OTOH good search - deep research - is one of the biggest productivity gains using AI.
Google has intentionally degraded search as a product to try to force people to use their models.
As they've now realized this kills off any incentive to feed their LLMs with new content they're stuck actually having to pay lip service to publishers by offering them, yep, a new way to prevent users from seeing their content!
What a bummer of a decade this has become.
"Google has intentionally degraded search as a product to try to force people to use their models."
Both things can be true.
Just all stinks of corruption.
isn't this the entire AI playbook?
artists, software developers, writers, musicians, everyone
total parasitism always kills the host
But I also think publishers have been complicit in providing a gradually worse experience, usually through SEO, for 10+ years.
This has drowned out what most people would call "good/original content" - think small, independent bloggers.
That big publishers might lose their shirts sounds like a good thing to me.
And I know some people are going to say how writers and news "don't deserve" to make money because they haven't sacrificed enough upon the altar of tech, hustle, and Silicon Valley - I don't really care. I think newspapers and writing in general losing out is a blow to society.
Well, and intentional efforts by the major tech companies.
Like Facebook lying about video stats to push "pivot to video". https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/well-this-puts-a-nail-in-t...
"It turns out that the metrics that Facebook was using to measure engagement with news video were wrong, massively overestimating the amount of time that users spent consuming video ads. In 2019, Facebook settled a lawsuit with those advertisers, paying them $40 million (while admitting no wrongdoing). But it was too late for the publishers who’d already pivoted to Facebook video and then either made big cuts or shut down completely when it turned out people weren’t actually watching."
The web has led to 10x more content being published in the past 30 years than was published in all of human kind's history before. And that's not including short-form posts/comments/reviews/chats/etc on social media and forums and communities.
The amount of increased competition and commoditization of content is insane.
I worked at a newspaper for years, during the early days of social media (I made our Twitter account, even... and once dropped an accidental f-bomb on it). I remember the video push; it was a huge change to workflows, hiring patterns, technology needs, etc. It was built on lies and bad data, and media outlets really haven't recovered since.
1. I don't believe that training LLMs on publicly-available content is morally bad. Nor do I believe that it should be prosecutable as copyright infringement, any more than I believe that we should prosecute humans for studying books/art/essays/movies/etc and "downloading" that information into their brains. I'm not a big fan of IP law in general (I think it's largely a crime against the people's freedom to share and riff on ideas and expression), but to the extent that we need to bring IP law into this, I only think it should be prosecutable to publish a near-exact copy of an existing work. Creating a tool/AI capable of reproducing a Lady Gaga song is not the same thing as actually reproducing and selling a Lady Gaga song.
2. Capitalist markets depend on constant competition and innovation. This is a good thing for consumers, as things generally tend to get better and better over time (look at cars, clothing, medicine, food choices, etc). The cost comes to business owners, who are endlessly forced to compete on cost/speed/availability/value at the risk of being disrupted. As a business owner myself, I am okay with this cost and do not find it morally wrong, unfair, or reprehensible. It's for the greater good, and business owners imo are the societal group least in need of charity or prioritization. And, again, the rules help consumers. When a business is being outcompeted, that's because consumers are voting with their feet for what they think is the better option.
3. Pure artists are unaffected. If you're a craftsperson, artist, writer, chef, programmer, etc who is creating for the love of creating, that's amazing. You are unaffected. Nothing under the sun can stop you from doing what you love. If you make a great burger for yourself or your friends and family, it does not matter that McDonald's has sold a billion burgers. However, once you start trying to sell your creations to others, you are no longer purely an artist, you are a business, and you will be subject to the aforementioned rules of the market. Which, once again, I think are fair.
4. Trying to skirt the rules of the market to avoid competition or disruption, imo, is not cool. It generally amounts to rent-seeking "I got here first" behavior, which benefits no one in society except for business owners who don't want to innovate. "My profession/industry was here first, and this is how it's always been since I got into it, and I like making money this way, and it's unfair for anything to happen in the market that disrupts my flow of money or causes me to change, and I'm going to use my incumbency/popularity/authority to try to change the law to stop newcomers from out-competing me or to force them to give me a cut, consumers be damned."
It is not a tragedy for a business model that used to thrive to decline. It's a natural process that has happened many tens of thousands of times, and it's the flip side of the coin called progress.
Apples to oranges. No amount of studying Rembrandt paintings would permit a human to paint 9 of them every minute.
Learning in humans and learning in LLMs are fundamentally so different, this analogy doesn't hold up to basic scrutiny.
> I only think it should be prosecutable to publish a near-exact copy of an existing work. Creating a tool/AI capable of reproducing a Lady Gaga song is not the same thing as actually reproducing and selling a Lady Gaga song.
Our legal system will decide that.
> Capitalist markets depend on constant competition and innovation.
Fuck capitalism and fuck the corporations playing it's game. I don't give a fuck if OpenAI makes a billion trillion dollars or not. I give a fuck whether or not people can continue earning money so they can not freeze to death.
If we want to embrace fully automated luxury communism, fine. If you want to automate millions of workers out of a job simply because you can, and pocket a fraction of their salaries each and be rich beyond belief while millions are consigned to starvation, you are everything wrong with our modern world and I hope those workers take vengeance on you.
> Pure artists are unaffected.
[ citation needed ]
> If you're a craftsperson, artist, writer, chef, programmer, etc who is creating for the love of creating, that's amazing. You are unaffected. Nothing under the sun can stop you from doing what you love.
You know what can? Losing your home.
> However, once you start trying to sell your creations to others, you are no longer purely an artist, you are a business, and you will be subject to the aforementioned rules of the market. Which, once again, I think are fair.
Justify to me how it's fair for a comic illustrator to lose market share to some asshole with a subscription to Midjourney. Justify to me why it's fair for copy writers to lose their jobs to ChatGPT because the results are fine. Is the broad-scale punishment for not learning to code that as software eats the world you just get to go die about it? Is that what our industry is? I thought we were in this to build a better, more efficient world, not to just privatize everyone's way to earn a living so our oligarchs could buy a 14th yacht.
This sucks.
All of #4 is trying to recast people trying desperately to cling to their mode of survival as rent seeking which is not only ethically disgusting, it's also dumb as hell.
You can recast this argument that it's only businesses losing out to AI, but it fucking isn't and you know that. It's workers who trained up for jobs and did exactly what they were told, and now their path to whatever meager way to scrape by is being automated so a handful of people who are already rich beyond fucking belief can be slightly richer.
Fuck this whole thing.
Literally the only people benefitting from AI are the rich assholes who are investing in it, who then get to scrape a tiny amount of money off of everything it writes, draws, and otherwise farts out for people who also transparently do not want to become skilled themselves. It robs workers of their ability to earn a living, it's widely regarded as shit to consume which makes the consumers experience worse and platforms already struggling to filter all the stupid garbage out have to now solve that too. Literally just a tax on everyone and everything on the internet, paid to people already unfathomably rich, because fuck you.
That's an arbitrary and irrelevant difference. Proof: if a future society upgraded human brains to have the same power as AI, would you then consider it to be immoral and illegal for humans to witness the works and creations of others? No, you would certainly not, as that would be ridiculous. Or take the inverse: it's illegal to use a copy machine to mass copy and distribute somebody else's work, but should it be legal for a human to do this by hand, since humans are massively slower than a copy machine? No, it shouldn't, both should be illegal.
These examples prove the point that ability/capability/skill are non-factors in assessing the morality and legality of copyright infringement.
> Fuck capitalism and fuck the corporations playing it's game. I don't give a fuck if OpenAI makes a billion trillion dollars or not. I give a fuck whether or not people can continue earning money so they can not freeze to death.
Capitalism and the competitive market have created more prosperity and taken more people out of the cold than any other economic system in history. So either you don't actually care about people's well-being, or you're simply ignorant of the effects of capitalism on human prosperity. I suspect it's the latter since you're 100% focused on only a small slice of what's occurring when competition/disruption occur (incumbents lose profits) and 0% focused on everything else (consumers went en masse, things get cheaper and more affordable, new opportunities are created, new players increase their profits).
Essentially you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. By trying to do do the shorted-sighted "humanitarian" thing to protect the profits/livelihoods of a small number of incumbents, you're sacrificing the massive benefits of everything else.
I would hope if we all had brains powered by AI we would recognize how stupid the game we're playing is and end it already, do away with the notion of money as a whole, and just set about living good lives, since that's what AI itself largely suggests we do. However, if this extremely tenuous metaphor is be executed as is presented, if indeed a human could look at a Rembrandt, and subseqently produce 9 copies of it per minute, no, viewing it shouldn't be illegal, but selling the copies absolutely should and would be.
Like if you just want to obsessively generate AI art and... idk, staple it to your wall? That's not illegal, nor even unethical. You don't need to generate it either, you can just print things, and have them.
> Or take the inverse: it's illegal to use a copy machine to mass copy and distribute somebody else's work, but should it be legal for a human to do this by hand, since humans are massively slower than a copy machine? No, it shouldn't, both should be illegal.
No shit.
> Capitalism and the competitive market have created more prosperity and taken more people out of the cold than any other economic system in history.
It also starves 25,000 people to death per day.
I have spent my life making video games and I can assure you market forces shape which video games are created for your enjoyment. There is a reason why a certain type of game appears on iOS and a different type of game appears on your PC. One is very shaped by the pricing rules of the Apple store and the other is very shaped by Steam. A "pure" artist may never be deterred from spending their days playing an accordion, but maybe the fact that no one is listening will cause them to choose a different path?
That initial investment in time/energy is what we need to protect to encourage people to do it. This goes for IP law also in the exact same way - why invest the resources into R&D if the end product will just be ripped off before you've had a chance to recoup anything?
Breaking hospitality/zoning laws is not 'competition'. (AirBnb)
Breaking taxi/transportations laws and regulation is not 'competition'. (Uber/Lyft)
Misclassifying workers to bypass employment laws is not 'competition'. (All 'gig' companies)
Operating unlicensed financial services is not 'competition'. (fintech)
Being given special content liability carveouts only to your platform is not 'competition'. (social media)
Evading antitrust norms via vertical integration is not 'competition'. (Apple app store and 30% rent)
Flooding the market with illegal or gray-area imports is not 'competition'. (Amazon)
Exploiting data without consent is not 'competition'. (all tech at this point)
Using investor capital to subsidize predatory pricing is not 'competition'. (almost all tech)
Every industry 'new' tech has gone after they have cheated, broken laws and/or had/pushed for (normally after the fact) special carveouts from the law so that they are the only ones in their field that get to operate a different way, used and harvested data in bad faith, used predatory unsustainable pricing practices.
Show me where tech has 'outcompeted' without doing any of the above. Where the product didn't need special protections/carvouts to existing law, didn't exploit data/peoples trust, didn't use investment capital to artificially lower prices, didn't utilize 'grey areas' to skirt barriers that ACTUAL competing companies obeyed, where the product delivered, on it's own, created a unicorn.
Edit: Responding as edit because I've been timed out. Apple is doing rent-seeking enforced through ecosystem control. This is traditionally seen as a monopolistic practice and historically/based on capitalist philosophy companies that did this were seen as a threat to capitalism and broken up/punished for this behavior. Rent seeking is explicitly anti-capitalist in classical economic thought.
This one is competition though. No one is forced to use Apple or develop for Apple. People purchase Apple because they like their products more than the alternatives.
From the Wikipedia entry on vertical integration[1]:
>Vertical integration can be desirable because it secures supplies needed by the firm to produce its product and the market needed to sell the product, but it can become undesirable when a firm's actions become anti-competitive and impede free competition in an open marketplace.
...
>A firm may desire such expansion to secure the supplies needed by the firm to produce its product and the market needed to sell the product. Such expansion can become undesirable from a system-wide perspective when it becomes anti-competitive and impede free competition in an open marketplace.
...
>The result is a more efficient business with lower costs and more profits. On the undesirable side, when vertical expansion leads toward monopolistic control of a product or service then regulative action may be required to rectify anti-competitive behavior.
Let's take copyright law for example. Set aside the fact that the entire basis of copyright law is EXPLICITLY to give businesses a "monopoly," which is the exact opposite of competition. Your issue with AI is that they are violating or trying to change the meaning of copyright law? How do you square that with the past 250 years of history of businesses successfully lobbying to strengthen and change copyright law in order to protect their monopolies and weaken competition?
Or let's look into taxi laws. Where for decades taxi medallion owners and fleet operators in NYC lobbied to prevent the city from issuing new medallions.
You seem to believe that laws increase competition and that resisting/changing/lobbying against the laws is meant to decrease competition, which is plainly untrue. Often the exact opposite is true, which is the very definition of regulatory capture.
Capitalism is a system that seeks to benefit the common man by incentivizing profit-seekers to compete to create new innovations, to deliver goods faster/easier, and to lower prices. It also seeks to disincentivize profit-seeking through non-competitive means that don't benefit consumers, e.g. monopolies, oligarchies, regulatory capture, false advertising, etc.
They won't.
OP's original comment called this stealing and this response is that the "obvious solution" is that the thief will pay their victim back after turning their stealing operation into a successful business. That is silly. Do people think that if the Pirate Bay is allowed to exist long enough that they will eventually start paying Hollywood Studios for new movies?
If you want to argue against OP in defense of these AI companies, argue why what they're doing isn't stealing or why what they're doing in the moment is justified. Don't say the stealing can be excused by some hypothetical and implied promise of future reparations.
EDIT: It's funny to respond to a comment asking for explanation of the downvotes only to be downvoted without explanation.
Yes, the AI companies are stealing. This is an area where the legal system needs to catch up.
Once it does, AI companies should have to negotiate contracts with publishers in order to legally use their content. Otherwise they should be open to lawsuits for copyright violations.
This is quite different from Pirate Bay, which is not run by a law abiding company with customers. Unless OpenAI wants to go underground and sell their services on the black market, they will have to play by the rules.
The trickle always turns out to be piss.
Edit:
Those how are downvoting me probably haver never spent a week writing an article or blog post.
Good luck with that, quality publishing died years ago when Google was optimizing for their end.
It’s a real phenomenon where search impressions and clicks, which moved roughly in tandem for many years, have started diverging rather abruptly and dramatically. It is an obvious qualitative change in Google search traffic.
Everyone is blaming the AI overviews, and they seem like the most obvious culprit. But regardless, the change in pattern is real and not correlated with site content quality.
I don't know what the hell is going on over there, but the systemic issues and awful decisions I see coming out of Alphabet companies in recent years paints a picture of suicidal levels of hubris at the c-suite level. The boards need to pull their heads out of their asses, otherwise incompetence is going to sink that ship before 2040.
[1] - https://jackyan.com/blog/2023/09/google-search-is-worse-by-d...
At this point, Google has become a shitty ChatGPT.
In the last few weeks, using both Google and ChatGPT for search, I get a far broader range of links from ChatGPT.
Basically, Google-today is the product of a long history of having and using its search the monopoly for profits and political agendas (include lots of other entities legally and otherwise forcing this use btw). All it's search results were as "opinionated" as an AI even before the appearance of ChatGPT. It's logical that any "green fields" search engine would be better.
Of course, the problem will be that OpenAI and company will face the
Example: The original Phil Specter version of Let It Be (the album) exists on Youtube but it's not possible to easily find it with either Google or Youtube searches (I've a number of times). But easily ChatGPT found a link to the song and album for me (Ole 'Chat gave strings use for google but these didn't work either btw).
1. A video or survey will take longer than just finding the content elsewhere. The survey is also probably more effort.
2. This breaks the "flow". The odds that I get distracted or just lose interest before the ad/survey is done is pretty high.
3. A lot of the stuff I want to read is more "passing curiosity" than "thing I have a dedicated interest in". The effort and time I'm willing to put into access is low.
The real question for me is whether Offerwall is going to make it harder to get around the paywall than previously. There are a few sites that actually send the full article, they just cover it up with an HTML element. You can still see the full text if you open the request for the content in DevTools.
This means if you like a blog, there could now be a way to organically discover other blogs similar to it, by following links across multiple sites.
There will not be a second decentralized web renaissance. We are all too busy, lazy, and enthralled by low effort content, like posting on HN.
If google doesn't do that, publishers will respond in a vicious way, like purposely poisoning content to mislead their LLMs.
Few Americans pay for news when they encounter paywalls
I created my own Internet index. That is how I control my discoveries.
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