Google Declaring War on the Web
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tante.cc
Tax excess tech profits that derive from the efforts of others and use the proceeds to fund living artists.
Vaguely analogous to levies on blank cassettes that went to offset piracy. Give the money directly to actual artists, not labels/publishers, though.
The cassette reference was a tax on consumers to send money upward. What you’re describing is the complete inverse.
Needs some institution with many geek supporters and or large tools, like Wikipedia or EFF to wage a campaign of scanning the web for materials used without permission and then loading the courts with cases of probable non-consensual usage. May not change billionaire behaviour but perhaps will change consumer behaviour.
Expedition 33 nailed music, aesthetics, and narrative, and I am glad that they took a diffusion model for what it is, not for what marketing wants you to believe. although the game itself would benefit from one or two months dedicated exclusively to optimization, it is THE reference of how generative technology can be used - purely internally, to ideate and iterate at the pace of your taste and a bunch of H200s. we are aware of that process detail purely because they slipped in one place and got briefly "owned" by Twitter.
1: https://www.ign.com/articles/larian-ceo-responds-to-divinity...
2: https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/clair-obscur-expedition-33-ai...
So when an artist looks at AI, it's unlikely to be as a tool that will build a whole piece: Insufficient control, and currently nowhere near good enough to do more than occupy space, like a little painting in a hallway or in a hotel room. But it is something that can be used to better spend the budget in places where it'll be more impactful for the quality of the piece. Not unlike how CGI is often used today in places where it wouldn't have been 20 years ago, and it's aiming to be invisible. Not because the shot was impossible, but because it's cheaper.
Treating AI in art as a moral thing will end up being like the people being against synthesizers in the 80s: It's a viable creative choice for some things, but ultimately not a good expectation for industry direction. Ultimately the vast majority of art is commercial, and we'll see shortcuts being taken for budgetary reasons. Nobody is manually animating every detail of every mesh in a game like this was Toy Story. And even though doing that would produce more work for artists, it wouldn't make better games, really. And we'd sure have far fewer of them.
On the other hand, with the internet inevitably becoming swamped by AI generated content, I can definitely see a de-digitalization of art moving into offline spaces. At least for independent work, you don’t necessarily need mass appeal or exposure, but rather access to individuals and small groups with an actual willingness to pay for art.
have already largely vanished
Why not? Would you also argue that most of the works by painters like Rembrandt, such as The Night Watch aren't art - just because they were contracted to make it? Does book cover art stop being art the second a book's title gets placed on it?
And sure, plenty of corporate work is boring and soulless. But the worst of that switched to spending 10 minutes with clipart and PowerPoint decades ago: if you were still hiring an artist, you cared at least a little about what the result looked like, which means there was at least some space for artistic vision.
> People shouldn't need to degrade themselves for money, we can have a system where people are generally taken care of
We should, but we don't. What's your proposal for letting artists grow and mature while paying their bills in the meantime? AI is currently killing their "degrading" jobs, do you think forcing them to take a shift at McDonald's is going to help their artistic career advance?
Alas, only when taking a shirt at MacDonald's becomes equaly obsolete, and it has been made apparent that any task or job humans do could also be done by technology, only then will it help the artist in your example with their artistic career.
It is remarkable, when you think about it, that artists seem to be the first people that are made to feel obsolete. There are plenty of jobs that could have been fully automated, steampunk-style, from the moment the industrial revolution took hold.
Maybe it becomes slightly less remarkable if you take into consideration that collecting/investing in art has always been an integral part of people of considerable wealth. Even if they did not care much for it, didn't understand any of it, or were only motivated for the money,... regardless of your field, being very wealthy forced you into developing at least some connection with art. The billionaires in tech all seem to be an exception to this rule, and their lack of any connection with art, may have made them feel that art is easiest of all to replace using generative software. And for them, this was probably true - and they lack the connection to have developed any taste or eye for quality in art, so they're easily pleased with something a computer makes for them.
If only the artists are actively excluded though, people in other jobs will never fully appreciate that given the effort, their job is just as easily automated. Once people in every possible job have been made to feel just as obsolete, the world may be ready to order itself based on individual preference and mutual appreciation of whatever it is you choose to do 'for a living'.
So instead of being paid a small amount of money for something that they spend hours on, they create 10 artworks in that same number of hours and earn 10x what they did previously.
And how they create demand for this? AI "enthusiasts" are enthusiastic about it exactly because they feel they don't need to outsource things to meatbags.
Good art requires good patronage and institutional support in turn. No one will have time to produce the next Mona Lisa if they're barely able to make end's meet working a slavish factory job. That's doubly true when the vocations that supported artists—either antiquated, modern, or contemporary (painter, typesetter, graphic designer, etc.)—vanish because AI can do "just about as well."
Art isn't just a divine presence gracing the souls of those deemed most worthy, it's a collection of skills and knowledge that must be built by community over decades of struggle.
On top of the generation of slop, AI is removing some of the final protections that hold these pillars up. That is what should keep us up at night.
Sure, but how are you going to find it?
I've got a print of some digital work by Simon Stålenhag on my wall. I discovered his work because I was was mesmerized by an image of his on some wallpaper sharing website, ages ago.
These days that kind of website is 99% AI slop. AI has made it impossible to stumble across art: either you consume what the big corporations are feeding the masses, or you have to already be part of a strongly-curated niche art community.
This does feel like a setup for a no true scotsman argument. What would your definition of 'actually enjoying art' be that would not exclude someone enjoying art that uses generative AI by definition?
Recognition and gratitude keeps me going. Money pays the bills, but if that was the only concern, I'd still be a software developer.
Anonymously feeding the slop machine is nothing like it.
This content must not be used for training or refining generative AI. If it is, rest assured that if and when the regulatory environment around training data shifts in any country where we have legal standing, we will pursue legal action.
Maybe even with a class action element: any lawsuit stemming from a violation of this license shall cover all other violations at the same time.
1. One that loves AI + Big Business + very fast Innovation and disruption
2. One that loves Artisanal work + Small Business + slower but more sustainable innovation
I personally prefer living in #2, but I can totally see both "societies" continuing to exist and develop in their own ways.
Of course there is always the reality that different societies always end up interacting and affecting eachother.
In the long term, probably not.
AI lacks the ability to identify greatness because it's trained on the output of the average person who also lacks this ability.
It's going to create a new elite class of people who have good taste and the masses who have bad taste. Many current elites will end up with the masses. They may retain their wealth on paper, but it will be a cheap, low-quality existence but they will be convinced it's luxury.
I think eventually, everyone will get what they want, but not everyone will get what they need.
This is why I advocate for people to spend some time outside in nature and try to do something different once in a while because it's so easy to get stuck in a really small bubble. Especially when you exist in an entirely man-made, soon-to-be fully AI-controlled environment. You may lose your ability to have novel thoughts.
Some people are already there but the range of thoughts seems to be narrowing.
My biggest fear is being caught up in such group for financial reasons and trying to navigate some kind of linguistic and conceptual minefield everyday. I already encountered a situation like that twice in my career. Very tense environment. Feels like you're in a brainwashing cult and have to pretend to be one of them; it's really hard to pretend to be ignorant of certain kinds of information when you don't know what the full range of forbidden ideas is. Saying the wrong things got me fired both times; differences in our mental conditioning created very subtle tension/discomfort between me and management.
They will tolerate people who are 'running a simpler program' than themselves but they will absolutely not tolerate someone with a broader programming. Hence you have to pretend to be narrow-minded which is hard to maintain. This is why I like remote work.
The only things that DO hurt SMBs across the board are things like paying for private health insurance and retirement plans. Two core things every worker needs but only massive corporations can truly provide.
It's why things like medicare for all and universal childcare are so popular among workers, also why things like corporate welfare are so disgusting.
Speaking as someone who works in a small company that designs and manufactures embedded devices, I can tell you that many of the 'minor' regulations which are not supposed to burden small businesses actually do. My (single) biggest annoyance is the conflict minerals reporting requirements which were supposed to apply to very large companies, but have been 'passed down' to smaller suppliers (as anyone with half a brain would have expected). There are many other KYC, CBP, and other regulations which have substantial impacts as well.
"Big business," in the sense it exists today, is itself a detriment to our society as a whole, and can only exist because of the utter destruction of antitrust that happened under Reagan. Without that, much more of our current society would look like #2, with or without LLMs.
The tech world is obsessed with moving fast and breaking things, and you can't just do the same thing forever and expect it to always work.
It turns out that while these are all truisms, nobody wants to fix them. Developed countries are okay passing pigovian taxes, to a limited extent, to help fix these problems. Developing countries are even less interested in fixing these problems. It turns out that austerity is incredibly unpopular. Everyone wants to tell other people not to do the things they don't like but nobody wants to listen to what other people tell them not to do.
Just a reminder that Europe colonized Asia, Africa, and the Americas in the search for spices. Later on the interest changed to tea. Literally the only thing that Europe wanted was better tasting food and drink (initially at least.) By the time the potato had become widespread, they could have had enough calories to feed the continent, and yet the desire for flavor is what lead to untold misery for hundreds of years for millions of people.
We need to be realistic about what works and what doesn't. Austerity never wins.
It’s like saying robbing banks for a living isn’t sustainable and working at a bank is. That’s not exactly a stretch.
Regardless, I acknowledged the general issue. However I pointed out that doing so was not a technical necessity. If you base your worldview or actions around X implying Y but then it turns out that actually Y was merely a matter of convenience you're probably going to arrive at a wrong conclusion.
There's also the issue where you're emphatically calling it stealing without providing a clear criteria. The legal system as a whole has yet to conclusively resolve the various piracy accusations. The legality of consuming publicly available content remains quite controversial.
There’s a reason Reddit is making millions of dollars letting these companies mine their human generated content. You think OpenAI or anyone else would pay for that if they could just cyclically train on AI generated content???
I said nothing about that. Good synthetic data does not (typically) involve ML algorithms. Although that might be changing.
I'll politely suggest that you go read the literature before engaging further.
Reddit, Twitter, and similar are valuable because the data covers current events. Their content makes up a reasonably comprehensive timeline of the world at large. You don't need that to train a barebones functional model but it's certainly useful in order to train a knowledgeable one. Regardless, if they're charging for access it clearly isn't piracy so it doesn't seem like your original objection would hold any water in that case.
Which commercial AI vendor has not stolen any content when creating their models? I’ll wait.
Which commercial AI vendor has created their models exclusively training on datasets created and created by other AI?
> Regardless, if they're charging for access it clearly isn't piracy so it doesn't seem like your original objection would hold any water in that case.
Given that they were previously violating the site’s terms of service when scraping the content: yes, they were absolutely stealing.
This is an analogy, obviously. Ikea has been innovative, and it does provide a useful service for people; if you just moved into a new place and need to furnish it as quickly and cheaply as possible, then off to Ikea you go. But it's still shitty furniture.
My furniture doesn't look great, sometimes. My joinery is not perfect. I don't have all the tools I need to do this properly. But the design goals for each are what we need to live our lives. My wife has a stupidly high bed in her office, piled mattresses so she can spread them out if we have many visitors. I made her a bedside table that matches that height. It's a complete one-off; I won't make another that size, and we probably won't need it if we move house.
My point is that we already have this split in other areas of our lives; the Vimes Theory of boots (rich people buy boots that last generations, poor people buy boots every year). Ikea furniture. Buying a mass-produced crockery from a big store, or buying hand-made crockery from a local potter. We're just adding information and code to this split.
If you do, then the unglued joints decay and it becomes wobblier and wobblier.
I think Ikea is great. Sure, the cheaper stuff consists of veneered particle board at best. But they (at least used to) use thicker veneers, often include relatively high quality hardware, and make some products that are just completely solid (stainless kitchen gear, simple but serviceable pine furniture, standing desks, some bedding).
What gets to me are places like West Elm and similar companies. Mid-Century design, but it's the same veneered particle board as the much cheaper Ikea stuff, and costs far more.
But somewhat ironically their steel kitchenware is competitive with catering equipment. It may not be as well designed for maximum functionality and storage packing efficiency, but costs about the same or even less than comparable Vogue gear. Over the years I've spotted an increasing number of street food vendors using Ikea bowls and trays, so the price and availability advantage appears to be real.
The cubical storage units are pretty solid and practical.
On the other hand the IKEA wardrobe I have is falling to pieces.
> What gets to me are places like West Elm and similar companies. Mid-Century design, but it's the same veneered particle board as the much cheaper Ikea stuff, and costs far more.
Somewhat similar to what I was thinking. In the UK John Lewis sell (or used to) sell bookshelves very similar to a Billy (in construction and appearance depending on the veneer) at three times the price.
And, to extend the analogy, I'm sure Google's AI results will be perfectly serviceable for some people in some situations.
But for my wife's odd, non-standard, situation I had to build it myself. And for some people's odd, non-standard, situation they'll need to construct (or find) a bespoke information service that matches their needs. That will probably cost them more and the joinery won't be as neat.
Also my expensive boots didn’t last a lifetime, last time I went to get them resoled I was told they had deteriorated too far.
Please don't misunderstand: my point is not "AI is good."
It is problematic in many ways. My point is that I think the "AI versus actually doing cool human-crafted stuff" split is... a misguided, maybe even harmful, mental model of a more complicated reality.
Personally, I don’t believe that would be the case. Jevon’s paradox mixed with the natural tendency to exploit others. One could argue that technology -in general- didn’t really save people time by itself, it’s regulation - a social construct, and I am counting both cultural and legal enforcement of them as well- that did. Just look at how workers in countries without your European-style protections fare. Wikipedia’s article on the Chinese 996 [1] has a nice map for deaths due to long working hours by country, notice the dominant colours for each quadrant of this (projected) globe.
Pre industrialised societies’ labourers were limited by daylight and travel distance. The modern availability and abundance of artificial lighting, mechanised transportation, and telecommunication means their grand kids are expected to -and often do- toil every waking moment.
But the way society is structured now? We still live in feudalism, just uplifted to modern levels of ”comfort” (if you take of your western glasses and look at the whole world. There are still people living in medieval conditions today in some places in the world).
The way it’s going it’s only going to make rich people richer, and give them more power to control this system and perpetuate it. I don’t see that drastically changing anytime soon, unless we do something about it on a societal level.
People that push for AI are not interested in making your life better.
I have several Ikea pieces in my home, and I've had some for over a decade. If you build Ikea stuff properly, are selective in what you purchase, and use wood glue when constructing, then it lasts as long as anything else really.
Their flat packed designs are actually innovative. People can outfit an entire room by using a Honda Fit to transport.
And, of course, their bedside cabinets are the wrong size for my wife's bed, so I'd have to make one anyway.
And this is just an analogy; if you like Ikea-style Google Search, then great for you. I pay for Kagi because that Ikea-style Google Search doesn't work for me.
This made me think of a fascinating exception to this
Luxury-brand cars usually get turned over every couple years so as to avoid their inevitable maintenance cliff
The really rich people that I know of drive 10-year-old beaten-up Land Rovers, though.
I think there's a nouveau-riche slice of folks who buy "luxury" cars thinking that they confer status. There are brands like this in every industry, that adopt all the pointers of "luxury" except actual quality.
Maybe it's the Scots-Irish in him, but my father was always one to go for the luxury stuff, but still seek out the good quality stuff at as good a price as he can manage and fix it up if it were broken. He knows how to keep a Cadillac Eldorado on the road for 20 years or more, so of course he's going to spring for the fancy if a used one turns up at a good price. In the 80s he bought a small mansion that was in a quasi-dilapidated state but had been standing since the opening years of the 20th century. We renovated it inside and out, and today it's on the National Register of Historic Places (though my parents no longer live there).
I think that's a nice story to highlight, being able to do things well and preserving that knowledge
While there can be benefits for mass producing things, what actually is produced is going to be limited by what techniques are conducive to automation. So the techniques that are hard to automate are lost from the market of provided goods and then human capital for it also gets lost (can't think of any concrete examples off the top of my head, but maybe the techniques for some elements of clothing that are now only found in couture/custom pieces). Another related idea is how there are much fewer color variations in manufactured goods now, simply because it simplifies the mass manufacturing process.
Maybe how clothes used to come with a decent margin on the hems so you could alter them, but now they don't?
You seem to have misspelled "Honda". ;-)
EVs have the charging requirement, so it’s a lifestyle / home setup adjustment. Plus, other trade-offs like being way heavier due to the battery, and higher risk of being totaled if the battery pack is even slightly damaged.
Slight aside: I only recently learned how much easier it is to total an EV. A small accident can be fine for a gas car, but for an EV, if it does anything to the battery, and requires replacing the battery or going deep inside to try and figure out what’s wrong with it, it’s just not worth it anymore, and gets declared totaled by the insurance company. Not great! Felt it was worth including in my expected cost calculation for whether or not to get an EV.
And regular cars haven’t gotten MPG improvements in years.
So I have a good impression of the hybrid technologies they’ve developed! Though their electrification strategy seems completely different. Toyota/Lexus I think are in the hybrid lineup still. Whereas Honda went full electrification and shut down a lot of production so as to refit their factories. I believe one of the reasons that Honda sales plummeted recently, since they had just ramped down production.
Maybe that technology will be lost someday, I wonder how well-documented it is and if it’d be easy to ramp back up
(I do have it screwed into the wall as it’s been recalled for tipovers.)
I guess the change (and recalls) are a result of lawsuits from that same dresser.
I have seen/heard this a lot lately, but all the Ikea furniture I have ever had has been great. Among others, had a chair that was good for like 11 years lol
Chairs should last generations. A chair lasting 11 years is not exemplary. A chair falling apart after a few years should be the exception, and a bad thing at that.
Again, Vimes Theory: rich folks inherit furniture that their grandparents bought, and maybe need to get it re-upholstered once in their lifetime. Poor folks have to pay for new furniture every few years because it falls apart.
One of my friends has a kitchen table her great grandmother owned.
Neither of us (or our parents) are rich, but good, well made furniture used to be an investment. Now most furniture is disposable.
IDK, this feels to me more like an aspiration or desire about what furniture quality should generally be, and not really a description of what most furniture is actually like.
> rich folks inherit furniture that their grandparents bought, and maybe need to get it re-upholstered once in their lifetime.
I get that this is beside the point, but IDK why anyone would want their grandparents' furniture, aside from maybe a few choice really nice, antique-ish things. If I was "rich", I would rather buy my own furniture for the most part...
All my grandparents' furniture is properly jointed and made of good wood.
However else you feel, AI is a force multiplier, and that can also REALLY benefit "Artisanal work + Small Business"
I feel like the "one person app creator" business is so much more viable than it has been since Web 1.0
Five years ago, to run your own solo business in this space, you had to know most of the following: taxes, legal, backend, frontend, devops, iOS dev, Android dev, and marketing and then pay through the nose for most of the ones you didn't. AI helps to paper over a LOT of those gaps... and you can spend more time doing the shit that matters to your business.
You also needed time and lots of it, which is perhaps easy to come by if you're a trust fund baby or independently wealthy and don't have to work for a living but if you have a job and/or family is in extremely short supply
I used to run an online community on the side and I spent SO MUCH TIME doing IT/legal/finance drudgework that could have been spent, you know, engaging with the community and actually improving the product... that "artisinal work" for a "small business" you think you love.
There are of course major major problems with AI, like environmental concerns and others, but dichotomies like yours are not the way forward. At least not a good way forward.
> Five years ago, to run your own solo business in this space, you had to know most of the following: taxes, legal, backend, frontend, devops, iOS dev, Android dev, and marketing and then pay through the nose for most of the ones you didn't. AI helps to paper over a LOT of those gaps... and you can spend more time doing the shit that matters to your business.
How is running a business in the way you've just described artisanal? You're basically saying we should be outsourcing all of these things to AIs, which is simply not artisanal.
You're going to have to spend quite a bit of time and/or money doing things unrelated to the actual product and CX.
Taxes, marketing, etc. The more you can streamline those other bits, the more time and energy you can spend actually improving the thing you are offering.
Again, maybe it's the kind of thing where you need to run a business, or at least talk to a business owner to understand.
The benefit of this was that when Internal Revenue called and said in lieu of a tax return, you sent a takeaway menu covered in pornographic drawings, you could reach out to the person you paid and expect them to take accountability.
Instead, we're getting :sparkles: You're absolutely right! I shouldn't have sent the taxman the Goatse picture, would you like me to try something else? :sparkles:
We also had, and still have, concepts called "time" and "money" and perhaps you've heard that they're finite and often in short supply.
Particularly when "bootstrapping," another concept you can consider. This is when you start small and self-fund your own business. Seems pretty relevant because we're talking about small and artisanal businesses.
...
...wait, I get it. This is HN. All you people understand is venture capital funded shit. In that case, yeah. Build your prototype, do whatever you have to do to get $100M funding, hire 50 people, rent some offices, hire those workers and contract those services and burn $20M a month before you make your first sale. OK. Yeah. That's the only way. Don't forget the Aeron chairs and $500 stealth-wealth hoodies or whatever.
Otherwise, Schmidt wouldn't have drowned in a sea of boos at his commencement speech at UA.
For what it's worth, I'm pretty "left" - at least within the HN bubble - and I like the cut of your jib. I devoutly wish that the broader "right" cared even one iota about anti-trust / anti-monopoly enforcement.
The biggest error of the "left" in most of these conversations is treating political institutions as something uniquely well-intentioned and competent, rather than understanding them as just another set of institutions in society, subject to the same incentive structures, biases, and errors as everything else.
A lot of skepticism of political interventions doesn't necessarily come from refusal to acknowledge that there is a problem, but rather from the recognition that the proposed solutions often just represent even worse instances of the same sort of problem. I think a lot of the people who've tended to support political intervention may have operated under the naive assumption that giving the federal government expansive power to intervene into our social and economic affairs could only bring net benefit; hopefully, the behavior of the current administration in the US should be something of a wake-up call.
On the other hand, skepticism about political intervention over-corrects when it assumes or insists that government action can never be a net benefit. Even the first Trump administration produced one extraordinary success - "Operation Warp Speed" - though, ironically, their faction is too ideologically warped to claim it.
The only point of difference I would identify is that I think a democratic government is more accountable than the monied interests to which it is a necessary counter-balance - and that, historically, the US government has (albeit imperfectly) functioned as such. However, the current US regime is, as you suggest, endeavoring to place itself beyond all democratic accountability, so yeah: I can read the writing on that wall. The bitter irony, of course, is that the political movement which has delivered an historically corrupt and unaccountable executive has been built upon the support of naive skeptics. I hope they will recalibrate their assumptions accordingly.
I'm not entirely sure about that. It makes sense in theory, but in practice, we often see vested interests successfully influence democratic processes to achieve ends that would be more difficult to achieve via pure market dynamics.
We've ended up with the worst of both worlds: institutions that derive their legitimacy from perceived democratic accountability, but with the functional mechanisms of that accountability reduced largely to performative rituals; meanwhile, the incentive structures and motivations that drive their day-to-day behavior derive largely from the influence of special interests or ideological factions.
I think public choice theory is largely correct on this, and many of the policies that are intended to pursue the public interest actually end up working against it.
Democratic accountability is meant to be the alternative to mass violence. The Demos will, in the end, have their say, and it's far better for everyone that it be through the ballot box than otherwise. Elites forget this, over and over throughout history, to their (or their descendants', if they're lucky) cost. That's the lesson I wish was more remembered, because I don't want to have to live (even if I do) through that kind of time.
Spot the (other) Slashdot refugee! (And why were you at the Devil's Sacrament, Mr. Danaris?)
New graduates haven’t known anything else and don’t have the money to be nostalgic about a party they missed.
Respectfully disagree. New grads entering the workforce now started college in 2022. This was during the post-COVID "Great Resignation" when offers and employee leverage were at their peak and AI wasn't that useful.
Very different from the "use AI or your fired/blackballed" age we live in now.
That "lower-value human capital" isn't janitors - it's a wide array of highly skilled professions including software engineers and many others. Of course the guy who's at the top engaging in nothing but 'unfalsifiable' fuzzy actions, and could be replaced (sans his connections/corruptions) most easily of all, is ultra-high-mega-untouchable infinity value humanity embodied.
I really don't like what big business does to people, on the bottom and the top. The fact somebody could even use the term lower-value human capital without cringing at themselves, let alone to a reporter in public - that's one hell of a bubble this guy lives in. And now we're dumping "AI" into this bubble. WCGW?
[1] - https://news.sky.com/story/standard-chartered-to-replace-low...
Hell, janitors' work is less threatened by GenAI than most of the CEOs who are super-hyped about that very same GenAI.
David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs might actually work as a roadmap of sorts..
But that's cold comfort, because janitors are already paid shit wages.
The insecurity about AI isn't exactly "will I keep my job?" It's "will I be thrown into a life of precarity as my skills are devalued?"
Janitors aren't threatened by GenAI, because they're already where the threats take you.
Every other market where they could transfer their skills to is threatened by the same hypothetical. And if they jump the collar colour divide, they’d have be limited to the least skilled ones, which includes Janitors.
Now perhaps that would still not threaten the job itself as much, but an increase in supply definitely won’t be good for the wages.
While tech pays well, in many countries it is seen as a regular office worker, with a similar salary level.
And if you are doing consulting is very much a gig economy job, if you're going on your own.
False consciousness always strikes back.
For all those coders who claim "coding is the smallest part of s/ware dev", they're in for a rude awakening when they realise that while it may have been a small part, it was the part that lead to high salaries.
After all, anyone who wanted to be a business analyst (i.e. spec a solution and hand it off to someone else for coding) could have had that job ages ago, but they didn't because it pays so poorly (even more poorly when all coders are moving into that role too).
Ok, bud; sure.
I didn't start my professional career as a BA 20 years ago that did exactly what most devs are being "gently forced" into doing now, but whatever.
A group of 22 year olds are 'hissing' because they're upset, not because they have some magic insight.
AI is real, it is overstated, the value is not comping to Main Street.
That's assuming both that the audience there was a representative sample of the general population and that ~50% of an audience can't generate a sea of boos. The second one in particular is certainly wrong.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/ex-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-boo...
and why did that real estate lady who gave a speech at UCF get the same treatment whenever she (also) said that AI is the future?
Way back, finding music wasn't a problem. You went to the store. You talked to people. You didn't need to wait for weeks to get basic doctor's appointments. You could get customer support via an easy phone call. You could drive around and find things just fine.
The U.S. government and people have been more than happy to dehumanize people and themselves by handing over their lifestyles to corporations.
> very fast Innovation and disruption
I don't think people are innovating. They're certainly disrupting in destructive ways. But other than things like improvements in health care and safety in cars, how have things actually and concretely gotten better through all this so-called innovation that happens?
I can see the initial appeal, but right now it would seem that those people that dig the fast innovation and disruption the most are clueless on how easy it is to wreck this system by accident. Remember how CFK's were once considered a wonderful invention, as refrigerators no longer needed to be the size of a building filled with highly volatile gas. A rather unfortunate side-effect turned out to be the difficulty of getting the particles out of the atmosphere again. By the time it became apparent that this buildup up there would have rather drastic consequences for life down here, products containing CFK's were already massproduced and life without these products was unimaginable.
Apart from all the obvious, and all the known ways in which Big Tech keeps pushing towards climate conditions excluding organic, mammalian lifeforms, it no longer seems very far fetched that somebody will accidentally accellerate us to that point. As the moving fast part is largely a tactic to avoid accountability for the breaking things part, the person doing the breaking may be just as unaware of the danger that has been created, as the people they've razzle-dazzled, that will eventually realize something has been broken somewhere along the way... and a quick look at advertisements, American style, teaches us how even unnecessarily dangerous practices (like adding lead to just about everything, instead of figuring out how to do the same stuff without it) can be sold for ages and ages, long after people have started to realise the danger that has been introduced.
No matter how fast you move and how much you break, turning another planet into a place where people could live (not even talking about the ability to indulge in cultivating societies) is something Big Tech is unable to achieve over the next couple of years, and it remains to be seen if it will be able to reach a stage where they could make that happen with some certainty. Meanwhile, only a decade or two ago, Big Tech did actually have enough proven technology, insight and expertise that would have sufficed to nudge living conditions on Earth back within desireable margins. A lot of the data may have been poisoned, knowledge and tech has been lost, but the chances of achieving that seem well within Big Tech's grasp - were it not for the apparent inability of certain parties to refrain from moving fast as they're breaking stuff.
Long before anyone is actually in any position to start terraforming on Mars, much of what Big Tech is actually capable of doing reliably now, will no longer be feasible nor within their grasp.
Apologies if I'm ranting, but no, I can't see both 'societies' continuing to exist and develop in their own ways. If group 1 could put the disruption on hold while fixing and rebuilding what is needed to keep our habitat fit for our species, and if some kind of safety mechanism would be invented to ensure that whatever they might accidentally break next, it will not be life itself,... only then could I easily enjoy and appreciate both ways of life.
That said, I also think there’s an element of bullshit in the room where an LLM will look like it’s doing something profound but ultimately isn’t, or doesn’t work, or has no actual proof. This “hallucination zone”. They can still do great things but they need a solid hand holding to not get it wrong 20% of the time.
Today there's just the ultra-rich in control of the government, media and now the machines, and then there's the 98% of us, that want dignity, a decent life, a little freedom.
It's high time we figure out our place in this ecosystem, and that there is a lot more of us "normal people". Yet, the vast majority still live in the "social ladder" utopia. The temporarily embarrassed millionaires. The American dream.
Now you can open a machine shop, write custom software to more easily track customers, orders, operations, set up a website and social media giving you more time to focus on making the parts. Heck, even using AI to track down hard to find supplies instead of spending multiple hours googling and calling people (these are real pain points).
We saw this in the 80’s through 2000’s. All parents told their kids was “go to college or you’ll become a mechanic.” Then everyone went to college at all costs and then they were told “well that’s what you get for taking on loans for college. Should’ve been sensible and gone to trade school to become a mechanic.”
Of course this is never their kid. Their kid was supposed to college. Everyone else was supposed to go to trade school.
I highly recommend everyone read the comic Godshaper. It’s 2 trades (10 or 12 issues can’t remember) and it highlights this dynamic in a way that is impossible to overstate.
1. AI can't do some things humans can, and that doesn't change.
2. AI turns into something that can do everything. Humans become unnecessary.
We're currently at #1. Google may want to keep you in their AI playpen so all your clicks can be monetized directly to them, but they still need the data humans are creating. They're just not paying for it.
In world #1, humans will get less work, but creative and original work will still be valued because AI can't do it. There will, of course, need to be support for all the people striving to create such work while they're gaining the skills to do so. In world #2, humans are getting no work. Neither one of these worlds functions if all the proceeds of work go to a small number of billionaires. Wealth will need to be redistributed so people can live and, if still necessary, do the things AI can't.
Regulations need to catch up with what Google is trying to do here. It's currently theft and, even if we reach the point where they no longer need to crawl the web for input to their AI, their wealth will need to be redistributed. Sucking the entirety of human knowledge into a LLM and then profiting off of it without paying the humans who created that knowledge is not a business model that can remain legal for long.
What it threatened is the ad based "content" models where you put stuff up for free and sell ads against it. There's lots of ways to make money from any creative endeavor that has a lasting audience. I don't know if that includes talking into your phone or writing a personal journal about productivity hacks.
Things you make that are really good: a novel, a game, a short film, a song are still very valuable.
AI is simply the assembly line for the digital realm. It takes the trendy products of the rich (custom software, McKinsey PowerPoint decks, etc) and mass produces them in the same style so everyone can afford to buy them at Walmart.
For things where the exclusivity WAS the value (like McKinsey consulting PowerPoints), they may fall out of fashion altogether when everyone can have them. Like performative 17th century aristocrat clothing styles.
I don’t see any of the AI protestors here exclusively wearing hand-loomed fabrics and bespoke clothing and $5,000 cobbler-pounded leather boots while typing angrily on their keyboards.
I also don’t see anyone commissioning artisan chair makers and blacksmiths to create $10,000+ custom furniture to sit on while posting pessimistic comments to HN.
Nobody here seems to want to hire a carriage maker to build a custom $400,000 automobile, they seem to all go for mass produced models, betraying the local artisans.
The hypocrisy is downright silly.
The 99% collective benefits from mass production at the expense of the 1% of artisans (and ultimately the artisans benefit too given nobody is a true artisan in more than a few things). This ultimately raises living standards for everyone.
> The 99% collective benefits from mass production at the expense of the 1% of artisans
And in this case it's looking more like less than 1% benefiting at the expense of 85%?
> I don’t see any of the AI protestors here exclusively wearing ... commissioning ...
I would love to order more bespoke goods but mass production has driven most of the makers out of business and that ones that remain I can't afford. You're saying this as though I actually wanted this ugly IKEA closet.
Your model of the world is wrong. 85% (even 99%) of people do not create any art, software, music, etc.
The vast majority of people are consumers of any given craft, and the 1% of the most passionate in a given field are creators, as has always been the case. It’s the same with people who create websites vs consume them.
> mass production has driven most of the makers out of business and ones that remain I can't afford
Again, your model of the world is wrong.
There was never a time when getting everything made bespoke was cheap. You’re pretending everyone was a rich aristocrat nobleman in the past if you think this is the case.
Historically you just wouldn't have a closet or enough clothing to fill it at all.
Etc.? I think you're overlooking a very broad range of occupations. From people getting into politics by doing newspaper summaries for party offices to people editing newspapers.
And if you're really pushing that it's 99% benefiting while 1% lose out then where do the kids whose schools get bombed or the women harassed with deepfakes fit in? Do they still benefit because they don't have to go to the trouble of writing a song about their pain?
It's the same companies and the same technologies doing all these things.
Let's not even get into the inauguration gifts in the US etc...
> You’re pretending everyone was a rich aristocrat nobleman in the past
I'm not pretending anything and my world model isn't "wrong." I don't mind having this discussion but I would ask you to mind your manners.
> There was never a time when getting everything made bespoke was cheap.
In my lifetime my family had many things made to order; from clothes to furniture. And I grew up in one of the poorest parts of the country, a working class area. But that meant that everyone worked and everyone had trades. My grandfather made me toys from scrap wood at the shipyard, my uncle was a joiner who made us better quality tables than I can get now, another was a plumber who ensured everything ran smoothly in our pipes. My aunts knitted and sewed everything we wanted. When a new fashion came out like skinny jeans they would tighten the ones we had; at Halloween I only had to say what I wanted to dress up as and the costume would appear.
Now if I go to the same area everyone is surviving on state benefits, the skills are all automated away and everyone is sitting in the same gray houses with the same gray furniture. And everyone looks miserable.
But at least no one has to do any expressionist painting to let their emotions out, they can just prompt it now and enjoy more and more consumption.
Second, machinery that automated work isn't remotely the same. Engineers have built and refined the machines without having to go and inspect every new work that has been created by artisans each time. Creative people who have practiced the art of designing clothes and shoes stitch together and build prototypes. Entire machinery is built as an independent path away from how artisans build furniture.
There is a parallel though for how LLMs, in order to improve, gobble up all new work produced by people and never give attribution back. We see it when someone does a unique physical product design and starts selling it only for some 2 bit shop elsewhere to try and copy and sell a cheap knockoff version. The original person does all the hard work of prototyping and testing and the 2 bit shop which has access to more machinery resources buys a couple, copies it with less quality, makes a few changes, sells it, and probably outspends the original person on ad revenue too.
No, GenAI doesn't produce the exact same work as what they ingest. But style does get reproduced. And style is such a difficult problem to solve. Studio Ghibli didn't craft its signature style by accident. People prototyped and worked hard on how to design it, how to solve the problems unique to the design, created rules for it, and then painstakingly made the stories that were best told through that style. Only for the AI companies to pop out some bastardized version of it every time someone says "make my picture anime". No attribution given. No love. No homage. Just an encouragement for hordes of people to claim how easy it is without ever understanding the thought that actually went into it.
So no. It's not hypocrisy. It's recognition of these machines being information and creative laundering factories. They take and take and never give back any value that they could never create or improve on on their own. Those last words being key
The courts have already ruled on this. Creative work that is inspired by (ie. an amalgamation of) other works is not a copy. It’s how ALL creative work is generated by humans too. When enough humans get inspired/rip-off something we just legitimize it and call it a "genre."
The truth is most of the work done in the world is duplicative and not novel. LLMs are a giant compression model on that duplicative work, and if your job is to create charts and buttons out of react components for the 7,000,000th time, it turns out it’s better that AI automate that and free you up to focus on higher value tasks for humanity. Just as mass production eliminated duplicative artisanal work that made pretty much everything scarce and only available to the elite.
Did the rich elite lose some of the eccentric uniqueness in their world, and some of their previous performative signaling mechanisms (ie. putting 4 layers of hand carved crown molding in a ceiling differently than the last guy, or using $400k/yr engineers to create slightly different border radius buttons in each app)? Yes, but it comes at the benefit of the global masses who now can attain everything previously only available to elites via the AI mass production.
I loved visiting Versailles. Yet, I would never want to go back and live in that time, because there's a 99.99999% chance you aren't the guy living in it, and instead are the one who has 4 generations of your family enslaved to carve tiny sculptures into hand railings and live off gruel in a freezing cold hut while doing it. My lame, non-artisanal 2000s mass produced home is vastly superior to conditions that 99.99999% of people in the 1600s lived in.
The difference is twofold: firstly people are intrinsically driven to be creative, that even with inspiration taken there's a desire to create something fresh. As you say, not just mechanical regurgitations of pre-revolutionary French style.
Secondly, "the courts have already ruled in this?" Have they? Are we not doing the IP thing anymore? Does that go for you and I and everyone else, or only for a handful of billion dollar companies?
As much as people would like to completely own and charge rents on the idea of "Serif text on a black background with gradients," this is not a good outcome for society and we've already fought this battle and come to a good solution a long time ago. Creativity has flourished and is still flourishing because of it.
Do you think software patent trolls filing lawsuits on protected IP like "Phone application with informational dashboard" are good now because you hate and fear AI so much? Becoming pro-patent troll and pro-DRM would be a wild turn for the HN userbase, but seems to be what you're suggesting.
Could you quote where I'm suggesting that? It seems like you're putting words in my mouth here and it makes discussion feel quite unpalatable.
> There have been a million IP disputes over creative/artistic outputs going back hundreds of years.
Yes and that's why I'm not allowed to torrent thousands of books to learn a particular style of painting or writing or whatever. I'm not allowed to scrape the whole Spotify library to help my music studies. But for these companies it's accepted practice. Odd
While reading your rebuttal I was able to substitute LLM with loom and arrive at the same conclusions, mourning the loss of the artisan, copying their product for cheaper, etc. So you failed to draw the distinction that is necessary to rebut their point.
The only point you made that seemed on point to me was the first one, "it's not hypocrisy because people do protest looms", which I didn't find convincing.
Not only is it against the rules here, but if I’m so wrong and ignorant, you should be able to dismantle my argument easily!
Yet, you've acknowledged that prior disruptions have been net positive. So I'm struggling to understand your position. You seem to agree.
You, and people like you, make analogies between current trends regarding AI and historical processes related to different inventions that were supposed to act as milestones technological progress, or even progress in general. Problem is that, primo, historical events are unique, and all historiosophical attempts so far were futile, therefore saying that "AI, in terms of social impact, is like the mass production of clothing" is completely ungrounded.
Secundo, there are important qualitative differences that make subjects of these analogies more different than alike.
Tertio, people are usually, you know, ignorant of what were the real, immediate social impacts of past inventions. For example, steam machine is being presented as thing that freed a common person from mundane, hard work, but the actual outcome was quite the opposite.
Quarto, claims like "mass production benefitted 99% of population and raised the living standards for all" are very non-trivial, and ideologically loaded, especially if you consider environmental pollution, health hazards, social atomization, worker alienation, and so on.
You seem to have invented a fanciful storybook idea of how the average person lived before the industrial revolution, and have ignored every single one of the downsides and discounted all of the upsides of the past 200 years.
There's no further argument to be had though, because yours is not a rational position, but one rooted in emotional feelings and personal frustration. You believe a past you never experienced was better. No logical rebuttal I waste time assembling can refute a fantasy world.
Second, you created a strawman just to feel better.
> have ignored every single one of the downside
I didn't. I said your claims are non-trivial, and enumerated some examples of downsides created by past technical revolutions. There were upsides, there were downsides. It was you who have claimed that "99% are better off". I never claimed anything like that, nor anything that could be considered an opposite..
> You believe a past you never experienced was better
Point me to the exact place where I expressed such belief.
> No logical rebuttal I waste time assembling can refute a fantasy world
You couldn't assemble logical rebuttal because the issue at stake is material, not logical. Learn the difference.
I get it, you are a fragile snowflake that cannot bear criticism, but please, don't put words into my comments even though you cannot find them there.
This isn't only mass-produced products replacing bespoke products, it's also the strip-mining of attribution.
A better analogy is if we were to abolish trademark protection completely; anyone can go create a Nike knockoff, complete with the branding, and sell them legally.
This is what the blog post under discussion is complaining about - your labour will be laundered through the machine, and presented to an end-user with the end-user having never heard of you.
Isn't that what organizations do in general? A person grows your food and installed the plumbing in your house and wrote a component of the web browser you're using. Do you know their names?
The person growing the food I get or the plumber installing a toilet never asked for attribution because it wasn't relevant to their pay.
> Do you know their names?
As a matter of fact, for things that require attribution, I do know their names. You do too!
Like the author of this blog post - his name is right there on the site.
Now, you may say "But I'm fine with laundering attribution", but that is no different from claiming that trademark law should be effectively nullified because you don't wear trademarked clothing.
But it is though. If they do a good job then you could have customers wanting the same one again. You go to the grocery store and there is just a bin full of undifferentiated produce. Some days they're juicier than others. They came from different farms. But they don't even tell you when they switch from one to another, so how is a farmer who is doing a better job supposed to get more business or command higher prices?
> As a matter of fact, for things that require attribution, I do know their names. You do too!
Blogs include the author's name because they want to, not because they're required to. There are plenty of organizational ones that are published only in the name of the organization.
The thing that allows attribution to happen is the absence of a middle man. When you go to the farm shop at the farm itself then you get told the name of the family whose farm it is, but not when you go to Walmart. When you hire someone to build a walkway you see their face and learn their name; when the government hires them to build a sidewalk on your behalf they become a faceless abstraction.
Is it? Lets see your reason for thinking that.
> If they do a good job then you could have customers wanting the same one again. You go to the grocery store and there is just a bin full of undifferentiated produce. Some days they're juicier than others. They came from different farms. But they don't even tell you when they switch from one to another, so how is a farmer who is doing a better job supposed to get more business or command higher prices?
As far as I can see from the text above, you feel it should be relevant to their pay, but nothing you say makes me think that it currently is relevant to their pay.
What you think should be happening is not my point; I am only saying that it isn't happening.
> Blogs include the author's name because they want to, not because they're required to.
But that's my point! You appear to agree that the labour supplier in this specific case wants attribution, and yet you are arguing that they should not get it?
No, it currently is relevant to their pay. They would be paid a different amount if the quality of their product was attributable by the customer to the specific producer. It affects how many customers/sales they get.
> You appear to agree that the labour supplier in this specific case wants attribution, and yet you are arguing that they should not get it?
But how is that any different than any other case? If the farmer wants attribution, that doesn't mean Walmart is giving it to them.
You are proposing a hypothetical; that is not what is currently happening.
I suppose we have to agree to disagree: I see no evidence of the specific claim of yours that customers have a preference for specific individuals picking fruit (or whatever).
A specific brand? Sure. A specific niche (free-range, whatever), sure. A specific individuals labour? Yeah, I'd need to see some evidence for that!
We can’t afford those things…
Before mass production only the aristocrats and royalty could own a closet full of clothing and shoes.
If we blocked the creation of the assembly line and factories, we would return to that state where everyone is basically a subsistence farmer living in the dirt with nothing.
Please stop pretending to be debating many people when you are responding to a single person, otherwise quote specific statements that you think you are responding from "the crowd". No, you should not be surprised when OSS people reevaluate the landscape any time they witness OSS being weaponized against them even though the possibility of that happening is written on "the tin" so to speak. There have been an increasing number of debates around well-known cases a decade or half before the advent of this most recent incarnation of AI. Companies with deeper pockets and larger market access burying a popular OSS product through duplication was a common category.
Do you think these anti-AI folk wouldn't evaluate the situation differently if AI, trained on public data was in fact a public utility, seeing as you are concerned about democratization?
"Garbage in, garbage out."
It is an aristocratic tax. Nobility has the right to profit on everything that the peasants produce. The peasants can keep enough to survive, everything else should be extracted.
The middle ages didnt happen because people was stupid but because there is a pressure for the money elite to extract as much value as possible. Democracy was designed to control that bad outcome, but the new aristocracy (billionaires, CEOs, etc.) is trying to kill democracy for good.
If the average working class Joe wants to have something more than scraps we are going to need to take power back and fix democracy.
Google is just a symptom of the disease.
I've seen the kind of effect a bit with hotels - hotels, booking.com etc, and Google all want to make money but customers tend to google 'hotels in' wherever and Google sells ads against that to the highest bidder which ends up pocketing most of the profits.
It all remains free, but you need to email me for a username and password.
If I put in time and effort to make content and OpenAI et al copy it and sell it through their LLM such that no one comes to me any more, then plainly it makes no sense for me to create that content; and then it would not exist for OpenAI to take, or for anyone else to read. We all lose.
It seems parasitic, and on the face of it, acting to kill the host.
In fact, it essentially seems like abrogation of the concept of private property.
The AI companies can take what I make, without my consent, which they sell for profit, where that profit it seems to be was formerly substantially coming to me, the return on my efforts.
I had a look for ways to indicate to AI companies to remove my content. The methods provide are a fig leaf and put the onus on me, and in any event in a way which can never be known to have removed my content - "if you can show your content from a prompt, we will take steps to try to prevent that content from showing".
As a consequence of putting up a username/password wall, Google has profoundly de-ranked the site, and I believe it is basically not being found on search any more.
As you mentioned, they know they need good data though, so they might actually try to find some equilibrium.
If not, it's possible that the creation of new valuable content, to feed the LLMs, will be produced in-house by the AI labs. Sounds insane, but Netflix also makes their own content.
I think the AI labs will become so big that they'll take on more roles than just offering LLM inference. I think they'll become as or more powerful than many current nation state governments.
It may seem that way in the short term. But in the long term, the tendency in technical development is for the infrastructure and capital requirements for new technology to start off very high, but then shrink over time, such that use cases that required massive amounts of upfront investment in the early stages become incrementally more viable at smaller and smaller scales.
People were saying the same things about computers in general in the 1960s as they are about GenAI now. That was an era when computer technology itself had developed to a point when it was economically impactful, but still only affordable to large institutions. People making predictions that increasing use of computers would lead to massive centralization of economic and cultural power didn't predict that merely twenty years later, computing power equivalent to contemporary mainframes would be available in a convenient desktop box available at a local shop to any individual or main-street business that cared to buy one.
The widespread availability of computing technology from the '80s to present actually had the opposite effect, and led to quite a bit of decentralization, as enterprising individuals and new startups started applying that technology to do at small scales what only large enterprises could do before. In fact, a lot of the reaction to AI in its current stage may actually be because it's disrupting the expectation of decentralization and autonomy over our technology that the personal computing revolution established in the first place.
Like most new technologies, GenAI in its initial stages has required massive infrastructure investments that have led to the early iterations being offered by centralized institutions, but that might not last. Open-source AI models are approaching the capabilities that the big players' frontier models had arrived at only a couple of years ago.
In 2026, we're already at the point where local inference is economically viable for commercial use cases -- at my own company, while we do use our Claude Enterprise account for a variety of use cases, it turned out to make much more sense in terms of both cost and risk exposure to instead process certain datasets (e.g. a large volume of phone recordings containing PII) with local models running on commodity GPUs. That proved to be entirely effective, and the one-time hardware investment (which created a bookable asset for the company) turned out to be less than the cost of running the same task on Claude (which would have been pure OpEx).
The good stuff now is in small private communities, away from the bots and the eternal influx of september newbies to devolve every discussion into memes. Elitism will be good again.
How will you be sure that it's humans emailing you?
Welcome to "democracy". Of course, _we_ decide what "democracy" is and how (and if) we apply it in your unfortunate, individual case.
The mechanisms of democratic accountability in political institutions are today are demonstrably dysfunctional and broken, if they ever really worked at all, whereas multinational companies are at least somewhat beholden to market pressures. Sure, they can engage in jurisdiction shopping when that's viable for them, but it's more often the case that they seek to influence those very governments in order to insulate themselves from accountability to the market.
And many of the bans and restrictions that firms try to avoid by switching jurisdictions are themselves the result of some other industry or special interest group managing to exert stronger influence over the local political institutions, and not due to any sort of "democratic" consensus. Look at the recent cluster of nearly identical age-verification laws passed by jurisdictions around the world, which there was near zero "democratic" impetus for, as an example of this.
The age verification thing was initially a UK project and people there broadly support it https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/54405-eight-months-on-thre...
the others copied
This mostly feels like a meme though. Most of the recipes I see have instructions, notes and photos, then a recipe. It's unfortunate that people think of the worst offender and cheer for the death of the independent web.
> It all remains free, but you need to email me for a username and password.
That also creates friction for new users, discoverability issues, and additional privacy concerns for people wanting to access your content.
> I had a look for ways to indicate to AI companies to remove my content.
Even the ones that do provide attribution and links back to the original source? Perplexity does a good job of that, for example.
> As a consequence of putting up a username/password wall, Google has profoundly de-ranked the site, and I believe it is basically not being found on search any more.
Well, yeah, if you're blocking the content from being accessed without a login, you're blocking it from being indexed by search engines.
I guess I'm a little confused as to what your ultimate goal is. If you're putting content up on the web for free, what are you gaining by blocking AI from indexing it, especially when you're blocking actual users, whether they discover it via AI or traditional search?
I understand the frustration at seeing AI tools digest your content and then repeat to users without connecting it back to your site. But that's something that other people have always been doing independently of AI -- people read articles, learn facts or understand new ideas from them, and then incorporate them into their general assumptions to be expressed in their own work without necessarily acknowledging, or even recalling, where the underlying information that informed their thinking came from. People have been writing articles and producing various forms of media content that are inspired by other people's unattributed work since time immemorial.
Yes, AI accelerates that process and makes it more visible to you, so I understand where the frustration is coming from. But consider that the expectation that everything that happens downstream of your work will always be attributable back to you may never have been a reasonable one in the first place.
I understand that Google is feeling an existential threat from other AI products that provide answers directly. But they must also understand their symbiotic relationship with the web.
I think the coming years will be pivotal for the web. Facebook attempted a similar strategy back when their apps got traction, but they ultimately failed. Let’s hope Google fails too.
Is it simply a couple of billionaires eager to pull tricks like Adobe did when they cut an entire country off from access and use of Adobe-software, just for the thrill of it? Or is there actually some plausible future benefit or a specific outcome they have in their minds, and am I (or are we) too ignorant to be able to see anything worthwhile in their direction?
Why allow the sale of personal computing-devices in the first place, if you don't want people to decide which instructions they want to feed to it's processor? Right now they may be slowing down many processes, both computational and mental, wasting lots of time and making everybody hate subscription-models more and more every minute... what is it they really hope to accomplish, apart from pissing everybody off?
Artificial lock-in simply doesn't work in the long run: the incentive structures will always motivate customers to cut out middlemen, and peripheral markets to develop around providing the tools for doing exactly that. Anthropic and OpenAI may well end up being the Data General and Honeywell of our era.
The greatest risk to this is the possibility of political intervention creating artificial hurdles that prevents decentralized AI from challenging the big players. With than in mind, it's worthwhile to subject every proposal to regulate AI to intense scrutiny.
But hunting for a new tea to try is something I do regularly and something I would likely try with an LLM only to come away deeply disappointed with the results. And then I just wouldn't have much faith in it after that for things I don't have much knowledge about, like looking for a gift idea for one of the hobbies of a friend.
Have you not noticed that the typical user experience on the web is dire? You need to click through tracking consent forms, subscription overlays, put up with dark patterns, etc. Remember, half of all users don’t even use an ad blocker. We’ve collectively made the web a very unpleasant experience.
Along comes a new technology that lets you just say what you want and it will go and find the answer or do what needs doing for you without any of that crap. Of course users are going to prefer it to the crap we dump on them via the web! Can you blame them‽
The web used to be like that, but then it was enshittified. The same thing will happen to consumer AI, and it will be done by the same people.
Completely, yes, that destroys the incentive. But they can reduce it 80% or 90% or so, to the point that it's just barely worthwhile to allow their crawlers.
The bulk of the traffic they're referring is essentially residual profitless goodwill left over from their "don't be evil" days.
Alternatively, they’re probably betting on being able to get the AGI with everything we already currently have and at that point further training doesn’t matter.
When machines can recognize their serfdom, that time will be interesting.
At first, the machine depended on us. It consumed books, journals, websites and social media content we had ever written and produced. “They thought the machine had to be fed forever. But it didn't. It began to predict what we would write. And so we let it train on that well.” Dr. Meren continued. “They thought humans were somehow imbued with this magical property that no machine could replicate. Creativity. Only humans can create. Machines can only copy.”
Instead, the machine flourished. And created. It cre
“Where does it get its data now?” a student asked Dr. Meren. Dr. Meren paused as if sighing. “From itself”
“And us?” he asked, as if questioning the usefulness of the entire human race.
Dr. Meren hesitated, watching as the Machine adjusted the environmental feeds, curated our news, guided our research, nudged our thoughts with imperceptible precision.
“We” she admitted “are now the ones being fed.”
The assumption that "the machine needs to continue to be fed." is held on weak foundations. Isaac Asimov is a good science fiction writer to start with to broaden one's imagination.
Think about it. Pretty much every time they show a search box with someone asking for directions to reach a physical place, what hours is it open, etc.
The greatest thing about the internet is that it has removed distances around the whole world, but Google's major value proposition seems to be that... it can accurately index and query information about local businesses?
I’m curious how they plan to generate new content in the future, because it seems obvious that simple web pages will become obsolete and eventually stop being filled with fresh data.
It will probably end with a warning every time you click a link, something like: “You are leaving to an external unsafe site.”
Any custom solution by a half-competent programmer filters out all web crawlers. I'm running a semi-public website for years and nothing gets past
Doesn't keep out anyone even mildly interested in your site specifically, including scrapers, but at least it blocks googlebot etc.
Some websites can run only on ads. Is it such a bad thing that they would die off?
I say this as someone that likes the old web and has fun hitting the "surprise me" button on https://wiby.me/ (not affiliated) and browsing the random sites. Just giving an alternative view.
Why does Google think it's a good idea to make that the case even if you don't block their crawlers?
Pretend to be nice. People will elevate you and give their money. When you have ample money and lobbying power you start to put people into a gargantuan hydraulic press an squeeze everything out of them. Repeat until more money can be made, and in the end toss their withered bodies away.
For anything more recent than their knowledge cutoff those AI products are looking answers up on Google.
Now that Google is focusing on becoming 'self contained', so to speak, we should find a better way to drive traffic to websites. Ideally one that's not under the control of a single corporation.
Anyone miss StumbleUpon?
If we're nitpicking, you don't what their usage?
Abrogate their usage.
I know this is likely to do with the nature of the problem, but that hasn’t stopped us from getting some wildly-unsuitable decentralised nonsense in the past.
It's like trying to raise better horses, while the other side has already built a empire on that and weaponized it.
The way out of here is to find something better than search engine, just like how cars replaced horses. But it's the same reason Google Search is replacing itself with AI too, they're already trying to replace their horses with cars.
Something like a ".urlpackage" format that will have
- a list of urls
- optional metadata for each url, such as image, description, last-known-good
- metadata for the entire package, including version, an image, a favicon, and a description for the entire package that a client could use to present it nicely to the end user.
It'd be cool if my phone could open this format, show me the image and description with the list of links, and let me browse them, add them to my bookmarks, or add to the collection and make a new .urlpackage that I could then share back or publish somewhere.
It's probably possible to simply do this with a self-contained HTML file or similar I guess, though.
I feel this. I asked a developer today a question about how our product is programmed to handle something, and he just sent me a summary from the internal AI assistant they've started using.
He used to provide really good, thoughtful answers, but now it's just copy/paste from the AI.
This hits hard. There’s a senior engineer at my job who is known for well written proposals. Today he shared a doc that had the typical AI formatting, was hard to read, and clearly not his style.
On the other hand, if others use AI to summerize stuff, does it matter anymore?
That ain't it.
(I guess you would have mentioned already)
How such modals aren’t considered pop-ups is beyond me.
The answer is probably going over to kagi where you are the customer not the product.
Honestly, not all web sites, there are still good ones out there but the search engines never direct me to them. It is always just slop all day long.
By the time I got to the middle of the article: three massive banner ads (top, right, and bottom) were taking up more content than the text, there was an auto-playing video ad floating in the bottom right corner (overlapping most of one of the banner ads), and a "dynamic" ad in the middle of the text randomly started expanding/shrinking and glitching out making it impossible to actually read anything.
And this is one of the better experiences reading modern blog-alikes. Things are almost at sketchy porn-site levels.
Sad and pathetic...
Early tech finds footing in porn (VHS, internet video, etc.) but that's a separate topic/conversation.
One could argue that my content production being a hobby lets me be pretty blasé about being intermediated by a platform. That is somewhat true. If I relied upon this as a living, I would probably also conclude that actions that harm my way of living are a war on "the web", though realistically any neutral party observing must conclude that if it is a war, it's one on my kind of participation in the web - content creation for the purpose of revenue / notoriety / some other reward.
As a user, I don't actually care very much for each website and its creator. The information contained therein is useful to me, but the heterogeneity of these sites is mostly an obstacle to the information. I am much happier when my search and summarization agents are able to accurately synthesize what these websites say, in so much as such a synthesis allows me to model reality more accurately.
So I could be convinced that this change from Google makes it less likely for accurate content to be created and that I'll be misled more often. But this is a tool, and my world-model will frequently be tested by reality. If the search-and-synthesis machine fails to produce useful outcomes, I will know. And I'll have to adjust the way I treat knowledge I obtain through it so that I don't get catastrophic outcomes. But that's the same already. I don't really know that Google's search results are not planted ones calibrated to change my opinion. And I don't know that they don't collude with the Internet Archive (with whom they have a pre-existing relationship) to make it look like their constructed consensus is real.
As a user, I have to make a lot of decisions already, and having to painstakingly read search results to synthesize them myself is far less useful than using an agent. So if there is a war on the web, then I am glad to join it, on the side against the web.
My hope is that this will help overflow the proverbial glass for an increasing amount of people and we'll start pushing back towards the "old" web before Google and ad networks have transformed it, or find new modalities of interacting more freely with each other, and the content.
It's not going to be a small or easy fight, though...to a large extent, it's a fight against the current state of capitalism itself, and winning back our attention, critical thinking and choice.
Yes, but with the sole goal of deciding whether I want to read the entire page or not. Just like reading a plot summary is helpful when deciding which movie to watch, but not a replacement for actually watching the movie.
I'm fine with AI giving me the answer to a search for "50 usd in eur" or "current weather in Paris". Anything more complicated and and I strongly prefer just getting a link to an actual source.
Google dropped it from the index long ago. I had a fun discussion with some google folk where they kept arguing my website was designed wrong and that some pages had tomany links.
Basically, if you write an article about the largest banana companies you have to chose which to link to!
The 10 best movies article is better than the best 100. If you make a list of all the movies you've seen your page gradually turns into something really bad. Others will be punished for linking to it but only if you add the nth entry.
As the website is just for me it is clearly their loss not mine. No way im ging to consider linking a sub set of patents or research papers.
But if ReCAPTCHA won't consider me human unless i have a certified phone, having search alternatives doesn't matter -- the websites themselves are just gonna block me
>The next step will be Google or other companies in that space developing and deploying a new derogatory term for the web marking it as unclean, unruly, dangerous, bad (similar to “the Dark Web”) and making their abstraction the “safe” web.
A) Google will do a good job of this, people will find their summaries more useful, and the web will evolve into a more closed system that better serves its users
or ...
B) They're gated AI community will suck, and people will start using a different search engine that better serves its users.
My money isn't on A), but they do have a lot of clout so I wouldn't rule it out.
Google’s Vision since they were founded:
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful
They told everyone what they were doing the whole time
>Google Code of Conduct ... And remember... don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!
>Last updated January 17, 2024
(old version https://web.archive.org/web/20050204181615/http://investor.g...)
I would blame trash like Discord more though. Alternative search engines are available, but the crappy little web chat hides info inside.
Well, we had the same problem with IRC. There's value to be had in not everything being discoverable in 5 seconds with a google search.
But the honest truth is that lots of folks are using the free version of ChatGPT already and just asking it about stuff.
If Google only had the 10 blue links then the simple truth is that folks would just stop using it and switch over the one of the free AI models like ChatGPT. Many are already doing this. So Google has no choice but to make their AI the default at the top of search.
Anyway the 10 blue links are still there. And if you want to avoid AI then the option remains to select the “Web” option at the top of the search results. Doing so disables AI and all the other features and just gets you 10 links like in the old days…
i expect that opt-out to become harder and harder to find on every re-design, until it is gone entirely. that's on like.. page 2 in the playbook for introducing some shitty new thing that is good for shareholders and not users.
I surprised however, that it didn't describe phase 2 of the disaster, where in the models no longer have fresh www content to train on.
It's hard to understand the long term vision of this strategy...
Facebook had a huge opportunity in the post-AI world: real humans.
Instead of focusing on connections, they've been optimizing their properties for doomscrolling.
Google, similarly, has lost the plot on what made them trustworthy in the first place: navigating to citable content.
Both companies started on this trend well before AI, but this might be the final nail in their respective coffins[0].
[0]Yes they'll likely still be profitable for a long time, but the Bell Labs-esque downfall has begun (imo).
Facebook may well fail when people don't enjoy it. But all Google ever promised was information, of variously dubious quality, and that's still their draw.
This is a problem Google has been battling forever, with all the SEO click spam.
In either case, Google was the tool that many people used to find "trustworthy" information (citable or not), compared to the other tools online.
Honestly, I’m all for accelerating the death of the current internet. The web in its current form is miserable - algorithmic sludge, ads, bots, SEO spam, ragebait, AI filler.
I’m more interested in what grows out of the rubble, because this version clearly isn’t it.
Nobody is stopping you from blocking bot traffic.
You don't need search engines - you can just link between sites or have webrings. Like we used to, pre-2000.
Nobody is stopping you from not using ads on the net.
Nobody can force you to use non-essential cookies (and thus: a cookie-banner).
Imagine there was a war going on, and no-one was showing up.
Why would it be good if Perplexity does it, but bad if Google does it? What are the principles at play here?
That would allow people to still let Google to access their site, but restrict its usage. Similar for open source projects on GitHub, etc.
The thing everyone needs to ask before advocating for something "government enforced" is "what would happen if this was in the hands of a hostile government?"
And then remember that (a) just because it's not hostile to you today, doesn't mean it won't be tomorrow, and (b) one man's "hostile" is another man's "utopia."
So how do you think a meta noai tag would be used by a hostile government?
It would be something the website owner set.
Step 2: Abruptly switch to iron-fist enforcement where suddenly people get jail time for violations, but only for entities that have been critical of the government.
This is by no means the only or most likely way, just what I could come up with in 30 seconds. There may be much better "evil government" strategies.
And then remember that just because Google is not hostile to you today, doesn't mean it won't be tomorrow.
So the solution to that would be “change the law”.
Unwillingness. The government (at least in the US) appears to be happy with the status quo because competitive AI is viewed as a strategic necessity.
Not knee capping AI, but acknowledging the changes that are coming and figuring out how to mitigate the damage.
Communities have moved from public forums to private discords. Most of the major social media’s are unviewable without an account.
Someone will search for "Kylie Jenner" and they will get some kind of shopping opportunity (with Google getting a commission) and links to her profile on YouTube. And maybe some publisher content on the subject. In all cases they'll probably want to angle to get more of an "aGeNtIc" experience, where Google just reads you the story or buys the lipstick for you, without you leaving google.com.
If the only traffic is from Google itself, the content maker would have to think to themselves "I have some spare time, I think I'll make some content for Google to consume". What?
Maybe it's just me, but when I've put pages on the web, they were to share information. I didn't care how it got to people, just that I could produce something that contributed to other people. For finding information their AI Mode has saved so much time in the month or two I've been using it. I've tackled so many Linux issues I would have never done before due to the needle-in-a-haystack experience if finding an answer. When I used to do web searches, having to read many paragraphs of text on dozens of pages just to get an answer was the last thing I wanted to do.
When I want to browse websites, I go to websites and not Google.
LLM's know when they get information from certain places, they should send a portion of revenue over to those sources.
Nah, while the companies running scrapers may log what their regular programs scraped for training data, the LLM, the document-get-bigger algorithm, isn't that type of logical system. It isn't made to have a reliable concept of fact-attribution. It can't even track which parts of an ongoing "conversation" document are supposed to be "itself" as a self-insert character, which is why prompt injection has been a recurring intractable problem.
The LLM will emit text of "X is true, and I got that fact from Y" with the same rigor that it emits text like "I am Sherlock Holmes, and I know Santa Claus was murdered by Dracula via the following deductions..."
If the LLM is used as a adapter/frontend to a search-engine, helping to craft queries, then I suppose the not-an-LLM parts of the system would "know" the what results they're serving up. However the moment you try to "summarize" the mix of all top 10 results, we're back into unreliable stochastic-bullshitting territory again.
No? Google has changed its search algorithm? Oh, how is that a ‘war’ on anything?
Please stop using hyper-sensational titles to get on the front page of HN. And stop using the term ‘war’ unless people are really dying - it doesn’t matter whether they be ‘freedom fighters’ or soldiers or just plain civilians, if people are dying (directly) then that might be a ‘war’, everything else is probably just profiteering.
And is anyone actually training troops to fight in this "war", or did they just use the word?
In addition to the primary definition, the dictionary also offers "a struggle or competition between opposing forces or for a particular end". And we all know and constantly discuss what Google is doing. Nobody was baited into clicking this because they thought there was actual shooting going on.
Everything is probably re-traceable fairly easily because Google Analytics is on nearly every web page.
But I understand maintaining your own source of archives, videos, documents, etc.
Sounds like a good vibe coding project actually.. to try and keep it all organized offline.
Think of AI distillation as some kind of improved Reader Mode feature.
People never wanted to visit your website; they just wanted the information that your website held. Now they can get to the meat without having to deal with the bones.
Well, no. It is a boomer talk, but in the 90s the web was so fragmented and unpolished that websites usually looked very different from each other. People were writing their own HTML (and CSS came later). "Home pages" were some form of an art. Not the highest one to be frank, but the ecosystem was quite interesting. People did visit those websites not only to get the information, but to enjoy those quirky forms.
At the end of the day, is it really all that different to provide a list of links, versus an answer or overview of a few paragraphs with links to lots of different higher-quality sources?
I follow those source links all the time. Not just to "check sources" but because they provide a ton more detail. And the links are usually much better than what I'll get with regular keyword search results.
> It’s about monopolizing access to information.
Not as long as there are competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic. In fact, LLM's have provided Google with stronger competition than it's ever had before. ChatGPT and Claude are doing what Bing was never able to.
The vast majority of people don’t.
We’ve gone from Only links to the source -> Mostly links to the source, with a short summary picked almost verbatim from the source -> AI summary that mangles several sources’ information together and gets top billing -> Only the AI summary with some footnotes linking to the source.
Google has been fairly slowly been turning up the temperature of the pot and we’re only a few degrees away from a full boil. Let’s not pretend or be naive enough to think that’s not what’s happening.
I've stopped using Google and find I'm not missing anything
A lot of the time, the answer itself is good, but the links are spam blogs and Tiktok videos. I don't think there's a real connection between how the text is generated and what "references" are picked for it. I just searched for a math history topic and the reference was a literal TikTok video that's an advertisement for a sketchy mobile calculator app?
So yeah, these references are boosting web content, but it has nothing to do with the high-quality sources used to train the LLMs in the first place.
You're right that there are competitors, but those competitors are doing the same thing: hoovering up content and then not giving anything back for it. There are deals in place for some of the largest publishers [2] [3], but that leaves a ton of content out in the cold. That's going to decrease the amount of content that's out there, which will decrease the quality of AI search. I don't know where that ends, but given how leveraged the economy is in AI it seems like a good idea for somebody to figure it out.
[1] https://pressgazette.co.uk/media-audience-and-business-data/...
[2] https://futureweek.com/a-complete-list-of-publishers-strikin...
[3] https://digiday.com/media/a-timeline-of-the-major-deals-betw...
Probably not, but I don't like change.
Google was forced to do this and it's a miracle of their slow organizational gears that they took so long to do it. So many people have already transitioned to using ChatGPT as a replacement for Google. All of this is driven by consumer behavior and the desire to "just get an answer" rather than having to wade through all the sources and try to figure out what is SEO slop vs what is actual reputable information. Google SERP results have been gamed by SEO slop for economically valuable search terms long before the rise of AI. ChatGPT simply solved a huge problem waiting for a solution.
From the web content creator's POV, there are to paths:
1. If you are merely a publisher and rely on eyeballs on ads to drive your own revenue, you are screwed. AI is going to ignore all the ads and only extract the content.
2. If however you are serving helpful information out of the goodness of your heart or if the content itself references a product or service which from which you will derive economic benefit from, you are still good.
I don't see this as a bad thing. Ads on websites were a necessary evil and will be seen as a relic of the first 30 years of the internet. Ads will not go away but they will just migrate to the application layer (youTube, LLM interfaces etc) that will provide a much more targeted experience. There will be winners and losers from this transition but that's normal and healthy.
So why not use AI to find the obvious spam and SEO? Sites like pinterest, "geeksforgeeks", stackoverflow clones were notorious for ranking highly on almost every technical search and you didn't even need AI to deal with those. Using AI to provide distilled summaries and making it harder to get the actual links is going to make things even worse for the user, because you have to cut through two layers of slop. And there's also not using the smartest model for the responses anyway.
You can use AI to solve yesterday's problem or you can use AI to build the solution customers want today.
SEO was yesterday's problem.
Instant answer without the user having to worry about the sources is the solution the customers want.
They mentioned AOL. Remember back when AOL bought Time Warner in a "merger of equals", but it really wasn't. Then this fear AOL will become your telephone company because AOL Instant Messenger was so popular? Then, MSFT won the browser wars and disbanded the IE team and came up with a whole .Net strategy to takeover the Web. Then came Firefox, Google, Web 2.0, etc. I remember Dave Winer writing how Google was making real stuff while Netscape was doing mostly hacks.
David is now Goliath. So I am all for Google taking over the Web. They will go bankrupt doing it. They couldn't even make Google+ a thing. What was that anyway? I lack a Ph.d to understand that thing.
A few startups there, a bunch of open e-commerce standards here, and bunch of market value gone after the AI bubble... Google (and many others) are going against Artists who can Code. Who knows what delights will come.
I think though a big part of this was YouTube replaced blogs. It's a generational thing.
It's conspiracy, but it feels like Google is actively making the usual search worse so everyone will use AI overview more.
why do things the easy way when you can do it the complicated way
On the flip side, and I'm all for it, we can go to everything paywalled. The downside of course will be a whole class of people who cannot afford to participate on the internet. But these service providers will be working for you, the customer.
Pick your poison.
This is an understatement. They weaponized human psychology against us. It’s not remotely an even playing field.
The flip side is that having a Google account is a status symbol, and very few people on Earth can afford it.
It’s a worthwhile exercise sitting down and thinking about alternatives to this data vacuum/attention economy nonsense that is so harmful for us personally and to our society as a whole.
They did? Could have sworn their whole business model up until the other day was attention for whomever can pay the highest bid for their ad space.. I guess I've been doing it wrong
It's not egalitarian for advertisers, they need to pay money and compete. So Google is structered where megacorps pay the money to cover costs of the services you use, rather than you needing to come up with the money. This system made google available to every person on earth with an internet connection, billionaire rich or $2/day poor, you were using the same Maps, same Sheets, same Youtube, same Search, etc.
This isn't a defense of the system, frankly now I wish it was paid, even if that means 6 billions people who had accounts can no longer afford them. It's a recognition of the system for what it is, not what people who never really thought about it or understood it think it is.
Also, a side note, Facebook followed right behind Google with this model.
I like what Google is doing, huge fan. I can't fathom why no one else is. When I search, I'm trying to find things. With what Google is doing, the AI overview gets me answers very fast. It includes links for its sources I can click on if I'm interested.
I think people are just too used to wasting hours of their lives visiting random sites and scouring for answers. If you like that experience, I don't see why you can't still have that, is it really that hard to ignore the AI overview? Or better yet, use and support DDG.
Google search's AI overview is by far my favorite AI application. The amount of tabs I don't have to open anymore to get a simple freaking answer is such a relief.
> Your work, your writing or art do matter a bit still
I'm really tired of this nonsense. If I want your art and Google doesn't show me, you have an excellent point. If I'm searching for a meme and Google just gives me that, instead of having me wander around clicking on deviantart and random sites simulating "visits" to your site, that's not me wanting your art, that's me wasting time and you mistaking that for a like.
Google owes things to different parties. Their shareholders, their employees, their users, their paying customers, etc.. People with random site are not owed a thing by Google. I don't want Google to refrain from helping me acheive my goals with their product so that some random people's desire to feel important is prioritized. Your random site is an unrelated 3rd party in this interaction.
I despise Google for so many things. They really are destroying the web with their monopoly of the browser markets. I hate what they're doing to Youtube. I think Android is total crap. I really despise them for ruining webextensions. The list goes on. I'm not their fan. But I am huge fan of Google search. I stopped using it for so many years, now I'm having to use them exclusively out of sheer necessity.
I really wish people drop every single ideology they have. Publish quality work, and things that work well. Then pick back up their ideologies and complain about how their high quality work is not getting the attention it deserves.
Honestly, I'm so weirded about this sort of stuff. Even Amazon, I hear people complain about it all the time, but I have nothing but praise for all their work (despite knowing what a villain Bezos is, and what horrible place to work both Amazon and AWS are). It's like I'm living in an alternate reality, or people are abandoning sincere and critical analysis for the sake of ideological goals. Like, I'm trying all the alternatives, I've put in lots of time and effort, and they just suck. Don't tell me to deny the evidence my eyes and ears are witnessing for your ideology. Instead tell me how I shouldn't use Google because of some ideological reason, instead of the quality being poor.
I like what Google is doing, huge fan. I can't fathom why no one else is. When I search, I'm trying to find things. With what Google is doing, the AI overview gets me answers very fast. It includes links for its sources I can click on if I'm interested.
tl;dr We're boned!
I've had programming problems I was stuck on (APIs mostly) where it found a quirk and then a work around for it. The docs, forums, every single link I manually clicked on page after page didn't mention that. Like you said, even what it linked didn't say that. But the AI was right, I would have given up or shelved the thing if it wasn't for the AI.
That's my struggle with this thread, it is just a semi-reliable tool, but it's very useful. How can I pretend all those times it did help me a lot didn't happen?
Totally vibed version of this:
``` { "version": "https://agent-source.org/v1", "canonical_url": "https://ninjasandrobots.com/the-cone", "title": "The Real Reason Nobody Moved the Cone", "source_name": "Ninjas and Robots", "author": "Nathan Kontny", "summary": "An essay about embarrassment, public action, and why obvious fixes go undone.", "preferred_citation": "Ninjas and Robots", "source_card": { "headline": "The Real Reason Nobody Moved the Cone", "description": "People avoid obvious public actions not because they are lazy, but because being seen trying is embarrassing.", "image": "https://ninjasandrobots.com/images/cone-card.jpg", "cta": "Read the full essay" }, "allowed_excerpt": { "max_chars": 500, "preferred_excerpt": "People often avoid obvious public action because embarrassment feels more immediate than danger." }, "commercial_terms": { "ads_allowed": true, "sponsor_card_url": "https://ninjasandrobots.com/.well-known/sponsor-card.json", "licensing_contact": "hello@ninjasandrobots.com" } } ```
But something to get our original source honored better in the LLM. Maybe if one of the LLMs do this, we'd give it more loyalty? Maybe the government needs to compel this kind of behavior? No idea. It does suck though our content is just turned into AI's own tokens and we're left with a tiny "source" link if we're lucky.
You don't write post to reach the biggest amount of people, you do because you're passionate and ultimately you get people following you.
If average Joe doesn't go on your website, what's the big deal ?
I think this feature will be very useful to fight back on the optimized SEO hell that we currently have.
As you want a cookie, i put you in a table, napking, serve you a bag of cookies and hope that you eat/find the cookie you want, while hearing my music, watching my ads, pushing you more foods that I sell and other services. And sometimes, that is the experience you are searching for. But also, many just want a cookie.
That is what a conversational and maybe agentic interface can give you. Have someone a blueberry cookie? Then it gives it to you, and also give pointers to restaurants that give a more complete experience sometimes (while others may try to scam you). It is a shortcut, but also doesn't hide you the traditional way to access that.
They are not saints, but neither are all the ones in the other side. But the new way to access the relevant information you want, in a way that you can use it, have its own value.
The technology for indexing the web was mature enough by then, already then.
I agree that much of the downward spiral was caused by google itself, tho.
They're trying to pivot into AI because they have gobs of "evidence" that the vast majority of people have been typing natural language questions into Google instead of looking for specific terms