Welcome to the forefront of conversational AI as we explore the fascinating world of AI chatbots in our dedicated blog series. Discover the latest advancements, applications, and strategies that propel the evolution of chatbot technology. From enhancing customer interactions to streamlining business processes, these articles delve into the innovative ways artificial intelligence is shaping the landscape of automated conversational agents. Whether you’re a business owner, developer, or simply intrigued by the future of interactive technology, join us on this journey to unravel the transformative power and endless possibilities of AI chatbots.
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The way we use the internet has changed completely since generative AI became mainstream. Where we would previously put a keyword-based query into a search box, we now seek more comprehensive and contextualised answers through OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Perplexity.ai or Anthropic’s Claude. Even if you have resisted the lure of asking your chosen AI chatbot pretty much everything, from help with your travel itinerary to book and movie suggestions, these responses are now embedded in your search results. With AI browsers around the corner—Google Chrome is slowly turning into one even as we speak—you just can’t avoid interacting with AI in your everyday internet usage anymore.
Of late, those who worry about the ethics of blurring these lines and what it does to the internet economy have started sounding warning signals for yet another transformation: the integration of advertising into AI chatbots and assistants. This is not a far future scenario—Google executives have confirmed that ads are coming to various Google AI products, and chatbots like Copilot and Quora’s Poe have been using chat history to personalise and display ads.
Ads inside LLMs (large language models) worry experts like technologist Mark Cuban: “This isn’t just the internet; it’s a platform that could be very manipulative depending on how it’s trained and prompted…If I build a model for mental health and advertisers want in, I could easily train it to manipulate people in harmful ways,” Cuban said on the tech podcast TBPN recently.
We are used to seeing sponsored links when we search for “healthy snacks” or “best preschools in my area”. Why then do ads inside LLM chats make us uneasy? It might have something to do with the dynamics of the interaction—the conversational, chatty tone we have become used to may have lulled us into thinking of it as a genuine conversation between two sentient beings. People have long, often personal and intimate conversations with AI. An ad in the middle of that would feel not only jarring, but like a betrayal. It’s a double-edged sword—would it then be better for the ad to be embedded in a way that doesn’t disrupt the experience, or for it to be labelled clearly as one?
Search ads have always lived in plain sight, says Jacob Joseph, vice-president, data science, at customer engagement and retention platform CleverTap. “But people treat chatbots differently. You share intent, context, sometimes even emotion. So when that conversation starts carrying commercial intent, it feels personal in a way search never did,” he adds. “The distinction between ‘what it knows’ and ‘who paid to be there’ gets much harder to spot.”
Earlier this week, Tim Berners-Lee, widely credited as the inventor of the world wide web, warned that the multibillion-dollar advertising model that has underpinned the internet economy could “fall apart” due to the rise of generative AI. The model works on humans consuming content on the internet along with a garnish of advertising, and if we let AI mediate this experience, the ad model loses its relevance, which makes it even more inevitable that ads will then become an integral part of the mediation.
We must get used to living embedded in this uncanny valley of being unable to distinguish between what’s real and “authentic” and what’s not. Consider yourself warned.
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