No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by ddingus » Mon, Sep 01, 2025, 5:03 PM UTC

stevage wrote: post #136

ddingus wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate that about Discord. It is a fun comms application, but it is severely lacking as a community. Once, before I realized this, I recommended users of a forum use Discord. The impact was severe and fortunately brief. We all realized we would not be leaving the usual, often high value info for others, and ourselves to benefit from in the future. We unwound that mess and now carry on in the usual way. Discord has ca…

It depends very much on the discord. I'm in several discords which are excellent communities. They're really good places to hang out, get to know people interested in the same hobby, build a subculture etc. I haven't really tried one as a QA or knowledge sharing site, perhaps they're much less good at that.

They can be excellent, but only in the moment.

The excellent communities I have been a part of can be searched. People can read it and learn. The Discord ones, unless they publish to a wiki or something, just don't exist.

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

#182

Post by const_cast » Mon, Sep 01, 2025, 5:41 PM UTC

maltelandwehr wrote: post #162

const_cast wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it's not running locally, then by nature of what an LLM is it cannot be private.

LLMs cannot act on encrypted information - the server must have access to all your plaintext prompts. And you simply are forced to trust they don't keep them forever, but they probably do.

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

#183

Post by _DeadFred_ » Mon, Sep 01, 2025, 6:28 PM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #159

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

Yes, having the incentive so that people create and release works is better than people not releasing the works. If people want to release free they can under out current system.

It's not lawless anarchy, it's just less of the works that copyright rewards (you get more of what you reward). So all those free books/music/movies that are made each year you still have, but you have less professionals taking a year off to go write their book. You have less decent funding for educations books. You have less sharing of knowledge and ideas, and I would say that makes society worse. If people were going to release it for free, they would be doing that today. People just don't work like that.

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

#184

Post by hakfoo » Mon, Sep 01, 2025, 9:00 PM UTC

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #183

fragmede wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 n…

Yes, having the incentive so that people create and release works is better than people not releasing the works. If people want to release free they can under out current system. It's not lawless anarchy, it's just less of the works that copyright rewards (you get more of what you reward). So all those free books/music/movies that are made each year you still have, but you have less professionals taking a year off to…

An alternative would be to provide broad grant opportunities to make it possible to have a lot of people exploring creative endeavours at modest scale.

Very few creative works require kazillion-dollar budget, and presumably many of the current ones are subject to technical improvements making them accessible (you could probably produce a film/series with "1995 broadcast TV" production quality with consumer equipment today).

Copyright enables the runaway success "I made enough selling records/prints of my painting/copies of my novel that none of my children for five generations have to work." But we only say that to a handful of people per year. A reasonable grant programme could say "I can spend a couple years touring the country playing small town ampitheatres, writing my dream novel, or trying to put together a movie with friends and still be able to eat at the end of the day", to thousands of creative types every year.

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

#185

Post by sebastiennight » Mon, Sep 01, 2025, 9:20 PM UTC

vadias wrote: post #135

sebastiennight wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wikipedia would probably have to deal with its internal politics and frequent-contributor culture before 2030. Wikipedia pages are not too shabby, in expectation. The Wikipedia meta on the other hand is something much less pleasant.

It seems like an unrelated issue to the topic at hand, though. I'd rather have difficult human interactions and trustworthy content VS no human interaction and hallucinated content.

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

#186

Post by stevage » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 5:10 AM UTC

ddingus wrote: post #181

stevage wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends very much on the discord. I'm in several discords which are excellent communities. They're really good places to hang out, get to know people interested in the same hobby, build a subculture etc. I haven't really tried one as a QA or knowledge sharing site, perhaps they're much less good at that.

They can be excellent, but only in the moment. The excellent communities I have been a part of can be searched. People can read it and learn. The Discord ones, unless they publish to a wiki or something, just don't exist.

Interesting point. The main one I'm part of started out as a wiki and is now both. The wiki is kind of the long term memory of the community, but it's so painful to have conversations there.

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

#187

Post by ryukoposting » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 2:00 PM UTC

rightbyte wrote: post #82

ryukoposting wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I have to use someone else's computer, or stand up a new one myself, I am reminded of this reality. If LLMs ruin the economic viability of corporate blogspam, that's a net positive for society in my eyes. One of the few net positives we can expect from the AI bubble, as far as I can tell. Of course, the new problem is that we have a bunch of LLMs trained on corporate blogspam, producing low-quality informati…

> If LLMs ruin the economic viability of corporate blogspam What would be the mechanism for that? If anything LLMs make SEO spam almost free to make.

By reducing click-through rate, as is the point of the article. If it isn't profitable, it doesn't matter if it's cheap to make.

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

#188

Post by fragmede » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 4:33 PM UTC

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #183

fragmede wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 n…

Yes, having the incentive so that people create and release works is better than people not releasing the works. If people want to release free they can under out current system. It's not lawless anarchy, it's just less of the works that copyright rewards (you get more of what you reward). So all those free books/music/movies that are made each year you still have, but you have less professionals taking a year off to…

Wikipedia, as well as untold unpaid hours that go into moderating all of the Stack Overflow family off sites, as well as Reddit and elsewhere, seems to say some people do.

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

#189

Post by egberts1 » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 6:27 PM UTC

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

#190

Post by nicbou » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 2:07 PM UTC

visarga wrote: post #177

nicbou wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where will the experience come from?

The AI model chats with the human, and the human uses AI generations in the real world. The real world provides feedback through the human back to AI.

Why would the human report back to the AI?