Tangentially, I think this explains the conspiracy theory that ad companies are spying on everyone's phones and serving ads based on what we talk about in real life.
Think about all the stuff ChatGPT and GPT-4 can do with even minimal prompting. Even when they hallucinate, the text is still ostensibly coherent and natural sounding. Now imagine a similarly powerful model, but its input is a ton of metadata about your behavior and its output is ads.
Now consider that adtech has had substantially more funding for substantially longer than research into LLMs, so ad serving models are probably way more powerful and optimized than even GPT-4.
Another thing is: people's individual behavior is not as unique as we'd like to think. As a whole everyone is unique, but in single surprisingly complex aspects of our life we are hardly ever alone.
Think about all the stuff ChatGPT and GPT-4 can do with even minimal prompting. Even when they hallucinate, the text is still ostensibly coherent and natural sounding. Now imagine a similarly powerful model, but its input is a ton of metadata about your behavior and its output is ads.
Now consider that adtech has had substantially more funding for substantially longer than research into LLMs, so ad serving models are probably way more powerful and optimized than even GPT-4.
It's freaky to think about indeed.