Advertising is coming to AI chatbots — and it could influence the answers you get

AI systems are increasingly being used to search for information and make decisions, creating new questions about how commercial incentives may shape the answers users receive. (Unsplash)

When Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were still university researchers, they warned that advertising could undermine the trustworthiness of search engines. In their landmark paper presenting Google, they also wrote:

“The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users[…]We expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased toward the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”