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Comment by tippytippytango | Hacker News Reader

I think of it as the return to 10 blue links. It searches the web, finds stuff and summarizes it so I can decide which links to click. I ignore the narrative it constructs because it’s probably wrong. Which I forgive because it’s the hazmat suit for the internet I’ve always dreamed of.

It gets in the trenches, braves the cookie popups, email signups, inline ads and overly clever web design so I don’t have to. That’s enough to forgive its attempts to create research narratives. But, I hope we can figure out a way to train a heaping spoonful of humility into future models.

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> Which I forgive because it’s the hazmat suit for the internet I’ve always dreamed of.

You dreamed of this? Why not dream of a web where you don’t have to brave a veritable ocean of crap to get what you want? It may surprise you to learn such a web existed in the not too distant past.

Your dream wins in a competition of dream quality. But it’s not realistic.

Of course it is - like I said, this existed not really that long ago. Why do you think it's unrealistic? What's different now? Hint: this erosion started long before generative AI.

I don’t think I could say anything that hasn’t already been written about the causes of this problem. But, I’m glad we have some tools that make things more pleasant while we work it out. Also existence of said tools could provide an incentive to go back to that world. If a website is awful, people will browse it with bots and reader modes, a good incentive for people to make their websites not suck.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry at your apparently sincere belief that spending a trillion dollars to build a fleet of data centers that collectively use more power than Switzerland is a better solution to the enshittification of the web than... not doing that.

Agreed. Maybe we're moving toward a world where LLMs do all the searching, and "websites" just turn into data-only endpoints made for AI to consume. That'll have other big implications... Interesting times ahead.

What do the websites get out of that exchange?

therein lies the problem, and is why Google search didn't disrupt itself until ChatGPT came around.

Interesting times, for sure.

> and "websites" just turn into data-only endpoints made for AI to consume.

As is already the case with humans, that only serves users to the extent that the websites' veracity is within the intelligence's ability to verify — all the problems we've had with blogspam etc. have been due to the subset of SEO where people abuse* the mechanisms to promote what they happen to be selling at the expense of genuine content.

AI generated content is very good at seeming human, at seeming helpful. A "review website" which is all that, but with fake reviews that promote one brand over the others… a chain of such websites that link to each other to boost PageRank scores… which are then cross-linked with a huge number of social media bots…

Will lead to a lot of people who think they're making an informed choice, but who were lied to about everything from their cornflakes to their president.

* Tautologically, when it's not "abuse", SEO is only helping the search engine find the real content. I've seen places fail to perform any SEO including the legitimate kind.

a sincere question; how is

>A "review website" which is all that, but with fake reviews that promote one brand over the others… a chain of such websites that link to each other to boost PageRank scores… which are then cross-linked with a huge number of social media bots…"

functionally different than a majority of news outlets in the US parroting the exact same story, verbatim?

This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo

* please note, i am glibly linking that youtube video as a completely transparent example of what i am talking about. There are many (many) more examples. don't read into the content of the video so much, and just think about the implications.

I think the only difference is one of scale and cost.

AI is automation, and the existence of fully automated propaganda doesn't deny the existence of manual propaganda before it.

> This is extremely dangerous to our democracy

Indeed, the existing manual kind of propaganda is already dangerous. Always was.

Even so, manual propaganda can at least be fought by grass-roots movements, by humans being human. This is why freedom of speech is valuable.

Hard for real humans to counter an AI that can be even moderately conversational at a cost of just USD 0.99/day to fully saturate someone's experience of the world.

Interesting idea. AI can't look at ads, so in the long run ads on informational material might die any you're going back to paying outright. I like it.

The ads will just become either bulk misinformation or carefully worded data points that nudge the AI towards a more favourable view of the product being sold.

>AI can't look at ads

But ads can be put in AI.

Ads? Too obvious. Just always suggest sponsors' products when it's in context, and censor your competitors so they're never mentioned in responses.

And since AI is so great and you don't want to bother going to the website and clicking through a cookie banner, as another commenter mentioned, you just won't ever know the competitor exists

I guess that's technically an ad but it's so much more subversive that "ad" doesn't really do it justice. It'll be like product placement but worse somehow

>Ads? Too obvious.

Have you dealt with people paying for ads? They want your rapt attention, not some possibly subliminal suggestion. The "good" thing about chat AIs is that they can, with a little work, make it nearly impossible to block. You want to use it for free, you get ads.

Or the content goes away entirely, and the AI has nothing to search.

If you ignore the narrative and only look at the links then you're just describing a search engine with an AI summarization feature. You could just use Kagi and click "summarize" on the interesting results and then you don't have to worry that the sources themselves are hallucinations.

The summaries are probably still wrong but you do you, at least this would save you the step of reading bullshit and boiling a pond to generate a couple links

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