Google Starts Testing Ads In AI Mode

Google has begun testing sponsored ads inside its Gemini-powered AI Mode, placing labeled "sponsored" links at the bottom of AI-generated responses. Engadget reports: [A] Google spokesperson says the result shown is akin to similar tests it's been running this year. "People seeing ads in AI Mode in the wild is simply part of Google's ongoing tests, which we've been running for several months," the spokesperson said. The push to start offering ads in AI Mode was announced in May. The company also told 9to5Google that there are no current plans to fully update AI Mode to incorporate ads. For now, the software seems to be prioritizing organic links over sponsored links, but we all know how insidious ads can be once the floodgates open...

"Ads In AI Mode"

[oldgraybeard]

Google's ad machine pretending to be AI? This could prove there is no "Intelligence" in today's AI.

Re:"Ads In AI Mode"

[martin-boundary]

I hate to say I told you so, but..... I told you so! The economics of capital and resource intensive AI services coupled with low demand needs somebody to step up and pay for it. It's not the users, who don't value AI enough to cough up real money and so must be tricked into using it for free. It's no longer the investors, who have put in real money for the last 3 years and are starting to ask for real returns on their investment, not a Ponzi scheme. The last resort to pay for AI are the advertisers. Like advertising in search, advertising in AI will cause the service to degrade and lose its value.

Re:

[codebase7]

It was already worthless to begin with. Now you'll need ublock Aigen or some other parser to strip out the ADs before you can use the output. God help you if you set up a script to just raw ingest after giving a very carefully crafted prompt. You'll be getting errors all over the place.

Even better, that script will need constant tweaking to get around Google's workarounds for the ADs, and Google will eventually mandate some extension to break content filtering. Along with some sort of auth token that will

Re:

[allo]

Google search has ads since decades. Google replacing the search page with an AI page ... who would have thought they also put ads on it? Be happy that they put them at the end and not in the text (yet).

Re:

[dbialac]

Google's ad machine pretending to be AI? This could prove there is no "Intelligence" in today's AI.

Sure there is. Google's AI just showed me that there's yet another reason for me not to use Google.

Speed run

[liqu1d]

Enshittification of enshittification

Enshitishitification you mean?

[TheMiddleRoad]

But then eventually you can pay for the search results AND have it give you ads, so it's enshitishitishitification.

Yo dawg Re:Speed run

[aRTeeNLCH]

Yo dawg, I put some shirt in your shirt, so you can have some shirt while you have a shirt.

PS Thanks to AI autocorrect (I swear I swyped spellcheck instead of autocorrect) this message got toned down. You know what I meant.

Well......

[VertosCay]

At least it doesn't make AI any worse than it was.

hallucinations

[Anonymous Coward]

Will it hallucinate entire brands and products?

Surprised?

[allo]

Who did think they replace a search page with ads with a new search page without ads? I think even Slashdot commenters aren't that naive ... are they?

Excellent!

[fjo3]

Another reason (not that I needed any more) not to use any Google products!

Hey advertisers

[Growlley]

I have an idea for a whole new untapped domain you can enshitify , you can put adverts in adverts,