Thread

1. mavsman · 1789923911 · focus · HN ↗

   To me, this quote just about sums it up:

   > The mechanism is standard adtech. What has no precedent is running it on an AI chat product.

   As someone who has been well aware of this mechanism for quite some time, I still feel icky anytime I re-read the details of it.

   What a time to be alive.

   1. clickety_clack · 1789924907 · focus · HN ↗

      Whenever I say something like “that’s a cool feature, but to do it you would have to build spyware”, everyone else is just like “the cat is out of the bag ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”. (I don’t build spyware, or work on projects that do).

      It blows my mind that people don’t care about the world they are building with this stuff. It’s a real tragedy of the commons. People see these collaborators from different wars and regimes and think “I’d stand up against the bad guy”… well I’ve got news for you if you build spyware, you are not the person you think you are.

      1. brookst · 1789926745 · focus · HN ↗

         I'm pretty unhappy with this, but are ChatGPT or Facebook really "the commons"?

         1. ben_w · 1789926870 · focus · HN ↗

            They're each in different grey areas that were previously the commons.

            Facebook didn't invent "talking to friends" or "showing adverts", but made itself "the place" hard enough most of the advertisers and most of the people intermediate through it.

            OpenAI didn't invent "asking questions and recieving answers", not even "from an agent who knows which sites to search on your behalf"; but it is competent enough that I might have it read 50 times as many pages in a day as I myself would have read, and the sites' owners don't get real eyeballs looking at ads during this. (In my case, adblock even if I did it manually; but apply this massive increase in page hits to everyone who has their LLM research stuff).

         2. applfanboysbgon · 1789928733 · focus · HN ↗

            I think any free platform with a billion people on it is, de facto, a commons. It would be great if we as a society acknowledged this and had come up with some better means of stewardship because the status quo is obviously heinous, but we've been happy to hand over absolute control of public discourse to a few trillion dollar tech companies.
         3. nilamo · 1789928742 · focus · HN ↗

            Common people work there and built the tools. At any point, they could have chosen not to. Or told the boss guy it wasn't plausible. At the end of the day, we're choosing and building the world we're in, while also loudly complaining about what we choose to do.

            Blaming a corporation takes away all the agency the workforce has.

         4. clickety_clack · 1789932319 · focus · HN ↗

            I think the internet in general is a commons and I should be able to browse it without being spied on.

            There should be general standards for what individual apps and websites should be allowed to do. There should be an expectation that the purpose of an app is what it does, i.e. a social connection app shouldn’t be an ad platform that suffers users insofar as they provide useful data to sell to advertisers.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.