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As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall to boost publisher revenue

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Re: As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall to boost publisher revenue

#31
post #23

Is it only me who feels its incredibly unfair for publishers, that not only did big tech trained their LLMs on free content authored by these publishers, but it's also killing their future revenue. It's like stealing from someone and then making sure they never make money again.

It's kinda an obvious solution: If people do get used to paying for ChatGPT like AIs (big "if"), then AI providers will start paying from their revenue for fresh new quality content. This would be great (if you don't like ads).

Could somebody downvoting this explain why? Shouldn’t AI companies pay for the content they train their models on and summarize?

Re: As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall to boost publisher revenue

#32
post #23

Is it only me who feels its incredibly unfair for publishers, that not only did big tech trained their LLMs on free content authored by these publishers, but it's also killing their future revenue. It's like stealing from someone and then making sure they never make money again.

It's kinda an obvious solution: If people do get used to paying for ChatGPT like AIs (big "if"), then AI providers will start paying from their revenue for fresh new quality content. This would be great (if you don't like ads).

Ah, yes. Trickle-down economics again.

The trickle always turns out to be piss.

Re: As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall to boost publisher revenue

#33

Is it only me who feels its incredibly unfair for publishers, that not only did big tech trained their LLMs on free content authored by these publishers, but it's also killing their future revenue. It's like stealing from someone and then making sure they never make money again.

[deleted]

Re: As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall to boost publisher revenue

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not forget that online publishing was dead on its feet before ChatGPT ever showed up. What really killed their revenue was zero barrier to entry, combined with social media monopolizing the attention of users. Every publisher fighting for smaller and smaller shares of attention with more and more outlets, leading to a race to the bottom.

> What really killed their revenue was zero barrier to entry, combined with social media monopolizing the attention of users. Well, and intentional efforts by the major tech companies. Like Facebook lying about video stats to push "pivot to video". https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/well-this-puts-a-nail-in-t... "It turns out that the metrics that Facebook was using to measure engagement with news video were wrong, ma…

I think this had The web has led to 10x more content being published in the past 30 years than was published in all of human kind's history before. And that's not including short-form posts/comments/reviews/chats/etc on social media and forums and communities.

The amount of increased competition and commoditization of content is insane.

Re: As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall to boost publisher revenue

#35

Is it only me who feels its incredibly unfair for publishers, that not only did big tech trained their LLMs on free content authored by these publishers, but it's also killing their future revenue. It's like stealing from someone and then making sure they never make money again.

Most of them were so shit in the first place. Click bait and listicle upon listicle.

Re: As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall to boost publisher revenue

#36
post #2

Hopefully everyone's learned not to build their business on top of any Google product. Who knows when they'll cancel it.

Given the monopolies, what are the alternatives? For video content, Youtube is near monopoly with alternatives no better than Google. Same goes for mobile app, website (traffic via Google SE), offline store (search/reviews on maps)

Re: As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall to boost publisher revenue

#37
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What really killed their revenue was zero barrier to entry, combined with social media monopolizing the attention of users. Well, and intentional efforts by the major tech companies. Like Facebook lying about video stats to push "pivot to video". https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/well-this-puts-a-nail-in-t... "It turns out that the metrics that Facebook was using to measure engagement with news video were wrong, ma…

I think this had The web has led to 10x more content being published in the past 30 years than was published in all of human kind's history before. And that's not including short-form posts/comments/reviews/chats/etc on social media and forums and communities. The amount of increased competition and commoditization of content is insane.

> I think this had I worked at a newspaper for years, during the early days of social media (I made our Twitter account, even... and once dropped an accidental f-bomb on it). I remember the video push; it was a huge change to workflows, hiring patterns, technology needs, etc. It was built on lies and bad data, and media outlets really haven't recovered since.

Re: As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall to boost publisher revenue

#38
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kinda an obvious solution: If people do get used to paying for ChatGPT like AIs (big "if"), then AI providers will start paying from their revenue for fresh new quality content. This would be great (if you don't like ads).

Could somebody downvoting this explain why? Shouldn’t AI companies pay for the content they train their models on and summarize?

They should!

They won't.

Re: As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall to boost publisher revenue

#39

The exciting thing about search engines becoming useless as a traffic source, is that small publishers and blogs will eventually learn to adopt old technologies to gain traffic: web rings and links sections. This means if you like a blog, there could now be a way to organically discover other blogs similar to it, by following links across multiple sites.

Why would I publish if no one is ever looking for my content? To feed the LLMs? A lot of blogging is done to make money. If no one is searching anymore what is the revenue model? What you’re describing to me seems like passion blogging which already exists and I don’t think the financially interested are going that way if there’s no revenue model.

Re: As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall to boost publisher revenue

#40
post #18

Is it only me who feels its incredibly unfair for publishers, that not only did big tech trained their LLMs on free content authored by these publishers, but it's also killing their future revenue. It's like stealing from someone and then making sure they never make money again.

I'll be the voice of dissent. I don't think it's unfair. 1. I don't believe that training LLMs on publicly-available content is morally bad. Nor do I believe that it should be prosecutable as copyright infringement, any more than I believe that we should prosecute humans for studying books/art/essays/movies/etc and "downloading" that information into their brains. I'm not a big fan of IP law in general (I think it's…

> I don't believe that training LLMs on publicly-available content is morally bad. Nor do I believe that it should be prosecutable as copyright infringement, any more than I believe that we should prosecute humans for studying books/art/essays/movies/etc and "downloading" that information into their brains.

Apples to oranges. No amount of studying Rembrandt paintings would permit a human to paint 9 of them every minute.

Learning in humans and learning in LLMs are fundamentally so different, this analogy doesn't hold up to basic scrutiny.

> I only think it should be prosecutable to publish a near-exact copy of an existing work. Creating a tool/AI capable of reproducing a Lady Gaga song is not the same thing as actually reproducing and selling a Lady Gaga song.

Our legal system will decide that.

> Capitalist markets depend on constant competition and innovation.

Fuck capitalism and fuck the corporations playing it's game. I don't give a fuck if OpenAI makes a billion trillion dollars or not. I give a fuck whether or not people can continue earning money so they can not freeze to death.

If we want to embrace fully automated luxury communism, fine. If you want to automate millions of workers out of a job simply because you can, and pocket a fraction of their salaries each and be rich beyond belief while millions are consigned to starvation, you are everything wrong with our modern world and I hope those workers take vengeance on you.

> Pure artists are unaffected.

[ citation needed ]

> If you're a craftsperson, artist, writer, chef, programmer, etc who is creating for the love of creating, that's amazing. You are unaffected. Nothing under the sun can stop you from doing what you love.

You know what can? Losing your home.

> However, once you start trying to sell your creations to others, you are no longer purely an artist, you are a business, and you will be subject to the aforementioned rules of the market. Which, once again, I think are fair.

Justify to me how it's fair for a comic illustrator to lose market share to some asshole with a subscription to Midjourney. Justify to me why it's fair for copy writers to lose their jobs to ChatGPT because the results are fine. Is the broad-scale punishment for not learning to code that as software eats the world you just get to go die about it? Is that what our industry is? I thought we were in this to build a better, more efficient world, not to just privatize everyone's way to earn a living so our oligarchs could buy a 14th yacht.

This sucks.

All of #4 is trying to recast people trying desperately to cling to their mode of survival as rent seeking which is not only ethically disgusting, it's also dumb as hell.

You can recast this argument that it's only businesses losing out to AI, but it fucking isn't and you know that. It's workers who trained up for jobs and did exactly what they were told, and now their path to whatever meager way to scrape by is being automated so a handful of people who are already rich beyond fucking belief can be slightly richer.

Fuck this whole thing.

Literally the only people benefitting from AI are the rich assholes who are investing in it, who then get to scrape a tiny amount of money off of everything it writes, draws, and otherwise farts out for people who also transparently do not want to become skilled themselves. It robs workers of their ability to earn a living, it's widely regarded as shit to consume which makes the consumers experience worse and platforms already struggling to filter all the stupid garbage out have to now solve that too. Literally just a tax on everyone and everything on the internet, paid to people already unfathomably rich, because fuck you.

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