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> You ask OpenAI for a product recommendation, and it recommends a product that they’re associated with, or one that a company is paying them to promote. Or maybe some company detects OpenAI’s web scraper and delivers customized content to win the recommendation. You just don’t know.

How is this even remotely different than Google Search? It's consulting Billions of pages to feed you a handful of results but mostly ads

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Given this era of weak regulation and enforcement, and the ability for the technology to obfuscate and opacify it, LLM companies will be able to get away with delivering promotional messaging undisclosed.

When Google search came about it had not yet been established that tech companies could "move fast" without consequence.

People have been operating on trust that search engine rankings are largely based on content quality/relevance/popularity, and that ads are marked as ads. And then the assumption was you would click through the top rankings to find something that actually met your needs, vs just buying one of the three results ChatGPT gives you.

It's true that there's nothing stopping Google Search from being a morally bankrupt operation though.

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