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AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

arstechnica.com

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Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#651

Post by tim333 »

rurp wrote: post #642
dahart wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> am I standing at the gates of hell in a line that includes Tower Records and Blockbuster? Maybe, but there’s a big difference - Netflix doesn’t rely on Blockbuster, and Spotify doesn’t need Tower Records. Google AI results do need your articles, and it returns the content of them to your readers without sending you the traffic. And Google is just trying to fend off ChatGPT and Meta and others, who absolutely will,…

The recent taking of people's content for AI training might be the most blatant example of rich well connected people having different rules in our society that I've ever witnessed. If a random person copied mass amounts of IP and resold it in a different product with zero attribution or compensation, and that product directly undercut the business of those same IP producers, they would be thrown in jail. Normal peop…

The trouble is what the LLMs do is effectively read a lot of articles and then produce a summary. What human writers do is quite similar - read a lot of stuff and then write their own article. It's quite hard to block what people have usually done because it's done by an LLM rather than a human. I mean even if you want to ban LLMs, if an article goes up how can you tell if it's 100% written by a human or the human used an LLM?

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#652

Post by lazide »

carlosjobim wrote: post #623
lazide wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a technology platform point someone at a specific venue and then lying about a ton of details (including costs) is not that situation at all. Frankly, most people would be angry in that situation .

If somebody is a person who demands to get something for nothing from complete strangers and then get mad when they don't - well that person has very low value as a human until they can find enlightenment. These guys are definitely not in the majority of people. There are reasonable reactions in this situation: Either be grateful that you got something for free, or accept that you were misinformed and pay what is ask…

This whole thread has a weird ‘ChatGPT is not at fault for passing off flat out bullshit as truth’ vibe. Wtf?

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#653

Post by _DeadFred_ »

throwaway290 wrote: post #287
tmountain wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is following the drug dealer model. “The first dose is free!” Given the cost incurred, lots of dark patterns will be coming for sure.

Yep. Dark patterns you can see are not that dark by comparison, we will need another word for coming dark patterns disguised in llm responses

We need to move LLMs into libraries. They are already our local repository of knowledge and make the most sense to be the hosts/arbiters of it. Not dystopian tech companies whose main profits come from dark patterns. I get AIs for companies being provided by businesses, but for the average person coming from libraries just make so much more sense and would be the natural continuation/extension if we had a healthy/sane society.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#654

Post by dingnuts »

afavour wrote: post #633
kylebenzle wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the old days people would pay to host video content and now people pay Google to watch other people's hosted video content. It's funny how easily people can be brainwashed into giving companies money for nothing. I'm still waiting for the first company to start selling bottled air next!

You're talking as if video content has no intrinsic value of its own. Of course it does. "Now people pay cable companies to watch TV shows. It's funny how easily people can be brainwashed into giving companies money for nothing."

I mean, when it launched the point of paying for cable instead of getting TV for free via broadcast was no ads

Now cable has ads and costs a fortune; I didn't know anyone who has it. I do still watch a little broadcast though, the price is right even if the programming isn't great.

If there's nothing on I turn it off and look at my phone

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#655

Post by p0w3n3d »

For some (unknown to me) reason the web pages that used to sustain themselves on very small, quiet ads that were shown on sides of the page, now require full page, annoying, shouting, focus stealing, one-minimal-x-closing-after-few-seconds ADS. Therefore AI summary is a panaceum for this sickness.

However I understand that pages that have articles written need money to pay for those articles. For some another (unknown to me) reason reading something by AI and summarizing it is not a copyright violation, but the work that has been done to prepare the valuable content (article) will not be rewarded, therefore extrapolating it to future I can see that the 'dead internet theory' is coming right up.

People will stop writing because they don't get rewarded, so AIs will start speaking and discussing with other AIs and the entropy might lower (as in the amount of information present in the internet) leaving us to AI generated content only.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#657

Post by ceejayoz »

brokencode wrote: post #589
Nicook wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its encrapification is real. It has been slow though, mostly affecting niche interests and smaller creators. And the ad experience has definitely gotten worse, but adblockers help. Try using youtube without and adblocker.

I pay for the subscription and don’t see any ads. It comes with YouTube Music. It’s great.

None of your videos have in-video ads? "This segment is sponsored by NordVPN!" style stuff?

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#658

Post by shortrounddev2 »

dahart wrote: post #584
DanielKehoe wrote: post #532

I've written high-quality technical how-tos for many years, starting with PC World magazine articles (supported by ads), a book that helped people learn Ruby on Rails (sales via Amazon), and more recently a website that's good for queries like "uninstall Homebrew" or "xcode command line tools" (sponsored by a carefully chosen advertiser). With both a (small) financial incentive and the intrinsic satisfaction of doing…

> am I standing at the gates of hell in a line that includes Tower Records and Blockbuster? Maybe, but there’s a big difference - Netflix doesn’t rely on Blockbuster, and Spotify doesn’t need Tower Records. Google AI results do need your articles, and it returns the content of them to your readers without sending you the traffic. And Google is just trying to fend off ChatGPT and Meta and others, who absolutely will,…

We are heading for an internet Kessler syndrome, where the destruction of human-written text will cause LLMs to train off of dirty LLM-written text, causing the further destruction of human-written text and the further degradation of LLM-written text. Eventually LLMs will be useless and human-written text will not be discoverable. I pray that the answer is that people seek out spaces which are not monetized (such as the gemini protocol) so that there's no economic incentive to waste computing resources on it.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#659

Post by carlosjobim »

lazide wrote: post #652
carlosjobim wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If somebody is a person who demands to get something for nothing from complete strangers and then get mad when they don't - well that person has very low value as a human until they can find enlightenment. These guys are definitely not in the majority of people. There are reasonable reactions in this situation: Either be grateful that you got something for free, or accept that you were misinformed and pay what is ask…

This whole thread has a weird ‘ChatGPT is not at fault for passing off flat out bullshit as truth’ vibe. Wtf?

It is at fault for lying, but only a base person would go out in the real world and try to make other people responsible for the lies they were told by a robot.

A base and egocentric person.

Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

#660

Post by zahlman »

quectophoton wrote: post #467
littlecranky67 wrote: post #233

Here is the experience when clicking a link on mobile: * Page loads, immediately when I start scrolling and reading a popup trying to get tracking consent * If I am lucky, there is a "necessary only". When unlucky I need to click "manage options" and first see how to reject all tracking * There is a sticky banner on top/bottom taking 20-30% of my screen upselling me a subscription or asking me to install their app. U…

For those who want to experience it: https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/ The only inaccurate thing of that meme page is that you only need to uncheck 5 cookie "partners", when in reality there should be at least a few hundred.

The web page source seems full of Easter eggs and I'm not sure how intentional that is. The generic labels and descriptions of content as "useless" make sense, but then I noticed things like multiple redundant tags and this script comment:

  src: "https://js.monitor.azure.com/scripts/b/ai.2.min.js", // The SDK URL Source
  crossOrigin: "anonymous", // When supplied this will add the provided value as the cross origin attribute on the script tag
which is part of configuration for some minified/obfuscated driver....

Anyway, is it really not even possible to set up things like NoScript and uBlock Origin on mobile?

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