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Google Declaring War on the Web

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Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#71

Post by winterbourne »

DeusExMachina wrote: post #27

I don't understand the endgame here. Websites let Google crawl their content in exchange of traffic. If Google cuts that out completely, what incentive do websites have to not block the Google crawlers? I understand that Google is feeling an existential threat from other AI products that provide answers directly. But they must also understand their symbiotic relationship with the web.

> If Google cuts that out completely, what incentive do websites have to not block the Google crawlers?

Completely, yes, that destroys the incentive. But they can reduce it 80% or 90% or so, to the point that it's just barely worthwhile to allow their crawlers.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#73

Post by xmcp123 »

afavour wrote: post #70
xmcp123 wrote: post #56

Kind of curious how it would pan out, if there was a government enforced meta tag one could add to signal what the data could be used for - for example “no-ai”. That would allow people to still let Google to access their site, but restrict its usage. Similar for open source projects on GitHub, etc.

The tech giants already violated existing copyright laws when scraping for AI content and faced very few consequences. So far the government has shown an inability to enforce anything.

So far, yeah. The courts shrugged and said it was allowed under current law.

So the solution to that would be “change the law”.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#74

Post by yborg »

munchler wrote: post #47

If Google stops driving traffic to websites, won't those websites stop allowing Google to crawl their pages? The pendulum might be in motion, but it seems like there should still be some natural equilibrium that it's heading to.

There won't be "websites" anymore, it will all just be Google. Other behemoths that generate original content (that aren't AI) like sports, news, entertainment will either be big enough to sign individual deals on pain of litigation or just force-scraped (as is happening now) by bots that are indistinguishable from human users.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#75

Post by ratio53 »

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #55
jollymonATX wrote: post #28

As a website owner I have seen major upticks in viewership myself but really it hits hard when you see an Ai summary that is wrong and your sites there. The whole Ai for everything push unfortunatly will downskill the world I fear and nothing can be done about it.

> downskill the world I feel this. I asked a developer today a question about how our product is programmed to handle something, and he just sent me a summary from the internal AI assistant they've started using. He used to provide really good, thoughtful answers, but now it's just copy/paste from the AI.

> He used to provide really good, thoughtful answers

This hits hard. There’s a senior engineer at my job who is known for well written proposals. Today he shared a doc that had the typical AI formatting, was hard to read, and clearly not his style.

On the other hand, if others use AI to summerize stuff, does it matter anymore?

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#76

Post by gatlin »

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #55
jollymonATX wrote: post #28

As a website owner I have seen major upticks in viewership myself but really it hits hard when you see an Ai summary that is wrong and your sites there. The whole Ai for everything push unfortunatly will downskill the world I fear and nothing can be done about it.

> downskill the world I feel this. I asked a developer today a question about how our product is programmed to handle something, and he just sent me a summary from the internal AI assistant they've started using. He used to provide really good, thoughtful answers, but now it's just copy/paste from the AI.

I have a co-worker who does this now. He's very smart, very capable, very experienced and it's clear that he's just a frontend for Claude now. It's tragic.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#77

Post by overgard »

I guess the extra insult is that the summaries still suck. I feel like every time I google a technical question, I get something wrong which references a youtube video watched by 30 people about an unrelated subject.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#78

Post by DocTomoe »

Nobody is stopping you from publishing on the net.

Nobody is stopping you from blocking bot traffic.

You don't need search engines - you can just link between sites or have webrings. Like we used to, pre-2000.

Nobody is stopping you from not using ads on the net.

Nobody can force you to use non-essential cookies (and thus: a cookie-banner).

Imagine there was a war going on, and no-one was showing up.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#79

Post by jumploops »

It looks like Google has taken a note out of Facebook's "lose trust" playbook.

Facebook had a huge opportunity in the post-AI world: real humans.

Instead of focusing on connections, they've been optimizing their properties for doomscrolling.

Google, similarly, has lost the plot on what made them trustworthy in the first place: navigating to citable content.

Both companies started on this trend well before AI, but this might be the final nail in their respective coffins[0].

[0]Yes they'll likely still be profitable for a long time, but the Bell Labs-esque downfall has begun (imo).

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#80

Post by overgard »

analogpixel wrote: post #29

I feel like AI has gotten to the point where the message is: If you want to make something (art/code/music/writing) you can do it for your own enjoyment, but you aren't allowed to make money from it anymore; only the large corporations can make money from content. If you do release something creative, it'll just be fed back into the machine to be copied over and over.

I imagine it'll take a functional legal body to do this IE maybe europe, but I think there should be a legally binding set of metadata you can attach to images to specify that they must not be used for training (with real penalties if companies are caught)
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