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Google Declaring War on the Web

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Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#181

Post by fc417fc802 »

hungryhobbit wrote: post #48

To me it seems either ... A) Google will do a good job of this, people will find their summaries more useful, and the web will evolve into a more closed system that better serves its users or ... B) They're gated AI community will suck, and people will start using a different search engine that better serves its users. My money isn't on A), but they do have a lot of clout so I wouldn't rule it out.

Unfortunately A seems inevitable to me but leads to lots of bad things down the road. However I don't see how individual sites can hope to compete on this. LLMs quickly and efficiently deliver relevant information in a lightweight easy to consume textual format. For example they've almost completely replaced getting recipes from websites for me because they provide a comprehensive overview while omitting all the extraneous nonsense. They're just plain better for most of my usecases in practice.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#182

Post by technotarek »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #166
soundworlds wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 make my own furniture. I am absolutely not a carpenter. But I hate Ikea furniture - it's made of shitty, flimsy, materials, and its design priorities are all based on cost and ease of transport, not on being great furniture that will last years and be an actual asset to the home. This is an analogy, obviously. Ikea has been innovative, and it does provide a useful service for people; if you just moved into a new pl…

I’m not a furniture maker, but I have a rather close connection to the industry. I used to hate ikea furniture. In fact I hated almost all modern furniture that mass market, that wasn’t high end. I was a huge proponent of vintage furniture ( and still am), but I have really come around on ikea. They sure still make some crap, but they also make some genuinely innovative pieces that can last if you treat them with a basic level of care. I’d specifically call out / praise a few of their beds with built in drawer solutions. A few good desks too. They also have other mostly solid wood products too. It really depends. Just my $0.02.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#183

Post by Procrastes »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #166
soundworlds wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 make my own furniture. I am absolutely not a carpenter. But I hate Ikea furniture - it's made of shitty, flimsy, materials, and its design priorities are all based on cost and ease of transport, not on being great furniture that will last years and be an actual asset to the home. This is an analogy, obviously. Ikea has been innovative, and it does provide a useful service for people; if you just moved into a new pl…

I want to buy you a CMOT Dibbler Sausage for the Vimes reference. Perfect metaphor for this situation. His point was that it was the cheap boots that keep people poor, so that makes me think artist and artisan patronage will be an even bigger thing in years to come.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#184

Post by krackers »

aiisahik wrote: post #130

This is such a basic take that totally misses the bigger picture of why Google made this move. Google was forced to do this and it's a miracle of their slow organizational gears that they took so long to do it. So many people have already transitioned to using ChatGPT as a replacement for Google. All of this is driven by consumer behavior and the desire to "just get an answer" rather than having to wade through all t…

>Google SERP results have been gamed by SEO slop for economically valuable search terms

So why not use AI to find the obvious spam and SEO? Sites like pinterest, "geeksforgeeks", stackoverflow clones were notorious for ranking highly on almost every technical search and you didn't even need AI to deal with those. Using AI to provide distilled summaries and making it harder to get the actual links is going to make things even worse for the user, because you have to cut through two layers of slop. And there's also not using the smartest model for the responses anyway.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#185

Post by fc417fc802 »

tw04 wrote: post #172
fc417fc802 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#1 may well put #2 out of a living but that isn't the same as stealing and doesn't (at least in and of itself) make it unsustainable. The fact that models were trained on scraped content isn't a matter of technical necessity but rather the path of least resistance (lowest cost in this case). Synthetic data is increasingly used for reasons of quantity, quality, and various technical considerations.

All of the major players in AI currently, literally stole to build their models. There isn’t one out there that hasn’t. So yes, it is the same as stealing because they were LITERALLY, in the literal sense, stealing.

Well, pirated. Piracy and stealing aren't the same thing.

Regardless, I acknowledged the general issue. However I pointed out that doing so was not a technical necessity. If you base your worldview or actions around X implying Y but then it turns out that actually Y was merely a matter of convenience you're probably going to arrive at a wrong conclusion.

There's also the issue where you're emphatically calling it stealing without providing a clear criteria. The legal system as a whole has yet to conclusively resolve the various piracy accusations. The legality of consuming publicly available content remains quite controversial.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#186

Post by wayeq »

ViktorRay wrote: post #161

I know a lot of people are unhappy with what Google is doing… But the honest truth is that lots of folks are using the free version of ChatGPT already and just asking it about stuff. If Google only had the 10 blue links then the simple truth is that folks would just stop using it and switch over the one of the free AI models like ChatGPT. Many are already doing this. So Google has no choice but to make their AI the d…

> Doing so disables AI and all the other features and just gets you 10 links like in the old days…

i expect that opt-out to become harder and harder to find on every re-design, until it is gone entirely. that's on like.. page 2 in the playbook for introducing some shitty new thing that is good for shareholders and not users.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#187

Post by zoom6628 »

overgard wrote: post #80
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)

Agree. Should be legally required for all web hosted pictures to be AI poisoned except with explicit verifiable opt out. Same for text.

Needs some institution with many geek supporters and or large tools, like Wikipedia or EFF to wage a campaign of scanning the web for materials used without permission and then loading the courts with cases of probable non-consensual usage. May not change billionaire behaviour but perhaps will change consumer behaviour.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#188

Post by shimman »

nickff wrote: post #150
eikenberry wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But big businesses suck at innovation so much that their primary form of innovation is through acquiring small businesses. But that is a big benefit for #2 as we need innovations to get to a sustainable system.

The problem is that it is increasingly difficult to survive as a small business (due to constantly increasing compliance/regulatory/legal burdens), so it makes sense to ‘sell out’ as soon as possible (or just give up early). The rate of small businesses growing into large ones has been decreasing for at least 20 years.

This is tech we are talking about. There are very little, if any, regulatory burdens in place here.

The only things that DO hurt SMBs across the board are things like paying for private health insurance and retirement plans. Two core things every worker needs but only massive corporations can truly provide.

It's why things like medicare for all and universal childcare are so popular among workers, also why things like corporate welfare are so disgusting.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#189

Post by scared_together »

metrognome wrote: post #142
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.

The rhetoric of this comment seems to imply that this is a bad thing, but is it really? If it becomes more difficult to make money through creative endeavors, then that leaves us with fewer reasons to be creative other than for the sake of self-expression... which is what we want, right?

If self-expression doesn’t put food on the table, it will become monopolized by those who were already well-fed doing something else.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#190

Post by tw04 »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #185
tw04 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the major players in AI currently, literally stole to build their models. There isn’t one out there that hasn’t. So yes, it is the same as stealing because they were LITERALLY, in the literal sense, stealing.

Well, pirated. Piracy and stealing aren't the same thing. Regardless, I acknowledged the general issue. However I pointed out that doing so was not a technical necessity. If you base your worldview or actions around X implying Y but then it turns out that actually Y was merely a matter of convenience you're probably going to arrive at a wrong conclusion. There's also the issue where you're emphatically calling it ste…

It absolutely is a technical necessity. You could build a model from scratch today without doing the same thing. And every model attempting to train on AI generated output degrades into nonsense almost immediately.

There’s a reason Reddit is making millions of dollars letting these companies mine their human generated content. You think OpenAI or anyone else would pay for that if they could just cyclically train on AI generated content???

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