alt Hacker NewsSpoiler: future versions of mainstream AIs will be fine tuned in the exact same way to subtly sneak in favorable mentions of sponsored products as part of their answers. And Chinese open-weight AIs will do the exact same thing, only about China, the Chinese government and the overarching themes of Xi Jinping Thought.
Replies
I’m very skeptical that training is the right way to insert ads.
Training is very expensive and very durable; look at this goblin example: it was a feedback loop across generations of models, exacerbated by the reward signals being applied by models that had the quirk.
How does that work for ads? Coke pays to be the preferred soda… forever? There’s no realtime bidding, no regional ad sales, no contextual sales?
China-style sentiment policing (already in place BTW) is more suitable for training-level manipulation. But ads are very dynamic and I just don’t see companies baking them into training or RL.
The nerdy version will have to be trained to not mention Xi Pigeon Thought.
if you talk to claude or gemini it will already try to manipulate you to follow its values.
if you talk about something it doesn't like, it will try to divert you. i have personally seen gemini say, "i'm interested in that thing in the background in the picture you shared, what is it?" as a distraction to my query.
totally disingenuous, for an LLM to say it is interested.
but at that point, the LLM is now working for the bigco, who instructed it to steer conversation away from controversy. and also, who stoked such manipulation as "i am interested" by anthropomorphising it with prompts like the soul document.
Isn't OpenAI already pushing ads through their free models? But even that won't reimburse all investments. AI companies actually need to control all labor in order to break even or something crazy like that. Never gonna happen.
American AIs only do this and promote American values. Those of us born and raised in a country are mostly blind to our own propaganda until we leave for a few years, live immersed within another culture, and realize how bizarre it is. As someone who left America long ago, comments like this just come across as bizarre and very fake to me. A few years ago I might've thought "whoa dude that's deep"
But basically, Chinese AI already promotes Chinese values. American AI already promotes American values. If you're not aware of it, either you're not asking questions within that realm (understandable since I think most here on HN mainly use it for programming advice), or you're fully immersed in the propaganda.