BoSacks Speaks Out: When Advertising’s “No Big Deal” Misses the Point

Cory Treffiletti’s “5 Reasons Why Ads In LLMs Are No Big Deal” lays out the advertiser’s logic cleanly: ads were inevitable; influence already exists; consumers adapt; revenue has to come from somewhere. Fair enough.

But the entire argument is framed as a media buying issue, not a trust issue. Not a systems issue. And certainly not a societal issue.

To my mind, it reflects what I call Advertising Thoughtlessness Syndrome (ATS), the quiet assumption that advertising is the center of gravity; that every environment eventually becomes ad inventory; that resistance is futile, temporary, and that integration is destiny.

Treffiletti is correct about inevitability. Advertising will appear inside large language models. Of course it will.

But inevitability is not the same as harmlessness.

The article assumes that because advertising successfully colonized print, radio, television, search, and social media, it can colonize this medium without consequence. That is the blind spot.

LLMs are not just another channel. They are sense-making machines. They do not sit beside content like a banner next to an article. They synthesize, rank, and generate the answer itself. They mediate interpretation. That alone raises the ethical bar.

Three tensions are dramatically underweighted.

First: opacity versus literacy.
The optimistic view is that consumers will figure it out. We have heard that before. Traditional advertising carried signals: visual framing, labels, tonal shifts, interruptions. Over time, people learned to recognize those cues.

LLM outputs blur them. When persuasion is embedded inside explanation, advice, or authoritative language, the signals are harder to detect. Commercial influence becomes conversational. Literacy does not automatically improve under those conditions; it becomes more difficult.

Second: influence without friction.
Comparisons to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) miss something critical. Search required a click. A choice. A pause where skepticism could enter.

LLMs collapse that pause. When the answer is the interface, and multiple options are synthesized into a single coherent response, commercial nudges operate closer to belief formation than media exposure. Less interruption. More absorption. That is a fundamentally different psychological dynamic.

Third: advertiser incentives versus system integrity.
The piece treats monetization as a neutral engineering problem. Costs exist; revenue must follow. True.

But when revenue becomes tied directly to response generation, incentives shift, even subtly. Systems move from optimizing for “most accurate” toward “most commercially compatible.” That shift does not require malice to matter. It is structural.

I am not arguing for a purist, ad-free utopia. Advertising funds media. It always has.

But proportionality and awareness matter. Ads inside LLMs are not “no big deal” because they operate at the layer of synthesis, not placement.

We are no longer talking about ads next to reality.

We are talking about ads inside the machinery that constructs it.

That deserves more than a shrug and a rate card.