5 ms·

Moat for chatbots is soon going to be whoever reddit/twitter/quora/stackoverflow allows to mine their fresh content for models. If the endpoint is not the user

Moat for chatbots is soon going to be whoever reddit/twitter/quora/stackoverflow allows to mine their fresh content for models. If the endpoint is not the user clicking in a link then why should these companies give away all that value?

bottlepalm 4y ago
Idk but it's going to be an AI arms race. For some reason I don't think it will last very long though..
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
zone411 4y ago
This has been going for many years already, with Google giving answers right in the search results and just using websites as their private content factories. The relationship has become more and more uneven every year, with no pushback from the websites (a collective action problem, some traffic is better than no traffic, or worse, traffic to your competitor) and it probably won't change as long as Google pays lip service and adds a few links once in a while. The quality of content and therefore the quality of Google's search results suffer in the long term because it makes no sense to invest in it, but as long as it's good for Google's quarterly results, they don't care. Their problem is new sites like Discord and mobile-only apps that never got addicted to traffic from Google in the first place.
highwaylights 4y ago
One of these things is not like the others. Stackoverflow has value for these models, the others will just make the nonsense responses worse.
nicbou 4y ago
This is something that bothers me a lot. I live from the content I write. It's not fluff. Some of it comes from weeks-long email conversations with government officials. It takes a lot of research and help from experts I have long-standing relationships with. If search engines serve that information but deny me the traffic, the website dies, as does the source of the information. I can deal with lazy copywriters just rephrasing my work because the original still outranks them, and I have legal options to deal with them. I can't do anything if Google - over 80% of of my traffic - decides to proxy my content and starve me of my income.
- spyder 4y ago
  That's one of the reasons more and more sites are starting to require sign-up to continue reading the article. So only provide a summary of your article to search engines and users can access the rest by the annoying sign up (or captcha). But that also means less of the content is searchable so the summary you provide for search engines has to be really good (maybe even AI can help to produce this summary). And it's probably not just big companies we will have to worry about because at least they can be somewhat regulated and they are in the public eye. The other "threat" in the future is the "distributed" AI when people can run their own personal AI assistants that could collect information for them by any means (singing up to to websites, e-mailing, calling people, talking to other AI agents) and with filtering out ads and sponsored content. At that point probably everything worthwhile will be paywalled and the "SEO" game will be to convince/trick these AIs to sing up / pay for your content.
  - Nathanba 4y ago
    That's a very positive way to look at it: Use the AI for your own benefit to generate a summary but the full information is hidden behind a signin/paywall. Of course whether this ends up being better for humanity is the question. On the other hand, maybe Google should be paying people for high quality, trainable content.
    - nicbou 4y ago
      I have no paywall by design. It's a core principle behind the website I run. I can cover the bills through affiliate links for services I actually recommend. However those are stripped by whoever uses my content for their own benefit, including Google.
- concordDance 4y ago
  The problem of incentivizing valuable content is known to be very hard and currently unsolved. Which is why our current media is 90% dross. I agree this worsens it.
  - 4y ago
hackerlight 4y ago
What is the legal landscape here? Is it within Reddit's legal right to disallow OpenAI from using the data on its publicly facing site?

bottlepalm 4y ago

Idk but it's going to be an AI arms race. For some reason I don't think it will last very long though..

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

zone411 4y ago

This has been going for many years already, with Google giving answers right in the search results and just using websites as their private content factories. The relationship has become more and more uneven every year, with no pushback from the websites (a collective action problem, some traffic is better than no traffic, or worse, traffic to your competitor) and it probably won't change as long as Google pays lip service and adds a few links once in a while. The quality of content and therefore the quality of Google's search results suffer in the long term because it makes no sense to invest in it, but as long as it's good for Google's quarterly results, they don't care. Their problem is new sites like Discord and mobile-only apps that never got addicted to traffic from Google in the first place.

highwaylights 4y ago

One of these things is not like the others. Stackoverflow has value for these models, the others will just make the nonsense responses worse.

nicbou 4y ago

This is something that bothers me a lot. I live from the content I write. It's not fluff. Some of it comes from weeks-long email conversations with government officials. It takes a lot of research and help from experts I have long-standing relationships with. If search engines serve that information but deny me the traffic, the website dies, as does the source of the information. I can deal with lazy copywriters just rephrasing my work because the original still outranks them, and I have legal options to deal with them. I can't do anything if Google - over 80% of of my traffic - decides to proxy my content and starve me of my income.

spyder 4y ago
That's one of the reasons more and more sites are starting to require sign-up to continue reading the article. So only provide a summary of your article to search engines and users can access the rest by the annoying sign up (or captcha). But that also means less of the content is searchable so the summary you provide for search engines has to be really good (maybe even AI can help to produce this summary). And it's probably not just big companies we will have to worry about because at least they can be somewhat regulated and they are in the public eye. The other "threat" in the future is the "distributed" AI when people can run their own personal AI assistants that could collect information for them by any means (singing up to to websites, e-mailing, calling people, talking to other AI agents) and with filtering out ads and sponsored content. At that point probably everything worthwhile will be paywalled and the "SEO" game will be to convince/trick these AIs to sing up / pay for your content.
- Nathanba 4y ago
  That's a very positive way to look at it: Use the AI for your own benefit to generate a summary but the full information is hidden behind a signin/paywall. Of course whether this ends up being better for humanity is the question. On the other hand, maybe Google should be paying people for high quality, trainable content.
  - nicbou 4y ago
    I have no paywall by design. It's a core principle behind the website I run. I can cover the bills through affiliate links for services I actually recommend. However those are stripped by whoever uses my content for their own benefit, including Google.
concordDance 4y ago
The problem of incentivizing valuable content is known to be very hard and currently unsolved. Which is why our current media is 90% dross. I agree this worsens it.
- 4y ago

hackerlight 4y ago

What is the legal landscape here? Is it within Reddit's legal right to disallow OpenAI from using the data on its publicly facing site?