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No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

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Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#111

Post by justahuman74 »

aftergibson wrote: post #92
duncanfwalker wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh god, this has just made me reflect that we're in the golden age of generative AI - not in technology terms, in user experience terms. We're in the period where the major products are competing against each other before they switch into enshitfication mode. You're certainly right, there's going to be ads in the answers and probably worse. I'm imagining companies paying to introduce ideas as subtle subtexts to milli…

Of course. Were in the burning VCs cash by the truckload phase. And inference isn't getting cheaper. I'd argue this is the worst its ever been in terms of over extending a business and they might not be able to enshitificate fast enough.

Inference will get much much cheaper. We're paying $30000 for a top of the line gpu right now, but that's only because everyone insists on buying nvidia, so nvidia has full incentive to charge the absolute maximum.

Long term that vendor lock in will go away and prices will go down to something reasonable.

Long ago CPUs were super expensive too, now they're so cheap we put them in toothbrushes

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#112

Post by hooloovoo_zoo »

p_ing wrote: post #75

Injecting ads into answers will be the next step for the search market. Reddit is doing it already. And unlike reddit post or comment ads, it may be very difficult to block.

It's just a new era in the ad-block wars where my ad-block LLM tries to excise the ads from their ad-generating LLM.

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#113

Post by cube00 »

watwut wrote: post #27
kleiba wrote: post #13

The argument seems flawed to me: by "killing the web", they refer to the example of a company adding SEO'd information to their website to lure in traffic from web searches. However, me personally, I don't want to be lured into some web store when I'm looking for some vaguely related information. Luckily, there's tons of information on the web provided not by commercial entities but by volunteers: wikipedia, forum us…

AI will kill the volunteers run websites and blogs faster then it will kill corporate ones. It will kill free information first. It will basically finish the process google search engine started when it started to require seo to find stuff. People will have less or no motivation to create them, because well, why would they? It will be just a food for AI of some corporation. And more importantly, people won't be findi…

> It will be just a food for AI of some corporation.

Food that said corporation makes a profit off while paying the author nothing.

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#114

Post by Ekaros »

halJordan wrote: post #102
fabian2k wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But AI is also going to kill some of your positive examples. Stack Overflow for example is in a steep decline, only a small fraction of questions are posted today compared to the peak. And the effects are more than financial, so even non-profit examples like forums would be hit. If new people don't discover your site with useful user-created content, they won't contribute to it. You're also cutting off the pipeline f…

That brings up the unstated part of the original comment. There's this obsession with ossifying the Internet because we're so afraid of losing something like SO. The people who made SO are not going anywhere, there will always be a SO, a wikipedia, a search engine. Let it evolve to the next thing.

Especially with main SO I really wonder if accepting natural cycle of online platforms would be best. When culture gets to point that there is enough negative views on platform, maybe it is time to let it be replaced.

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#115

Post by const_cast »

_factor wrote: post #56
add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot believe you people. The only difference between the status quo and the future is that the promotional messaging will be seamlessly and undisclosedly delivered with the conversational output. Ads are not going anywhere. We can be forgiven for not seeing how social media was going to become weaponized against us, how streaming's promise of no ads was only temporary. There's no excuse for not seeing it coming t…

Local AI searching for me and filtering the ads is my future. You can speak for yourself.

Yes, I'm sure your "local AI" running on 8 gb of ram will be able to filter the ads added by the super computer AI just fine.

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#116

Post by pbronez »

duncanfwalker wrote: post #80
p_ing wrote: post #75

Injecting ads into answers will be the next step for the search market. Reddit is doing it already. And unlike reddit post or comment ads, it may be very difficult to block.

Oh god, this has just made me reflect that we're in the golden age of generative AI - not in technology terms, in user experience terms. We're in the period where the major products are competing against each other before they switch into enshitfication mode. You're certainly right, there's going to be ads in the answers and probably worse. I'm imagining companies paying to introduce ideas as subtle subtexts to milli…

You better believe I’m going full self-hosted AI the moment I get a whiff of sponsored content in an AI response I paid for.

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#117

Post by cube00 »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #31
kleiba wrote: post #13

The argument seems flawed to me: by "killing the web", they refer to the example of a company adding SEO'd information to their website to lure in traffic from web searches. However, me personally, I don't want to be lured into some web store when I'm looking for some vaguely related information. Luckily, there's tons of information on the web provided not by commercial entities but by volunteers: wikipedia, forum us…

People create content for free but not to be sucked into some machine that funds a $T company who mixes it up and spits it out without attribution. You want to share info for the sake of it but you also care deeply about how it’s presented and would like people to come read it on your site. So all that volunteer stuff will be killed along with all the recipe sites because those people aren’t going to put in the time…

> In the short term it will feel liberating

They won't feel so liberated when they find ads embedded in the model's response in ways that make it difficult to uBlock.

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#118

Post by Ekaros »

argentinian wrote: post #36
insane_dreamer wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if they can’t afford to pay the bills.

There are a lot of artists and creators that create while they work in a job not related to what they create. Money is not the only motivation to create.

I might even prefer those that make content for love of the thing and not for profit. I am not against them making a living. But There is enough of examples that in long run jus ending up worse. Maybe with higher "production quality". But worse in other ways that matter.

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#119

Post by sebastiennight »

wongarsu wrote: post #30
kleiba wrote: post #13

The argument seems flawed to me: by "killing the web", they refer to the example of a company adding SEO'd information to their website to lure in traffic from web searches. However, me personally, I don't want to be lured into some web store when I'm looking for some vaguely related information. Luckily, there's tons of information on the web provided not by commercial entities but by volunteers: wikipedia, forum us…

Another commonly ignored group are those that publish information because they want others to know about that information. Even in a worst-case situation where websites are only crawled by bots and get no human visitors at all anymore, government and company websites won't disappear. Any tourist board worth their salt will increase the amount of content they publish compared to current levels. The local conspiracy nu…

> And that's assuming a world where people only ask LLMs and don't care about the provenance or trustworthiness of information at all. Which seems unlikely, even conspiracy nuts have some sources they trust more than others.

They will just have one model that they trust more because (a) it aligns with their views, or (b) it's a sycophant and agrees with anything and everything.

They definitely are not the people most likely to care about clicking "source links".

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#120

Post by vertigolimbo »

BinaryIgor wrote: post #91

Interesting take on the future of web incentives; even before LLMs, I was often wondering how sustainable the ads model is - it obviously has a ton of tradeoffs. Maybe we will just go back to pay content as it was before the Internet era? Magazines and such

Perhaps. My worry is that magazines will be full of AI generated content.

I enjoy reading some very niche magazines and, at the moment, I cannot tell if it's AI generated or not. So, as long as the reader is entertained, magazines will do just fine.

Either that, or we will develop some sort of proof that the content is human generated, not AI.

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