Time Magazine Now Running Ads Meant Specifically to Influence AI Agents

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If you feel like the internet is turning into a place for bots — not to mention by bots — you’re not alone.

Social media platforms have been flooded with low-effort AI slop, while even once renowned publications are doubling down on the tech by outsourcing writing and editing responsibilities to the tech. In June, Cloudflare found that website traffic from AI agents and bots had overtaken human-generated traffic for the first time — even earlier than predicted.

In the latest sign of the bot takeover, Time magazine has begun serving ads specifically aimed at AI agents. As Digiday reports, it’s an effort to adapt to a new reality governed by the tech. Their promise to would-be clients: by optimizing ads for the bots, brands could be made more visible to AI chatbots and show up in more responses.

The publication started stripping down its webpages last month from HTML to markdown — text-only versions, which live in parallel to the user-facing pages — that are easier for AI agents to ingest. Alongside these new pages, the company is using AI to generate agent ads, which are formatted as FAQs that include a brand’s information and messaging, according to Digiday, and are labeled as “sponsored content.”

It’s a bizarre new tack for the online media industry, which has been reeling from a massive drop in traffic. That falloff has largely been attributed to Google stopping users from visiting websites by serving them with often inaccurate AI summaries.

To stay afloat in an industry mired by continuous layoffs, Time is trying to reinvent itself by appealing to advertisers that want sway in the AI era. A striking metric: the publication said it’s seeing more bots crawl its pages than humans on most days. It says several brands, including online banking service Ally Bank and not-for-profit Project Management Institute, have already signed up.

“Maybe it’s more important to influence the agent than even the human, because with a human you influence one person,” Mobian cofounder and CEO Jonah Goodhart told Digiday. “When you influence ChatGPT, you’re influencing potentially all of ChatGPT. If ChatGPT changes what it says about [a brand], it’s massive and it’s more than any one campaign could ever do.”

“The big idea here is LLMs and AI want trusted information about brands,” he added. “We’re serving that up to them in a very straightforward, easy way.”

To Time, it’s part of a broader effort to sell a Generative Engine Optimization — the AI era evolution of the Google-centered Search Engine Optimization industry — product to brands.

It’s an open question whether Time‘s gambit will pay off and make up for lost search traffic. As Digiday points out, it could even backfire if tech platforms like Google were to change the rules by penalizing AI-oriented ad spam or serving markdown pages aimed at bots that differ from what human users see.

In short, there’s no guarantee it will work, but Time is experimenting regardless.

Time chief operating officer Mark Howard told Digiday that “this is brand new, and we believe that we are paving the first path forward here.”

More on Google: Google Pulls Down Feature for AI-Generating Fake Satellite Images on Google Earth After It’s Immediately Used to Fake Terror Attacks

The post Time Magazine Now Running Ads Meant Specifically to Influence AI Agents appeared first on Futurism.

IN the summer of 2019, I was seated in the wine cellar of a walled Medieval town high above the Dordogne Valley of France, not far from Sarlat-la-Canéda, making phone calls, writing reports. I have given this story in other places and it appears as though you’re about to hear it again. Rob Skiba is a name you that you might be familiar with. Though he had made a name for himself as a Nephilim researcher, more recently Rob had taken a dive into the deep end of the pool via flat earth research. The recorded interviews I conducted between he and Rick Hummer, a fellow flat earth investigator and close friend of his, was published while still occupying that very wine cellar. Read all about it. Chicago Is Not a Mirage.

Word quickly spread. Within a few short weeks, dozens of flat earth researchers began accepting my invite for a private interview, if not a series of interviews. From a 17th-century tower built by King Louis XIV, and with a stunning view of the Alps, I sat down with Robbie Davidson, founder of the Flat Earth International Conferences, conducting multiple sessions. While staying in Dumfries, Scotland, David Weiss agreed to take part in the interviews, as did Bob Knodel of Globebusters. There were others. But when I asked the interviewees to discuss the moments that shaped their lives, among the many PSYOPs, false flag attacks, and hoaxes that were discussed, only these men committed commentary to the false 9/11 narrative.

The resulting recordings ballooned into The Unexpected Cosmology, a book which became a website and was even intended as an anthology. And of course, the following discourse was originally a chapter. It was Walt Disney who stated, “Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.” Those sentiments remain applicable here as well. American Sensationalism: The 9/11 Interviews was always intended to be expanded upon with the inclusion of new researchers. So I’m sorry to say the project became stagnant during the Covid-19 psychodrama. I took a break to tackle other projects. We lost Rob Skiba. Rob offered hours of private conversation regarding his life but we never got around to the big one. 9/11. It was in the cards. Sadly, Bob Knodel died soon afterwards. Voices are being squeezed from an entire generation. Gnosis passes with them.

In the aftermath, the FE community became fractured. People began going their separate ways. Robbie Davidson, among a noted few others who were interviewed for the project, got up and left the movement altogether. It is not my intent to erase his or the contributions of others if only brief. They came, they went, their testimonies remain.

The original vision may have hit roadblocks but it is not forgotten. I expanded this paper a few years later to include testimony from author Pauly Hart, a dear friend of mine. I had wanted to continue that trend every year thereafter but you know how it goes. For the 25th anniversary of the attack I have redirected my efforts to its first large scale expansion, including Andrew Hoy and Darrin Geisinger into the mix. Perhaps others will lend their experiences to the recorder in time.

The following is their report.

Read the 9/11 Interviews

Watch the Interviews