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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

#61

Post by MangoToupe »

pixl97 wrote: post #54
MangoToupe wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. I'm saying we're about to see another few orders of magnitude of it.

Recently i've noticed google is even less effective than normal because it's turning up ad-filled pages that vaguely relate to the query but are clearly entirely generated by an LLM that also doesn't know what you're looking for.

So, we went from 95% crap to 100% crap over the course of about two years. There is obviously still stuff out there worth finding, but I can't imagine LLMs are going to get us there.

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

#62

Post by pixl97 »

8organicbits wrote: post #46

I'm curious what the overlap is between people who use AI tools and people who use ad blockers. Personally, I've been a leech on the ad-funded web my entire adult life; I always block ads. I haven't adopted AI tools. They only seem to work well for content that's readily discoverable anyway, otherwise the risk of hallucination has been far too high in my testing. If I care about the answer, why risk it? I believe the…

Eh, I block every ad I can and use AI. That said most of my AI searches are ones that are in depth and use thinking models.

With that said there are some queries AI does better than search engines. If I have something I'm trying to remember from the distant past with poorly refined definitions I can iterate to a solution much better than reading spam filled sites.

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

#63

Post by nicbou »

visarga wrote: post #38

The content is now created in private chats with AI, probably a trillion tokens per day flow between humans and LLMs. When new AI models are made they will incorporate some experience from past usage. This dataset might be the most valuable source for training AI and solving our tasks. So in case humans decide to abandon publishing, there is a new experience flywheel spinning up.

Where will the experience come from?

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

#64

Post by fabian2k »

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…

But AI is also going to kill some of your positive examples. Stack Overflow for example is in a steep decline, only a small fraction of questions are posted today compared to the peak. And the effects are more than financial, so even non-profit examples like forums would be hit.

If new people don't discover your site with useful user-created content, they won't contribute to it. You're also cutting off the pipeline for recruiting new users to your forum or Q&A site.

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

#66

Post by pixl97 »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #33
djoldman wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Social media doesn’t provide news. It provides regurgitation of actual news by journalists (who need to eat) and a lot of hot takes and commentary on the actual news by journalists. Take away the journalism and you’re left with Reddit hot air.

Eh, in that case most 'news' doesn't provide news but opinions and commentary.

Conversely a lot of 'news' in its raw form is posted to social media.

What you're talking about is long form journalism which is expensive and not popular with the 30 second soundbite population we've grown.

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

#67

Post by ryukoposting »

UltraSane wrote: post #59

The Web has become completely unusable without uBlock Origin.

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 information that only feels plausible because of its correct grammar and neutral voice.

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

#68

Post by bostik »

_factor wrote: post #56
add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just wait until the foundational models are all fed with increasing amounts of ads. After all, it will be the one remaining source of ongoing, if not human generated, at least human curated content. Ad exchanges will offer firehoses for a hefty fee, and the advertisers themselves will pay the exchanges extra to push their ads more frequently in there to gain a higher share of repetition.

The AI companies in turn will hoover in the deluge because they need something new to train their models with, embedding the ad copy deeply into the model itself.

Your local AI of the future will be just as ad-riddled.

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

#69

Post by gmueckl »

Waterluvian wrote: post #60

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…

Social interactions are subject to network wffects and have all but captured by social media companies. This part of the web is dead and won't come back.
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