[disgruntledphd2]

> Ah, so you are against ads! At least the way ads are today. With that I mean that the way ads today mostly focus on manipulating over informing is effectively hindering your ability to choose.

Speaking as someone who worked in advertising for a looooonnnngggg time, there are three ways that ads seem to work (above a randomised holdout).

1. The ad is something that the person actually wants, and they then convert.

2. The ad is something that the person was about to buy, and they convert.

3. The ad is part of a long running campaign that shifts (some) consumer's behaviour over time (ads for Coke etc fall in this category).

Ads aren't magic, and most people ignore them most of the time. It turns out that enough people don't that they can be profitable sometimes, but mostly that's just targeting people with more money than sense.

This HN notion that ads shape everyone's behaviour (except me, obviously) is so disconnected from my experience that I am sometimes confused by it.

[SebastianKra]

When I walk around my increasingly billboard-infested hometown. I observe that almost every ad actually nudges me in some way: whether I should switch internet providers, whether my financial strategy is fine, what kind of scam this tabloid newspaper is running, etc...

I believe most people are influenced by these constant micro-impressions far more than they realize.

My best defense is to build a resentment towards the companies being advertised.

[disgruntledphd2]

> I believe most people are influenced by these constant micro-impressions far more than they realize.

Your feelings are fair, but if this were the case then we'd see far more consumers changing their preferred phone/electricity/TV provider on a regular basis, and we could correlate this with (lagged) advertising spend.

But there is very little evidence for this. Like, I have a doctorate in psychology, and behaviour change is really, really hard and only works in a small number of cases. That model does seem to have predictive power, in that very few people convert as a result of seeing an ad (less than 1/1000 in the very best cases), and most of those that do don't keep buying products for long.

Now, if you already do something (like order takeaway pizza) it's much easier to get someone to do more of that, but its very very very hard to establish a new behaviour.

[hlynurd]

Ads actively drives population-wide increases in addictive gambling behaviors and the overconsumption of unhealthy foods

[myrmidon]

Anecdotally, lots of intelligent people I know like to pretend to be completely uninfluenced by advertising, which I think is delusional.

In my view advertising is in big parts (your category 3) basically a constant side-channel attack against peoples minds, eroding decisionmaking and purchasing decisions (mostly!) to peoples detriment.

The net-beneficial aspects (product information, and, arguably, boosted general demand) could be better achieved otherwise.

[hlynurd]

A single polluting factory won't ruin the lungs of a single person, but thousands of factories will have an unhealthy effect on a population.

[pigpop]

Your explanation should be common sense for anyone who has been around long enough and I agree that it seems to be fashionable to claim that ads have a nefarious, hypnotic effect on The Masses. The thing that does seem to have an outsized effect on how people think is their desire to be seen as part of a group and they tend to signal this by repeating arguments they've heard members of that group make. That's where advertising/propaganda has a real foothold in everyone's psychology. If you form a parasocial bond with an influencer or a group it does have a strong effect on your behaviour since you want to be liked by them so you will say and do things you think they'll approve of and agree with what they say and do. No one is really exempt from this since being exempt involves complete isolation and/or extreme disagreeableness. The only real remedy is having strong bonds with other people who aren't hopelessly beholden to outside influences. No small task since it only takes one member of the group to act as a channel.

[disgruntledphd2]

> The thing that does seem to have an outsized effect on how people think is their desire to be seen as part of a group and they tend to signal this by repeating arguments they've heard members of that group make. That's where advertising/propaganda has a real foothold in everyone's psychology.

Monkey see, monkey do. This is basically how human society works, and is impossible to stop. The best you could do would be control who people hang around with, but even that is almost impossibly hard to make work.

[olalonde]

> This HN notion that ads shape everyone's behaviour (except me, obviously) is so disconnected from my experience that I am sometimes confused by it.

Same. They've also never really bothered me, especially billboards and street advertisements. I was actually sad when they got rid of the neon signs in Hong Kong.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/08/fading-glory-t...

[guelo]

Which category is it when the user asks which is the best brand for the thing they want to buy and the platform lies to them and recommends the brand that paid the most money?

[fwn]

Concealed advertising is highly problematic and deserves discussion. It is not, however, what OpenAI introduced in the article above. Their current ad formats are, apparently, transparently labeled and clearly separated.

It is very likely that this will adjust in the future. Just look at how indistinguishable from organic content some prominent ad placements have become over time. But: There is merit in discussing the actual product, not some hypothetical version of it. If we do discuss hypotheticals, we should make that explicit.

This also helps the whole debate (and therefore, I believe, ad critics): arguments grounded in reality are usually far more effective than those that aren't. ... And there might come a point where OpenAI introduces some kind of native ad format. We would be well advised to preserve our credibility for that discussion.

edit: Paid content in the organic LLM output is a current problem already. It ist just not what this announcement is about.

[satvikpendem]

The illegal one because ads must be disclosed according to the FCC, in the US and I'm sure similarly in other countries.