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Comment by Denzel | Hacker News Reader

All these conversations have one glaring omission. As it stands right now, ChatGPT is a net negative on the ecosystem it exists in. What does that mean?

ChatGPT extracts value from the ecosystem by hoovering up primary sources to provide answers, but what value does ChatGPT give back to these primary sources? What incentivizes content creators to continue producing for ChatGPT?

Right now, nothing.

ChatGPT (or its descendants) must solve this problem to be economically viable.

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They don't have to. Ad & search dependent companies need to answer for themselves how to handle the coming disruptions. As an analogy, Kodak was a disruption opportunity, not a problem, for apple and flickr.

Yes, maybe some content dries up -- no more stock photo sites -- but entirely unclear how important and they can wait to see how zombie companies adjust. Ex: ChatGPT encourages us to put more api docs online, not less.

Google has already taken a lot of heat from increasingly keeping people on the search results page rather than sending them to the content providers. Chat interfaces are going to take that problem to the next level since they not only present someone else’s content but do it without linking to them.

At some point that destroys the web as sites move behind paywalls. Google or Facebook giving you less revenue is still a lot better than receiving nothing.

In some cases, that’s fine (AWS doesn’t mind you learning how to call their metered APIs on someone else’s site) but there are a ton of people who aren’t going to create things if they can’t make rent. Beyond the obvious industries like journalism, consider how many people are going to create open source software or write about it when they won’t get credit or even know if another human ever read it.

That's not really a problem for the adoption or economic viability of ChatGPT, though. At some point, it hoovers up all the knowledge of the Internet, encodes it into its model, and then - the model just stagnates as content providers stop providing content. That's not a big deal for it - it'll continue to be the primary place people go for answers even when the source material has thrown in the towel and decided they don't want to play, just like how people continue to go to Google even though webspam & SEO have long since made the web a place where you don't bother to contribute.

Eventually the ecosystem might collapse when people realize they get more accurate, up-to-date information from sources other than ChatGPT. But considering that ChatGPT's answers are already more "truthy" than "truth", accuracy does not seem to be a top priority for most information-seekers.

Once all competing language models and providers have hoovered up all the existing knowledge and can do similar things with it then margins for that part of the story will shrink rapidly.

It will all be about access to new information, access to customers (such as advertisers) and access to users attracted to other aspects of the platform as well.

I think producers of new content and their distribution platforms will have a lot of leverage. Youtube, Facebook, TikTok, Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, traditional publishers and perhaps even smaller ones such as Substack and Medium, are all gatekeepers of new original content.

I think Google is best positioned to make the economics work. Unfortunately, they don't appear to have the best management team right now. They keep losing focus. Perhaps the danger of their core business getting disrupted will focus their minds.

The content is a bootstrapping tool. Once the language model gets critical mass it gets further training data from its interactions with users, which are private to the language model's developer. It's like how Google Search bootstrapped off the content of the web, but the real reason you can't replicate Search today is all the information about who is searching for what, which links they actually click on, and how long they spend on the page.

They don't need to solve that problem. Lots of things cannabilise on others without needing to pay them back to be viable. Wikipedia is really just a collection of sources, summarized. It owes nothing to the authors of the source material and does not seek to redress the balance. Google is a sophisticated filter for sources, it doesn't need to pay anything back to them to provide value for the searcher. Same with chatgpt, it filters and transforms its source material but owes nothing in return. News will still be published, data will still be generated at scale.

> Wikipedia is really just a collection of sources, summarized. It owes nothing to the authors of the source material

And yet it provides references and attribution where possible most of the time.

...which do nothing for the websites that had the original content.

This is the opposite of true in my experience: if you run a content-heavy site, Wikipedia is going to be one of your top traffic sources — especially for time on site since the visitors who arrive tend to have a very low bounce rate.

Look at my profile, I own content-heavy sites and have for many years. I can show you logs - Wikipedia does virtually nothing. And the content of my sites has been regurgitated by Wikipedia thousands of times.

It maybe doesn't drive much traffic directly from Wikipedia, but you might have a higher SEO rank when people search in google for whatever your sites are about. Thanks to the links from Wikipedia.

Which are tagged with ugc or nofollow :DD. You have to realise that the current model is based on outrageous theft of people's hard work.

If you view the source of any Wikipedia page, they purposefully include "nofollow" tags, so Google ignores these links!

"nofollow" or not, it does not mean that search engines do not take that into account. They maybe don't scan the linked site there and then, but I would be surprised if they did not take note of that someone linked to it.

All I can say is that my experience has been very different. Wikipedia editors have been very good at citing our primary sources.

I mean my sites are cited over a thousand of times, but it only makes sense: a tiny percentage of visitors who view the Wikipedia page even reach the bottom of the page and then click on one of the links. And there is no benefit in terms of Google rankings.

Are you concerned about all your data being scraped and getting directed for references by chat bots?

How would that affect your monetization?

Yes, it's pretty much game over for free-to-access factual content sites. I've been focusing heavily on AI in recent years, so I saw it coming. It's been a death by a thousand cuts, with Google incorporating long snippets, etc.

The majority of content on the web is just rehashes/remixes/duplication of existing content. The percentage of unique, original content is small in comparison, imo.

Ie there may be 10-100 news articles about an event all with the same source. Youtube has tonnes of duplication/"reaction" videos where the unique content portion is very minimal.

> but what value does ChatGPT give back to these primary sources?

The dissemination of their thoughts and ideas.

With no attribution or way to discover the source. That's great for propagandists but maybe less great for everyone else.

Maybe the next generation of LLMs will have more favorable things to say about you if you have published interesting things on your blog. Which in turn would be visible to any employer looking you up in that LLM.

When a real person tells you something in person today, how do you know the original source?

You can ask where they heard it from.

Where did you hear about the economic benefits of Georgeism from? Do you appropriately attribute sources if you mention it to someone?

I know all sorts of things, many in great detail and with high confidence, that I would be very challenged to appropriately source and credit the originator/inventor. I suspect most people are similar.

Substitute “memory safety of Rust” or “environmental concerns with lithium batteries” depending on your interests

Well that person has reputation/credibility and some reasoning they apply, before passing on the information. Just because you read that the world is flat are you gonna start telling people that? Now let's be clear, some people do mindlessly regurgitate nonsense, but their creditability is typically very low, so you ignore them. There is a grey area where some things aren't clear, but on the basics people of average intelligence are fairly robust, I'm not convinced chatGPT is.

Unattributed thoughts I'm not convinced that is giving back, further I do think this is susceptible to attack, how many flat earth articles do I need to pump out for chatGPT to consume and come to very wrong conclusions?

Perhaps there are some mitigations for this I'm unaware of?

The preview is over, so I can’t link it, but Kagi had GPT3 assisted search, where the model would explain something and provide links and references. They are planning to integrate it into their search, can’t wait, it seemed useful.

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