Google Tells Advertisers It'll Bring Ads to Gemini in 2026

Posted by pavel_lishin 1 day ago

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Comments

Comment by kelseyfrog 1 day ago

The most enviable part of Star Trek isn't warp speed or teleporters; it's the complete lack of advertisements shown to the characters.

Moreover, there isn't a technological barrier to an ad-free life like the other technologies. We just haven't the collective social will to make it happen. In some sad way it feels even more impossible than FTL.

Comment by ndriscoll 1 day ago

It's totally possible. My computer blocks ads, and the city I live in bans billboards and requires things like an evergreen hedge to block commercial parking lots from being visible from an arterial (the required greenery scales with the lot, so you can generally see names on the front faces of small strip malls, but big-box stores are completely hidden). The signs businesses are allowed to have are there to help you find where to turn, and have things like size restrictions and aesthetic requirements.

Comment by ElijahLynn 1 day ago

That's great to hear that your city bans billboards, which I believe to be a safety hazard for drivers on the road.

May I ask which city it is?

Comment by joshstrange 1 day ago

To give an example, Dublin, OH is like this. There are many restrictions on signs/advertisements and it’s quite nice. I grew up there so it felt normal but I’ve had friends who have visited comment on it. Some have complained (mostly joking) about how all the buildings all look similar, the McDonalds is a nice brick building with a relatively small sign [0] which looks similar to the bank next door [1] but for whatever is “lost” in boundless creativity is gained in the lack of eye sores IMHO.

[0] https://maps.app.goo.gl/wFod1vA58Fr2VWu66

[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/xduhC7S7UBTPFwt67

Comment by ndriscoll 1 day ago

Generally speaking from what I've seen, the "nice part" of any suburban metro across the US has such a ban in place. Chatgpt can give lists for specific regions.

Comment by corobo 1 day ago

The second most enviable is locally hosting "Computer"

The entirety of the future Starfleet on our current timeline gets bricked whenever us-east-1 goes offline

Comment by vunderba 1 day ago

I heard Picard's got a pretty lucrative sponsorship deal with Lipton - he's busy stacking that gold-pressed latinum to fund his retirement on a French vineyard.

Comment by Teever 1 day ago

I acknowledge that like prostitution advertisement isn't going to ever go away completely, and I acknowledge that also like prostitute it's a better world where we legalize and regulate advertisement over a world where we didn't but with that said it's really dismaying that vanguard of our industrial and technological capability as a species is built on advertisement.

Will that always be the case? Or will the people who work at these organizations finally realize that they're only making the world a worse place every time they integrate advertisements into their business model?

Comment by debayande 1 day ago

Believe Google's pushed back on this: https://www.theverge.com/news/840438/google-pushes-back-on-a...

Comment by s1mplicissimus 1 day ago

Does anyone of the finance pros here know if there would have been a way to profit off predicting that ads would be introduced into chatbot responses?

Comment by msuniverse2026 1 day ago

There is sure to be a great way to get google to express ads during a chemical weapon recipe though.

Comment by sekh60 1 day ago

Consider DuPont for all your chemical weapon ingredients needs!

Comment by seg_lol 1 day ago

Given that Google makes 85% of revenue from ads, and AI will make ads disappear, adtech company has huge incentive not to slit its own throat, but has no choice.

How they gonna maintain that ARPU? The whole economy is being held up by some unpriced asset somewhere. Once PE finds it, we are all cooked.

Comment by hapticmonkey 1 day ago

This is like the Rick and Morty “you pass the butter” joke.

All the talented engineers pouring into AI realising they’ve just been used as tools of the ad-tech market to serve more ads to people. That’s their real purpose.

Please get out and go and make something better. Before even your most treasured moments, like reading kids bedtime stories, become commodified with ads.

https://ai.google.dev/competition/projects/storybook-ai-bedt...

Comment by sidereal1 1 day ago

The crazy part of that is how much it undermines all the apocalyptic hype about AGI replacing our entire workforce. Surprise, it's just another app filled with ads and premium subscriptions.

Comment by hightrix 1 day ago

I truly wonder how long until there is ublock origin or similar for AI tools. One can only hope a gorhill like figure will emerge to save us.

Comment by ndriscoll 1 day ago

Assuming you can't just directly filter it, and even if it's hard to run a high quality LLM locally for the time being, it should be feasible to run a smaller model on the returned output of large commercial models to identify and remove any advertising. Actually I wouldn't be surprised if you could plug a model for filtering malicious content from all web pages right into the local translation framework Firefox already has.

Comment by Imustaskforhelp 1 day ago

This, I had actually thought about the ads idea but then realized that local models can filter it out.

But then again, the ads models have worked out fairly well for google and meta when ublock origin on firefox and for a loong time on chrome too was literally just go to appstore, search ublock origin, click download

That was it

I am sure that we are gonna see similar innovations happen for these ads too but then again, I think that the key point here is that the ad models works right now when we have ublock origin, so even if we have your tool, maybe most people (would still be ignorant about it?)

I think this is what is basing the whole AI industry in but this cannot be the way they can fund trillions of $'s spent.

I think what would happen more likely is that they will use AI to create a detailed profile of you and see the code generated, where its deployed, see what username it was and what email, link all your emails to every platform and every connection. Not going to lie, but its a scary thought.

I think something scarier can happen if it can actively shadow-ban you like its doing but now from the whole web in a more "personalized way" Imagine if google chrome launches out a feature that blocks websites which can be harmful to you creating an AI generated block-list I guess giving reasons why...

I think AI context windows are going to be an issue here and compute required to do this at scale so I don't really know and I am just rambling right now.

Personally I don't really know, If Google has ads, I just use gemini web for some vibe coding, I might take more questions to chinese models or even pay for them via something like open router where they might not have ads if this still happens via anonymity or just run the models locally yeah.

I wonder if we can create a community of people who have gpu who can have web of trust-like properties and they can share AI access to people who they trust and so on and maybe some gift properties but just niche closed properties where the trust factor is (more?)

Maybe offtopic but if we ever implement something like this, I really like https://ch.at 's interface and how minimalist it is.

Comment by recursivecaveat 1 day ago

It can't be done in general. "Hey Gemini, give me an exercise suggestion". When it suggests going for a run, how much of that is real and how much comes from the Nike campaign? Even google will not know the answer to where ads begin and end.

Advertisers might feel a bit weird about paying for something they cannot track, but for eg pharmaceutical companies have been taking doctors out to dinner for forever. Paying to sway the opinion of a communicator instead of paying to communicate is not necessarily new.

Comment by debesyla 1 day ago

Depends on how deeply is the ad hidden. If the LLM-engine is using some deep level manipulations over a long period I'm not sure if blocking that ad would be possible.

What I forsee is a future of "local" AI engines. I think Apple is waiting for its moment for when people will ask for private-offline AI tools + a lot of smaller companies will follow. It won't be a huge success, but it will be popular in HN and in tech savvy crowd.

Ofc, it's only a personal prediction.

Comment by zb3 1 day ago

You presume that ads will just be near the content you want.. but what if ads will be served instead of the content, like instead of AI answering the question fully, some of it would be deffered to a book or instead of doing a trustworthy comparison it would bias the result?

People would run away, but in Gemini they're already drifting towards this direction with the useless garbage video suggestions..

Comment by metallichrome 1 day ago

Google could easily afford to make Gemini ad-free, effectively the only consumer LLM with that as the base experience

Comment by seg_lol 1 day ago

As long we freeride on all the other rubes that don't have adblock.

Comment by hhhh11111 1 day ago

They are not even the leader. Ads too soon seems like a good way to ensure they never will be.

Comment by jack_tripper 1 day ago

Teacher: Did you use AI to write your biology paper?

Student: no

The student's paper: "And you know what else helps wounds heal besides Aloe Vera? Playing War Thunder! The most comprehensive free-to-play, cross-platform, MMO military game"

Comment by zb3 1 day ago

For me they've already enshittified Gemini (at gemini.google.com) by making it recommend useless YouTube videos which I don't want to watch because I want to get the answer - that's why I use AI.