> LLMs are smart enough to make the result seem "organic"

I would never describe the output I've seen from LLMs as "organic".

This was already a problem in a world without LLMs. Reputation is the only human mechanism that mitigates this.

I'm very grateful that we have a lot of players training LLM's, including several that are published as open models and open weights.

I fully expect LLM results to start including ads, but because of the competition I hope/believe the incentives are much better than they are for, say Google's search monopoly.

It could potentially be more insidious though.

We'll probably start sending prompts to multiple models and comparing the results with lower-power local models.

Would be funny if LLMs get SEO'd to death and go the same way as search engines

This already happens unintentionally, e.g. Wikipedia loops, where bad info on Wikipedia gets repeated elsewhere, and then the Wikipedia article gets updated to cite that source.

When LLM-generated content is pervasive everywhere, and the training data for LLMs is coming from the prior output of LLMs, we're going to be in for some fun. Validation and curation of information are soon going to be more important than they've ever been.

But I don't think there'll be too much intentional manipulation of LLMs, given how decentralized LLMs already are. It's going to be difficult enough getting consistency with valid info -- manipulating the entire ecosystem with deliberately contrived info is going to be very challenging.

They’re already talking about llm search optimization as the new SEO.

tbf, Google has pretty the monopoly on search engines, the rest is way behind (even after enshitification). LLMs seems to be a more competitive space.