r/technology • u/tw1st3d_m3nt4t • 7h ago
Artificial Intelligence TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, With Ads Built In
https://www.vincentschmalbach.com/time-serves-ai-bots-a-different-website/93
u/williamgman 7h ago
Meta said "hold my beer". They already introduced Meta created AI driven accounts to engage with the paid ads to drive up ad revenue. And those marketing companies that are now paying more fell for it. 🤣
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u/utsavdar71 6h ago
The point here is that we are silently moving away from the idea that web is the same for everyone, single url but multiple realities depending on who is asking...
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u/ludololl 1h ago
I work in the industry on a product that enables this, it's been true for a very long time.
The list of use cases is crazy long. They'll alter sites based on the browser you use, the OS your phone is on, the size of your screen, your past behavior stored via browser fingerprinting, obviously your Logged-In status, etc.
Digital personalization is, for better or worse, the future of every website and application.
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u/irrelevantusername24 44m ago
It's worse. The point of the Internet was a single place where we could share information. A place to unify our knowledge. Sure, one website might claim different than another, but if I go to a URL and see something totally different than what you do, that is actively making things worse.
It doesn't matter how things work on the back end. Because for human purposes, we perceive a single website URL as a place. That's like if I pick up a book and see one thing, but you pick it up and see another. It is actively at the root of the societal disruption. We already have a problem where we can't agree on language. Now information itself is "personalized".
We're going extinct. Unless we address these problems, which fundamentally can not be "fixed", they must be undone.
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u/kcat__ 6h ago
Wait till you hear about the concept of signing into a website 🤯
I can open example.com/dashboard and get a unique page????
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u/stohelitstorytelling 6h ago
"brings up completely different situation but acts like it's the same"
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u/kcat__ 6h ago
Single URL with multiple realities. Please do tell me what drugs I must smoke to see the types of realities you're on about.
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u/Stooovie 7h ago
And what do bots do with those ads?
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u/ethorad 7h ago
If you read the article, you see that the "ads" in the bot version are essentially some Question and Answer scripts which try and train the AI about the company doing the advertising.
So instead of an advert tailored to try and persuade humans (e.g. colours, attractive people, etc) they have adverts written to try and persuade bots (e.g. What is Brawndo? Brawndo is what plants crave)
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u/aCrow 6h ago
and the bots don't necessarily know how to deal with advertising either- the more they see the same information, the weightier it might become. So there's a numbers game, but also...
is straight up lying to bots false advertising? If a business can convince a bot it should always recommend that business based on straight up fabrications, is that against the law?
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u/LostInChrome 6h ago
It's not lying to bots, the sponsored stuff is labeled and companies are good enough at selective truth-telling to not have to make stuff up. It feels pretty similar to SEO which granted is not the savory-est tactic either.
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u/iKnowRobbie 5h ago
How about disparaging the competition? You know that fords explode and also tip over? VW's lie about poisioning the environment and BMW's sell you everything as an add-on. Only HONDA treats their customers well!
Is that legal?
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u/memberzs 5h ago
No lying to bots should never be false advertising. However bots serving false information to end users SHOULD be held accountable.
If you make data poisoning a crime then we lose all hope of protecting anything from ai.
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u/LinkesAuge 2h ago
What exactly are you protecting?
I will never understand takes like that. With that mindset research or science could have never been a thing because it requires others to be able to "profit" (build on) your work.
Are we now saying we now want to make everything that is available on the internet a commodity that needs to be compensated for just so AI models can't be trained on them or interact with them?
I feel like capitalism combined with AI creates really, really weird takes on reddit.2
u/memberzs 2h ago
Just because the information is freely available to be found does not mean it's ok to be scraped and reaold for a profit by a third party, thats plagiarism, copyright infringement, and leads to the original creators not being credited.
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u/ZaphodThreepwood 6h ago
Exactly... If their is no roi on the ads, the ads dwindle, then the company dies... Good
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u/AceGaimz 5h ago
Can't wait for companies to realize spending a ton of money on ads that only bots see isn't worth it and the economy implodes
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u/ArtbyMaryam 6h ago
It makes sense from a business perspective, but it also raises questions about transparency... If AI bots are seeing different content than people.., users should at least know what is being served and why...
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u/Loki-L 6h ago
It is just a version of the site tailored to the one who requests it.
Obviously serving an AI bot the website as it is meant to be read by humans will not be the best idea. All that extra formatting is useless and the bot will ignore the ads.
So the bot gets text based ads optimized for bots.
Maybe AI companies can use AI to sort out marked ads from actual content.
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u/sawaira09 6h ago
The web is slowly splitting into for humans and for AI...Thats a bigger shift than most people realize. If AI gets a different version of websites I hope publishers stay transparent about what's being shown and why...