First, there’s the privacy risk. What does the chatbot know about the user, and how does it use that data to target ads? How can the user know what the bot is using when it targets those ads? The European Union is currently challenging Meta’s right to show people personalized ads even after the company offered to let users pay a monthly fee to opt out; I don’t see why regulators would treat a chatbot any more leniently. Second, there’s the risk to the user experience. A company that enters the advertising business ultimately wants to show users as many of them as users will tolerate. How will Perplexity’s answers gradually change as pressures mount to increase the ad load? Finally, there’s the risk of undermining trust in the product. The promise of an “answer engine” is that it gets you the best response every time. Letting advertisers sponsor follow-up queries could introduce bias or simply worse answers into the product. Ad-supported chatbots will cause users to wonder whether they are really getting the best answer possible, or whether they are being guided algorithmically toward more lucrative queries.
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