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The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

kaveland.no

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Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#111

Post by cheschire »

spauldo wrote: post #98
myself248 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss Altavista every day. Case-sensitive search is how you tell DOS from DoS. Putting "exact phrases" in quotes no longer seems to work. Then they added insult to injury by forcing you to +mandate a term otherwise they might just ignore it. Now that no longer works either. I've entirely given up on Google. I've made extensive shortcuts so I can directly search various sites straight from my location bar: wikipedia,…

It's really strange, while I agree Google's results aren't as good as they used to be, they're still miles ahead of DDG for me. Is it because I still use keyword search like it's the early 2000s? I tried to switch to DDG because Google was blocking Hurricane Electric IPv6 tunnels. DDG is still my homepage but I usually end up clicking the bookmark I made for ipv4.google.com. I wish I knew why DDG works for all you pe…

Isn’t DDG basically Bing with a privacy layer?

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#112

Post by pajamasam »

SEO spam was still easy enough to spot and skip through in search results before the masses of LLM-generated content took over.

They seem to generate extremely specific websites and content for every conceivable search phrase. I'm not even sure what their end goal is since they aren't even always riddled with affiliate links.

Sometimes I wonder if the AI companies are generating these low-quality search results to drive us to use their LLMs instead.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#113

Post by bondarchuk »

karel-3d wrote: post #78

The money situation is what gives me pause with LLMs. The amount of money it's burned on this is giant; those companies will need to make so much money to have any possibility of return. The idea is that we will all spend more money on AI that we spend on phones, and we will spend it on those companies only... I don't know, it just doesn't add up. As a user it's a great free ride though. Maybe there IS such a thing a…

"It has cost a lot of money and therefore they will try very hard to make it back". I don't think it really makes sense. Companies will always try to make the maximum amount of money anyway.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#114

Post by rolandog »

nperez wrote: post #5
boothby wrote: post #2

> These days, I find that I am using multiple search engines and often resort to using an LLM to help me find content. For a few months, I've been wondering: how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into the training data? It's trivial to add prompts encouraging product placement, but I would be completely shocked if the big players don't sell out within a year or two, and start biasing the models themse…

I'm not going to disagree because greed knows no bounds, but that could be RIP for the enthusiast crowd's proprietary LLM use. We may not have cheap local open models that beat the SOTA, but is it possible to beat an ad-poisoned SOTA model on a consumer laptop? Maybe.

If future LLM patterns mimic the other business models, 80% of the prompt will be spent preventing ad recommendations and the agent would in turn reluctantly respond but suggest that it is malicious to ask for that.

I'm really looking forward to something like a GNU GPT that tries to be as factual, unbiased, libre and open-source as possible (possibly built/trained with Guix OS so we can ensure byte-for-byte reproducibility).

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#115

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

> I would rather use a library where the librarians don’t have financial incentives to show me certain kinds of books more often than others.

Oh, you sweet summer child...

I have family that used to be in charge of dealing with institutional corruption. In particular, public service corruption.

It's bad. Very, very bad. When "public servants" are paid less than their private counterparts, are routinely treated like crap by their employers, as well as those they serve, and they are in charge of services that could be incredibly lucrative to others, you're guaranteed to get corruption.

"Let's just use AI!" is the rallying cry.

Now, let's examine a scenario, where the folks that can make money from the service, also run the tools that implement the service...

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#116

Post by arn3n »

willvarfar wrote: post #59

My dream solution: The EU creates an institution for public knowledge, a kind of library+tech solution. It probably funds classic libraries in member countries, but it also invests in tech. It dovetails nicely into a big push to get science to thrive in the EU etc. The tech part makes a in-the-public-interest search engine and AI. The techies are incentivised to try and whack-a-mole the classic SEO. E.g. they might s…

God, I’d love to work for something like this.

The closest equivalent thing we have today is (in my mind) places like the Apache Foundation or LetsEncrypt, places that run huge chunks of open source software or critical internet structure. An “Apache for search” would be great.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#117

Post by 9dev »

Mistletoe wrote: post #79
karel-3d wrote: post #78

The money situation is what gives me pause with LLMs. The amount of money it's burned on this is giant; those companies will need to make so much money to have any possibility of return. The idea is that we will all spend more money on AI that we spend on phones, and we will spend it on those companies only... I don't know, it just doesn't add up. As a user it's a great free ride though. Maybe there IS such a thing a…

I’m constantly confused why Google wants me to use Gemini so much. Why would they want me to use an AI that doesn’t show ads, isn’t their search, and costs them money to generate the responses? The instant we see ads in LLMs we will stop using them, it will be as abrupt and as annoying as the vuvuzela example because using an LLM is a very intimate interaction. It will feel much more jarring when your intimate chat f…

Google has this pesky problem of carrying almost all their eggs in one basket: The moment their ad business doesn’t work anymore, the behemoth that Google is will come down to its knees. But due to the way the company is structured, they need search to drive users to the ads, and it’s all one big mess of entangled revenue streams that can’t be touched for fear of breaking something.

Now if AI turns out to be the next big thing, they can steer differently next time, sell subscriptions, and avoid all that entanglement with multi-sided markets and layered revenue strategies. At least that’s my take.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#118

Post by Retr0id »

pajamasam wrote: post #112

SEO spam was still easy enough to spot and skip through in search results before the masses of LLM-generated content took over. They seem to generate extremely specific websites and content for every conceivable search phrase. I'm not even sure what their end goal is since they aren't even always riddled with affiliate links. Sometimes I wonder if the AI companies are generating these low-quality search results to dr…

> they aren't even always riddled with affiliate links.

Presumably the goal is to build up a positive-ish reputation, before they start trying to monetize it. Or perhaps to sell the site itself for someone else to monetize, on the basis of the number of clicks it's getting per month.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#119

Post by kristianc »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #108
sheiyei wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YET.

Remember, Google also didn't have ads interspersed with their search results for over 1̶2̶ 2 years

That wasn’t out of benevolence, that’s because they hadn’t discovered the ads business model yet. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle now.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#120

Post by dismalaf »

Mistletoe wrote: post #79
karel-3d wrote: post #78

The money situation is what gives me pause with LLMs. The amount of money it's burned on this is giant; those companies will need to make so much money to have any possibility of return. The idea is that we will all spend more money on AI that we spend on phones, and we will spend it on those companies only... I don't know, it just doesn't add up. As a user it's a great free ride though. Maybe there IS such a thing a…

I’m constantly confused why Google wants me to use Gemini so much. Why would they want me to use an AI that doesn’t show ads, isn’t their search, and costs them money to generate the responses? The instant we see ads in LLMs we will stop using them, it will be as abrupt and as annoying as the vuvuzela example because using an LLM is a very intimate interaction. It will feel much more jarring when your intimate chat f…

Because Gemini has paid tiers. Also to prevent users from going to other providers.
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