It’s finally here: advertising are making their way to Bing’s AI-powered chatbot. In a blog post on Wednesday, Microsoft corporate vice president Yusuf Mehdi stated that the company is “exploring placing ads in the chat experience,” and when we inquired for further information, a Microsoft spokeswoman confirmed that you may start seeing them.
“Yes, ads will appear in the new Bing, specifically in chat (as they do in traditional search results),” Caitlin Roulston, director of communications at Microsoft, told The Verge in a statement. “Because the new Bing is still in preview, there may be some variation in how it appears right now.” We’re continuously looking into new ad experiences and will provide more information when it becomes available.”
Long before ad discussions with ad agencies were said to have taken place in February, Microsoft was allegedly testing advertisements in Bing. Check out this sample Debarghya Das supplied from an inquiry regarding affordable Honda automobiles if you want a sense of what the adverts may look like. There are citations with a little “Ad” box after two of the phrases that appear to go back to Bing.
I am unable to see any Bing Chat advertisements, thus I am unable to tell you whether the “variability” that Roulston alluded to in the statement exists. However, the example given by Das sounds like a sensible approach for Microsoft to identify an advertisement, and if everyone finally experiences it, I don’t believe it would be overly intrusive.
The problem is that we still don’t know how many adverts we might see or how Microsoft will decide whether to display an advertisement or to get a response from a publisher or website directly. Microsoft aims to “share the ad revenue with partners whose content contributed to the chat response,” according to Mehdi in the blog post, but that doesn’t address the issue of how Microsoft intends to balance ad and non-ad answers. Whatever that balance is, the presence of advertisements will increase the already challenging cognitive burden of deciding whether you can believe a certain response.
You will probably move through the waitlist very fast if you want to attempt and view a Bing Chat advertisement for yourself.
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