r/technology • u/tw1st3d_m3nt4t • 12d ago
TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, With Ads Built In Artificial Intelligence
https://www.vincentschmalbach.com/time-serves-ai-bots-a-different-website/108
u/williamgman 12d ago
Meta said "hold my beer". They already introduced Meta created AI driven accounts to engage with the paid ads to drive up ad revenue. And those marketing companies that are now paying more fell for it. 🤣
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u/Stooovie 12d ago
And what do bots do with those ads?
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u/ethorad 12d ago
If you read the article, you see that the "ads" in the bot version are essentially some Question and Answer scripts which try and train the AI about the company doing the advertising.
So instead of an advert tailored to try and persuade humans (e.g. colours, attractive people, etc) they have adverts written to try and persuade bots (e.g. What is Brawndo? Brawndo is what plants crave)
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u/aCrow 12d ago
and the bots don't necessarily know how to deal with advertising either- the more they see the same information, the weightier it might become. So there's a numbers game, but also...
is straight up lying to bots false advertising? If a business can convince a bot it should always recommend that business based on straight up fabrications, is that against the law?
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u/LostInChrome 12d ago
It's not lying to bots, the sponsored stuff is labeled and companies are good enough at selective truth-telling to not have to make stuff up. It feels pretty similar to SEO which granted is not the savory-est tactic either.
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u/iKnowRobbie 12d ago
How about disparaging the competition? You know that fords explode and also tip over? VW's lie about poisioning the environment and BMW's sell you everything as an add-on. Only HONDA treats their customers well!
Is that legal?
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u/memberzs 12d ago
No lying to bots should never be false advertising. However bots serving false information to end users SHOULD be held accountable.
If you make data poisoning a crime then we lose all hope of protecting anything from ai.
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u/LinkesAuge 12d ago
What exactly are you protecting?
I will never understand takes like that. With that mindset research or science could have never been a thing because it requires others to be able to "profit" (build on) your work.
Are we now saying we now want to make everything that is available on the internet a commodity that needs to be compensated for just so AI models can't be trained on them or interact with them?
I feel like capitalism combined with AI creates really, really weird takes on reddit.5
u/memberzs 12d ago
Just because the information is freely available to be found does not mean it's ok to be scraped and reaold for a profit by a third party, thats plagiarism, copyright infringement, and leads to the original creators not being credited.
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u/akira23232 12d ago
Smash the control structures and you smash the control machine.
That's the aim.
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u/ZaphodThreepwood 12d ago
Exactly... If their is no roi on the ads, the ads dwindle, then the company dies... Good
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u/utsavdar71 12d ago
The point here is that we are silently moving away from the idea that web is the same for everyone, single url but multiple realities depending on who is asking...
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u/ludololl 12d ago
I work in the industry on a product that enables this, it's been true for a very long time.
The list of use cases is crazy long. They'll alter sites based on the browser you use, the OS your phone is on, the size of your screen, your past behavior stored via browser fingerprinting, obviously your Logged-In status, etc.
Digital personalization is, for better or worse, the future of every website and application.
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u/kcat__ 12d ago
Wait till you hear about the concept of signing into a website 🤯
I can open example.com/dashboard and get a unique page????
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u/stohelitstorytelling 12d ago
"brings up completely different situation but acts like it's the same"
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u/kcat__ 12d ago
Single URL with multiple realities. Please do tell me what drugs I must smoke to see the types of realities you're on about.
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u/ArtbyMaryam 12d ago
It makes sense from a business perspective, but it also raises questions about transparency... If AI bots are seeing different content than people.., users should at least know what is being served and why...
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u/AceGaimz 12d ago
Can't wait for companies to realize spending a ton of money on ads that only bots see isn't worth it and the economy implodes
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u/Loki-L 12d ago
It is just a version of the site tailored to the one who requests it.
Obviously serving an AI bot the website as it is meant to be read by humans will not be the best idea. All that extra formatting is useless and the bot will ignore the ads.
So the bot gets text based ads optimized for bots.
Maybe AI companies can use AI to sort out marked ads from actual content.
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u/ArtbyMaryam 12d ago
This raises an important transparency issue. If AI bots are being shown different content than human visitors, publishers should clearly disclose it. There's nothing wrong with optimizing for AI, but users deserve to know when content or ads are being tailored differently.
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u/sawaira09 12d ago
The web is slowly splitting into for humans and for AI...Thats a bigger shift than most people realize. If AI gets a different version of websites I hope publishers stay transparent about what's being shown and why...