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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

#21

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #9

If AI kills the ad-funded business model of the internet, it will be one of the few good outcomes from AI. Good riddance.

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 this time.

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

#22

Post by dmortin »

api wrote: post #8

The previous model isn’t sustainable either. It leads to enshittification. Content can’t be free if you want it to be of any quality.

> 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.

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

#24

Post by _Algernon_ »

kleiba wrote: post #14
api wrote: post #8

The previous model isn’t sustainable either. It leads to enshittification. Content can’t be free if you want it to be of any quality.

I disagree, lots of volunteers have provided tons of high quality information since the inception of the web. Wikipedia is written entirely by people that didn't get any compensation for it. People answer questions on forums for free. Likewise, a lot of content produced with commercial interest in mind is total garbage (this is e.g. where the term "click-bait" originates from). There's always quality stuff and crap,…

Wikipedia continued existence is not dependent on ads or clicks.

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

#25

Post by jayd16 »

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…

The same amount of quality content might still exist even when the advantages to providing it dry up further.... But good luck finding in an ever growing sea of slop.

We might see a resurgence in curated content but I have my worries. Google gets worse and worse but also traditional curated sites have started simply repost what's trending on Twitter.

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

#26

Post by giantrobot »

djoldman wrote: post #11
add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who will pay for a subscription fee for journalism if people get trained to receive their information from an opaque tl;dr machine rather than primary sources?

Americans already, and increasingly, report getting a good chunk of their news from social media: https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/social-med... Folks who want more traditional journalism will pay for it.

> Folks who want more traditional journalism will pay for it.

If that is a tiny minority of people then there won't be a critical mass available to pay real journalists. No journalist can afford to work on long form investigative stories on minimum wage.

Even relatively straightforward legwork on a completely local story requires some driving around doing interviews. A whistleblower isn't going to just do a Zoom call with a journalist. A journalist can't get a first-hand account of an event from watching a webcam.

Good journalism isn't cheap. It doesn't have to be lavishly expensive but it's definitely not cheap. If only the New York Times can pay to hire journalists there won't be any meaningful journalism because they simply cannot scale to cover the world let alone the country.

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

#27

Post by watwut »

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 finding and joining communities that produce the websites like stack overflow.

It was nice while it lasted, but likely it will be something that existed only for one generation.

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

#28

Post by quectophoton »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #24
kleiba wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, lots of volunteers have provided tons of high quality information since the inception of the web. Wikipedia is written entirely by people that didn't get any compensation for it. People answer questions on forums for free. Likewise, a lot of content produced with commercial interest in mind is total garbage (this is e.g. where the term "click-bait" originates from). There's always quality stuff and crap,…

Wikipedia continued existence is not dependent on ads or clicks.

You just made me imagine if Wikipedia had titles like "Is the Heliocentric model wrong?" or "The third planet of the Solar System has a generic name! Learn everything about it", and half of it behind a paywall.

Or worse, if its content were distributed in short videos: "What to know what's that giant fire ball on the sky? Watch until the end!", with a like-and-subscribe animation covering the bottom 20% of the video every 5 seconds.

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

#29

Post by VladStanimir »

I use copilot for search, in one of two ways. The first is as an advanced search where i use the answer to gauge if it found what i am looking for then follow the links for details. The second is when i am looking for some information i once knew and i remember some details, like the title of a book i remember the plot points too, then when i find it i go do something with that information.

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

#30

Post by wongarsu »

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 nut will have an incentive to continue their blog, as will any university researcher. Press releases about new scientific discoveries will continue. Your personal blog might die, but lots of current "linkedin influencers" will start blogs to ensure LLMs think positively about their skills.

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. The web will be fine. It will change drastically with the death of click-based advertising, but I don't see a future where it disappears

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