Disclosure is technically required, but in practice I see undisclosed ads on social media all the time. If the individual instance is small enough and dissipates into the ether fast enough, there is virtually no risk of enforcement.
Similarly, the black box AI models guarantee the owners can just shrug and say it's not their fault if the model suggests Wonderbread(r) for making toast 3.2% more frequently than other breads.
If Clorox fills their site with "helpful" articles that just happen to mention Clorox very frequently and some training set aggregator or unscrupulous AI company scrapes it without prior permission, does Clorox have any responsibility for the result? And when those model weights get used randomly, is it an advertisement according to the law? I think not.
Pay attention to the non-headline claims in the NYT lawsuit against OpenAI for whether or not anyone has any responsibility if their AI model starts mentioning your registered trademark without your permission. But on the other hand, what if you like that they mention your name frequently???
The point is that Clorox cannot pay OpenAI anything.
Marketing on your own site will have effects on an AI just like it will have an effect on a human reader. No disclosure is required because the context is explicit.
But the moment OpenAI wants to charge for Clorox to show up more often, then it needs to be disclosed when it shows up.
> But the moment OpenAI wants to charge for Clorox to show up more often, then it needs to be disclosed when it shows up.
Yes, I agree with this. But what about paying a 3rd party to include your drivel in a training set, and that 3rd party pays OpenAI to include the training set in some fine tuning exercise? Does that legally trigger the need for disclosure? You aren't directly creating advertisements, you are increasing the probability that some word appears near some other word.
