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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

#171

Post by JohnMakin »

krisoft wrote: post #150
JohnMakin wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s crazy on the web when you point out that google or google products used to be much better in the past someone will come out of nowhere to tell you it’s always been that way what is this instinct? anyone that’s over the age of 25 would know

> what is this instinct? "The rules were you guys weren't going to fact check." The instinct is about pointing out factual inaccuracies. What they wrote is either correct, or not. If it is not, and someone knows better they can and should point that out. If you, or some other commenter, have a fuzzy feeling that google is worse than it used to be you are free to write that. You are perfectly entitled to that opinion.…

Other than the fact the parent comment to this subthread is posting a literal factual innacuracy regarding the history of ads on google - It’s not just one guy’s “fuzzy feeling.” It’s been written about in so many thousands of words over the last two years and is the general sentiment across the tech space. It’s sort of the major reason big companies like chatGPT, and smaller ones like Kagi are trying to swoop in and fill this void. it’s fairly obvious to anyone paying attention.

You can sealion with posts like this all you want but every time someone counters a post like this with ample evidence it gets group downvoted or ignored. You are also making an assertion that you’re free to back with evidence, that google and google products are not noticeably worse than 10 years ago.

here’s one study that says yes, it is bad:

https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_20...

Since we don’t have a time machine and can’t study the google of 2015 we have to rely on collective memory, don’t we? You proclaiming “it’s always been this way” and saying any assertion otherwise is false is an absolutely unfalsifisble statement. As I said, anyone over 25 knows.

Besides perusing the wealth of writing about this the last two years or so, in which the tech world at large has lamented at how bad search specifically has gotten - we also see market trends where people are increasingly seeking tools like chatGPT and LLM’s as a search replacement. Surely you, a thinking individual, could come to some pretty obvious conclusions as to why that might be, which is that google search has got a lot worse. The language models well known to make up stuff and people still are preferring them because search is somehow even less reliable and definitely more exhausting, and it was not always this way. If it was always this way, why are so many people turning to other tools?

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#172

Post by myaccountonhn »

aardvarkr wrote: post #29
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 think for the moment the leading AI companies are strongly incentivized to not succumb to the advertising curse. Their revenue is subscription driven and the competition is ridiculously fierce and immune to collusion. Everyone is trying to one-up everyone else and there is no moat that locks you into a single product. Their incentive is to score as high as possible on benchmarks in order to drive up their user base…

You can start with subscription, then add ads on top. When you constantly need growth that's kind of the logical conclusion.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#173

Post by philipwhiuk »

jonplackett wrote: post #138
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…

They’re all investing with the assumption they can be the ‘winner’ and take all the spoils. Maybe nvidia can be a winner selling shovels but it seems like everyone else will just be fighting each other in the massive pit they dug.

NVIDIA is already a winner selling shovels.

They don't need a winner, they want the race to continue as long as possible.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#174

Post by jraph »

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…

> Maybe there IS such a thing as a free lunch after all!

A free lunch that costs our environment though, which is a big caveat :-)

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#175

Post by HappMacDonald »

jerf wrote: post #165
bondarchuk wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Yes, but there are definitely levels of desperation. Companies confident that "somehow, it'll all work out" are quite different than "oh crap the money is gone we need revenue now ". We're probably entering that transition sometimes this year.

Google is certainly showing unusual signs of revenue wringing desperation at the end-user level in the past year or so.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#176

Post by Xenoamorphous »

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…

> The instant we see ads in LLMs we will stop using them

People didn’t stop using Google Search, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and a myriad other services and products (and things like TV before those) because they got ads.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#177

Post by tokai »

arn3n wrote: post #116
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.

No, the closest equivalent are the various national libraries.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#178

Post by JohnMakin »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #168
krisoft wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what is this instinct? "The rules were you guys weren't going to fact check." The instinct is about pointing out factual inaccuracies. What they wrote is either correct, or not. If it is not, and someone knows better they can and should point that out. If you, or some other commenter, have a fuzzy feeling that google is worse than it used to be you are free to write that. You are perfectly entitled to that opinion.…

Except that jkaptur is the one making up false statements, and then providing "citations" that contradict him. I don't think an instinct to point out inaccuracies can explain that. There would have to be inaccuracies to point out first.

If you believe stuff like this isn’t actual astroturfing, you must face that from somewhere there seems to exist a deeply ingrained belief from a subset of extremely vocal and argumentative people that Google is amazing and if it isnt well that’s just how the web is now (ignore the google man behind the curtain that created the modern web in the first place) and if it’s not that well, it’s always been this way (even if it hasn’t).

There is a very strong stance on this site against talking about astroturfing, and I understand it. But for the life of me, I cannot figure out where this general type of sentiment originates. I don’t know any google enthusiasts and am not sure I’ve ever met one. It’s a fairly uncontroversial take on this website and in the tech world that google search has worsened (the degree of which is debateable). Coming out and saying boldly “no it isn’t, you’re lying” is just crazy weird to me and again I’m very curious where that sentiment comes from.

see some of the sibling and aunt/uncle comments in this thread to get at a little of what I’m talking about.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#179

Post by bandoti »

d_phase wrote: post #130
sheiyei wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YET.

You obviously haven't been A/B tested yet. I got very obvious advertisements in a super simple question I asked last week to ChatGPT. The question was "When was the last year it was really smokey in Canada" it answered in one paragraph, then gave me about 6 paragraphs of ads for air purifiers, masks etc. I'd guess we're only 6-12 months out from a full advertisement takeover.

I think it’s time folks dust off their library cards :)

Or support an open source AI model.

I stopped using ChatGPT when it started littering my conversation with emojis. It acts like one of those overzealous kids on Barney.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#180

Post by bombcar »

Marazan wrote: post #164
d_phase wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You obviously haven't been A/B tested yet. I got very obvious advertisements in a super simple question I asked last week to ChatGPT. The question was "When was the last year it was really smokey in Canada" it answered in one paragraph, then gave me about 6 paragraphs of ads for air purifiers, masks etc. I'd guess we're only 6-12 months out from a full advertisement takeover.

The simpler explanation is that ChatGPT is trained on webpages that have been SEO'd to death. So you are just getting SEO'd pages (i.e ads) regurgitated to you.

This is of course, absolutely, master sahib boss man.

Have you considered buying a ChatGPT filter/scrubber to clean your results? Only $9.99 a month! Not available in all areas, not legal in most of the world.

;) and

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