Generative AI Advertising as a Problem of Trustworthy Commercial Intervention

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Qiu, Jingyi, Mei, Qiaozhu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Qiu, Jingyi
Mei, Qiaozhu
author_facet Qiu, Jingyi
Mei, Qiaozhu
contents Major deployed generative AI advertising systems preserve a visible boundary between commercial content and AI-generated responses. Yet empirical research shows that ads woven directly into large language model (LLM) outputs often go undetected by users. We argue that generative AI fundamentally changes advertising: rather than placing products into discrete slots, it enables interventions on the generative process itself, which induce commercial influence through less observable channels. This reframes generative AI advertising as a problem of trustworthy intervention rather than content placement. We introduce a taxonomy organized by influence tier, corresponding to interventions on progressively more latent variables: product mentions, information framing, behavioral redirection, and long-term preference shaping; and show how these tiers instantiate across modalities and system architectures, including retrieval-augmented generation and agentic pipelines where upstream decisions can sharply constrain downstream outcomes. Both major deployed systems and designed mechanisms concentrate on the most observable and easiest-to-govern tier, while the forms of commercial influence most consequential for user autonomy remain poorly understood and lack frameworks for detection, measurement, or disclosure. The central challenge is whether commercial influence in generative systems can be made trustworthy, i.e., attributable, measurable, contestable, and aligned with user welfare.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_18673
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Generative AI Advertising as a Problem of Trustworthy Commercial Intervention
Qiu, Jingyi
Mei, Qiaozhu
Computers and Society
Computation and Language
Major deployed generative AI advertising systems preserve a visible boundary between commercial content and AI-generated responses. Yet empirical research shows that ads woven directly into large language model (LLM) outputs often go undetected by users. We argue that generative AI fundamentally changes advertising: rather than placing products into discrete slots, it enables interventions on the generative process itself, which induce commercial influence through less observable channels. This reframes generative AI advertising as a problem of trustworthy intervention rather than content placement. We introduce a taxonomy organized by influence tier, corresponding to interventions on progressively more latent variables: product mentions, information framing, behavioral redirection, and long-term preference shaping; and show how these tiers instantiate across modalities and system architectures, including retrieval-augmented generation and agentic pipelines where upstream decisions can sharply constrain downstream outcomes. Both major deployed systems and designed mechanisms concentrate on the most observable and easiest-to-govern tier, while the forms of commercial influence most consequential for user autonomy remain poorly understood and lack frameworks for detection, measurement, or disclosure. The central challenge is whether commercial influence in generative systems can be made trustworthy, i.e., attributable, measurable, contestable, and aligned with user welfare.
title Generative AI Advertising as a Problem of Trustworthy Commercial Intervention
topic Computers and Society
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18673