Comment by kweingar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kweingar | Hacker News Reader

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Mass adoption of AI chatbots seems self-defeating. Who is publishing the information that the chatbot uses to give you 1 concise answer? Depending on the query, it could be Wikipedia or an academic journal, but for many topics the chatbot would need to draw from for-profit ad-supported websites.

The chatbot user benefits from having one great answer pulled from the best sources (and no ads), but the websites that underpin the chatbot’s usefulness will no longer have monetizable traffic. In the long-term this disincentivizes people from publishing online, which would reduce the quality of not only the chatbot output but the web as a whole.

Imagine local news being totally unavailable online by any means because the rise of chatbots means that nobody can make any money writing about local news.

Edit: A first reaction to this might be “have the chatbot show ads and share revenue with its sources.” This probably wouldn’t solve the problem. Journalism (and many kinds of writing) would be a less attractive career if your readership consists mostly of people getting second-hand summaries via chatbot. If chatbots do become popular, I worry about a bleak future where journalism and other writing is replaced by an anonymous blob of underpaid foreign laborers whose only job is to shovel up-to-date facts into chatbot databases.

tldr: It's not my problem

That's a valid perspective, but remember that the quality degraded when we started having paid memberships and ads to websites.

What's a news outlet worth paying for? who actually pays for content online? who knows how to block all ads and didn't do that?

That business model really proved to be worthless, it dragged the quality down with more desperate pay-to-read prompts. Nobody will miss this and we will have again people with real world experience writing knowledge or opinions in their free time. So it goes back to that, quoting scientific papers, books and actual reputable and knowledgeable people writing blog posts.

With the news being mostly propaganda, I don't know what to quote there and how many outlets still have a reputation.

I personally write during my free time in my personal ad-free minimalistic website and have list of blogs I track for contents.

Things changes, waiting for full time "authors" to come up with a profitable plan to just progress is also not an option.

> What's a news outlet worth paying for? who actually pays for content online? who knows how to block all ads and didn't do that?

I don’t know how far we’re going to get if we not only expect volunteers to supply everything the model needs in order to be up-to-date and useful, but also expect access to the model to be free of charge and ad-free.

That’s a pretty massive amount of man-hours, compute, and R&D effort to expend for literally no return on investment.

> we will have again people with real world experience writing knowledge or opinions in their free time

We already have this now in the form of a bored knowledge-worker blogger class. It’s not nearly enough to provide up-to-date info for a chatbot, and I don’t see how the implosion of journalism as an industry will lead to more people spending their free time writing for no pay. If anything, it will drive more knowledge behind pay walls like Substack, which will be inaccessible to the chatbot anyway.

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