[pseudosavant]

When ads were introduced into Google, it objectively made the search product worse. You no longer saw what they thought would be the most relevant result. You literally saw Google's most profitable (it is an auction) result.

If we apply that kind of thinking to chat LLMs, it means instead of getting the most relevant tokens, you'll be shown the most profitable tokens. Maybe the most relevant tokens will be below the fold (like unpaid search results) now.

[pseudosavant]

Just wait for the image generators that have paid product placement like TV and movies do now. You ask for an edit of a photo and it changes an ad in the background to a different company. This idea seems awful, and also so obvious that it is going to happen.

[satvikpendem]

Going to? It happened 20 years ago already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Force_is_with_Cristal_Beer

[amitav1]

> "it objectively made the search product worse"

I would disagree, because without the advertising there probably would be no Google.

[vinyl7]

Arguably Google could go the way of AOL and no one would notice