Commercialized Generative AI: A Critical Study of the Feasibility and Ethics of Generating Native Advertising Using Large Language Models in Conversational Web Search

Understand

How will generative AI pay for itself? Unless charging users for access, selling advertising is the only alternative.

• Especially in the multi-billion dollar web search market with ads as the main source of revenue, the introduction of a subscription model seems unlikely.
• The recent disruption of search by generative large language models could thus ultimately be accompanied by generated ads.
• Our concern is that the commercialization of generative AI in general and large language models in particular could lead to native advertising in the form of quite subtle brand or product placements.