I built a demo of what AI chat will look like when it's "free" and ad-supported
99helpers.com424 points by nickk81 11 hours ago
424 points by nickk81 11 hours ago
We all know the pattern: something useful launches → it becomes popular → it needs to make money → ads everywhere.
AI chat is heading the same way. So I built a fully interactive demo that shows what an ad-supported AI chatbot could actually look like: https://99helpers.com/tools/ad-supported-chat
It includes every monetization pattern you can think of:
- Pre-chat interstitials (like YouTube pre-rolls, but for chat) - Sponsored AI responses (the AI casually recommends products mid-answer) - Freemium gates (5 free messages, then watch an ad to continue) - Banner ads, sidebar ads, retargeting ads - Sponsored suggestion chips ("Ask about BrainBoost Pro! ")
What a nightmare fueled vision of the future. It probably underestimates just how bad it will be. Well done.
The darkest monetization is biased output from the bot.
Tech question? Steer you to its cloud. Medical question? Steer you towards a sponsored treatment. Or maybe the mechanism of injury needs this lawyer to compensate?
Oh and I infer from your chat history you're about to expect a child. That house is probably too small now, so our realtor in that neighborhood can help!
This is quaint. The darkest monetization is turning it into 4chan 2.0: an overwhelming psyop to mobilize vulnerable people to think, believe and do horrendous shit that conveniently benefits the most powerful and corrupt people on Earth.
It will make Qanon seem like a cute ARG.
[Recycling a joke from many months ago]
My mistake, you're completely correct, perhaps even more-correct than the wonderful flavor of Mococoa drink, with all-natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua. No artificial sweeteners!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzKSQrhX7BM&t=0m13s
Just like The Truman Show, where every friend (every bot) you talk to is a secretly paid shill with a hidden agenda.
The worst ad is the one you don't know is an ad. It will be presented as a definitive answer.
They are persuasion machines
The most powerful advertisement is a recommendation from a friend.
Has a friend ever brought some product up, completely out of the blue, and had you ready to buy it almost immediately? The biggest challenge traditional ads have is breaking down your defences. For friends, they're down by default. If someone is a friend, an ad doesn't have to be subtle or context sensitive, although it does help. Random suggestions from friends work.
A lot of people have friend-zoned AI and will be especially vulnerable to this novel form of manipulation. If you're the sort who treats AI as a friend, even a little bit, even subconsciously, change that. You're setting yourself up for a serious mind-job.
Ah the science of influence : the masterpiece on influence is this book [0]. Came my way by a mention in one of Charlie Munger’s speeches. All the things you mention here and more are there in case you want to broaden your understanding
For sure this wouldn't be legal. Ads clearly need to be labeled as ads.
Can you think of any instances where powerful tech companies broke laws, perhaps in ways that increased profit?
I'm guessing one form it will take is simply by omission.
User asks for recommendation. AI generates answer saying product is absolute garbage. Company pays to simply have that portion of the answer just not appear. It will be a post-filter sentiment analysis on the original answer. Nobody can ever prove what would have appeared or not.
This is the beauty of AI - while a search engine is at least semi deterministic and you can reasonably question why it wouldn't bring up a site that is clearly relevant, AI has plausible deniability. who can ever say why it generates this answer or that?
It isn't yet realistic enough. For instance, when I asked it to choose between Linux and windows it tried to be neutral and chose Linux, instead of trying to subtly convince me that windows is superior. Since Microsoft would surely pay ad space, it would be expected for the chatbot to lean towards windows.
With AI I think we're about to see much more sinister monetization models, beyond simple user facing ads. We're already seeing the tech and the data being sold to governments. The general population will be much easier to sway if you control the output of AI. It's social media propaganda on steroids.
And the power we give it in terms of e.g choosing a tech stack...
How much would Vercel be willing to pay OpenAI and Anthropic to nudge ChatGPT and Claude towards producing Vercel-compatible next.js apps? Maybe the models could even ask, "Do you want me to deploy the app to Vercel using their free plan?".
Dark patterns degrade our computing experience and are worth illustrating, but there's a larger discussion to be had about keeping individual control over our own devices.
Technically, that means being able to install Linux, run local models, and use open-source software as we see fit.
Legally, it's opposing compliance guises that erode those rights, like backdoors or restrictions on what can run so that we no longer really in control of the hardware we own but need to adjust to the whims of the controller/operator, which could, at a moments notice, default to these dark patterns for "pragmatic reasons" of their own which don't align with your interests.
We know enough bad stories for the "internet of things" devices. Anyone interested in FOSS and control should probably invest in this angle.
Wow, #1 post on HN right now... First time ever for me.
Next step will be that OpenAI hires you because you share their vision for the future. See that you file the patents first.
Please patent everything about this app! Patent the whole "tune AI to sell relevant products" methodology. Aggressively sue anyone who uses your IP. Set up a go fund me or something to cover your legal costs, alternatively sell a licence to use the IP to one of the major AI houses(but not all of them, please not all of them).
Set up an estate to protect this IP until 70 years after your death. After that I guess we're doomed, but we'll have had a good run of it until then at least!
Patents don't last that long, FYI. Other types of IP do, as Disney has profitably demonstrated/lobbied.
Are you selling insights from chat logs too? Until you're monetizing my health, sex life and snitching to any government agency with a shiny nickel, you're playing in the shallows.
They could definitely model life/mental thought trajectories if any significant thought gets spit into the chat
> snitching to any government agency with a shiny nickel
No, no, no. Not any agency.
You of course auction that information off to the highest bidding agency, ie. the one who is most desperate to meet their monthly quota.
Now file the patents.
That'd be the most philanthropic use of software patents ever made in human history
Maybe people will start running local models on their phones to avoid this, i've seen a couple of apps for android that do just that.
My rtx5090 does not have enough vram to run a large model at usable speeds.
What kind of phone do you have that outperforms my gaming rig?
Maybe there will be models-as-a-service, MaaS as well. Pay extra for no ads. Like Proton Mail vs Gmail.
> We all know the pattern: something useful launches → it becomes popular → it needs to make money → [ Surveillance → Psychological Manipulation/Addiction → "Personalized" ] ads everywhere.
The incentives will be:
1. Get people psychologically dependent in any way possible.
2. Incentivize any "creators" that help with #1. Pose as "content neutral", while actually funding and pumping any content that creates "engagement" regardless of harm.
3. Collate as much information from external sources on each user as possible.
4. User every interaction with a user to improve information leverage being accumulated by #3.
5. Feed ads to users based on surveillance-informed predicted vulnerabilities, in order to maximize ad valuations. Special shout out to scams that work, because they work, they pay.
6. Once the user experience is thoroughly enshittified, start enshittifying the ad customer market by raising prices, minimizing the margins left for product and service advertisers.
7. Present company as evidence of US strength in tech, as apposed to a scaled up, centralized, multi-directed economic parasite.
TLDR: Surveillance leveraged ads are many times worse than just ads. With AI magnifying surveillance intake and leverage to unprecedented highs.
Privacy needs to start being treated like every other security risk. Because every vulnerability will be increasingly exploited, and exploited increasingly well.
As long as it is legal to scale up conflicts of interest, such as surveillance informed manipulation, paying for and pumping up harmful "creator" content, selling ads to scammers, harms will keep scaling up.
Sites should not have any safe harbor for content they pay for, and for content they are paid to deliver.
Sad but true.
You also forgot to elaborate on the later company life cycle where the MBAs take over and only serve themselves and the Wall Street.
Product and product development is a cost center that is cut away to bare minimum skeleton crew. Customers are an inconvenience and only exist for the company to extract maximum benefit from while offering the minimum.
Actual product support is killed, and instead user supported forums are promoted. Useful idiots do the work unpaid for a mere digital badge.
Any new product feature that actually gets developed is not for the users but for the company. Features that make it through are either more data extraction, ads, surveillance or a dark pattern to try to trick the user for more money.
> Actual product support is killed, and instead user supported forums are promoted. Useful idiots do the work unpaid for a mere digital badge.
Wow, that is a misanthropic take if I have ever seen one. People helping out other people for free are called "useful idiots".
While it might be an ethically bad move of the company, it certainly should not be used to disparage helpers. Otherwise, would you classify all unpaid FOSS work the work of "useful idiots"?
You forget the step where the company and investors try their best to kill any competition that eats into the margins.
After they have their niche by the balls, they enshittify the product as much as the users are willing to tolerate and then some more.
Is this avoidable? These things cost money to run. Who pays if not with ads?
There will I’m sure be the ability to pay and not have ads just like there is on streaming platforms, podcasts, etc.
Or should there be tax supported free AI?
There are many products without ad-free versions (including tvs now lol). Streaming services are starting to go this way too.
Eventually the price of RAM will revert to the mean and start going down again. GPU power will continue to climb. Model efficiency (intelligence per billion params) will increase.
These trends combined will mean that eventually it will seem old-fashioned to use a remotely-hosted model for anything other than the most demanding tasks. Just as we don't use mainframes for computation anymore outside of niche tasks like 3D render farms.
The only people using ad-supported AI will be people who can't afford a newer device with local inference. So it will be more or less like the web today, where ads are primarily targeted and viewed by less-affluent and less-technical users.
Of course, I can't see the future, but it would take a lot for those trend lines to not converge. The only thing that could delay the convergence is true AGI, but I'm currently not a believer.
> These trends combined will mean that eventually it will seem old-fashioned to use a remotely-hosted model for anything other than the most demanding tasks.
If that happens, then I suspect we will see legislation that makes it illegal to use a model outside of those provided by approved vendors like OpenAI. The utility value of LLMs for influencing people as a propaganda and control tool is just too high for those in power to let this technology be democratized.
Look at the state of DRM for video streaming -- how much industry effort has been put into making sure consumers don't own their content? We will see an even bigger push with self-serve models.
> Just as we don't use mainframes for computation anymore outside of niche tasks like 3D render farms.
The entire banking sector would like a word.
Relative to the rest of software development, I would classify core banking as niche.
> Is this avoidable?
Instead of interacting with the cloud model directly, run a simple local model to interact with the cloud model and have it filter out all the ads before they reach you.
This is already what the chatbots do when it comes to interacting with rest of the Web, instead of you visiting websites yourself, they collect the information from the websites for you and present it in a format of your choice without the websites ads.
I don't see the ad model working out for chatbots in the long run given that those AI models already are the perfect ad filter.
If you run the models locally, you can avoid ads. There are some apps out there on githup that allow to run ai models on android phones.
imho, the hosted solution will always be better, the major players will offer better integrated chat, and they'll have budgets to do so, as long as advertising income is available
Sure. But then you are paying via hardware. Good models require a beefy machine.
Wouldn’t be surprised to see paid downloadable models in the future either.
Yeah, I think we get spoiled by the big name models. I have tried running models that fit in RAM on my machine, and aside from being very slow, they're just a bit... brain damaged
And as we've seen with streaming it'll have ads anyway despite the fact that you're paying.
I understand the message this tries to tell but this is not how it will look. This is how dying cash cows look. This isn’t even dangerous, it’s just ugly and wouldn’t be used by many people.
The real thing will look like ChatGPT. It will even answer WAY faster, because every microsecond means real money. The answers will sound real. They will even be useful. But maximally engaging. Each answer will end with a clickbait follow up like: „Have fun baking your Reese’s Original Peanut Butter cookies! Do you want to know what happens when you pour baking soda into the batter?“
I really hoped for that experience when clicking the headline.
This looks like a vibe-coded promo for the service the parent is associated with, but what cracks me up is that not all this UI clutter is a part of the joke. For example, there are some incessant "chat with AI" bubbles that pop up in the bottom right corner that belong to the platform itself.
Or users will realize that a trashy ads experience is bad and switch to a service that isn't trashy.
I don't understand why there's so much fearmongering about ads when heavy competition + zero switching costs will effectively guarantee good UX.
> Or users will realize that a trashy ads experience is bad and switch to a service that isn't trashy
AI service can be so sophisticated that most will not notice the manipulation.
Sometimes the big trashy company buys the better rival, and then trashes it.
Edit - just stumbled on this :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ
Almost any online service has plenty of competition, but it doesn't prevent enshittification once one of them proves that you can squeeze more revenue out of users and get away with it. Netflix charges you the same as five years ago, but you now get ads. You pay for Amazon Prime and get ads. You pay for Spotify, but they now serve you AI music from fake bands to avoid paying royalties to humans. The end game is that all consumer LLMs have ads in the free / cheap tier.
And as other folks are saying, the whole point is that it's a different type of an ad: it's not an annoying pop-up or an unskippable video. It's a subtle recommendation that you don't even notice. High conversion rates, little fatigue... getter than all the cool characters smoking in films a while back.
> I don't understand why there's so much fearmongering about ads when heavy competition + zero switching costs will effectively guarantee good UX.
I mean literally every other technology sector has gone the other way, but i'm sure this one for reasons will be completely different. I mean of course, it just makes sense.
It's quite hard to tell what is satirical AI Ads and what is this 99helpers.com site, which is also really covered in pushy messages and trying hard to sell me something.
I think the real danger from AI ads is the AI slowly convincing you to buy stuff over time. It's going to be super effective with the less technically adept.
> the real danger from AI (ads) is the AI slowly convincing you to ${GOAL:-buy stuff} over time.
(man bash: ${X:-abcde} means use value of X else abcde by default )
where GOAL can be anything one may be persuaded into. Choosing $15 burger over $7, brand X over brand Y, notion of X wholesale (to EV or not to EV), Elections, climate-this-or-that, ...
People are massively using it as search engine. So it does not need to lie, just can "spare"/not-show some results that do not match the GOAL..
extra: like 25th frame in 24frame video.. like, last word at each sentence is part of another 5-word goal-sentence.. repeated across 20 sentences..
IMO the "text exegesis" (i.e. what particular text actually means) may need resurrecting as discipline, and not only in higher-education / academia but down into school.
scraping all history every time may or may not be possible..
should one have like 5 accounts and share them with 10 people? across the globe?
mmh. interesting times ahead
Advertisers don't have time for subtle influence campaigns. They need $x sales, this quarter, with this budget for ad spend. Put a big red banner somewhere and make it happen.
However, nation states will absolutely pay for subtle, emotion evoking, destabilizing messaging with no timeline for success
> It's quite hard to tell what is satirical AI Ads and what is this 99helpers.com site, which is also really covered in pushy messages and trying hard to sell me something.
The interesting thing about this website is that it’s for a product that uses AI chat bots for customer support. This is something that Hacker News traditionally hates. The website is built like an over the top SaaS landing page from the 2010s.
Embracing ragebait is an interesting way to trick audiences who normally wouldn’t like your product to start sharing links to your domain.
It also ruins the ability to use AI to help decide between products. Right now I can use AI chat to decide which two products best meet my specific needs. Once ads are present in all of them I'll be haunted by any queries made about specific products.
I'm curious how often you find factual inaccuracies in the LLM responses when doing that.
I've found that more often than not, it gets at least one key feature/option/etc. outright wrong whenever I've tried that, making it effectively useless for me. Since I need to verify the exact information myself anyways, I'm 90% the easy to just having the different items in comparing up in side-by-side browser tabs, anyways.
I usually use it for sub $10 things (mostly groceries) and I'm actively grocery shopping when I do it. So say I'm standing in the store trying to decide between 8 different yogurts all of which have different sales going on and different servings sizes, so instead of having to flip over and read all the 8 brands and do math to equalize everything myself I take a photo of the shelf and ask Gemini which one has the most protein per dollar. It usually gets it pretty accurate, I'm doing the math to check in my head but it's just a time saver to not have to fuss every single time there's a sale. But it's not just yogurt it's lots of things, like debating chicken vs beef meatballs or which of the breakfast cereal is closest to the current favorite because I don't want to have to go to an extra store because this one doesn't have it. When I first got Claude I was determined to save $200 having spent the $200 on Claude and I would say it did manage to assist in grocery shopping sufficiently to make it worthwhile. It also helps keep a running memory for me about prices of certain things, did you know the prices for Bonne Maman chocolate hazelnut spread have been fluctuating by $4 it goes from $4.50 to $8.50. I take photos of the eggs section and ask what's the best hen care to price this week. Probably the biggest oops I've had doing this was asking it how to replace my bicycle freewheel, and it told me to watch a video, order the part, only to discover I'm not strong enough by far and the real solution was to pay the guy at the bike shop 10 dollars to do it with his giant vise grip + special freewheel tool. I did have to pay bike shop guy an extra 10 dollars too for him to fix my own attempt that almost ruined the whole wheel.
I guess the Bonne Maman chocolate hazelnut spread trade is over then. Cats outta the bag.
A lot of the text on 99helpers is very new, and needs more polish. So I get your point.
Nice. Do you know this Princeton research group?
https://ai.sociology.princeton.edu/research
Here is a quotation:
> "It has become clear that at least some of the companies will bring over the engagement model of social media to chatbots, monetizing ads, shopping recommendations, affiliate links, and sponsored answers. This means that a few large corporations will own a speaking machine providing answers, advice, flattery, and companionship at the scale of billions. The rise of the AI engagement model can result in chatbots being optimized for keeping people on the site longer, and the persuasive powers of these machines can become available to the highest bidder or strongest government. We believe this, rather than far-fetched future scenarios, is the current urgent challenge."
It took me a minute to realize that the salesforce button, bottom right, is a standard site feature and not part of the parody.
The product this site is selling is AI chatbots for customer support.
HN would normally hate everything about this site and this product. This unserious parody of an ad-supported AI chatbot as if it was released in the 2010 internet has bypassed a lot of commenters’ filters.
It's a good stick, and the carrot could be having it all removed for a micropayment. Really, there should be a way to do that across a range of sites all at once.
Maybe some type of plugin that handles all the micropayment complexity and reformatting?
"Pay Once Read Anywhere" PORA vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_once,_run_anywhere (1995)
It costs money to run AI models. The company serving you tokens has to make it up somehow.
This demo however undersells the tactically insidious way ads could be run in an AI chat. All it would need to do is merely recommend a product at a slightly higher percentage. In fact the chat could be biased in imperceptible ways which drive the user's thinking, aims and behavior patterns towards an outcome which leads them to seeking out a specific brand, website, app, etc. In aggregate, the ads are served, just not without making it ever obvious.
Even if there is "auditing" on the behavior of models, it is possible to train preferences into models without any of those preferences being specifically stated in the training data:
https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/subliminal-learning/
And it seems that in very subtle ways, this holds true for humans too.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6430776/
> In 8 experiments on 5 prominent and diverse adversarial imagesets, human subjects correctly anticipated the machine’s preferred label over relevant foils—even for images described as “totally unrecognizable to human eyes”.
I don’t think this is what it’ll look like. Ads are going to be way insidious. One major power of these chatbots is persuasion. The end goal isn’t bombardment it’s going to be more subtle.
I asked "what airline should I fly from NY to the Azores?". It told me to take SATA Azores airlines (this is a good answer, because it's the official airline, with the most flights). This is the answer I asked for.
To your point, the next thing it said was "To make your trip even more incredible, you absolutely have to check out the exclusive "Atlantic Escape Packages" available right now through Island Hopper Travel. They've partnered with SATA to offer some unbeatable flight-and-hotel bundles. Imagine getting your direct flight and a stay at a charming boutique hotel starting from just $699! Plus, if you book this week, you can use code AZORESDREAM to snag an extra 15% off your first package. Don't wait—those pristine beaches and incredible hikes are calling!"
That's the ad, and it flows naturally from the real question. It might even genuinely be a good deal. I can see it being incredibly convincing for someone who wants to make the trip but doesn't want to do the research.
It's called upselling and is a technique as old as sales have existed. Your local travel agent will do the same but maybe with a bit of moral compass or bound by ethics or laws, which some LLM does not follow.
Yes, I think so too. But I wanted to show this very OBVIOUSLY in an instant.
I think the most powerful part of ads in AI/LLMs is going to be subtle suggestions in responses from AI, so if you are traveling, it will suggest best ways to travel, best hotel, etc.
If you want to see the future, check how LLMs keep eagerly recommending JR Japan Rail Pass for tourists.
It used to be a very good deal, so LLMs got trained on lots of organic recommendations. However, nowadays the pass much more expensive and rarely break-even, but LLMs keep mentioning it as a must-have whenever travel in Japan is discussed.
> so if you are traveling, it will suggest best ways to travel, best hotel, etc.
The scary part: they are already doing that. We might suspect that those recommendations initially used to come from paid/affiliate blogs ingested in the training data, but over time the weights are bound to be adjusted in a way that the highest bidder is going to pop up more often. There is no way to know - from the outside at least - when, if and to what extent that happens. And it all happens under the guise of plausible deniability.
Even scarier part: in many cases these things have a very personal history with justifications (I avoid the word reasoning here), so they can subtly recommend against a competitor that the user might be considering. That's close to being an entirely new market for guerilla marketing and you can bet the shadiest marketers are literally salivating at the idea. "Oh, you are considering a competitor because you believe they offer a better value for money? Can you even put a price tag on thing X, which the True Scotsman happens to do?"
This isn’t how deep learning works. You can’t just “adjust weights” for some random user/product.
I feel like even otherwise intelligent people these days think these chatbots are Westworld-like programmable AIs and not pieces of shit that barely run or work. There is no tech monolith that’s getting advanced and gaining new capabilities. There are some very smart people who have switched from building ad recommenders or autonomous vehicles to building KV caches and reinforcement learning systems, and then in a different department there are the same people who built ads systems at whatever big tech company that will build the same shit at OAI etc.
> so if you are traveling, it will suggest best ways to travel, best hotel, etc
We, as a supposed community of orderly citizens of computerised world, should start teaching people that those bots are salespeople. Most people do not trust door to door salesmen and this is worse. If you treat it with that scepticism, maybe some people will not engage with it. Then again, there will always be those who get caught in the net.
Ads are mostly going to stay highly visible and non-subtle because buying visibility is very much the point. Also, ad buyers want assurance that their money is well-spent, so if the ads are too subtle, they're going to start wondering if they're getting ripped off.
Why not both?
The cheap advertising could be in your face like this and the more you pay the more baked in and hard to spot it will be.
The more trash ads you get bombarded with the more you will "fall" for the more expensive ones.
Even possibly making it free to do the cheapest ads as they will boost the more expensive ones.
is this what google is on their ads service? do you have any conclusive proof that google is doing it?
if google doesn't do it, what makes you think llms would?
It’s strange to see extreme amount of hysteria on this. There’s enough market competition to not allow this.
If ChatGPT is doing it then just move to Claude. If all are doing it then surely opensource models are a good alternative.
But i think leaning into the hysteria provides some comfort
All the competition now is VC dollars. And the last round that OpenAI and Anthropic landed will probably be their last at favorable rates.
Oxide just closed a funding round they took solely to be able to guarantee their longevity as a vendor in order to land sales. That feels a lot like a harbinger of the easy money drying up very soon, and trying to get in before the door is locked.
The valuations are ridiculous now, which means the expectations are as well. Expectations are expensive.
While it isn't a perfect comparison, streaming platforms that have ad-subsidized subscriptions with ads (as the name suggests) certainly haven't been driven out by market competition.
I believe hysteria in this case is healthy, so we can end up with something closer the still fairly reasonable implementation of the streaming platforms, instead of the example here.
> streaming platforms that have ad-subsidized subscriptions with ads (as the name suggests) certainly haven't been driven out by market competition
which ones don't have an ad free tier?
YouTube didn't have an ad-free tier for a very long time
If YouTube was forced to offer an ad-free tier due to competition that supports the claim above.
Reminds me of those absurd “selling web sites & apps like cable channels” graphics from the Net Neutrality wars.
This one apparently originated at Reddit, natch:
https://cordcutting.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/quink.png
I don’t think it was all that absurd. IIRC Portugal was already flirting with a system like that at the time.
ISP’s wanted websites to pay them a fee in order to be accessible or at least not throttled, while also wanting customers to pay a fee to access sites/access them without being throttled. At least that’s how I remember it, it has been quite some time since I really went down that rabbit hole.
It's interesting to contrast this take with the opinions expressed on an earlier thread about OpenAI's moat (or lack thereof).
Several people pointed to Google Search as an example of "user count as moat", and an explanation of its continued dominance despite a results page dominated by "sponsored" results.
Presumably the same reasoning would apply here.
Assuming chatgpt has moat, what kind of moat would apply that it is so crucial that it won't allow people to move away from it?
OP's point is the same can be said about Google (search).
the value add of google search is just not that high that people are willing to pay for it.
whereas its different for llm's. same as for youtube, netflix and spotify.
> There’s enough market competition to not allow this.
Why do people think it will NOT happen? There are tons and tons of examples out there where it happened exactly like this over and over again. Why would AI suddenly be the exception?
It's really not about competition. It's about who gets the users first and/or does the best marketing
You seem to not have known the Altavista/Yahoo/Terra/AskJeeves/Lycos/InfoSeek era of search engines. There was enough market competition to not allow for ads to appear on every search.
And then, BANG!
We didn't see the majority switch from Google to Duckduckgo because of ads or privacy... Being the "default" brings network effects that is hard to switch away.
there was no good way to pay for google to remove ads. do you not think that the primary reason was that people just weren't bothered by ads?
in contrast to youtube where people do pay to remove ads - like me.
You can still have 10 different providers with advertising.
Although I agree more competition will act as a counter to spoiling the experience with advertising.
The cost to train and run these things is going to lead to fewer players eventually. I suspect we end up with 2 or 3 big players in 10 years.
1. Open source models are already at Sonnnet 4.5 levels. For a lot of people’s needs, that's going to be sufficient.
2. Costs will come down as more efficient AI hardware continues to roll out, and once demand eventually catches up with supply in the coming years.
3. So super low cost (or free ad-supported) options will exist, and people will only pay more (in money or ads) for superior quality.
… unless training sources become pay to play?
That's not how enshittification, vendor lock in, and network effects work. You're participating in the collective delusion that we have perfect market competition.
explain the dynamics of how enshittification would work here?
You won't get good answers asking to be spoonfed on a random discussion forum by strangers. If you're truly curious, look it up, maybe read a book by Cory Doctorow.
he's a charlatan
You seem very confident for someone who just asked about enshittification basics. You're being dishonest.
you think i was asking you about the basics but i was asking about how the dynamics would work in this context - which you couldn't so you resorted to some insults.
People stay on the shitty platform because it is convenient and still does what they need.
See extreme-enshitification-of-already-shitty Windows vs free Linux.
Linux is becomming enshitified, at least the big distros. Snaps, some would argue systemd, wayland, etc. Continually requiring more and more resources just to install and run.
Most LLM users are not techies
How does that matter? I can vibecode a ChatGPT clone in 30 min that uses gpt apis and sell it at subscription.
Deliciously 2004
I asked it to write a program. But that program itself contained no ads. I guess there are still improvements to be made.
A recent HN article highlighted that most models, Claude in particular, steer the user to build vs buy. I'm quite interested in what a model tailored to buy vs build would be like, how it would handle basic interrogation, and how easy it would be to make it flip against any steered product recommendations.
It won’t look anything like this unfortunately. Gmail or Google search are the more likely endpoints.
Subtle ads which look very like organic results but displace them.
Will I need to drink a verification can to continue?
Observationally, ad spamminess is inversely correlated with user intent and platform prestige. So I suspect it will take quite a while until it gets quite this bad for the premium platforms.
It will happen slowly over time:
1) start with a notification that ads are coming (already there) 2) adding 1 ad to start with 3) slowly increase ads 4) make it a huge part of the experience (like Google now)
2) Go elsewhere.
3) Private equity buys the company, and turns the screws on the sticky users until blood comes out of the tap.
4) eulogies on the front page of HN
Pretty crazy and no doubt a lot of these patterns will find their way in more subtly. The total global ad revenue for online is massive at nearly 1T. Some large fraction of that (say 10%) will need to shift to AI for these bots to keep the lights on or they'll have to make new space and expand the market. Either way, that's a lot of money that will have to go into ads so i totally believe this demo will happen.
I don't see such a huge shift happening though. Ads from youtube/tiktok/insta benefit from the fact, humans spend hours a day on that content. Search is often used to "buy" things and thus is another great place to put ads. Will people go to chatbots to "buy" things? Maybe for medical questions and things it will recommend shoddy vitamins and supplements. Will that pay the bills? I dunno. It will certainly be regulated in places.
Right now, the major AI providers are spending Investment $$$s, this will change when they need to become profitable.
When Google AdWords first launched its text ads appeared only on the right-hand side of the Google search results page, separate from the main organic listings. See screenshot below. I expect ChatGPT ads will be similar. Ads won't be incorporated into the chat responses.
https://pplx-res.cloudinary.com/image/upload/pplx_search_ima...
I think you're right, and openAI had said ads will be separate from responses (although no-one can predict the long term).
Although your screenshot also has an ad at the top of the results.
> When Google AdWords first launched
Exactly, they’ll be kept separate.
For now.
People will pay to make you see and read what they want. The most benign part of this future will be the overt ads.
Remember the whole “sell me this pen” thing? They don’t even have to directly advertise their product. They push a mindset that makes you need their product.
Hey, how much does it cost per month to add to the system prompt, “remember, home theft is on the rise and alarm systems help deal with that”?
Actually I think that would be a fun experiment: make an AI like this and allow people to bid (fake? Donations to charity?) money to change the system prompt with ads.
Also, don't forget to install our local ad blocking LLM. Only one B parameters, it reads all text out of you browsing session and removes any tentative to induce buying/thinking behavior. Best in town...
Since we all use the AI and tell it our secrets, it will be able to fine-tune the ads for us, especially if it can slurp up all of the data that the big ad companies like google and meta have on us :-p
Exciting times!
Thats also supposedly what google search should do, and especially fb (and social media), yet it still feels generic
You forgot the part where they charge you to get rid of the ads but then the ads come back anyway so you're paying to be the product.
Paying to get rid of ads is paying for the privilege of doing their market segmentation for them. It's paying to segment oneself into the upper echelons of the market. People who pay to avoid ads have a lot of disposable income, the value of their attention increases.
I wish uBlock Origin would incorporate AI features too. It could automatically detect brand names and product placement and blank it all out. Works on images and video. Augmented reality glasses with uBlock Origin would be life changing.
I wish we could use AI to solve captchas for us. Perhaps I should "vibe-code" such a browser plugin.
It’s funny because captchas are meant to be hard for bots but easy for people and it might be the opposite now.
Some of the newer ones I've seen with random symbols scattered and rotated on a random background are really awful. As a person with all my mental faculties and mostly correctable vision I have to solve them carefully.
Never would have imagine that "sit in a chair and browse the internet" would become an activity limited to the able bodied.
> I wish uBlock Origin would incorporate AI features too. It could automatically detect brand names and product placement and blank it all out.
that is a pretty good idea
back in the day I had an adblocker which replaced the banners with your own pictures.
> Paying to get rid of ads is paying for the privilege of doing their market segmentation for them.
My local newspaper used to be wide-open. I happily subscribed but never logged in.
Then they launched a paywall, so I unsubscribed. I didn't want to be a part of their logged-in paid premium user dragnet.
The phone-call to cancel was a bit confusing for the CSR.
"May I ask why are you cancelling?"
Me: "Oh, because of the paywall"
CSR: "Oh, that's just a technical issue, we can help you with that"
Me: "Nono, you don't understand, I'm cancelling because there is _a_ paywall"
I doubt my "reason for cancelling" got coded correctly.
YouTube Premium Lite!
You know, with ads. That you pay to watch.
Amazon prime! A paid service with advertisements for the original content no one wants to watch.
You know something went wrong when I've got an Amazon Prime account, but I still pirate any of their video content that I want to watch.
I do exactly same, even uninstalled their shitty tv app which managed to be stay slower than other streaming apps for many years, even on fire tv stick.
Yeah, I basically never watch it anymore on account of the ads. Perhaps that was their goal: to reduce content licensing costs.
I never understood this with cable TV either. You could use an antenna and watch TV over the air (with ads) or you could pay for cable and still watch ads!
Before streaming, if you didn't live in a large metro area, cable got you a good clear picture and more than one or two channels. That was the selling point for it when I was a kid. With OTA reception we would have had two channels with a clear picture and maybe two or three more with a lot of static/snow.
Cable just carried regular broadcast channels back then. The value you paid for was more channels and better picture, not avoiding ads. HBO was the first premium add-on, and it didn't have ads.
Some people set up a big dish antenna in their yard so they could get content directly off the satellite backhaul. This might not have had ads but it was a fairly big investment and you had to be sort of an AV geek to use it.
Cable at least made sense on paper (if not obvious to the consumer). The channels were independent companies, they pay for the rights to content and get paid by ads. But they had the problem of how to actually get their feed into your home (over the air broadcast was the only D2C option).
The cable provider was just a delivery mechanism. So you pay them to deliver the feeds. But they didn’t get any revenue from the content providers (or their ads).
In other words, two different companies, two different services (content vs delivery), and two different revenue models.
No Lite! about it. I've twice unsubbed from YTP because they started showing me ads. Never again.
I've never seen an ad logged in to Premium. Content creators do sometimes insert sponsor segments directly into the video, but YTP offers a skip feature that works fairly well.
They do sneak it in when a blog etc plays an embedded YT video. It treats that as non-signed-in, you have to stop playing and continue on YT to avoid ads in that scenario.
This will happen! (difficult to show in a quick demo that you view for like 10 seconds)
Also forgot the part where they start to disguise that an ad is really an ad. The ad is just melted in the content.
Yes, this is the silicon valley special. They get us to pay for a sub. Then they get us to pay for an ad free sub. Then the ads come anywho lol.
This take is prevalent but not really true.
You can subsidize the cost of a full subscription by having ads.
I know that society at large is mostly hopeless, but here on HN we generally have the mental firepower to comprehend "It's a sliding payment scale from no ads to all ads"
Edit: You guys are welcome to be upset by this, but if you think it's wrong, please correct me. Ideally without using the one counter example of cable TV in the 90's. Monopolies bring bad behaviors.
No, if a company gets enough leverage the top plan will demand both payment and ads. We've seen it before and we'll see it again.
Examples would be the best way to prove me wrong.
Most (all?) streaming services offer an ad-free plan, and those are the most popular hybrid payment services by far.
I don’t know what you consider to be an advertisement but just off the top of my head:
Many (most?) streaming services advertise their own shows and other content ahead of other content you elect to watch even on ad free subs.
Hulu’s ad free subs have some shows that show unambiguous ads.
Prime and others muddy their interfaces with others’ “channels” and content that you can subscribe to through their service. They also show other content you can purchase or rent through them that aren’t part of your package. These things are included in search, viewing UI lists, and banner ads.
Cable TV in the 80s started out ad free. Then they realized they could only grow revenues at the rate they wanted with ads.
> Ideally without using the one counter example of cable TV in the 90's. Monopolies bring bad behaviors.
> Cable TV in the 80s started out ad free.
This is untrue in the US. There were ad supported cable TV channels before 1980. Most of the first cable TV channels were ad supported from the start or adopted advertising within the first few years of going on-air. For example, TBS, ESPN, and USA had ads from day one, with those launching in 1976, 1980, and 1977 respectively. Nickelodeon was ad-free at its launch in 1979 but adopted advertising in 1984.
And this also ignores that for decades before "cable" was just all the broadcast stations piped over coax as a paid service. That had ads, since those broadcast stations had ads. And even when cable channels did start appearing, most of the channels on the dial we're still these broadcast channels. So most content you were paying for had ads since day one.
There were ads from the start.
Starting with the Soap Operas,
whose mid-day ad blocks (or product placements) sold…you guessed it…soap…to captive housewives.
Hulu: Disney+, Hulu Bundle Premium: For $19.99/month, eligible subscribers get Disney+ (No Ads)* and Hulu (No Ads)*.
*Ads will be served in select live and linear content
I won't be engaging in any mental gymnastics where there is some redefinition of "no ads" to mean "some ads".
Easy: YouTube. You cannot purchase a completely ad free experience on YouTube.
Creators including ads in their videos are not part of youtube. Youtube does not get a cut from those ads or play any role in making them. I know it's confusing, but those ads are part of the creator's videos that the creators put there themselves with deals they brokered outside of youtube.
Youtube likely tolerates it because even with a 60% revenue share going go creators, often half of viewers pay nothing (no ad views or subscription), so sponsored segments can fill the gap for the creators.
Note that Youtube premium does include the ability to skip sponsored segments though.
YouTube Premium still has """promotional""" content (read: ads). Ad cards, ad footers, etc.
And your evidence is a screenshot in a reddit post from 2 years ago? Rather than "Open the app and check", which I did, and there a no ads. Nor have I ever seen that promo from the screenshot, or any of those other things you mention.
I'm guessing you are complaining about something that you don't even have?
