From: wasbit@REMOVEhotmail.com
On 22/11/2025 22:03, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
> 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.
>
The last time I booked a (UK) hotel, by booking direct we got free
parking unlike those who booked through a comparison site.
> 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.
>
--
Regards
wasbit
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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