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.