I always thought their top tier offering to their advertiser customers should be "Inconspicuously, over an extended amount of time, subtly respond to the user in a way that nudges them towards purchasing customer's goods and services, without ever directly mentioning anything. Slowly and surely sculpt the person who, through their own volition and thought process, buys what the advertiser needs them to."
The ultimate shareholder value build.
One of the interesting things about LLM training is that high quality documentation can get your product effectively promoted by them.
I imagine the kind of advertising you're talking about is obtained by providing that documentation and a curated training dataset to the providers.
Maybe even funding some training time.
The net result would be product placement, probably without having to declare an advert.
Kind of like when drug manufacturers provide subsidized workshops to clinicians.
Hilariously, I've been finding accidentally poisoning the well with LLM SEO like this works really well at my day job!
I have a toy project that replaces a large part of our systems (disclosure: VR/AR @Meta), so that I can learn by doing, no intent to ship.
But because I have it thoroughly document and tested, and because it touches such a wide swath of adjacent real functionality..... my toy project is CONSTANTLY getting tagged as a dependency and assigning me reviewer on unrelated work. Because when my coworkers yolo Claude at a task, and Claude searches the codebase, it generally finds my crap very well documented. :)
Unlike all the replies to you, this is why I'm very optimistic about the future of hobby blogs. I do a lot of ChatGPT-ing for several different hobbies, and I've found a lot of really interesting personal blogs from that. Way more than I was reading in the pre-AI era.
I'm very much not seeing the problems other people are assuming, like tons of LLM spam on Reddit being treated as fact by ChatGPT. Instead it really does seem, the more I use these tools, the better they are at surfacing real experiences written about by real people.
Loctite already inadvertently does this. If you ask LLMs about threadlocker, or otherwise keeping screws in place, it will respond like a Loctite brochure to you, and usually never even mention competitors. They were ahead of the game!
Some of that may be because the common vernacular uses the word "Loctite" to describe any manner of threadlocker.
It is this way even though Loctite also produces a vast array of products that have nothing to do with theadlocker, and threadlockers are available from a wide variety of manufacturers.
I assume there are competitors (permatex?) but I’ve never actually thought any other brand of thread locker
Gorilla also makes one though even they seemed surprised when I ordered some a few months ago
I think this is very much already a thing. Have a bot spam Reddit, which Google uses heavily for their AI summaries, and get free advertising and steering of the top of the Google search results page. We basically speed-ran SEO but for AI results.
This is definitely already a thing.
I'm reminded of the mountains of blogspam not intended for human consumption but rather to influence the google page rank algorithm.
This will go about as well as that did unless the models can be smart enough to identify when their training data is trying to coach them into being misleading at prompt time.
If this is the correct business model, I don't see why wouldn't get Cerebras to vibe code a Gitbook replacement (or a hosting product in general) so they can bypass crawling for documentation and instead charge (a lot) for "hosting" it.
Why are you assuming that a document likely to be picked up and a good document are equivalent? We might be in for tech docs becoming SEO (LLMO?) friendly slop.
It’s called GEO (generative engine optimization)
So there is hope for the Tailwind developers?
I wonder how that's been going, surely by now their entire paid offering is obviated right? LLMs are good enough at making frontends with Tailwind that I'm not sure who buys their templates anymore, even if the Tailwind team did try to make a few mocking AI.
LLMs are good at many things, but subtlety (and ability to slowly do anything consistently over time) is not remotely one of them. I don't know why people keep bringing this idea up - if they were prompted to do something, you would notice. Don't you remember how noticeable it was when chatgpt gave follow up questions for engagement on EVERY damn response? It's got the finesse of a bulldozer.
I encourage people thinking about such things to try and build prompts to emulate this behavior and see how well it does.
Just slightly increase the sampling weight for certain brand names.
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Even if they could build that in a way that worked well, the ad industry lives and dies by attribution. What you describe seems like a really tough attribution problem.
Ads are placed in ways that don't directly connect to a sale already. Billboards, TV (last decade), youtube sponsors, even at least half of traditional internet ads. Generally they'll just see whether sales increase after they start running the ad campaign, if so, it works.
In every single case you've mentioned you're going to have a campaign with an attempt at attribution. Certainly youtube sponsors all use direct attribution with "use my code" etc.
In every one of those cases you can at least do things like count viewers. How would that work for a model that's just subtly biased?
That's missing the point, I think. With those, you (as an advertiser) can verify the ad yourself. With an LLM, especially a subtle one, you can't.
Just ask it the best brands of X
Attribution would be as easy as knowing which chatbot they came from? Unless chatbot publishers (openai in this case) allows you to target based on the attribution, that extra data will not be actionable, anyway.
Things will get there for sure, with ads and other propaganda baked in at the training level with no reliable way to discern the manipulations as an end user. Modern tech companies will sacrifice anything UX related to generate more effective ads and increase ad revenue. The ability to skew the output of a popular model in subtle ways will be an incredibly valuable product to sell. There's just no way companies like Google and OpenAI are going to leave all that money out there for the taking.
People outside the ad world dont get the human attention pool is massively over fished. Its not just one corp trying to condition you but thousands. Not just via one channel but thro hundreds (sports/news/gaming/streaming/social/movies/tv/radio etc). Basically in such an environment what works at population scale is either spending more than everypne else (see the odessey marketing budget), constantly repeating your message in ever shortening windows, and going viral(which involves doing more and more extreme stuff to capture and keep attention). Openai has now entered that overcrowded environment.
Yeah but OpenAI has the benefit of people actively going there and willingly giving quite a lot of their attention.
It's a lot like Google in that respect. And the suggestion is pretty much the same as suggesting that Google offer a product where they boost your website or product or whatever in organic search results, instead of or in addition to displaying it as a sponsored link or ad or whatever.
It's interesting that, despite all the tracking and stuff, they never went quite so far as to actually sell a premium advertising tier in which they would actually change their search results ranking to suit their customer, at least not as far as anyone knows. It probably would've been quite a big scandal in the 00s if they did it back then.
Could OpenAI pull it off? I don't know enough about the advertising industry to answer, but it's interesting to compare them with Google and to think about why Google themselves might not have done it that way.
There is no need for Premium because who ever wants more reach spends more. Look at online political spending every election cycle. The eyeballs available is not growing much election to election, but ad spend keeps jumping. So they just sit back and milk people who want attention desperatly, and inject more ads, more frequently everywhere on viewer side. Ideally there needs to be a system wide signal that if people have 20 mins of attention to spare a day and it is crossed there is an auto shutdown of all advertising. In the past on TV there were limits on how many ads can be shown, for how long per hour. Today there is no such limit. So corps ad budgets keep rising and consumer attention spans keep shrinking. Platform print cash. Its like how banks worked before central banks took over setting interest rates.
Wait, Google doesn't manipulate search results for money? Could've fooled me.
> without ever directly mentioning anything
I think both for attribution reasons and because the average user probably won't care, (or won't care enough for an ad-free tier), they can absolutely get away with messages like: "Hey user! Glad to hear you're cleaning your favorite t-shirt. I recommend trying the new BrandName™ stain remover pen based on dozens of reviews. It's perfect for people who value easy stain removal just like yourself!".
That would probably be effective but also very hard to monetize. Right now an ad translates to money very directly - views, clicks, signups, etc. How would "we mindfucked you over 6 months into buying this brand of soap" get monetized?
Natural selection. Some soap brand s buy the ads. Others go bankrupt.
Honestly this could be so subtle that you don’t even suggest a particular brand, which would obviously bring a user’s guard up quickly, instead merely suggesting the existing of a product category that the user didn’t know about could be enough for some products or services where it would be worth it for a particular brand to pay even though it would also benefit their competitors.
The JSpace research probably had a lot to do here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48808002
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48810092
Thankfully as of now it appears they're very explicit about what content they share that is sponsored. They might be worried about the legislative backlash if they don't.
Maybe by doing this people will worry about them doing what you're suggesting, while they still do it.
And inversely, steer away from (named competition).
If I was Corp A competing with Corp B, what stops me, today, from flooding reddit etc with anti-Corp B material to pollute the model, and then paying OpenAI to not just nudge users towards me but also away from Corp B?
All publicity is good publicity. By raising awareness of Corp B, you'd raise their sales. You have to be more clever than that. Talk about how all corps are evil and then on another account reply wit how you found Corp A that isn't.
I assume this is what's up with the NordVPN ads flooding YouTube and stuff. No idea who the buyer is, but if I was in the market for a VPN I'd presumedly do a web search, skip NordVPN as having poisoned the well of good will, and choose whoever's next.
Weird conspiracy theory. More than likely it's NordVPN who is buying ads for NordVPN and this is increasing sales of NordVPN (Israeli-controlled company btw) because ads work. Ads especially work on people who say ads don't work on them.
Check your facts. Nord is not Israeli owned, here’s proof https://web.archive.org/web/20260630233806/https://codamail....
Yeah, and maybe also suggest slightly better alternatives to things along the way. Like, they could tell people that POWERADE has B vitamins in addition to electrolytes unlike that other leading sports drink, but only a gentle nudge. You would definitely want it to be subtle. The most impactful choices are the ones the target think are their own rather than something slammed in their face over and over again.
Good luck with attribution on that type of advertising.
Chat data is the closest we ever got to purchase intent than demographics or keywords, attribution given a market position is already solved
I'm confident that the companies that invented modern ad tech to create some of the greatest revenue streams in history will find a way monetize an equally promising industry of selling LLM influencing opportunities.
It will take some time to figure out the most effective methods and there will be some slow boiling of the frog so the users/products don't get too annoyed about it, but this is where things are inevitably heading.
If exploitation is the game, ad-tech companies will find a way!
I mean, yes, but also won't publicly tell people about that. There's never going to be a marketing page for that advertising program.
I am sure saltman has companies which do this.