[stingraycharles]

This is not an elephant in the room, this is so obvious and discussed all the time. What else is Google going to do, give up their one and only goose that lays the golden eggs?

Regular search being replaced with AI search means regular search (with ads) being replaced with AI search (with ads).

The benefit of AI search will be that it’s much better “integrated” in the answer, aka even harder to detect.

[akoboldfrying]

> This is not an elephant in the room, this is so obvious.

Maybe they grew up in an environment where the phrase "elephant in the room" meant a situation where people enter a room, notice an elephant there, and immediately scream "Jesus Christ there's a goddamn elephant!"

[bbmatryoshka]

Usually the elephant in a room is something very evident about which no one wants to discuss about

[stingraycharles]

But everyone is discussing how AI will have ads, so it’s not an elephant in the room.

[akoboldfrying]

Yes. My post was a joke -- I was trying to make fun of GP's (to me, baffling) use of the phrase "elephant in the room" by proposing an unlikely explanation for why they seemed to get its meaning back-to-front.

(Thinking about it a bit more, I actually think that the phrase's meaning could have really gone that other way. Nothing in the phrase itself suggests that the elephant is being deliberately ignored -- we only learn that critical part "in the background" via culture. For comparison, the similarly structured "bull in a China shop" means exactly what you would expect, without any implied reversal.)

[Ajedi32]

They could have ads alongside the AI response, in a completely separate section of the page (like search results are). That seems fine. But if they start including ads in the AI context window then it becomes impossible to tell what parts of the response are driven by advertisement vs organic results.

It seems like for now they are making an effort to keep them separate.

[chilli_axe]

Elephants in the room are obvious by definition.

[bandrami]

I think the point of the phrase is that it is obvious but people refuse to talk about it

[j_maffe]

But wouldn't that break FCC rules?

[HWR_14]

FTC rules. And probably. Unless they disclosed somewhere that there were ads informing results, in which case the fine print wins again.

[xigoi]

Since when does Google care about laws?

[water-data-dude]

Is this administration really interested in enforcing regulations? The FCC might make noises, but only until Trump gets another kickback.

[NitpickLawyer]

> their one and only goose that lays the golden eggs?

Eh, it really isn't the only goose in goog town. Cloud is at ~20% of their total revenue, and probably is going up w/ their hardware success and other licensing deals. I'm curious to see what goog can do with their properties if this trend continues. Less reliance on ads could be interesting. (many former googlers have said that pressure from the ad business was felt across all their products)