this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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Many of their customers want them to produce ads.
Fair - but I would hope for a functional product supported by delivery of ads, rather than ads that exist for the purpose of ads so that there can be more ads delivered along with the ads (oh yeah, and somewhere in there, a product... which itself is little more than merely another thinly-disguised advertisement).
Google is the perfect example: it made its name bc it WORKED, then it started to be supported by ads - okay fine so far - then the ads took over and now very often, it merely passes on SEO "ads" (except crucially: remember that was supposed to be the product) rather than show actual results. Plus on top of that, it also shows the ads. The latter are fine but the former are most definitely not, especially when it pushes out real results so that like even on page 5 you can't find what you were looking for, which might still be the very top result of DuckDuckGo hence cannot be that hard to produce. It exemplifies the process of enshittification for us all.
Those products exist. There are plenty of AI products that don't involve ads at all, you pay for a service that uses AI to help do whatever it is the service is about (for example GitHub Copilot). There are open source products that give you those services for free, even.
Some people use those services to create advertising, but it's not like advertising is the only field that this stuff is useful for.
Believe it or not, but at one point Google (and similarly many of the products that it owns now, like YouTube) did not have ads in them either...
I am okay with adding ads to them though, to help support future product development. And likewise contributing packages delivered as open source, ofc I am happy with that.
I just do not like watching products, like Google search, lose out on services, not b/c of traditional ads but rather the newer style of ads in the form of SEO, i.e. not "ads" so much as "misinformation", which Google made far too easy to game the system with as compared to the previous incarnation, where it was based more on "reputation" e.g. linking to & from other sites. Though similar to ads in that it is a way for companies to promote themselves, jumping straight to the front of the line rather than play "fair".
Nowadays you can zoom in on Google maps and not see the store you are looking for until you are practically on top of it or manage to click it directly - instead Google prioritizes what it wants to show you, based on who ponies up what amount of dough to Google, rather than what you as the customer want to see.
And as for AI, it simply was not ready. It was itself an advertisement to executives from people trying to sell it before having made a viable product yet. Thus I am not surprised that they lost billions due to mismanagement of this highly interesting and promising field, that will eventually offer everyone a great deal, one day.