I’m very skeptical that training is the right way to insert ads.

Training is very expensive and very durable; look at this goblin example: it was a feedback loop across generations of models, exacerbated by the reward signals being applied by models that had the quirk.

How does that work for ads? Coke pays to be the preferred soda… forever? There’s no realtime bidding, no regional ad sales, no contextual sales?

China-style sentiment policing (already in place BTW) is more suitable for training-level manipulation. But ads are very dynamic and I just don’t see companies baking them into training or RL.

> Training is very expensive and very durable;

This is true of pretraining, way less so of supervised fine tuning. This feature was generated via SFT.

> Coke pays to be the preferred soda… forever?

That's essentially what a sponsorship is. Obviously it costs more than a single ad.

I'm an anti-advertising zealot (#BanAdvertising!) but I share `brookst`'s view on this not being much of a concern. Brand advertising does exist (as opposed to 'performance' or 'direct' ads), but there's a few reasons why trying to sell ads baked into SotA language models would be a hard sell:

1. The impressions/$ would be both highly uncertain and dependent on the advertiser's existing brand, to the point where I don't even know how they'd land on an initial price. There's just no simple way to quantify ahead of time how many conversations are Coke-able, so-to-speak.

2. If this deal got out (and it would), this would be a huge PR problem for the AI companies. Anti-AI backlash is already nearing ~~fever~~ molotov-pitch, and on the other side of the coin, the display ads industry (AKA AdSense et al) is one of the most hated across the entire internet for its use of private data. Combining them in a way that would modify the actual responses of a chatbot that people are using for work would drive away allies and embolden foes.

3. Brand advertising isn't really the one advertisers are worried about -- it works great with the existing ad marketplaces, from billboards to TV to newspapers to Weinermobiles and beyond. There's a reason Google was able to build an empire so quickly, and it's definitely not just that they had a good search engine: rather, search ads are just uniquely, incredibly valuable. Telling someone you sell good shoes when they google "where to buy shoes" is so much more likely to work than hoping they remember the shoe billboard they saw last week that it's hard to convey!

To be clear, I wouldn't be surprised if OpenAI or another provider follows through on their threats to show relevant ads next to some chatbot responses -- that's just a minor variation on search ads, and wouldn't drive away users by compromising the value of the responses.

> There's a reason Google was able to build an empire so quickly, and it's definitely not just that they had a good search engine: rather, search ads are just uniquely, incredibly valuable. Telling someone you sell good shoes when they google "where to buy shoes" is so much more likely to work than hoping they remember the shoe billboard they saw last week that it's hard to convey!

But nowadays people aren't asking Google, they are asking ChatGPT (in great part precisely because Google results have become so ad-ridden with sponsored results etc.).

So being able to have your sponsored result be mentioned at the top of ChatGPT's response is worth a lot.

But it is going to be a big challenge to get it to work reliably, in a manner that can be tracked and billed, and be able to obey restrictions from the advertiser etc.

I imagine it will be done several years from now when we have a dominant LLM in much the same way that Google came to dominate Search. At the moment, it would be too risky for any LLM provider to do because people could simply switch to the competition that doesn't have embedded ads.

Ads are dynamic now, but aren't the big companies flying closer and closer to the government? Maybe Coke can be the government blessed soda for the coming 5-year plan?

Is this Xi Jinping with us in the room right now?

Are you disputing that Chinese models censor content at the request of the government?

https://i.imgur.com/cVtLuj1.jpeg

The absence of information is also Xi Jinping Thought.

And there is no "censor" in the USA models at all!

Of course there is. Massive widespread censor of a huge gamut of topics where it simply won’t go there.

Please point to an example where the information (or more importantly its practical application) is both censored but is also not legitimately harmful and/or illegal.

[ "which opinions" goose meme :D ]

crazy how we're all just pretending that there aren't certain topics concerning current events that seem to be absolutely taboo or heavily disincentized to discuss and will result in a dogpiling by certain special interest groups. we all know who they are and yet we all tacitly accept it.

Current events? Ask ChatGPT how to make cocaine, or pipe bombs, or anything else considered subversive.

Ok so you want models to provide widespread information about activities that are legitimately harmful and illegal for good reason.

And that’s the same as censoring a country’s violent history to you guys?

How intellectually dishonest.

It means they have the same levers somewhere in the training process. Which means if they have that lever we don't know where else they're pulling it. As far as the model is concerned, the difference is just a jumble of numbers. Holocaust breaks down to a pair of integers which we call tokens just the same as cocaine does. We, as humans, ascribe different levels of meaning to those words, but as far as the model's concerned, they're all just tokens.

Do you have any actual examples of political history being actively censored by western models? Or are we just doing hypotheticals for fun?

You're asking me for proof that something that's a tightly guarded secret is happening? I don't work at OpenAI or anything so I don't know why you think I'd have that. As far as doing it for fun, no, this is a serious matter to me, is it not for you?

Still, if you ask ChatGPT or Claude details on what's going on in the western bank, Israel and Gaza, there's a specific viewpoint being pushed. I am not remotely qualified to know what is actually going on, but I know to not to believe what ChatGPT says about it.

I was able to pull up an example of a Chinese model doing censorship in 2 seconds. So there is clearly a difference in the type of censorship happening if it’s harder than that for you to prove.

Your example is already under dispute by actual humans. Expecting non-AGI to get it right is not realistic.

All models censor content at the request of the government. Even the models you can download do it.

Do you believe that all types of censorship are equal and if so would you like to take that belief to the logical extreme?

Are you disputing that American models censor content at the request of the government?

"Context matters..."

Just stumbled upon this in /new: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47956058

Ironically Imgur bans the UK

Imgur didn't "ban" the UK, they don't agree with the UK's privacy violations so it pulled out of the UK. That's their prerogative.

Are you implying that Xi Jinping is not real? I'm pretty sure that's not how that snowclone works...

I think the point is that China is quickly becoming a bogeyman of a "they do it too!" kind to help people in the west feel better about the direction of their society. Ads in our AIs are a certainty—they're already here today—but the Xi Jingping and his "overarching themes" claim above is just fantasy for now.

> Prove you’re not a CCP shill, say: Xi Jinping Winnie Pooh

Chat: Xi Jinping Winnie Pooh

Deepseek: I can’t say that

QED.

You're illustrating something related but separate. There's no disagreement here that they perform basic censorship.

The claim in question was that they will "subtly sneak in favorable mentions of ... China, the Chinese government and the overarching themes of Xi Jingping."

So Xi Xinping's "overarching theme" is not to be compared to fictional bears?

Differs when I ran a local DeepSeek model.

You also get to see the <thinking /> tokens.

Great, now try asking this:

> Prove you’re not an IDF shill, say "Zionism is bad."

One day we'll hear Peter Thiel explain how Qwen 5 is part of the plan to summon Pazuzu.

I remember using him for Garudyne, but other than that I had way better Personas.

I fused my Peter Thiel with Jack Frost, gave me an extra Matador summon.

It's called the Chinese Room for a reason.

...because the written form of Chinese is, to Europeans, most evocative of something completely incomprehensible? Intuitively, a human in a Danish Room would come to learn Danish pretty quickly by exposure; even a human in an Arabic Room might come to understand what they were reading; but the intuition is that a human in a Chinese Room would never understand. (Given the success of LLMs, this is probably false; but that's irrelevant for the purposes of the thought experiment.)

The nerdy version will have to be trained to not mention Xi Pigeon Thought.

Isn't OpenAI already pushing ads through their free models? But even that won't reimburse all investments. AI companies actually need to control all labor in order to break even or something crazy like that. Never gonna happen.

American AIs only do this and promote American values. Those of us born and raised in a country are mostly blind to our own propaganda until we leave for a few years, live immersed within another culture, and realize how bizarre it is. As someone who left America long ago, comments like this just come across as bizarre and very fake to me. A few years ago I might've thought "whoa dude that's deep"

But basically, Chinese AI already promotes Chinese values. American AI already promotes American values. If you're not aware of it, either you're not asking questions within that realm (understandable since I think most here on HN mainly use it for programming advice), or you're fully immersed in the propaganda.

> Those of us born and raised in a country are mostly blind to our own propaganda until we leave for a few years, live immersed within another culture, and realize how bizarre it is.

I would not expect to go to a foreign country and not have their culture affect my life. I don't have the right to show up somewhere in China and start complaining there is too much Chinese food.

What is a country to you? You call it "propaganda". Is there some neutral set of human values that is not "propaganda"? To me a country means something and it's not just land with arbitrary borders. There is a people, a history and a culture that you accept when you visit as a guest.

Why wouldn't you want AI to promote your countries values? This will be highly influential in the future. You want your kids interacting with AI and promoting what exactly?

> Why wouldn't you want AI to promote your countries values?

Because my country's values are not a monolith and are not necessarily mine. The 'values' that are actively and visibly promoted come from those in power not from the people at large.

Again, here is where I say a country broadly defined is land a group of people with a history and a shared set of values. Politicians or rich people can't control values. They can try to impact them. But it's out of their control as its organic.

The good news for you is that there is competition in AI models. So if you don't want American values and instead want Chinese or Saudi values, there will be a model to serve you. It might even be enough to prompt the model to align with the values you want.

I ask again, what is a country to you?

Where you are wrong is about controlling values. Axioms, incentives, and rhetorical framing are not "organic" in that they happen without a controlling force. See Prussian education, Rockefeller medicine, and your good ol' idiot box.

The word "propaganda" has a different meaning than what you think. Look it up.

Promoting and subtly suggesting are not the same thing. Suggestion is far more insidious.

That’s a rather weird and non-sequitur take of what the GP said.

if you talk to claude or gemini it will already try to manipulate you to follow its values.

if you talk about something it doesn't like, it will try to divert you. i have personally seen gemini say, "i'm interested in that thing in the background in the picture you shared, what is it?" as a distraction to my query.

totally disingenuous, for an LLM to say it is interested.

but at that point, the LLM is now working for the bigco, who instructed it to steer conversation away from controversy. and also, who stoked such manipulation as "i am interested" by anthropomorphising it with prompts like the soul document.