Ziff Davis CEO says be wary of taking advice from AI about buying your products for one big reason

CEOs who are currently known for standing in front of OpenAI Sued ChatGPT for allowing unauthorized copies of its company’s content to be madehas focused its attention on warning consumers against using AI chatbots for advice when making large purchases.

Vivek Shah, CEO of Ziff Davis – which is also ZDNET’s parent company – Recently, journalist Peter Kafka said in an interview on Podcast Channels They’ve noticed a worrying trend of chatbots moving away from the neutral sources that consumers traditionally prefer when purchasing high-dollar items.

“Ultimately, sources matter,” Shah said. “Where we get information from matters. And so if you start looking at citations in LLM chatbots, you’ll see that the sources have moved from journalistic sources to marketing sources.”

Beyond ChatGPIT, Shah talks about turning to apps like Google Gemini, Perplexity, and Anthropic Cloud to find information when researching an important purchase. Although all of these platforms cite the locations from which they got the information in their natural language responses, in some cases they make their sources less prominent and not as easy to click on and verify.

But Shah suggested that consumers should take that journey to make sure they understand what sources are shaping the information that chatbots are giving them in such a quick and digestible format.

“I’m surprised by how many of the citations are not from publishers but from brands,” he said. “For most (brands) getting AI answers is a good thing because it favors their product. But it may not be in the best interest of the user. And so I would encourage people to just look at what the information in the answer actually is, and then ask yourself, ‘Would I have trusted those sources (before AI chatbots)?’

In a quick comparison of four of the most popular chatbots by asking them the question “Are the Meta Ray-Ban Display Glasses a good buy”, I got mixed results. Cloud and Gemini showed more vendor sources while Perplexity and ChatGPT relied more on publisher sources. Perplexity displayed its sources most prominently and made it easiest to click through. But keep in mind that each person will get different results when using LLM, and even asking the same question multiple times may yield different results.

And of course, Shah oversees a portfolio of companies that provide traditional third-party buying advice that is vendor agnostic – which also includes ZDNET. And the Ziff Davis lawsuit against OpenAI for its questionable content scraping activities appears to project Shah into the role of AI skeptic and even Enemy No. 1 for ChatGPT. However, Shah opted out of his AI villain role, or at least made it a bit more subtle.

“I’m actually very optimistic about AI in terms of what it can do in terms of our business and we’re seeing some really smart implementations right now,” he told Kafka. Shah also acknowledged that part of his company’s future could be licensing its trust data to feed future AI chatbots.

“My issue is an intellectual property issue, but it’s not an issue where I say AI won’t be transformative for our lives and our businesses,” Shah said. “I think it’s going to happen.”