Microsoft announced the arrival of advertising in results from Bing and its AI-powered chatbot. We may soon be seeing advertisements in AI creative results – although it’s not yet clear how they will work.
Bing, the AI chatbot will suggest advertisements in search results
The Advertisements are coming to the Bing chatbot based on artificial intelligence. Yusuf MahdiMicrosoft’s corporate vice president, announced on a dedicated blog Wednesday that the company is “exploring the possibility of placing ads in chat,” and a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed that users may start seeing them.
According to reports to The Verge Caitlin Roulston, director of communications at Microsoft, “ads will appear in the new Bing, especially in chat (as in traditional search results).” So (it seems) no advertising in the texts created or in the summaries requested, but rather in the searches in which you ask which are the best restaurants in the area or the best attractions of a city to visit.
A situation still in development
Since the new Bing is still in the preview stage, it is still unclear ithe way ads will be shown. Microsoft is still exploring new opportunities to improve the advertising experience and will share more details in the future.
Microsoft has reportedly already tested ads on Bing and has discussed the matter with ad agencies in February. An example of what the ads might look like was shared by Debarghya Das in a query on cheap Honda cars, where two of the resulting sentences have a small “Ad” box which refers to Bing. It looks like a new footnote: you can see it on Twitter at this address the result.
While you still can’t see Bing Chat ads, the example shared by Das seems like a sensible way for Microsoft to brand ads. If this is going to be the experience users will see, it seems the ads will be too intrusive. And most importantly, they will be distinguishable.
However, at the moment it is not yet known how many ads will be displayed or how Microsoft will choose to balance the ads and non-ad responses. In the blog post, Mehdi said that Microsoft wants to “share ad revenue with partners whose content contributed to the chat response.” But he didn’t provide details on how the company intends to handle the balance between advertising and non-advertising.
In any case, the inclusion of the ads will add an extra cognitive load to the difficult choice of determining whether or not an answer is reliable. Giving us users an additional motivation to always check AI chatbot search results carefully.