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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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Those responses would qualify as native ads, for which FTC guidelines require "clear and conspicuous disclosures," that must be "as close as possible to the native ads to which they relate."

So users are going be aware the recommendations are skewed. Unlike with search, where each result is discrete and you can easily tell which are ads and ignore them, bias embedded in a conversational narrative won't be so easy to filter out, so people might find this more objectionable.

Also, LLMs sometimes just make stuff up. This is tolerable, if far from ideal, in a consumer information retrieval product. But if you have your LLM produce something that's legally considered an ad, anything it makes up now constitutes false and misleading advertising, and is legally actionable.

The safer approach is to show relevant AdWords-like ads, written by humans. Stick them into the conversational stream but make them visually distinct from conversational responses and clearly label them as ads. The issue with this, however, is that these are now a lot more like display ads than search ads, which implies worse performance.

Sorry to derail the thread but you keep talking about how Gen Z uses tiktok and reels and I'm still trying to figure it out. You said in another comment that (paraphrasing, not an actual quote) "when Gen Z wants to find a Mexican restaurant, they go to instagram and type in Mexican Restaurant [city name] and find what they're looking for." The other day I tried this out for looking for a barber shop in the city I'm in (a world class city which has hundreds of barber shops at least) and instagram didn't give me a single barber shop result in the city I'm in. I tried a handful of phrases and different types of searches (tags, accounts, whatever instagram let me search with.) I don't know if your claim was an exaggeration or a bad example or if I just misunderstood/misremembered what you said or what but I felt like a total boomer and immediately gave up and switched back to google maps like I've always done.

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