[dead]
Google Declaring War on the Web
131–140 of 466 posts
Re: Google Declaring War on the Web
#132I 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.
As someone who simultaneously makes music professionally, and works in IT professionally, it has been really interesting watching GenAI unfold, and the diverging cultures around it. It is almost like the world is splitting into two "societies": 1. One that loves AI + Big Business + very fast Innovation and disruption 2. One that loves Artisanal work + Small Business + slower but more sustainable innovation I personal…
I don't see that at all. I see spammers and propagandists love LLMs because they can use it to accomplish their goals at the expense of the rest of us. I see AI companies marketing their products hard but in ways that seem self-defeating. Seems obvious but ads shouldn't make people hate the product and the AI folks don't seem to understand this. I see lots more effort to find artisanal things because people understand how much spammy stuff is being made. So I see basically an attack on the media ecosystem and people adapting with various levels of success to those attacks. I also see it costing the platforms as now they have extra effort and expense to keep their value for their users. Nobody wants to read a bunch of LLM generated slop on the social feed.
Re: Google Declaring War on the Web
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's assuming that the only market is stuff people are hanging up. The games industry, one that already takes advantage of its workers, is going to love this to the detriment of really passionate artists who love their craft and industry.
genAI is going to be great for indie games. Solo productions are much easier to produce and will only get easier as tooling improves. I sort of see this as a spotify moment I guess. A democratizing force that will allow many more people to get paid for their art but with much less job security and often as a second job. Whether that's a good thing is certainly up for debate but I think as a consumer it's probably goo…
well, GenAI is an ultimate prototyping machine. I keep repeating that so often that autocomplete on my phone already learned it. look at Clair Obscur - this game did use GenAI internally for textures and forgot to clean up in ONE place. they were sorry for that and thanked the community for pointing out. naturally, Twitter and Bluesky went equally mad at Sandfall just for the mere fact of usage, but that didn't disqualify them from The Game Awards, as you can tell from how many awards they got.
Expedition 33 nailed music, aesthetics, and narrative, and I am glad that they took a diffusion model for what it is, not for what marketing wants you to believe. although the game itself would benefit from one or two months dedicated exclusively to optimization, it is THE reference of how generative technology can be used - purely internally, to ideate and iterate at the pace of your taste and a bunch of H200s. we are aware of that process detail purely because they slipped in one place and got briefly "owned" by Twitter.
Re: Google Declaring War on the Web
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's assuming that the only market is stuff people are hanging up. The games industry, one that already takes advantage of its workers, is going to love this to the detriment of really passionate artists who love their craft and industry.
genAI is going to be great for indie games. Solo productions are much easier to produce and will only get easier as tooling improves. I sort of see this as a spotify moment I guess. A democratizing force that will allow many more people to get paid for their art but with much less job security and often as a second job. Whether that's a good thing is certainly up for debate but I think as a consumer it's probably goo…
Gamers don’t like AI.[1][2] I actually think indie studios that don’t use AI will do better than ones that do.
1: https://www.ign.com/articles/larian-ceo-responds-to-divinity...
2: https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/clair-obscur-expedition-33-ai...
Re: Google Declaring War on the Web
#135I 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.
What I really don't understand is where the next generation of training material will come from. If websites stop being published and/or crawled, how will the machine continue to be fed.
They have enough internet slop. The training material they care about comes from experts, not randos online. This is why Mercor and Scale are billion dollar companies.
Re: Google Declaring War on the Web
#136We abrogated getting traffic to our websites to Google long ago. Mostly because Google was so good at it that the alternatives became significantly less useful. Now that Google is focusing on becoming 'self contained', so to speak, we should find a better way to drive traffic to websites. Ideally one that's not under the control of a single corporation. Anyone miss StumbleUpon?
An open way to trade, store, and export lists of websites in a way that works seamlessly on desktop and mobile browsers would be pretty neat.
Like bookmarks and links?
Re: Google Declaring War on the Web
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not too worried about it because the first segment of society is doomed to be 'good but never great.' AI lacks the ability to identify greatness because it's trained on the output of the average person who also lacks this ability. It's going to create a new elite class of people who have good taste and the masses who have bad taste. Many current elites will end up with the masses. They may retain their wealth on…
Taste is subjective, authenticity is not. People in #2 want human created content, even if it's not as "good".
My definition of bad taste is; will be derivative. These people will consume variants of the same thing over and over, not realizing it to be the case. They will be narrow minded and predictable. They will be afraid of any other ideas which doesn't fit the acceptable pattern of their tribe.
Re: Google Declaring War on the Web
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
The end game is the consumer no longer leaving Google and the web becoming synonymous to Google for them. Why shop on some random website when you can have Gemini buy it for you? Why look for information on Wikipedia when… you get the idea. I think the coming years will be pivotal for the web. Facebook attempted a similar strategy back when their apps got traction, but they ultimately failed. Let’s hope Google fails…
We're going back to the CompuServe/AOL/Prodigy model
We're going back to the mainframe model. Client-side general-purpose computing is an impediment to recurring subscription revenue and vendor lock-in.
Re: Google Declaring War on the Web
#139Websites brought this on themselves. Have you tried visiting one? Popups upon popups upon ads upon cookie banners upon notification permission prompts. I’m not going to miss that. Nobody is going to miss that.
Think of AI distillation as some kind of improved Reader Mode feature.
People never wanted to visit your website; they just wanted the information that your website held. Now they can get to the meat without having to deal with the bones.
Re: Google Declaring War on the Web
#140If Google is "declaring war" what do you call Meta hiding all "ugc" in their walled garden? Compare to YouTube which you can still use without logging in.