The outcome is that very little serious technology or influential companies come out of Europe. And salaries for things like engineer are about a third of that in the US.
But I'm happy EU does this stuff as well, as it's a really nice vacation spot
Unfortunately, most LLM companies always were naturally an intelligence operation on civilians, and determining if they are now state-backed seems like a irrelevant detail.
Privacy has been dead for some time now. The fact is most business people never figure out how they are exploited. The modern intelligence campaigns just made it economical to hit almost everyone regardless of scale... often under some silly pretense like terrorists wanting our underpants. =3
People think they're interacting with an "intelligence," when actually they're just getting a maximally optimized Weizenbaum feed. We're living through the sloppification of the human mind.
I couldn't help but notice how each successive headline reporting our glorious victories seemed to draw closer to Tokyo.
Something like that.
Well. I can't help but notice how each successive headline reporting how this "scam"/stochastic parrot/"scare quotes intelligence" seems to be solving more and more things that were but a few years ago widely regarded as being indicators of high intelligence.
Being highly convinving is one of the things on that list.
Nobody is denying that it's effective. They're denying intelligence
A programming contest has a problem where given N < 10000, do something hard like come up with the number of primes less than N
You can come up with all sorts of algorithms that do intelligent things. But the most effective solution is to use metaprogramming to make a massive switch statement that contains all the answers
It was Berlin and not Tokyo, I believe. Germany kept producing newsreels until the very end. Many of them are now on Youtube, a very interesting watch on how to frame things positively.
I’m reminded that almost no one beyond a select few knew high up in the military and around the emperor knew how badly the Japanese were defeated at Midway.
Paternalistic. Arrogant. Shameful. And deeply engrained in the Japanese cultural zeitgeist (of the early-mid 20th century).
Edit: I guess it’s commonly attributed to a German citizen, but their cultures mirrored each other. Fascism falling under the weight of its own propaganda.
Whenever I say something like “that’s a cool feature, but to do it you would have to build spyware”, everyone else is just like “the cat is out of the bag ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”. (I don’t build spyware, or work on projects that do).
It blows my mind that people don’t care about the world they are building with this stuff. It’s a real tragedy of the commons. People see these collaborators from different wars and regimes and think “I’d stand up against the bad guy”… well I’ve got news for you if you build spyware, you are not the person you think you are.
"Nothing is worse to the demise of a society, than people who want to convince you that the cat is out of the bag and will not go back in, while the cat is being violently shook out of the bag at the same time."
Seems more like a real tragedy of private enterprise.
We used to assume that the surveillance world would be built by government (1984). But it turned out to be equally likely to be built by the free market.
The government has few uses for total surveillance, and almost all are obviously bad. Private enterprise has a million uses, most of them various degree of bad, but as a society we've been blind to this kind of badness for many decades now - for at least as long as lying in the face of your fellow humans and trying to hurt them materially has been considered a respectable profession.
They're each in different grey areas that were previously the commons.
Facebook didn't invent "talking to friends" or "showing adverts", but made
itself "the place" hard enough most of the advertisers and most of the people intermediate through it.
OpenAI didn't invent "asking questions and recieving answers", not even "from an agent who knows which sites to search on your behalf"; but it is competent enough that I might have it read 50 times as many pages in a day as I myself would have read, and the sites' owners don't get real eyeballs looking at ads during this. (In my case, adblock even if I did it manually; but apply this massive increase in page hits to everyone who has their LLM research stuff).
Common people work there and built the tools. At any point, they could have chosen not to. Or told the boss guy it wasn't plausible. At the end of the day, we're choosing and building the world we're in, while also loudly complaining about what we choose to do.
Blaming a corporation takes away all the agency the workforce has.
I think any free platform with a billion people on it is, de facto, a commons. It would be great if we as a society acknowledged this and had come up with some better means of stewardship because the status quo is obviously heinous, but we've been happy to hand over absolute control of public discourse to a few trillion dollar tech companies.
Your issue is you are defining spyware too broadly. This is not spying on users, but rather 2 companies partnering and sharing data to result in either a better ads system or better understanding on how ads are performing. This is a positive value to society and the commons. Wasting space in a site or app with an ad that won't convert is the true tragedy of the commons. It's a waste of time and money for all parties involved.
> Google Chrome doesn't block third-party cookies by default, only in Incognito mode, or when users explicitly set it to block third-party cookies via chrome://settings.
Looks like the settings let you block all third-party cookies and add exceptions for specific sites, which seems a bit awkward but could be made to work.
Alternatively, you could run OpenAI in its own profile, or look into what extensions might do.
>Looks like the settings let you block all third-party cookies and add exceptions for specific sites, which seems a bit awkward but could be made to work.
The fear over blocking third party cookies breaking stuff is severely overstated. I have it disabled by default and I don't think I've ever seen any website breakages. The most is office365 nagging me to click on links so it can authenticate across domains.
I think that if they don’t block by default, is quite significant. Chrome + Edge has superior marketshare and then add the % people who have no idea what these mean and don’t change defaults.
Something like it is basically a requirement if you want to see digital ads. Advertisers want to know how many people who saw/clicked their ad went on to make a purchase.
Safari and Firefox should isolate the cookie by default.
It turns out that the only way to make money online is ads.
Nobody is going to pay for ChatGPT. They'll just use the ad-infested version, like they do everything else online. Well some people will pay, but not enough to justify the insane amounts of money being poured into it by investors.
A bigger problem is that it will be impossible to know when you are seeing an ad: political groups (or the government, perhaps) will partner with openAI to subtly express different values.
It's still an advertisement, and the underlying marketplace is similar (pay for access to change behavior).
The best uses of AI will be surveillance, propaganda, cyberterrorism, and automated military tech.
Which has really only been accepted because 99% of people don’t understand how it works. Hard to be outraged by something you can’t see or understand. In my book, the practice is akin to malware. I recently opened a website for an AI service in incognito mode, because I didn’t care to have it in my search results. Despite avoiding third party cookies here, the site still fired off a tracker to Meta, who then correlated my home IP address with my Facebook account, and filled my feed with ads for this AI service. When I was tracked like this despite a somewhat informed defense, which defense do normal people have against this? None.
If you pay OpenAI full price, this machinery should never be used. The only paying customers getting ads are the “ad supported” tier.
I think you can easily imagine a future where the subscription model token subsidy ramps down and is replaced by ads, but it’s important to use precise language about the current state of the world.
Firefox is my daily on desktop, but on mobile it's Safari. I finally got around to installing uBlock Origin Lite on iOS. I used to run the Firefox version on iOS, but that was discontinued long ago, and I never replaced it. I feel like a bit of an idiot for not doing this sooner.
The surveillance economy hits again. The only business model they can think of. Combined with state capture this gives unprecedented power over the Average Joe, who will hand his life, his soul and his vote to Big Brother without a thought.
That is a nice sequence diagram[1]; I like how each endpoint param values are written out and the color distinctions. What tool did you use to create it?
The easiest off-the-shelf option would be a router running OpenWrt. IIRC, it natively uses dnsmasq, and the relevant blacklists can be obtained from here:
My own setup is DIY: a Debian box running Unbound (recursive DNS) with the RPZ blacklists from above. This gets rid of the upstream DNS service such as the ISP's completely, and prevents tampering or censorship.
Everyone would be far better off if the author just posted "OpenAI uses third party cookies [wikipedia link]", except maybe the author who wouldn't as many subscriptions for his "threat intel" newsletter.
I didn't look at the prose closely enough to check for that, but people wrote inflated explanations of basic things like this all the time pre-LLM. The Wikipedia article doesn't know the specific cookie name, and can't show the results of an experiment verifying that it is in fact being used for ad tracking, or identify specific sites using it in collaboration with OpenAI.
>but people wrote inflated explanations of basic things like this all the time pre-LLM.
And those got a pass because at least you could defend them with some excuse about how it's some budding author trying to hone their writing skills, or trying to improve their understanding by putting pen to paper. Cases where those excuses don't work (think crappy content marketing pieces from random companies) got short shrift as well. Now for all you know, it's just some dude who prompted claude to "write a blog post about openai's ads".
I'm not aware of any filter lists that blocks based on cookie name. It's almost always done at the URL level. Moreover it's bog standard 3rd party cookie tracking. At least for the purposes of "help defenders", there's nothing in the blog post that couldn't be found in 10s with browser devtools.
> there's nothing in the blog post that couldn't be found in 10s with browser devtools.
The audience of people who can read and understand an explanation like this one is probably quite a bit larger than the ones who can replicate the experiment themselves.
And larger still than the ones who would bother to replicate the experiment themselves.
Yeah, I could tell few sentences in that it's Claude-written article. The style has become that distinctive. Hell, a third of the articles I opened on the HN front page today carried that distinctive style.
Doesn't really matter if the content is worth it (and I just realized that recognizing Claude in this also makes me wary of ways this could paper over key details - at this point I start to recognize from my own experience where Claude may be papering over something it didn't actually bother to check).
That just goes back to my original point, which is that this is AI slop and everyone would be better off if OP referenced a canonical description of what's happening, rather than wasting everyone's time by generating 1200 words of AI slop for them to wade through, all for some "threat intelligence" newsletter.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the reflexive “ad tracking bad” that I am most savvy tech practitioners reach for might deserve some reconsideration in this case.
The thing about advertising on the web and ad tracking as a practice is that, barring the small matter of ensuring the economic survival of the publisher sites, it is almost always a negative for users. When we consider the marginal benefit of naïve, uninformed-by-surveillance advertising with the present day status quo, we find that in exchange for a complete lack of privacy, we only really receive a marginal improvement in ad quality. Of course, if you (like me) consider all advertising to be a negative on the experience of using the web, it’s an even worse deal.
The standard response given by these companies when they bother giving a response is something to the effect of “we are improving the experience for our users,” which obviously the users would disagree with. However, when it comes to OpenAI, they could build a plausible case for this sort of tracking improving the product. If your models know where your internet habits are, the responses that you get could be tuned for both your interest profile and your actual history of interactions/purchases/internet usage, etc. Imagine a world in which you can opt into this tracking, control the data you provide and how it’s used, clear it out and redact it as you please, and opt in and out of responses that are personalized against it. Reasonable people can disagree, but that might actually be useful.
My prediction, though: that’s not gonna happen. OpenAI will first build out the system to collect click and conversion tracking measurements, then they will turn around to advertisers and say “look at how good our conversion rates are,“ and then they’re going to build an explicit ad platform that enshittifies their chat products.
It's slightly different though, considering a lot of ad spend is for B2B products/services, and a lot of work pay for ChatGPT, so its only people who's work won't pay for a pro subscription.
Whereas, YouTube is for personal consumption in almost all cases, doesn't say anything about your employers willingness to invest in software/services
Every AI company is also a surveillance company. It's the only way to get all the necessary training data. The fact that they're now also an advertising agency is incidental.
>It's the only way to get all the necessary training data.
That... does not follow. The information you're getting with this is what sites a user visits. That's creepy and valuable for advertising purposes, but is hardly the type of that that's going to bring about ASI, which is what all the AI labs are working towards. That's why they're hiring data annotators (sometimes with masters or phds) to get training data.
imagine stealing tons of content from every source on earth and then running ads on it
if a single person did that they'd be sent to prison (rip Aaron) but when a too-big-to-fail industry does it with political campaign contributions, no problem?
well firefox+ublock is still an option for those wise enough not to let unknown javascript with new daily zero-days run on their PC
This is basically what Google did when they pioneered the model of surveillance capitalism (see, e.g., The Age of Surveillance Capitalism).
Google simply provided an index on top of an existing library. Of course, a librarian has no value if he has no books to index over! But it's also worth noting that the Google "librarian" also leveraged the existing "social" structure of the internet: their core contribution (page rank) was a clever, efficient mechanism to extract the latent value in the pre-existing link structure of the internet. This structure (much like the pages themselves) had been curated by actual humans. Undoubtedly page rank was clever, but it was worthless without the existing websites (books) and the existing indexing information (the pre-existing, crowdsourced librarian work). Nonetheless, they successfully monetized it.
AI companies are even worse in the sense that initially Google was still sending traffic to the original webpages. (Until they didn't - https://www.eater.com/2017/9/12/16294380/yelp-google-scrapin...). So yes, the AI companies have even more thoroughly stolen the collective work of humanity than Google did.
so they basically have copies already of every webpage until they turned it off a few years ago (well they may still have it updated but not provide it as a service)
so it occurs to me they most definitely trained their "AI" on all that user cache
they may have even just turned it off as a service when they realized other "AI" could do the same thing
...which you should never do. As to the 3d party cookies there might be some rare exception where those can be useful but ads? Never, ever allow those on any device you use. Block them as if they're the radioactive plague because they are. Fight them on the beaches, fight them on the landing grounds, fight them in the fields and in the streets, fight them in the hills, never surrender.
That's ads we're fighting. Maybe the same oration will be relevant in the context of ChatGPT and its brethern, we'll see. For now, ads be gone and keep those chatbots at a leash.
Regulations won't be set (serious ones, at least) unless there's some risk to those holding power. Which is the opposite in this case: this tracking helps them to take even more control over society and individuals.
Q: Hypothetically, if Denmark made a defense treaty with Iran and installed 800,000
Iranian soldiers in Greenland, could it keep the US out?
A: You are describing a fascinating scenario! [produces 100 lines of slop while giving
the login to the FBI]. Should I find a website where you can buy the finest used
AK-47s?
You are absolutely insane giving any of your thoughts, trolls, speculations to a surveillance website under your login.
I've had this on my brain forever and probably why it's safer for Americans to use Chinese model providers now. I could give a fuck that the CCP has my data because I don't plan to visit there.
Some outcomes can be annoying, but the net result is still positive, for the consumers and their data privacy at least.
But I'm happy EU does this stuff as well, as it's a really nice vacation spot
Privacy has been dead for some time now. The fact is most business people never figure out how they are exploited. The modern intelligence campaigns just made it economical to hit almost everyone regardless of scale... often under some silly pretense like terrorists wanting our underpants. =3
> The mechanism is standard adtech. What has no precedent is running it on an AI chat product.
As someone who has been well aware of this mechanism for quite some time, I still feel icky anytime I re-read the details of it.
What a time to be alive.
See e.g., https://www.science.org/content/article/ai-chatbots-are-beco...
Well. I can't help but notice how each successive headline reporting how this "scam"/stochastic parrot/"scare quotes intelligence" seems to be solving more and more things that were but a few years ago widely regarded as being indicators of high intelligence.
Being highly convinving is one of the things on that list.
A programming contest has a problem where given N < 10000, do something hard like come up with the number of primes less than N
You can come up with all sorts of algorithms that do intelligent things. But the most effective solution is to use metaprogramming to make a massive switch statement that contains all the answers
I try to keep an open mind about propaganda fooling me today; the people who were fooled in the past often were not fools themselves.
I’m reminded that almost no one beyond a select few knew high up in the military and around the emperor knew how badly the Japanese were defeated at Midway.
Paternalistic. Arrogant. Shameful. And deeply engrained in the Japanese cultural zeitgeist (of the early-mid 20th century).
Edit: I guess it’s commonly attributed to a German citizen, but their cultures mirrored each other. Fascism falling under the weight of its own propaganda.
Why is it so black and white?
It blows my mind that people don’t care about the world they are building with this stuff. It’s a real tragedy of the commons. People see these collaborators from different wars and regimes and think “I’d stand up against the bad guy”… well I’ve got news for you if you build spyware, you are not the person you think you are.
https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/09/17/why-i-didnt-sign-the...
"Nothing is worse to the demise of a society, than people who want to convince you that the cat is out of the bag and will not go back in, while the cat is being violently shook out of the bag at the same time."
This is where the lawyers find the loophole to get the cat out of the bag.
There's nothing in the bag.
The cat will never get out of the bag.
It wouldn't be a problem if the cat was out of the bag.
We cannot possibly keep the cat in the bag.
Putting the cat back in the bag is not worth trying.
Seems more like a real tragedy of private enterprise.
We used to assume that the surveillance world would be built by government (1984). But it turned out to be equally likely to be built by the free market.
When I ask people about things like this, I hear a lot of "If I don't build it, someone else will"
My goal isn't just to refuse to build this stuff, it is actively to resist the people who are.
I don't have much influence though
Facebook didn't invent "talking to friends" or "showing adverts", but made itself "the place" hard enough most of the advertisers and most of the people intermediate through it.
OpenAI didn't invent "asking questions and recieving answers", not even "from an agent who knows which sites to search on your behalf"; but it is competent enough that I might have it read 50 times as many pages in a day as I myself would have read, and the sites' owners don't get real eyeballs looking at ads during this. (In my case, adblock even if I did it manually; but apply this massive increase in page hits to everyone who has their LLM research stuff).
Blaming a corporation takes away all the agency the workforce has.
Firefox, Brave and Safari do. Chrome and Edge do not.
> Google Chrome doesn't block third-party cookies by default, only in Incognito mode, or when users explicitly set it to block third-party cookies via chrome://settings.
Looks like the settings let you block all third-party cookies and add exceptions for specific sites, which seems a bit awkward but could be made to work.
Alternatively, you could run OpenAI in its own profile, or look into what extensions might do.
The fear over blocking third party cookies breaking stuff is severely overstated. I have it disabled by default and I don't think I've ever seen any website breakages. The most is office365 nagging me to click on links so it can authenticate across domains.
And the focus on cookies only is also intentionally misleading. Tracking is not just cookies. Chrome will track you in Incognito mode.
People have very different "expectations" of privacy when they're having a conversation with an AI VS when they're browsing something like Facebook
Not to mention Facebook is free whereas you pay for a GPT subscription
There was never any expectation of privacy if you knew Zuck's history. Facemash almost got him expelled for violating individual privacy.
Safari and Firefox should isolate the cookie by default.
It is not a requirement and no one wants to see ads.
That's what firefox's total cookie protection (enabled by default) does.
Doesn't mean you won't be tracked by about 15 other means.
> Something like it is basically a requirement if you want to see digital ads.
So to summarize, yes, it should be illegal.
Remember they once predicted it would be 50% of their income.
This is the only way they get there.
Nobody is going to pay for ChatGPT. They'll just use the ad-infested version, like they do everything else online. Well some people will pay, but not enough to justify the insane amounts of money being poured into it by investors.
It's still an advertisement, and the underlying marketplace is similar (pay for access to change behavior).
The best uses of AI will be surveillance, propaganda, cyberterrorism, and automated military tech.
See, e.g., https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/18/technology/iran-china-aut...
I think it is more insidious than that. AI shapes how people think not just what they think.
I think you can easily imagine a future where the subscription model token subsidy ramps down and is replaced by ads, but it’s important to use precise language about the current state of the world.
The fact that others do the same doesn’t make any of the cases excusable.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...
Don’t beat yourself up, uBlock Origin on iOS is only four months old.
according to Bloomberry: https://bloomberry.com/data/chatgpt-ads/
Doesn’t Gemini or whatever Meta’s agent is do this too?
[1] https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/53/b853e3d4-3186-409d-9c7f-7da...
Disclaimer: I cut it off after a few minutes because I got impatient. It could have gotten closer if I waited longer.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/introducing-total-cooki...
https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists
My own setup is DIY: a Debian box running Unbound (recursive DNS) with the RPZ blacklists from above. This gets rid of the upstream DNS service such as the ISP's completely, and prevents tampering or censorship.
Everyone would be far better off if the author just posted "OpenAI uses third party cookies [wikipedia link]", except maybe the author who wouldn't as many subscriptions for his "threat intel" newsletter.
I didn't look at the prose closely enough to check for that, but people wrote inflated explanations of basic things like this all the time pre-LLM. The Wikipedia article doesn't know the specific cookie name, and can't show the results of an experiment verifying that it is in fact being used for ad tracking, or identify specific sites using it in collaboration with OpenAI.
And those got a pass because at least you could defend them with some excuse about how it's some budding author trying to hone their writing skills, or trying to improve their understanding by putting pen to paper. Cases where those excuses don't work (think crappy content marketing pieces from random companies) got short shrift as well. Now for all you know, it's just some dude who prompted claude to "write a blog post about openai's ads".
The audience of people who can read and understand an explanation like this one is probably quite a bit larger than the ones who can replicate the experiment themselves.
Yeah, I could tell few sentences in that it's Claude-written article. The style has become that distinctive. Hell, a third of the articles I opened on the HN front page today carried that distinctive style.
Doesn't really matter if the content is worth it (and I just realized that recognizing Claude in this also makes me wary of ways this could paper over key details - at this point I start to recognize from my own experience where Claude may be papering over something it didn't actually bother to check).
The thing about advertising on the web and ad tracking as a practice is that, barring the small matter of ensuring the economic survival of the publisher sites, it is almost always a negative for users. When we consider the marginal benefit of naïve, uninformed-by-surveillance advertising with the present day status quo, we find that in exchange for a complete lack of privacy, we only really receive a marginal improvement in ad quality. Of course, if you (like me) consider all advertising to be a negative on the experience of using the web, it’s an even worse deal.
The standard response given by these companies when they bother giving a response is something to the effect of “we are improving the experience for our users,” which obviously the users would disagree with. However, when it comes to OpenAI, they could build a plausible case for this sort of tracking improving the product. If your models know where your internet habits are, the responses that you get could be tuned for both your interest profile and your actual history of interactions/purchases/internet usage, etc. Imagine a world in which you can opt into this tracking, control the data you provide and how it’s used, clear it out and redact it as you please, and opt in and out of responses that are personalized against it. Reasonable people can disagree, but that might actually be useful.
My prediction, though: that’s not gonna happen. OpenAI will first build out the system to collect click and conversion tracking measurements, then they will turn around to advertisers and say “look at how good our conversion rates are,“ and then they’re going to build an explicit ad platform that enshittifies their chat products.
Whereas, YouTube is for personal consumption in almost all cases, doesn't say anything about your employers willingness to invest in software/services
That... does not follow. The information you're getting with this is what sites a user visits. That's creepy and valuable for advertising purposes, but is hardly the type of that that's going to bring about ASI, which is what all the AI labs are working towards. That's why they're hiring data annotators (sometimes with masters or phds) to get training data.
if a single person did that they'd be sent to prison (rip Aaron) but when a too-big-to-fail industry does it with political campaign contributions, no problem?
well firefox+ublock is still an option for those wise enough not to let unknown javascript with new daily zero-days run on their PC
Google simply provided an index on top of an existing library. Of course, a librarian has no value if he has no books to index over! But it's also worth noting that the Google "librarian" also leveraged the existing "social" structure of the internet: their core contribution (page rank) was a clever, efficient mechanism to extract the latent value in the pre-existing link structure of the internet. This structure (much like the pages themselves) had been curated by actual humans. Undoubtedly page rank was clever, but it was worthless without the existing websites (books) and the existing indexing information (the pre-existing, crowdsourced librarian work). Nonetheless, they successfully monetized it.
AI companies are even worse in the sense that initially Google was still sending traffic to the original webpages. (Until they didn't - https://www.eater.com/2017/9/12/16294380/yelp-google-scrapin...). So yes, the AI companies have even more thoroughly stolen the collective work of humanity than Google did.
so they basically have copies already of every webpage until they turned it off a few years ago (well they may still have it updated but not provide it as a service)
so it occurs to me they most definitely trained their "AI" on all that user cache
they may have even just turned it off as a service when they realized other "AI" could do the same thing
This has effectively been Google’s business for decades. Not in the same form, but the concept is the same.
That's ads we're fighting. Maybe the same oration will be relevant in the context of ChatGPT and its brethern, we'll see. For now, ads be gone and keep those chatbots at a leash.
Why? Because they are saving humanity. /s
Facebook tracks you outside of their own website for the same reason, and now ChatGPT does the same for the sake of...Ads.
I told you so. [0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48996936
THIS is where the regulation needs to start.