So now you need something like ChatGPT to cut through the noise?
I once employed a journalist to write about the pros and cons of wedding insurance. Just to give you a clue how long ago this was, it was a unique article at the time.
Many years years later, every article you will read about wedding insurance (there will be many thousands) is around 90% similar in style and content to the one I paid for.
I dare say you could use any other topic as an example, one thoroughly researched original and many thousand similar copies. I can't see how ChatGPT is not going to make this situation much worse?
It'll tell you what the pros and cons of wedding insurance are, and because eventually it'll have access to your calendar, it'll tailor that answers to the specifics of the fact that you're having a destination wedding during monsoon season in the area.
Once this kind of AI search becomes the default way we look for information, there won't be a point to creating SEO spam anymore. It'll create other problems, of course, but that's the way it goes with new technology.
I think this is probably true for some people, the same sort of person who sees something on Facebook and assumes that it's true. [1] But there are quite a lot of people for whom "according to whom?" is the next question after being told something factual. For them, I think search's job is to find relevant sources and get out of the way.
But I think even finding out is a long way away. The main thing that ChatGPT has nailed is glibness. It produces text that sounds authoritative, whether or not it's correct. And it's often incorrect. People may try ChatGPT search out of novelty or because it feels human. But if they depend on it and feel the real-world impact of a confidently wrong answer, they're going to treat it as a human that's untrustworthy. A blowhard, a liar, a fool. So I'm sure the major search players are going to be very cautious rolling out chat-like things. Google has spent decades building up consumer trust, and the don't need a zillion articles about people who a too-confident chat steered wrong.
[1] E.g., That men in white vans are kidnappers: vhttps://www.cnn.com/2019/12/04/tech/facebook-white-vans/inde...
Maybe that's good. There are glib liars on the net, and not all of them are ChatGPT. If people learn to be skeptical of fine-sounding content on the net, maybe they'll apply it to humans, too.
The most basic technique for estimating trust in an answer today is to check the sources, see who said it, why, who is agreeing with them, etc.
It some AI just spits out an answer without any references, you cannot do that. You either have to blindly trust the answer, which will be dangerous, or you'll have to blindly distrust the answer, at which point the AI will be useless.
Step 2: Sources? Check them. Do they exist at all? Do they say what the thing in question says they say?
Step 3: Check for other (non-cited) sources that confirm what the cited sources say. Check for other sources that dispute it.
Perfect example I found a while back: If you know Chinese or Japanese, ask ChatGPT for the stroke order of a certain character and watch how confidently it tells you how to draw a nonsensical scribble.
Even when you ask it for the stroke order of 一, it will tell you to draw a vertical line!
> With a person, you can slowly get to the bottom of it and develop a relationship.
With this kind of content (with most content on the internet, I'd argue), you really can't.
For now HN is a bastion of conversation across many countries and domains
What about creating new, relevant, interesting content that no-one will ever see because search no-longer exists? Will site owners continue to do it knowing AI will crawl it, and never send traffic? Probably....not?
How do LLMs of the future get better if website owners are no longer incentivized to create content?