This article feels a few years too late. Of course, AI is in every aspect of advertising and content recommendations to "help" you make more targeted choices. I speak as a former insider who spent many year building advanced systems for increasing conversions.

What's worth talking about in 2020 though is:

- What is the differential power that companies with advanced AI hold over other smaller players like mom and pop stores or smaller retailers? Is AI sophistication the new "income inequality" since smaller companies that can't wield that power get out-competed by larger players, leading to extreme concentration in the hands of few as time goes on?

- Compared to 2000-2010, what is the net increase in 2010-2020 for consumerism for someone making the same salary given online + AI influencing buying behavior? How does that fare for 2020-2030 and is that a sustainable path for the planet?

- How is AI influencing our buying habits and consumerism in general? Are we buying new type of things we'd never have considered before? Does it change who we are as people?

- Why are we not using AI to weed out bad reviews just like we do for email spam? Is the lack of AI in the right places equally harmful in making us buy more? Does Amazon really not have the resources to score reviews given how obviously fake top reviews tend to be for almost every non-brand item you look up on amazon?

> Is AI sophistication the new "income inequality" since smaller companies that can't wield that power get out-competed by larger players, leading to extreme concentration in the hands of few as time goes on?

This year it's AI. 10 years ago it was user analytics (well, it still is), and before computers it was having marketing department.

Large retailers with money to spend have always had a massive advantage over small retailers, both online and offline. AI is just the next incremental step.

That's not to say I endorse AI marketing, or larger companies outcompeting small ones. I just don't think AI is anything new in that regard, and after AI there will be some new technology (pheromones, I bet) that large retailers will be using to extract wealth from us.

>- What is the differential power that companies with advanced AI hold over other smaller players like mom and pop stores or smaller retailers? Is AI sophistication the new "income inequality" since smaller companies that can't wield that power get out-competed by larger players, leading to extreme concentration in the hands of few as time goes on?

Our experience as well. We built custom, turn-key, machine learning products for large enterprise for seven years now. One of our biggest frustrations is that our clients are exclusively huge companies because these projects are costly. I've had friends running companies ask me if we could do something for them, and I was embarrassed not to be able to help them build product because they wouldn't be able to afford our services.

So what we're doing to address that is to make our machine learning paltform[0] to reduce the time and effort it takes to build machine learning products. We feel that we can pull it off and we aim for 10x reduction in "time to value". Given that our business model was that of an agency with the mythical "engineer.day" unit, dividing that by 10 could make it affordable.

Second, amortizing work that was already done into services people could use. For example, we have forecasting functionality where people could forecast time series (say for sales, capacity, etc.) with seasonality, etc.

Third, teams such as ours could benefit from not having to make the mistakes we've made over these years and start at that level instead. These lessons cost a lot to learn in term of time and money. All the lost productivity to find out which dataset was used to produce which model, and what parameters produced which metrics. All is embedded in there.

There are many other reasons and objectives to do that.

- [0]: https://iko.ai

Classmates did something like op talks about for his thesis a DECADE ago, and already then it was old school. AI as a term just gives many eyeballs right now.

I don’t understand how this can be labeled news.

>What is the differential power that companies with advanced AI hold over other smaller players like mom and pop stores or smaller retailers

At least at the moment, I don't think this is a huge issue. I run a "mom and pop" business with my wife, and taking advantage of state of the art marketing technology through eBay, Amazon, Facebook etc. is dead simple and at least semi-affordable.

As the technology becomes more advanced, I don't see any reason why these massive companies would conspire to deny small businesses access to it. Sure, companies with in-house AI developers will have an advantage, but if it reaches the stage where this is make-or-break, small businesses failing will be the least of society's problems.

You became a sharecropper.

This is because you no longer own your relationship to your customer.

Sharecropping works but over time, you lose any leverage in the situation. You need them but they don't need you.

The end game doesn't involve anything good for you.

I work with many online stores that are switching from the sharecropper model after seeing the end game. They now have their own shops.

This, too, can be tainted by the big tech companies controlling access to customers but it's quite a bit safer. Repeat customers don't need to come again through the big channels and are often the real lifeblood of a retail business.

I don't disagree that relying on a third-party platform for the majority of your income comes with risks (see the Adpocalypse on YouTube), but I think you've made a few assumptions about my business that aren't 100% true.

Regardless, owning your own shop doesn't magically solve all of your problems. You still need to bring customers in, be that through PR (which takes time), or advertising (which costs money).

I didn't mean to make an overly broad assumption about your business. I'm sorry if I did. There are indeed ways to combat the platform's influence within it like strong product branding and differentiation backed by a legal monopoly.

What I'm really after here is to say that all those tools that the platforms give you come at a very high cost.

My point was that platforms are indeed hurting small businesses. We are now forced into a kind of surfdom. That's not a great future.

All good man, no offense taken.

Your point about the platforms having too much power is right, but I don't think it's reached the level of full-on serfdom - at least not in e-commerce.

Sure, eBay/Amazon take a 10-15% cut of the sales, and this is arguably excessive, but they make it possible for product designers to sell their products direct to consumers on a large scale. Before they existed, the only way to reach a broad audience was through a hierarchy of retailers/wholesalers that might end up taking 70% of the final sale price.

It's not perfect, but it's definitely better than it was.

re sharecropper

Usury, debt bondage, gig economy, aggregators. I think about this all the time.

The last stage capitalism flavored critiques hold no weight for me. I don't even understand what they're saying.

I want to hear about restoring and nurturing entrepreneurship, financing for cooperatives, fair profit sharing arrangements, community banking.

How did the Progressives and Good Government reformers talk about these issues leading up to The New Deal? I've been reading about those movements, but haven't gotten very far.

David Graeber and Clay Shirky make sense to me.

Recommendations, please.

I feel like it's up to the consumer how much he wants to be influenced by ads.

I use an ad blocker online. I never see ads. I rarely shop on Amazon because of the counterfeit risk and overall mediocre satisfaction. When I do it's for something specific that I've researched in advance.

I don't watch TV and I have Youtube Premium so I don't see ads there.

I do most of my shopping at local retailers and buy the brands I've bought for years.

Don't worry, there's ads for people that think they don't watch or care about ads as well...

Right. It's amusing that people think they can just "opt out" of ads. Sure, you might miss the preroll commercial but just about every car, every cell phone, every drink, and every clothing choice that you see in media is a paid placement now. Some of it is more obvious than others, "I can't believe how great this Ford Fusion handles" but most of it is just a flash of a logo in the broader plot.

Most product placement is pretty obvious. I don't think it influences me. And I don't really watch any popular media. I could not even name one popular sitcom showing today.

Everything you see influences you more than the things you don't see. That's the entire point of advertising. It's all about brand recognition, i.e. avoiding the "I have never heard of this brand" moment in as many people as possible. A lot of startups post their whiny shutdown announcement on HN and then everyone is surprised that they have never heard of the startup.

Even if you somehow avoid being influenced by ads directly, you can still get influenced indirectly. You will see the product more, hear people talking about it and maybe a friend recommends it to you. You might not recognize it, but that's still the ad influencing you.

If an ad campaign results in a company not going out of business before I ever hear of them, and I only ever hear about the company because I happen to walk by a store of theirs, and then seeing what they sell, purchase a product from them, then technically if not for the ad campaign I wouldn’t have bought the product from them, but obviously this sort of thing isn’t what people are concerned about when they are concerned about whether ads influenced them to buy a product.

They should be, if product success is determined by the skill and technology of advertisers then product _development_ is irrelevant and the only thing which matters is a companies ability to access advertising.

In that world even people who never see an advert will have only a hollow choice of products from the 'market'.

I don’t think that follows. It seems conceivable that advertising can both help, but does so much less than the quality of the product , but nonetheless can occasionally push things over the edge from “goes out of business” to “doesn’t”.

But that is a bit different. What you see and hear directly from other people is already a filtered view. The ads that lead to bad products never influence you nor do they take your attention. Some stuff passes through but with some common sense it could all be avoided.

I share the sentiment of the OP; i am shielded from ads and even if they come through some way or another it’d influence me personally very little: i rarely buy stuff and when I do I research extensively. Some brands that are overly advertised are also a red flag to me.

But, I am aware I am in minority here. And those like us have a negligent impact at best. I think advertising does heavily influence the masses.

As a meta note, I wish people reserved the throwawayXXXX accounts for "I work at <company of interest>, using a throwaway for obvious reasons".

It's worse if it's just to brag about how advertising doesn't affect them, especially if the reason is that they have the technical chops to simply dodge the ads while everyone without those skills is deluged in AI targeted, psychologically optimized advertising they are ill equipped to avoid the effects of.

It's been quite clear to me for some time that our technological intelligence progresses at a rate far exceeding that of our emotional intelligence, which may not be progressing at all. So when I see articles like this, it isn't surprising at all. Technology is used today to basically "hack" our emotional brain to get us to do or think things we otherwise wouldn't.

It's clear we are progressing technologically. Does anyone know of any science that describes how our emotions and the biology that generates them are progressing, particularly in our more and more technological world?

I love that this point has been brought up. Everything I see has suggested that our emotional intelligence is actually falling if anything. We're inundated with self-help material that is just the same garbage spewn over again. Everything of value has been drowned out by the noise. People are struggling more than ever with their emotional state. Social media was supposed to be this great connector yet its practically crippling our ability to form connections. The cynic in me says it's deliberate; to subdue the masses, but I know that the reality is that there's just no money to be gained after you fix someone, and no one's going to pay to be fixed unless it's a guarantee. That's why we're stuck with individual therapy for even the most trivial things. Such a massive inefficient system we live in, and it's only made worse since there is money to be made by making someone less emotionally stable; by making them vulnerable you make them easier to manipulate and more succeptable to advertising. It's a cycle where the incentives are all misaligned.

Not that it's always bad to rehash things, but the title as stated is almost tautological. Of course AI (as the media loosely defines it). Yeah obviously product recommendations are about making you buy more things (at least from that brand). What did you think the money was being invested in?

The article title seems a bit less obvious while also better describing what the article is about > How artificial intelligence may be making you buy things

Things are either redundant or they aren't. They can't be almost redundant, because then they wouldn't serve the purpose of being redundant.

Now we have word salad out of the way, I can say that it is absolutely possible to game the way people see the world to make them buy things they don't need or want and that GPT-3 has shown us it's possible to do that with a neural network which is basically pitting it against your average human's ability to resist it. This could be a type of addiction and corporations peddle that shit all day long as we well know.

Or not. There is really no data in the article besides some very contrived self reported numbers.

In Germany, a Berlin start-up called SO1 is doing similar things with its AI system for retailers. It claims that nine times more people buy AI-suggested goods than those offered by traditional promotions, even when the discounts are 30% less.

To me it suggests exactly the opposite of the title. No AI secret sauce, just smoke and mirrors.

Can you walk us through how the quote doesn't support the title? It seems to strongly support the title.

Sure.

1. The title is meaningless. Replace the HN title's 'may' with 'may not' and it is exactly the same thing.

2. Especially if you consider the original title is How artificial intelligence may be making you buy things. There is nothing concrete in there.

3. It you read that quote again it is a very carefully worded and cherrypicked piece of data, something that is very common in AI hype articles. Without the actual numbers it is also meaningless.

Again, it is only my interpretation that the article is disingenuous, feel free to disagree.

But the quote, IF TRUE, supports the title. You are claiming the quote implies the opposite. I also think the article is overblown even though I agree that AI shapes peoples behaviours in ways that is manipulative, but your original critique is illogical.

Yes. I claim it is textbook weasel wording. Which to me sends the opposite message. Call it illogical if you will.

No, the statement can be true and does not support the title. Say we have X AI offered goods and Y traditional promotions where |X| >> |Y|. Then it is not surprising more people buy AI offered goods. The statement remains true, but not what it wants to imply. Also we do not know other factors about the goods, say Xs are popular while Ys are not, they are not controlled for. Literally apples to oranges.

Good advertising might also be making people buy things.. and word of mouth, and having a good previous experience with the product. So what? Ah, I see, it's easier to blame it on the instrument than the handler this time.

Let's blame the beneficiary instead, it's their purse and final decision. If we're worried about the environment, we should totally tax or outlaw bad practices, but do this at the appropriate level, not in software.

It's true. The primary purpose of an ad is to connect buyers and sellers and this is why companies spend an enormous budget on it but a lot of ads have a deceptive component to them. The real product is nowhere near as good, often just a lot of hot air and sometimes a complete dud.

But ads also sit at the wrong level. Instead of connecting the buyer with the seller who happened to have the biggest marketing budget, we should be connecting the buyer with all potential sellers.

> "With the app we have found that the average contents of a basket are up 20%, and people with the app are three times more likely to return to shop in that store"

How does this compare to any loyalty scheme that people opt into? I'd think this applies also to people who pick up a paper stamp card.

It is exactly the other way around. People who frequent a store are more likely to know about their promotions or opt it to their programs. Source: me, I usually shop at the closest shops in person and more likely to have their cards and coupons.

Also the numbers are meaningless without a baseline.

I think you are agreeing with me, but I'm not sure?

I am suggesting that the quoted figures are what you would expect without AI being involved, and perhaps they are even not that good.

Yes, I do agree. No novel insights in the article.

The word "making" in the headline may be a bit strong.

I observe myself buying Crowd Supply gadgets I more often than not find I have not powered up. One wonders.

I worked with the Crowd Supply people as a project creator a couple of years back. They didn't seem to have any sophisticated AI that was trying to manipulate users into buying crap - they did have plain ol' Google Analytics, but they also went to the effort of removing unnecessary JavaScript from their site so that NoScript/AdBlock wouldn't run into any issues.

I think it's more a fundamental issue related to crowdfunding itself - you buy a product that you're interested in at the time, but don't receive anything until a year later. By then, there's a decent chance you've moved on and no longer need it.

No. AI is a tool. Companies are trying to make people buy things.

No. Companies are a legal fiction. People are trying to make people buy things. No. People are a language fiction. Languages are trying to make people buy things.

I think we can probably stop at people in this context :)

The article is a little thin on breaking news. I think that Zuboff’s book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power is the definitive and scholarly material on AI and data driving people’s actions. Control of behavior at scale. Neoliberalism. All the right topics for understanding where we are headed.

Alternatively: how AI is helping you find the things you want.

How AI is convincing you to want things you don't need

How fairly basic data analysis and machine learning are used to optimise product sales.

YOUR AI will help you. THEIR AI will trick you.