[weird-eye-issue]

Let me let you in on a little industry "secret"

You can't trust those results no matter what

The pages that they pull in to source that data all contain affiliate links and companies contact websites to get their tools to the tops of those lists by paying money often monthly. I know this because I do this...

It's basically standard SEO but it also manipulates AI like ChatGPT very very easily

[SlinkyOnStairs]

> It's basically standard SEO but it also manipulates AI like ChatGPT very very easily

There are key differences.

1) Google doesn't get paid for the SEO, so even is crime is involved, Google isn't directly responsible.

2) AI ads are unmarked, which is illegal pretty much everywhere. And because of the way LLMs work, it is impossible to tell where a given output came from, neither which part of the prompt/context nor whether it's from the prompt or training.

[jmathai]

> 1) Google doesn't get paid for the SEO, so even is crime is involved, Google isn't directly responsible.

Google doesn't get paid directly for the SEO but they definitely benefit monetarily. Do a recipe search and ask yourself if these are the results the user would like to see. Google benefits by not penalizing sites which litter themselves with ads. It's not that indirect.

[threetonesun]

Why would AI ads be unmarked? Most of the Google AI search results I get show sources. They're just summarizing top results for you, injecting a ad shown as an ad into that isn't tremendously different than how Google worked before.

[hightrix]

For the same reason that ads in reddit comments are unmarked. The law hasn't caught up yet. There are countless "guerilla marketing" campaigns across reddit that are not identified as ads. I expect AI will be no different and it'll take the law a decade+ to catch up.

[threetonesun]

Every ad in Reddit is clearly marked. I'm not being obtuse - obviously Reddit, the internet, magazines, TV, all do some form of subliminal advertising, astro turfing, paid placement, etc, but we're talking about two different things from Google's business perspective, and I still doubt they are as interested in the latter as they are being the search leader and putting well paying clients right up front in bold (and underlined) letters.

[pseudalopex]

Small low contrast Promoted where posts have small low contrast time is not clear marking. Fake comment ads are a little more clear.

[inetknght]

I wish I could be this naive about things and still be happy.

[gruez]

Instead of making non-substantive patronizing remarks, why don't you respond with actual arguments?

[weird-eye-issue]

I'm just talking about the methods that business owners can use for getting good SEO or AI recommendations are basically the same thing, not sure what point you are trying to make?

[faangguyindia]

Simplest way to do is by running affiliate program for your SaaS and shady marketers will do everything to get sales if it's profitable.

[weird-eye-issue]

Eh not really

They won't get you on any worthwhile list unless it's their own because it's too risky for them and any site they would publish it on would want to use their own affiliate link. Unless of course we are talking about something like Medium or YouTube which does work

And then of course there's the fraudsters who will bid on branded keywords we have banned dozens of people for that

[nunez]

The cheat code for that used to be Reddit before they got growth-hacked 10+ years ago.

[weird-eye-issue]

Actually Reddit is receiving more organic traffic than ever before and is more valuable to game than ever

But yes actually I was doing this about 15 years ago in the men's fashion subreddit for one of my companies lol

[kalaksi]

Can you elaborate a bit on how that looks like in practice?

[weird-eye-issue]

You just use aged accounts to engage and make it look like they're promoting a certain business through either new posts or comments or combination. And you can use tools or just Google to see which Reddit threads are already ranking for a certain keywords and then you would go to those pages and leave comments recommending your business etc

[nunez]

here's a more well-publicized and AI-ified example of how that's done: https://www.404media.co/ai-is-poisoning-reddit-to-promote-pr...

[reactordev]

This is why local AI is so important

[bayindirh]

It's already being trained on "public" (ethical or otherwise) data. So, it already has ingested that kind of "optimization" during pre-training and training.

I don't think you can fine-tune your way out of it.

[ToucanLoucan]

People still think these things are smart. That if their word generator eats enough of the Internet, it will somehow give them the real information that's otherwise hidden. Or perhaps a better word; filter the bullshit.

To filter bullshit it would first have to understand bullshit, and it doesn't. That's why an LLM will tell you the solution to a problem that doesn't work, and argue with you when you correct it.

[bayindirh]

This is what bothers me a lot. For the people who doesn't know how it's made or want to believe, it's a miracle.

For me, it's a resource wasting text generator. I'll not lie, I don't use OpenAI, Mistral or Anthropic's models, even for coding. I prefer to read my API docs and cry once.

I used Gemini, five or six times in total. Twice I asked a couple of very specific things, and it unearthed them. Since they were not products, but information, that was helpful. Twice, it has given wrong information. When I "told" it, there was another way, it said "of course there are two ways", etc. Tasteless and time wasting.

I don't like using an LLM all day long, or offload my thinking to them. It's the ultimate self-poisoning incident.

And as you say, these algorithms can't know right/wrong/logical/bullshit, etc. They just spew out text.

[latexr]

Something I’ve also seen multiple times is an LLM giving wrong information, I tell it it’s not right, then it tells me I’m “absolutely right” and it provides the exact same answer and tells me that one will work.

[reactordev]

Oh Gemini, how no one uses you enough…

[satvikpendem]

I was just reading another post yesterday and your comment reminds me of this one [0], same sort of format and experience of the submitted article of the HN post that comment is on.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48211730

[reactordev]

Sadly critical thinking skills have atrophied steeply in the last decade.

[fsflover]

This is far from widespread at the moment, so it'll be possible to at least use the current cutting-edge models locally in the future.

[bayindirh]

Far from widespread? SEO has seeped to all crevices of the internet for the last 20 years.

[fsflover]

By this measure, any information you can get whatsoever is biased and there is no reason to trust anything at all.

[satvikpendem]

All information has some sort of bias, as no information can truly be unbiased. There is no reason to trust any specific piece of information but taken in aggregate one can disambiguate the biases.

[latexr]

The major difference is that right now when you land on a page you can do your due diligence and decide if you trust the source. You can still be tricked, but it’s harder and you can get better at the detection.

With LLMs, everything is given the same importance so you have no idea if the data came from a reputable source or an obvious SEO junk website.

[rplnt]

That doesn't solve this particular problem. Your local model was trained on reddit comments written by bots.

[soloto]

Local AI will have the bias that existed at the time of its training, which is different from no bias. For stuff that needs to be current, a local LLM would need to search the net regardless.

[embedding-shape]

And since "no bias" isn't something that actually exists in reality when it comes to language or even anything near humans, "bias in local model I can introspect" will always be miles ahead of "bias I know is there, but cannot introspect".

[soloto]

Agreed in full.

[Schweigerose]

How do you make sure that the model you run locally is not tainted? Is there even a way to confirm this without providing the complete training set?

[psb5]

Fwiw I just run kiwix/zeal locally which has old school search index of all articles in wiki/stackoverflow etc. That seems enough for most of my day to day use.

[jondea]

It's less compromised, but it's still basing the answer on compromised queries. This is why I pay for independent reviews (e.g Which) where their incentives are more aligned with yours.

[FergusArgyll]

How does that help if it's using search? You get whatever the search engine outputs

[rdtsc]

Not if the models come from Google. The ads will be implicit in the model. X is better that Y an Z would be easy to add to a the training set.

[pautasso]

Does this mean the model must be retrained every time a new ad is posted? How much are AI ads going to cost?

[rdtsc]

Yeah, I meant not individual ads but implicit forced/influenced preference for certain brands. Let’s say it always picks Coke vs Pepsi when giving an example of a soft drink. Or picks BMW when asked to pick the best car. Which cloud provider is the best? -Why, GCP of course, etc.

Companies then get to bid for a preference “place”. This is more like Google paying to be the search engine default in Firefox.

[weird-eye-issue]

Local AI models pull in search results just like ChatGPT does ...

And they are trained on web data just like any other model...