Something that stuck out on this was the notion of the LLMs as models of human knowledge, and the notion that we could "see the gaps". There's been an interesting debate* in journalism over the concept of neutrality - what it means to "just present the facts," and whether that's actually a useful service, and what are actual facts, and how do you define a fact (it's gotten rather epistemological), and that's just for things that actually happened in the real world. I think what's not taken into account here is how much of the world is not able to be summarized into One Universal Truth - how much of what we look for is actually the preference of the author ("what are the best new albums this year?" "how do I cook chicken?"), or an intellectual synthesis of a subject (basically anything written by that acoup guy), or just some entertainment or random digression on a topic. I think this is part of the crux of the argument behind the artists vs LLMs debate (you know, aside from all the economic exploitation) - even the act of writing a summary is a creative act when performed by a human that generates something new, whereas an LLM is, as far as we can tell from both the mechanics and the actual output, a remix of existing content. I think our appetite for the latter is less than we think it is.
I don't fundamentally think that Cloudflare's view here is _wrong_ - by and large, when I google what internal temperature to cook pork to so I don't die, I'm not looking for an opinion or someone's life story - but I think I'm much more interested in how we create the weird niches that create the "knowledge" for the blender. Cloudflare alludes to it with the talk about Reddit and whatnot, but I'd love to know what the plan is to actually create and nurture those communities where people can really get weird into whatever topic they're interested in. Right now we're all sort of just ghettoized into various Facebook communities or whatever, but recreating an actual vibrant communal internet where people can find their weirdo subcultures and actually negotiate on some kind of reasonable footing with the LLM scrapers (who were the social network people, who were the search engine people, who have always been the ad people) would be a genuine improvement to the internet.
* read "hellish swamp diving affair"