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Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers

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Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers

#41
post #28

I think that requiring PoW (proof-of-work) could take over for simple requests, rejecting requests until a sufficient nonce is included in the request. Unfortunately, this collective PoW could burden power grids even more, wasting energy+money+computation for transmission. Such is life. It would be a lot better to just upgrade the servers, but that's never going to be sufficient.

Worse than that. Such computations are nothing to a desktop computer, or a server in a datacenter. But they are definitely going to be a problem for cheap smartphones. Ironically, the computers that are the best suited for solving these proof-of-work problem are the same kind of computers that are used to train and run AIs. And for even more irony, chatbots are relatively lightweight on the client side, being just te…

If the PoW difficulty is IP or subnet specific, then the IP addresses or subnets that hammer the server more can be given increasingly greater PoW requirements. The smartphones, assuming they're not being used as proxies, will have few requests, so the server can go very easy on them with the PoW difficulty.

Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers

#42
Well I didn’t expect some good coming from the ai revolution and yet.

If it helps to annihilate the « news » sites that depended over advertisement to be profitable, that’s great.

Advertisement and journalism should never have been in the same sentence, no one can provide full independent news when you’re at the mercy of advertiser threatening to bail out if you say something bad on them.

Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers

#43

Well I didn’t expect some good coming from the ai revolution and yet. If it helps to annihilate the « news » sites that depended over advertisement to be profitable, that’s great. Advertisement and journalism should never have been in the same sentence, no one can provide full independent news when you’re at the mercy of advertiser threatening to bail out if you say something bad on them.

Here is Ben Franklin addressing this issue back in 1731 by essentially saying, "that's true, but then how would news ever get printed?"

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-01-02-00...

Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers

#44

Well I didn’t expect some good coming from the ai revolution and yet. If it helps to annihilate the « news » sites that depended over advertisement to be profitable, that’s great. Advertisement and journalism should never have been in the same sentence, no one can provide full independent news when you’re at the mercy of advertiser threatening to bail out if you say something bad on them.

How much do you pay for your news?

Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers

#47

Well I didn’t expect some good coming from the ai revolution and yet. If it helps to annihilate the « news » sites that depended over advertisement to be profitable, that’s great. Advertisement and journalism should never have been in the same sentence, no one can provide full independent news when you’re at the mercy of advertiser threatening to bail out if you say something bad on them.

[deleted]

Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers

#48

[flagged]

We still need people on the ground reporting on these things. AI can't (yet) have connections and conversations with relevant parties. Many interviews would not be possible without a reporter developing a rapport with the interviewee beforehand.

If they are actually needed they shouldn't have any issue finding funding.

Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers

#49
post #6

Anyone surprised? I mean that's just what Google does and did from the very early days. I am more ashamed that politicians worldwide have done basically nothing to help media companies in the last 25 years. We can always ask ourselves: What is more important for our society: independent media or our search overlords?

Politicians hate Media companies, sometimes they deserve the hate but there is almost no reality where having accurate, objective news reporting is beneficial for politicians.

Re: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers

#50

Google's damned if they do and damned if the don't here: - If they don't make search AI centric, they're going to get lapped by AI-first competitors like Perplexity, OpenAI, etc. We saw many people here predict Google's pending demise from this. - If they do make search centric, they're unfairly consuming they world's content and hoarding the user traffic to themselves. Since no reasonable company is just going to st…

A simple tale of how capitalism leads to unintended anti-social consequences through market mechanisms that no one participant can control.
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