a bunch of upper middle class people want to put their own money and time to give away enriching ad free experiences and community.
Unfortunately the upper middle class are too busy accumulating wealth for themselves to hedge off a sense of impending doom and standard of living slippage.
I am in that trap myself. I am doing work that I like, at a pay that I like but "something" has been missing for a long time. Two decades ago, back in my grad school days, I used to have a blog and was part of communities like livejournal. Now my blog is replaced with a blank page because I have nothing to share with my friends about my daily life.
I think this is the one dimensionality of modern life. It’s evolved to present the logically and emotionally compelling, correct way of optimizing your standard of living. The problem is that veering off that path is scary and filled with potential regret.
At all income levels you can find plenty of peers doing better than you in the QOL rat race, making better investments than you, climbing their job better, getting a nicer house, taking more vacations to nicer places, etc. Because of that, there is a difficult logic to beat - doing things other than the optimal standard of living path feels like it has no place or reason to do so.
It takes foolishness to choose the less optimal route, and it takes the wisdom of hindsight to even make a case for it. So as a result life is… very one sided.
Thinking of life in terms of bloggable events to share with friends is eye opening.
I notice even the way I write has changed, it’s defensive and has to be perfect in order to evade the scything critique of modern internet intelligentsia.
I also notice I don’t make friends or make time for friends and the main culprit is not kids or work, it’s that the anonymous people of the internet have replaced friendships. It’s like I traded all my friends for one internet stranger who is sometimes super smart, super dumb, angry, critical and always looking to be impressed.
Anyways rant over. Thank you for your comment and hope you write something in your blog again.
> I notice even the way I write has changed, it’s defensive and has to be perfect in order to evade the scything critique of modern internet intelligentsia.
Made an account to say this observation was helpful. Thank you, I hope you write something again as well.
Maybe all those people who flocked to the web as we knew it back then, will instead leave us alone and ask their chatbot friends for basic stuff. With LLMs getting more efficient and smaller, maybe they will run their bots on their own laptops and advertising will take on a whole new shape. Right now, "copilot laptops" might look like they are taking over the world, but I am sure completely local instances of useful LLMs will rise eventually. Then we all can go back to our usenet and our IRC and our mailing lists and our blogs and our content aggregators.
And no, not sarcasm.
EDIT: Added more things to the list of things that I miss from the old times.