Julius Schulte

Last Name

Schulte

First name

Julius

Email

julius.schulte@unisg.ch

ORCID

0009-0000-9890-403X

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Monetization Risks in AI Systems: A Bing Copilot case study Submission to the European Commission
(2024-04)
Strauss, Ilan
;
O'reilly, Tim
;
Mazzucato, Mariana
;
Schulte, Julius
We conduct a descriptive analysis and simple experiments on Microsoft's AI Copilot LLM-a service that provides answers in a comparable manner to a Search results engine. We interrogate the nature of Copilot's generated results, characterized by notable use of advertising to monetize user attention already, and compare it to Microsoft's traditional Bing search engine results on a series of e-commerce product queries. We find that the underlying sources from which the generated results in Copilot ostensibly come from (the footnote links) differs substantially from the websites listed in Bing's traditional search results, but for no apparent reason. A lack of algorithmic transparency and explainability in Bing's Copilot opens up room for providing suboptimal text results in return for paid placement (advertising). We highlight that use of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) by LLMs, to draw on a wider body of relevant material, creates significant monetization opportunities for LLMs. To avoid past mistakes of digital platforms, advertising output needs to be clearly demarcated, limited in scope, and regulated for quality. We also recommend that LLM generated results should