alt Hacker NewsWhy is it even Meta's job to announce that an AI agent is being used? Is there a law that actually forces them to make that known?
Otherwise people could just use local agents on their own machine controlling their existing browser/logins as they likely already do, without issues.
Replies
What's crazy is that the ToS is basically, "allow us, Amazon, to give you algorithmically higher prices- and if you try to circumvent that, you can't buy from us anymore".
I think the arguments for these kinds of near-monopoly companies being true market-driven capitalism seem more and more false.
The idea that Amazon will tell you that you don't even own the right to your own shopping experience tells you everything you need to know. Apple owns your device and Amazon owns the right to show you whatever price/product they want, regarless of your search intent.
I guess it’s more that Amazon’s server queries for an answer and intentionally obfuscating a bad one comes across as lying.
What do you mean? Declaring the agent is transparency. You should be congratulating Meta for their rare good deed.
[dead]
That's irrelevant from Amazon's perspective. If an agent is popular enough and has some fingerprint they can identify, they have a strong incentive to block it.
Agents that scrape and digest web data are entirely anathema to brand-reliant and advertising-reliant vendors and marketplaces. Even human assistants could be trusted to develop brand attachment and respond to advertising meant to shape their preferences. And while LLM agents are still manipulable, that's a frontier that nobody really knows how to navigate effectively yet, at least not to the degree of optimization modern vendors and marketplaces (especially Amazon) have acheived.
It's quaint to imagine what AI agents might do for consumers in the naive internet that preceded their emergence (if you ignore their vulnerabilities and flaws), but that's not what they'll be able to achieve as that same internet responds to them -- at least not at Meta scale. It's not very different than how social media companies once offered, and then aggressively withdrew and policed, API's to their graphs and feeds. Those open API's simply aren't compatible with the business objectives that keep these companies running, no matter what cool and profoundly user-friendly things could be built on them.
The same kind of incompatibility applies to AI agents when it comes to e-commerce. It won't be a permitted thing until, and except for where, vendors/marketplaces can assert control over the agents themselves and manipulate them to ends comparable to what they can achieve with human consumer sentiment already.