TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In(vincentschmalbach.com) |
TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In(vincentschmalbach.com) |
Sounds like politics.
"Tell a lie enough times, and it becomes the truth."
Maybe now we'll get something similar, just happens to be for LLMs, but for us who like less bloat, it can be a better viewing/reading alternative. Hope it spreads :)
It's effectively dead today, and while it was dominant, Google abused it to get people to view and link to their cached copies of AMP pages, rather than the original site.
It also led to widespread abuse where the AMP version of the page differed in content significantly from the regular page. The same issue existed for WAP.
You may also remember browsing the web using Opera Mini, which wasn't a direct user-agent but used Opera's backend systems as a proxy that stripped, minified and compressed HTML/CSS, and resized and recompressed images. It let you browse the web using massively less mobile data, but raised a lot of privacy and security issues.
It's frankly wild how many of my favorite tools for Internet browsing have nothing to do with connectivity, solving bugs, or any of that and it's just stripping out all the fucking BULLSHIT that comes on a modern website.
I'm also completely unbothered by the precedent of drip feeding product ads to someone's LLM chat history, and having that influence future conversations, because if you're going to outsource your buying decisions to an LLM, frankly I don't really care if you buy stupid products at that point - you brought that on yourself.
- reject all 3rd party cookies
- selectively refuse to load 3rd party domains
- block javascript
- block webgl
- block webrtc
- block canvas
- use a generic user agent because "resist fingerprinting" is checked
- etc.
To a lot of sites, this makes you look like a bot. Most people don't go around deliberately spoofing their user agent these days. (and of course bots themselves can present whatever user agent they want.)
Be careful not to do this with Googlebot, though. Google would consider this "cloaking" and could ban your entire domain for it.
Could it be that other scrapers are pulling the pages, without making the extra requests to get ad related resources, to present the content to people ad-free, and embedding the ads in the main response body is a way to get around that so the human sees an advert at least, even if it isn't the one they might see if the stalky-adtech-algo could deliver something more targetted.
For media/news businesses that make their money from readership, it is unsustainable to subsidize Alphabets content farm. Thus, understandable people would change their corporate posture with a search turned scraper company. =3
Most people will say "yay, it is great you waste the time of AI bots via ads!". Well, I already think ads should not exist in the first place, nor bots, but both exist - but the real issue is when websites now steal my time. That was different in the 1990s. I think mankind made several missteps here.
If there is any article mentioning something around this, can someone share it please? Im curious to know about it
Maybe they are banking on LLMs including it in their training data while scrapping or something like that. It does track impressions so they are definitely up to something.
This sort of reminds me of that. LLMs are by their nature credulous. They can be trained to not give in easily to some things, like the capital of the US, but in general they constitutionally have a tendency to believe what they read. What they read is basically their universe. There's only so much room and so much training data to really strongly pin raw facts in their weights. The only way they can not believe some marginal fact presented to them in their input is to possibly have read something that contradicts it in the same session... and the vast, vast majority of the world is those marginal facts, not really objective things like capital names.
So if you can work a confident statement in to an LLM's input about some semi-relevant topic, it's truth to the LLM. And, being truth, the LLM will then happily and confidently elaborate on it quite a bit.
Of course, if it's irrelevant to the current query, it probably won't have much effect. Ads have always been a game of numbers, anyhow. Even a query about a science topic has some probability of eventually turning to a question about banking in the same session. It's probably a good idea to rather strictly partition your conversations to stick to a single topic, not to defend against this but just to maximize the effectiveness of what is in the context window by keeping it focused, but I have to imagine there's plenty of people out there who reuse conversations all the time and end up with single conversations covering a huge array of topics.
The good news, and the bad news, all at once, is that Google isn't going to take this one sitting down. If they're going to replace the search engine box with an LLM, well, they're using the same LLMs we're all using, if not in fact a bit cheaper one for the work they do, and by golly, that bot should be serving up Google's ads, not Time's ads! Who do these uppity content creators think they are, anyhow?! So there is definitely going to be work done in the field of ad-blocking content served to LLMs.
You assume that UI is sacrosanct and the same everywhere. Those LLM providers are already offering to mingle all your conversations together. Gemini from Google for example defaults to memory from every conversation, and it's safe to assume the option to disable it will be eventually removed.
There was a brief moment in the early Internet before it was all hyper-optimized... Until the parasites in the advertising industry started attaching themselves to every page.
The year before ChatGPT, the first page of Google was SEO-optimized blogspam designed to say as little in as many words as possible, to splice ads between every paragraph. This was the net result of 20 years of SEO. I suspect this is why Google's AI search didn't get as much pushback as other tools, since its summarization of pages functions is a form of adblock.
Given the ecological impact of AI, I wonder how much damage the ad industry will be causing in 10 years once they figure out how to trick LLMs into manipulating their own users.
Probably something like this?
But to your implied point about getting an advertisement into a memory file... that makes it even more amusing to hack Google's own AI to put Time's ads into it. I think that's probably an easier problem for Google to solve, too, though. The small size and the way that a memory is going be a stereotypical summary makes it easier to filter out the ads Google doesn't want...
... but it'll cost them. That's an AI-complete problem and they're going to have to run LLMs over the memories to filter them, at their expense.
The most obvious fix to me is to have an LLM try to pre-filter out the ads from Time's content before feeding that as pristine content to the "core" AI so it won't be corrupted by the advertisement, but the LLM doing the filtering has to be at least as smart as the one using the content and/or the one inserting the ads. (A dumber one can filter the obvious stuff, but then the obvious next step in the arms race is for Time to tell their AI to be more clever about it, and a smarter AI will dominate the dumb cheap AIs here.) This is going to be an expensive setup.
Why do we choose to live in the worst timeline?
This could take up to 30 minutes for subagents to complete. So you go to the store, but the milk is already sold out. Walmart will ship you the milk if you pay the S&H. You drive back home and check the terminal. "Completed in 6m37s."
is the worst timeline. That's close though
Let us not forget they are a business =3
That was the entire point of the tech. If Google had wanted they could have upranked simple and lightweight websites but they didn’t do that (at least not until whoever had used amp for their promo package left and the project was killed).
AMP was just one of many smash-and-grab attempts to steal the internet, wrapped in a fake-gold-encrusted PR-infused box. Google has quite a lot of them.