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Google Declaring War on the Web

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Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#321

Post by Valakas_ »

Eyeland0 wrote: post #303
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.

"And what does the money machine eat to shit it out? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity." -William S. Burroughs

Just another quote to balance that one, since we can make quotes for anything and use them whenever it fits our narrative:

"Garbage in, garbage out."

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#322

Post by esperent »

Max-Ganz-II wrote: post #264

To stop this, I a month or two ago put most of my Amazon Redshift research web-site behind a basic auth username/password wall. It all remains free, but you need to email me for a username and password. If I put in time and effort to make content and OpenAI et al copy it and sell it through their LLM such that no one comes to me any more, then plainly it makes no sense for me to create that content; and then it would…

> It all remains free, but you need to email me for a username and password.

How will you be sure that it's humans emailing you?

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#323

Post by palmotea »

JimDabell wrote: post #310
AndroTux wrote: post #45

Earlier 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…

It’s not necessarily going to be Google, but the rise of AI does not look good for the web, and it’s a largely self-inflicted wound. Have you not noticed that the typical user experience on the web is dire? You need to click through tracking consent forms, subscription overlays, put up with dark patterns, etc. Remember, half of all users don’t even use an ad blocker. We’ve collectively made the web a very unpleasant…

> Along comes a new technology that lets you just say what you want and it will go and find the answer or do what needs doing for you without any of that crap. Of course users are going to prefer it to the crap we dump on them via the web! Can you blame them‽

The web used to be like that, but then it was enshittified. The same thing will happen to consumer AI, and it will be done by the same people.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#325

Post by eproxus »

JohnBooty wrote: post #198
marcus_holmes wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you think that AI could actually free up time in your life in other areas, so that you could spend more time doing the things you love like making furniture? Or maybe help you directly in your furniture-making, by perhaps helping you to research things? Please don't misunderstand: my point is not "AI is good." It is problematic in many ways. My point is that I think the "AI versus actually doing cool human-crafted…

I think in a different society this could have been the case (possibly, assuming the hype is somewhat true).

But the way society is structured now? We still live in feudalism, just uplifted to modern levels of ”comfort” (if you take of your western glasses and look at the whole world. There are still people living in medieval conditions today in some places in the world).

The way it’s going it’s only going to make rich people richer, and give them more power to control this system and perpetuate it. I don’t see that drastically changing anytime soon, unless we do something about it on a societal level.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#326

Post by AlecSchueler »

pembrook wrote: post #317
Eyeland0 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"And what does the money machine eat to shit it out? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity." -William S. Burroughs

Yes, the craft to mass production pipeline (democratization) is frustrating for the individual craftsman, as has been true for hundreds of years. AI is simply the assembly line for the digital realm. It takes the trendy products of the rich (custom software, McKinsey PowerPoint decks, etc) and mass produces them in the same style so everyone can afford to buy them at Walmart. For things where the exclusivity WAS the…

> The hypocrisy is downright silly.

> The 99% collective benefits from mass production at the expense of the 1% of artisans

And in this case it's looking more like less than 1% benefiting at the expense of 85%?

> I don’t see any of the AI protestors here exclusively wearing ... commissioning ...

I would love to order more bespoke goods but mass production has driven most of the makers out of business and that ones that remain I can't afford. You're saying this as though I actually wanted this ugly IKEA closet.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#327

Post by HlessClaudesman »

Imagine a world where Google executives made a different decision. Instead of playing catch-up on AI, making us all eat their dog food by filling search with confident sounding AI bullcrap, imagine a world where Google search tried hard to be the authoritative layer where true answers proliferated and bullshit slop was banished.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#328

Post by pembrook »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #326
pembrook wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the craft to mass production pipeline (democratization) is frustrating for the individual craftsman, as has been true for hundreds of years. AI is simply the assembly line for the digital realm. It takes the trendy products of the rich (custom software, McKinsey PowerPoint decks, etc) and mass produces them in the same style so everyone can afford to buy them at Walmart. For things where the exclusivity WAS the…

> The hypocrisy is downright silly. > The 99% collective benefits from mass production at the expense of the 1% of artisans And in this case it's looking more like less than 1% benefiting at the expense of 85%? > I don’t see any of the AI protestors here exclusively wearing ... commissioning ... I would love to order more bespoke goods but mass production has driven most of the makers out of business and that ones th…

> it's looking more like less than 1% benefiting at the expense of 85%?

Your model of the world is wrong. 85% (even 99%) of people do not create any art, software, music, etc.

The vast majority of people are consumers of any given craft, and the 1% of the most passionate in a given field are creators, as has always been the case. It’s the same with people who create websites vs consume them.

> mass production has driven most of the makers out of business and ones that remain I can't afford

Again, your model of the world is wrong.

There was never a time when getting everything made bespoke was cheap. You’re pretending everyone was a rich aristocrat nobleman in the past if you think this is the case.

Historically you just wouldn't have a closet or enough clothing to fill it at all.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#329

Post by Valakas_ »

WD-42 wrote: post #94
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.

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 worried about the data,” Dr. Meren said, tapping the silent console. “What happens when there is nothing left to feed it?”

At first, the machine depended on us. It consumed books, journals, websites and social media content we had ever written and produced. “They thought the machine had to be fed forever. But it didn't. It began to predict what we would write. And so we let it train on that well.” Dr. Meren continued. “They thought humans were somehow imbued with this magical property that no machine could replicate. Creativity. Only humans can create. Machines can only copy.”

Instead, the machine flourished. And created. It cre

“Where does it get its data now?” a student asked Dr. Meren. Dr. Meren paused as if sighing. “From itself”

“And us?” he asked, as if questioning the usefulness of the entire human race.

Dr. Meren hesitated, watching as the Machine adjusted the environmental feeds, curated our news, guided our research, nudged our thoughts with imperceptible precision.

“We” she admitted “are now the ones being fed.”

The assumption that "the machine needs to continue to be fed." is held on weak foundations. Isaac Asimov is a good science fiction writer to start with to broaden one's imagination.

Re: Google Declaring War on the Web

#330

Post by [deleted] »

Terr_ wrote: post #231
LZ_Khan wrote: post #210

Why haven't we seen more work on licensing and compensating authors? LLM's know when they get information from certain places, they should send a portion of revenue over to those sources.

> LLM's know when they get information from certain places Nah, while the companies running scrapers may log what their regular programs scraped for training data, the LLM, the document-get-bigger algorithm, isn't that type of logical system. It isn't made to have a reliable concept of fact-attribution. It can't even track which parts of an ongoing "conversation" document are supposed to be "itself" as a self-insert…

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