Matthias Ott✍️ New post: Ad Infinitum
Google announced the biggest change to Search in 25 years at #GoogleIO. But where are the ads…? 🤔
Oh! Listening to my favorite podcast @shoptalkshow reminded me that I forgot to connect the dots to another, probably totally unrelated detail: that Chrome just shipped with the Prompt API and a 4GB Gemini Nano model, despite pushback from other browser makers.
https://matthiasott.com/notes/lazy-and-prompt
https://matthiasott.com/notes/lazy-and-prompt
Wenzel Massag@matthiasott reading your article one question came up on repeat in my mind:
What can we do? How can we make it stop and strengthen the open web?
I have no good answers, as the only thing in my mind right now is to show banners on sites to Chrome users, reminding them of Firefox and explaining how to delete Chrome.
Also, your text reminded me of is a blog post I read a few days ago: [Safari and Firefox change how big sites render based on the domain…](https://mastodon.social/@webstandards_dev/116578008154462482) by @denodell
Christopher Kirk-Nielsen@matthiasott It's mind boggling. It's like blockchain all over again, some person has the idea of "let's use it for everything" except this time it made it to some stakeholder at Google and they're killing their flagship product for… sloppy results which won't drive any traffic to the very sources they slurped up? Eesh, count me out. (well I am already not using Google Search personally, but count me out twice then?)
Amelia Bellamy-Royds@matthiasott This is an excellent write-up Matthias, following the money to find the gotcha under all the gloss.
I still suspect they will eventually include conventional advertisements, but covert ads in AI answers are more concerning.
Most countries have either regulations or media-industry standards requiring advertising & paid placement content to be identified. Public pressure will be needed to keep that so. And ideally require info about all personalization data used in the ad auction.
Ana Tudor 🐯@AmeliaBR @matthiasott Clearly disclosing online advertising is a legal requirement in the EU.
Ads must clearly state that they are ads and name the party paying for them.
Users must be able to see why they are seeing a specific ad (targeting criteria).
Sensitive data categories (e.g., political opinions) cannot be used for targeting without explicit consent.
Google are not the average influencer recommending cosmetics in her bathroom and I'm sure they can afford great lawyers. And still...
@anatudor @AmeliaBR Yes, in their screenshots on the blog post about new ad formats, they are labelled as “sponsored.“ Although I don’t know how they might do that inline within a written answer, I suppose they would need to – or perhaps mark the whole experience as sponsored? But that will probably not be sufficient…
@matthiasott @anatudor I didn't know that targetting criteria was legally required in EU. That's great.
But yeah: I'm not sure how they technically *could* identify specific aspects of an AI answer that are influenced by these paid inputs. So all you would get is some generic disclaimer that "This response may include some paid product placement that was targetted to your interests based on [link to a list of 100s of categories their ad auction system has you in]."
@anatudor @matthiasott Follow-up, because I finally read Google's AI advertising integrations announcement:
https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/google-marketing-live-search-ads/
(From the day after the presentation Matthias wrote about)
At this point, the paid AI summaries are still separated out from the rest of the response, with a "sponsored" label. The common feature is AI-generated text explaining how the advertised website or product answers the user's query.
I suspect an issue will be hallucination when the answer isn't there.
@AmeliaBR @matthiasott "how the advertised product or website answers the user's query" sounds so strange to me.
Here's why: I have no idea what others look for online, but I am looking for *information*, not things to buy.
If I do buy something online, it's rarely ever anything else other than concert tickets. Maybe music (though I normally move my ass to a store), maybe some band merch. And I never ever need a search for any of that, I just go directly to the band/ label websites...
Eric Eggert@matthiasott „Dauerwerbesuchergebnisseite“
mantish@matthiasott great article!
"Google is betting its entire future on a world where people eagerly hand over their emails, their files, their habits, and their trust"
They have such a big market share and they know people don't really make this choice consciously. Most people are unaware or don't make a big deal out of this.
Marco 🇪🇺@matthiasott another thing is that I can‘t decide anymore to not see ads. Currently we can use content blockers to get a more peaceful and less distracting browsing experience. We are able to decide which sites we support by selectively allowing ads to be visible. This isn’t that easy anymore with the new ad mode (maybe using local ai to rewrite the results to cut out the intrusive content but might be hard because of a much higher level of personalization). Which furthermore might make it even harder for people to dissect ad content from real content.
// ps: sorry this put in in a bit of a doomsday mode. There might be positives as well.
// ps: sorry this put in in a bit of a doomsday mode. There might be positives as well.
🇪🇺 Paul Schoonhoven 🍋🍉@codecapitano for years I am careful what sites to visit. Sites from publishers with pure ads with some content I dont visit.
@matthiasott
@matthiasott
Kevin@codecapitano @matthiasott I allow all ads but the problem is the ads are overlapping each other since there are so many. I cannot count the number of ads I see on a webpage because they blink so fast and reload over and over. It is very comical. XD
@codecapitano @matthiasott Yes...I am seeing much more Pretend Intelligence slop on many websites.
Caspar Fairhall@matthiasott Unsettling, indeed. Terrifying might be an even more apt adjective.
Jon Henshaw
HaraldCapitalism and in particular growth based economics is dying. The limiting resource, it turns out, is not the planet. It is people's time, motivation and patience to buy ever more shit in ever less time.
The symptom: completely out of hands, overboarding attempts to fill every niche of peoples lives with "begging to buy more shit", aka "advertising".
KanaMauna@matthiasott I am assuming that the ads will include paid political advertisements. Doesn’t this get pretty close to political subliminal messaging propaganda?
Andrew Wippler@matthiasott Google took the traffic that would cost you bandwidth and decided to pay for it themselves. They will go bankrupt by hogging all the traffic. Down in a blaze of glory.
Simplicator
Man aging with two dogsThat's how you know when Google's enshittification is complete.
troy_friz_zellMotherfuckers are high on their own supply.
When I search the web, I don't want a story from a spicy autocomplete. I am trying to find a link to an actual expert. This is exactly the opposite of what I want. I will never use it.
That said, good. I hope this brings their entire evil empire crashing to the ground.
Chris Mills@matthiasott 100% no thank you. This is so disturbing. I will be heading to myKsuite over at Infomaniak and I don't really know what will become of our online retail business - which relied on Google Ads for the past 10 years - and it worked. Until now. Drat.
@ambientspace G00gley eyes' ads suck. They are very random and irrelevant for me even though I allow them to track me from site to site.
Tim Severien@matthiasott I expect these ad-sprinkled LLM outputs will be really bad for users if they're not clearly presented as ads due to the automation bias. I also wonder how Google plans to combat misinformation and such. Surely some political movements and lobbying industries are happy to spend a big ol' bag o' money to nudge answes to their favour. Pretty sure that there's a financial asymmetry between fossil fuel industry and climate scientists, for example, so I know who will outbid who.
Greg Lloyd@matthiasott 🧵#GoogleIO
“[From Googe blog post] When AI Mode gives you a list of recommendations, paid placements can now appear as items on that list. Google calls them “Highlighted Answers.” When you search for a product, Gemini writes a custom explainer for the advertiser, framed as objective advice about why this product “may be the right choice for you.”…The mechanism is paid content inside AI-generated recommendations, written by the same model that’s supposed to give you neutral answers.”
“[From Googe blog post] When AI Mode gives you a list of recommendations, paid placements can now appear as items on that list. Google calls them “Highlighted Answers.” When you search for a product, Gemini writes a custom explainer for the advertiser, framed as objective advice about why this product “may be the right choice for you.”…The mechanism is paid content inside AI-generated recommendations, written by the same model that’s supposed to give you neutral answers.”
Viviana@matthiasott Reading your post I have to think about "The Circle" and shudder ...