Just wait till there are ads for free users, which is going to happen. Depending on how insidious these ads are, they could be extremely profitable too, like recommending products and services directly in context.
most likely you will be targeted with ads based on what you give to the model.
if you ask chatgpt about electric cars, expect a wave of ads coming at you from EV automakers from all channels: socials, media, email, mail, etc - trying to close you on their car brand
The OP is not equating contextual with insidious. They're pointing out, correctly, that contextual ads can be insidious. And if they're profitable, they probably will be.
A lot of the companies offering LLM services are in a race gain market share and build expertise. Right now, they can burn through millions of dollars of VC money, with the expectation that they'll turn a profit at some point in the future. If that profit comes from advertising, and critically, if users don't expect advertising in their free LLMs, because they didn't see ads in generated output in the past, that will be very insidious.
> If that profit comes from advertising, and critically, if users don't expect advertising in their free LLMs, because they didn't see ads in generated output in the past, that will be very insidious.
Are the free LLM providers offering their service with a contractual obligation to the users that they will not add advertising to the outputs? If not, how is it insidious?
Because then the AI isn't working for you anymore, it's working for the advertisers. Which isn't necessarily bad, but we can be pretty confident that the AI will not be upfront about this, and instead try to act like it's working for you.
Just being contextually relevant doesn't mean its in your interests as opposed to in the interests of the advertised or that the levers are transparent.
Are you assuming all commercial relationships are adversarial? Why can't advertisers and those advertised to have aligned interests? What transparent levers do non-advertised results have, how do you know search rankings don't have hidden commercial incentives? Why trust undisclosed bias over disclosed relationships? Isn't transparency about incentives better than pretending they don't exist?