Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bradt.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 190 posts

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

#51

Post by cout »

CharlesW wrote: post #39
zb3 wrote: post #15

"Content" that is made for clicks is precisely what I'd want to disappear from the universe.

You'll still see it, but in laundered form, indistinguishable from non-placed content. We just won't be able to block it, because its origin will be hidden in the system. I think I'm going to miss the world where I could more easily trace the provenance of information.

I'm hoping the in the future there will be an LLM that can somehow map text back to its source. Current LLMs can kinda pull it off if you ask them, but afaik they aren't trained specially for this task.

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

#53

Post by pixl97 »

dmortin wrote: post #18
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…

> Luckily, there's tons of information on the web provided not by commercial entities but by volunteers The question is: is there content which is useful, but not provided by volunteers? We see more and more content behind paywalls, and it is a loss for many people who can't pay, because they won't be able to access the same content for free supported by ads. So the result is poor people are going to lose access to c…

As the world always has been. There is no human right that we must have free content supported by ads. And ad supported content has tons of its own issues.

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

#54

Post by pixl97 »

MangoToupe wrote: post #19
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…

Sadly, i think the future is more crap. It is simply too easy to generate text you think people might want to read (even if it is not).

The future is already here, and it's already crap. The web has been concentrated and filled with spam for a decade if not more.

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

#55

Post by pests »

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 recipe thing is because recipes are not copyrightable and many duplicates exist around the internet. The padded length makes the content unique / not penalized as a duplicate and as a secondary benefit avoids penalties for short content.

Not saying this is good, but it’s the reason behind it.

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

#56

Post by _factor »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #21
_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 t…

Local AI searching for me and filtering the ads is my future. You can speak for yourself.

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

#57

Post by api »

_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.

No it’s dependent on donations, either monetary or content. It’s not really free. It has an economic model. You can get away with one that minimal for Wikipedia because serving mostly static content is incredibly cheap.

Wikipedia can also only work because the upstream scientific and academic work to produce what gets posted there is largely subsidized. Wikipedia posters and maintainers do not have to pay the true cost of the content they are posting and very little of it is original.

This model won’t work for, say, journalism, which is very expensive. It won’t work for difficult polished software products. It won’t work for truly original artistic or literary work which takes tremendous amounts of time to produce. If, for example, authors can’t charge for a novel, then only people with trust funds or who are independently wealthy can afford to invest the time it takes to write a book.

The people pointing out how bad ad supported content is are proving my point, which was that there must be some kind of economic model. If there is no working one, content producers default to ads which leads to enshittification.

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

#58

Post by quectophoton »

VladStanimir wrote: post #29

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.

A fuzzy search engine with a better "semantic index"[1] than classic search engines, but the trade-off is that instead of returning links it returns a generated soup of words that are semantically close to your "query".

Mostly useful when you're only looking for the presence of words or terms in the output (including the presence of related words), rather than a coherent explanation with the quality of human-written text.

Sometimes the response is accidentally a truthful statement if interpreted as human text. The quality of a model is judged by how well-tuned they are for increasing the rate these accidents (for the lack of a better word).

[1]: EDIT: In the sense of "semantic web"; not in the sense of "actually understanding meaning" or any type of psychological sense.

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

#60

Post by Waterluvian »

If we can streamline the generalized information seeking process, that part of the web can dry up and disappear. And then we’d be left with more of the early era web, where you’re visiting websites not because you have a specific question to answer, but because you’re engaging in a social or interactive or otherwise deeper activity.

When it comes to “I have a specific question I need answering and then I’m done” the Web feels horribly clumsy and full of absolute garbage to wade through because they don’t want you to get the answer and go away. They want to milk your eyeballs for impressions and attention.

Post reply on HN