From: not@telling.you.invalid   
      
   Lawrence D'Oliveiro  wrote:   
   > But what if the visitors to your site are AI bots, looking for deals   
   > on behalf of a human that ends up one step removed from contact with   
   > you? Then all those ads and extra persuasive messages fall on the   
   > worst kind of deaf ears -- no ears at all. The human says to the AI   
   > agent "get me a ride to the airport", the agent goes away to the Uber   
   > and Lyft sites (or whatever else turns up), and picks the cheapest   
   > option at that moment.   
      
   What on Earth makes you think the AI bot would do something as   
   crazy as that? These chatbots are an inscrutable black box that   
   suggestions come from, and the companies running them need to make   
   massive amounts of money out of them while offering them cheap/free   
   to use. The inevitable outcome is that companies will pay to have   
   their services used by these chatbots. Amazon surely already do it   
   with their Alexa gizmos which presumably order generic items from   
   the supplier they like best (pays them most), or from themselves   
   directly for many things.   
      
   Perplexity apparantly tried to muscle in on Amazon's AI shopping   
   game and they're defending that. That's interesting if you own   
   shares in Amazon, but otherwise who cares? The real problem is that   
   people who rely on AI will never even see alternatives, not just   
   for products and services but for points of view on anything.   
      
   For example if you do a web search for a specific hotel it's often   
   very hard to pick the hotel's own website out of all the booking and   
   comparson results which come way higher in the search results. I've   
   even falsely assumed a hotel didn't have their own website before.   
   But it's usually cheaper to book rooms directly. If you ask an AI   
   to book a room at a hotel I think it's very unlikely that they'll   
   bypass the booking sites and really get the best deal. Instead   
   they'll book with whichever booking site has paid them most, and   
   maybe then the hotel will pay the booking site extra to have   
   themselves chosen by AI when people just ask to book a room   
   somewhere in that location. Instead of buying unreliable ads,   
   now they're paying for the certainty of manipulating a machine   
   intelligence which dopey internet users have conveniently   
   outsourced their thinking to, and the AI companies only have to   
   tweak a setting in return.   
      
   Further along, now locations like towns have an interest in getting   
   themselves recommended as holiday spots by AI. AI might talk about   
   more notable people from a town that pays for more mentions on   
   their service, so more people want to go visit historic locations   
   there. Before you know it people en-mass are absorbing obscure   
   niches of history and politics by default just because some town   
   or tourism company paid to boost visitor numbers, and unlike with   
   old techniques like paid magazine/newspaper articles, now people   
   really believe they're exploring _the_ true answer to their own   
   personal questions.   
      
   Where Amazon is getting upset is that they'd like to be the ones   
   running the AI and therefore at the end of the food chain for that   
   money. Not just another middle-man for retailers, competing equally   
   with the others for their AI 'thoughtshare'. While we watch these   
   AI companies squabble over who gets to be king, we've missed the   
   fact that we're becoming part of their kingdom.   
      
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