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

bradt.ca

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

#151

Post by p3rls »

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…

at this point, i've built a massive platform for ten years and watching the seoers die might be worth it losing it all for. it'll at least kill off all the indians that have been scamming in my niche for three and half years with impunity

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

#152

Post by moralestapia »

fabian2k wrote: post #64
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…

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…

>Stack Overflow for example is in a steep decline

This is because they're a big bunch of assholes and no one wants to deal with that. Their decline started way before ChatGPT came in.

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

#153

Post by cuu508 »

ben_w wrote: post #20
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…

On the one hand, I agree with what you've said. On the other, I think it's unlikely the fun old geocities era comes back. We'll probably get stuff that looks like it, but it's hawking nationalist revisionist propaganda instead of occult shapeshifting magic lifted from Sabine Baring-Gould, and a thousand Temple OS-inspired clones instead of python.

I fear we will get more walled gardens like FB because AI bots will have harder time scraping them.

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

#154

Post by _DeadFred_ »

pbronez wrote: post #116
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…

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.

Some decent tech billionaire should do what Andrew Carnegie did for libraries but for AI. Would be really cool if they tied it to local libraries.

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

#156

Post by _DeadFred_ »

ChiMan wrote: post #122

This gets to the heart of why we have copyrights. They’re not to make writers rich. They’re to make us all rich with the content they produce. The modern abuse of copyrights by the likes of Disney does not negate this otherwise wonderful institution.

It blows my mind people here don't understand this. Copyright is a huge benefit to society. And under copyright, people that don't want to use it are free to release their rights to the world, so you get two approaches. Which one do we see contributing the most to modern thought? To modern entertainment? To education? Imagine if all text books were open, the only authors would be overworked grad students assigned to update them for next quarter.

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

#157

Post by _DeadFred_ »

visarga wrote: post #38

The content is now created in private chats with AI, probably a trillion tokens per day flow between humans and LLMs. When new AI models are made they will incorporate some experience from past usage. This dataset might be the most valuable source for training AI and solving our tasks. So in case humans decide to abandon publishing, there is a new experience flywheel spinning up.

So they will learn on the hallucinations they told to people? Sounds like a sound system.

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

#158

Post by _DeadFred_ »

sebastiennight wrote: post #121
danielfalbo wrote: post #65

We just need to go back at reading books in libraries

I've written a 125,000-word book a year before GPT-3 was a thing. If this book came out today, in 2025, how would you know that the 420 pages are actually worth your time and not just a bunch of hallucinated LLM slop? I've been wondering whether Wikipedia and libraries in 2030 will be in a better overall place quality-wise, or will just be overrun. The last few times I looked for information on YouTube (by typing a k…

This is music discovery for me now. Anything new by new artists with zero background/presence/indicator that they wrote the music I just pass on.

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

#159

Post by fragmede »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #156
ChiMan wrote: post #122

This gets to the heart of why we have copyrights. They’re not to make writers rich. They’re to make us all rich with the content they produce. The modern abuse of copyrights by the likes of Disney does not negate this otherwise wonderful institution.

It blows my mind people here don't understand this. Copyright is a huge benefit to society. And under copyright, people that don't want to use it are free to release their rights to the world, so you get two approaches. Which one do we see contributing the most to modern thought? To modern entertainment? To education? Imagine if all text books were open, the only authors would be overworked grad students assigned to…

> Copyright is a huge benefit to society.

Is it? We don't have the technology to duplicate the Earth in, say, 1776 but without copyright, and run an experiment, so all we can point at is a logic argument that we need to incentivize writer and artists and creators. Which I mean, sure. I want to write the next great American novel and not have to work for the rest of my life. and for my children and their children to not have to work either. Is that really for the betterment of society though? You can give some additional logic arguments in favor of that, but without Earth duplication technology, there's nothing that really constitutues real actual proof. The closest comparison we have that I know of is to look at China, which has far weaker intellectual property laws, and, well, they haven't fallen into lawless anarchy.

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

#160

Post by maltelandwehr »

balder1991 wrote: post #49
dmortin wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Content can’t be free if you want it to be of any quality. There are lots smaller local websites which can produce useful local content because of ad support. Those may not have enough subscribers to continue behind a paywall.

What I notice here in Brazil is that most local news channels get the bulk of their money from TV ads. They all have a badly done website-blog with news that are very superficial (like 2 paragraphs) just to fill them with ads up and down and try to get something from it. The big channels nowadays usually have 2 websites: one that is free and full of ads and pop-ups with very superficial news (seemingly written by int…

How can we adapt that to LLMs? Do LLM providers pay for access to these articles?

Do I as a user have to do a micro transaction whenever an LLM generates an answer on one of those paywalled articles? Because as a user, I do not wish to read the quality journalist analysis, I wish for it to be part of the LLM answer that is tailored towards me.

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