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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

#161

Post by dolphinscorpion »

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…

Bottom line, you will always get content, whatever that may mean.

But great content creators will want to be rewarded one way or another. Book writers get paid, movie makers as well, so why shouldn't those who share their wisdom in a blog post? If someone is making money off your content and you aren't, you will not be happy. When it's not even attributed to you, it's even worse.

SEO is a response to Google's incentives, and Google can fix it if it wants.

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

#162

Post by maltelandwehr »

const_cast wrote: post #115
_factor wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think that is too unrealistic.

• Small models have performed really well in recent years. • Newer phones will have more RAM. • Private LLMs do not necessarily need to run locally.

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

#163

Post by whimsicalism »

yes, i use LLM search specifically to avoid the sort of SEO crap that this articles describes as the lifeblood of the internet.

you do not have to be too old to remember how the internet got on perfectly fine without this model (and in my view, largely better)

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

#164

Post by whimsicalism »

stevage wrote: post #137
amarant wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely part of that is because most tech related questions have already been asked and answered on SO. I'd say a decline in new question is stack overflow working as designed. A large part of what makes SO so good is the searchability of old questions. There will always be new questions to ask, as new technologies confuse Devs in new ways, but to expect new questions to be asked at the same rate as peak is to misunde…

That explanation totally fails to account for SO's usage suddenly falling off a cliff as soon as ChatGPT arrived on the scene.

because the answer to so many questions can be distilled from the content already on SO

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

#165

Post by whimsicalism »

skybrian wrote: post #132
neehao wrote: post #124

As Tyler Cowen says, solve for the equilibrium. "Many widely used machine-learning models rely on copyrighted data. For instance, Google finds the most relevant web pages for a search term by relying on a machine learning model trained on copyrighted web data. But the use of copyrighted data by machine learning models that generate content (or give answers to search queries than link to sites with the answers) poses…

AI companies are already paying for content to train on.

not in any serious manner. they are paying for content that has been successfully walled a la reddit, not all that is copyrighted. its law of the jungle

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

#166

Post by whimsicalism »

8organicbits wrote: post #50
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.

I assume that AI chat is a lot of questions being asked by people unfamiliar with the subject matter. Would that training dataset have any information from experts?

any? yes, i chat about things i am expert in

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

#167

Post by whimsicalism »

mola wrote: post #47
johnnyApplePRNG wrote: post #37

I can't bring myself to "Google" anything anymore. Every single time I open up google and try searching for the information... I get frustrated being forced so do the agentic work and sift through the crap... and I fall back on ChatGPT or Gemini.

Interesting. When I Google I always get the AI summary which does it for me.

the google search AI is trash and wrong very often, and I’m a big fan/early adopter of LLMs

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

#169

Post by cube00 »

adithyassekhar wrote: post #147
cube00 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Incoming uAIBlock. uBlockAi? The taglines write themselves.

Hopefully we have local AI by then, big tech will no doubt put filters in to stop you using their service to filter their own ads.

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

#170

Post by Gud »

natebc wrote: post #85
roblh wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord is just absolutely worthless for this. Any question that gets asked gets buried in days if not hours. It pretty much guarantees the same basic garbage gets repeated over and over and over forever. Basically the exact opposite of stack overflow.

Inevitably too you'll get someone scolding you to "check the pins" which you then do and get introduced to that hellish nightmare. Discord is great for chatting with your friends, gaming, etc. but man it's a horrible knowledge repository.

Frankly it’s not really great even for that, but they have captured the audience and now we are stuck with it.

Every time I boot into Manjaro to do some gaming, almost always there’s a new update for Discordavailable and guess what? The updates to Manjaro are always lagging behind a few days to a week, and Discord won’t run with a slightly out of date client.

The only way to get is working is using the snap, and who doesn’t want use some 3rd party package manager just to send some kbit/s voice data?

Additionally the interface sucks and is really bloated

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