5 ms·

I couldn't care less about Google or its business but here is how I think this is short-sighted in at least on way. If there is no search engine and people can'

by emrah 4y ago

I couldn't care less about Google or its business but here is how I think this is short-sighted in at least on way. If there is no search engine and people can't benefit from being found, they will be less likely to produce content. So chatgpt will need to incorporate sources to its results but if any result is a combination of multiple pages then i don't know how it would show that. And without attribution, content creation will likely not die but shift and who knows what that'll look like I imagine even chatgpt's output will change in time, it can't stay like this

nicbou 4y ago
In the end someone needs to do the original research, to go out and take pictures of stuff. If these people are no longer entitled to the sweat of their brow - not even attribution - why would they bother? I'm one of those people. If it comes to that, I'll have to find another line of work. I won't just start doing it for free.
- autoexec 4y ago
  The internet was filled with people posting useful content and photos long before the ad industry showed up and shat on everything. People love to share their passions and knowledge with others and will happily do it for free. Who is paying you to post comments here? An internet where clicks and ad pushes don't drive content might look different, but it certainty wouldn't be devoid of content.
  - nicbou 4y ago
    I'd keep writing comments and the occasional blog post, but I might not devote my life to documenting German bureaucracy, as I currently do. That's by far my most valuable contribution. It's a bit like how I love to cook for friends on the weekends, but don't volunteer as a line cook in restaurants. Without any reward, I'd have to get a job and I'd have far less time to write. You can't run everything on sheer passion. Some valuable things depend on creators getting rewarded for their work.
    - autoexec 4y ago
      With an internet that didn't run on ads we'd lose some things for sure. Some of them useful or entertaining, but we'd also lose a lot of the SEO/contentfarm garbage and it'd be a huge win for people's privacy. How successful have you been with getting tips and how does that compare to the income ads generate for you?
      - nicbou 4y ago
        You dismiss most of the internet so casually that you seem to argue in bad faith. Most of the useful internet monetises its traffic one way or another, and not just with privacy-invading ads. My website looks and works the same with an ad blocker, and it's as far from blogspam as it gets. I'll leave it at that, and invite you to flex your imagination a bit. Think of all the websites you depend on that would not survive having zero revenue.
  - twelve40 4y ago
    so... given that right now ChatGPT works on a set of finite, curated datasets (not the whole entire web like Google) and doesn't credit the authors of its information whatsoever, you are saying if it becomes prominent and destroys all traditional search traffic to website content authors, they will just happily keep posting quality content into the void, even though nobody except a mindless digester robot will read it? (since they will get no search traffic and will never get any credit of any kind for their work)
    - autoexec 4y ago
      Probably? I mean, it's not as if only the AI will read it if that AI is passing along the information to others. The AI would just the interface people use to access the information. A do think a lot of people put stuff online just to be helpful. What amounts to "credit" is often very abstract. For the early web, counting page views and watching visitor counters increment was somewhat satisfying, but a lot of communication online is pseudo-anonymous. What's the "credit" we get here? Karma awarded to a pseudonym? If I leave a review on amazon, no one seeing it (but amazon) will ever know it was me, but it's nice to see others mark the review as having been helpful to them. An AI interface to information found online could provide something similar. For most people at least, I don't think that a lack of personal recognition or reward invalidates the sanctification they get from even the smallest acknowledgement that they've contributed to something. It also seems like much of the absolute worst things online exist only to optimize page views and monetary reward. Being freed of so much of that trash would be pretty nice.
      - nicbou 4y ago
        I put helpful content online for free on my personal blog. The karma I get comes from the occasional thankful email, and coffee with strangers with similar interests. I don't even measure traffic. I just like to know that people land there and find what they need. If this corpus that took countless hours to create was distilled by an AI, it would feel completely pointless to extend it. Imagine writing a book knowing that no one will see it, but that an in-house writer at the publishing house will read it once and write its own version. They'll get credited and paid, but you won't. Some people are okay with that, but probably not the people whose words you read all day, either to solve a problem or entertain yourself.
albntomat0 4y ago
I think it depends on the type of content. I've primarily used ChatGPT for additional explanations of programming terms (e.g. C++ lambdas & capturing local variables, validated against my code and other sources). The results from Google for the same query are a bunch of overly long, SEO'd crap, covered in ads. There are plenty of other things I've searched for recently, were ChatGPT simply doesn't make sense. One example is looking for trusted reviews of kitchen appliances, and things to do on vacation. I need to be careful with those as well, given the incentives around human reviews. I'm skeptical that market will be disrupted by a language model, while also being the most relevant for advertisers.
- webmaven 4y ago
  > There are plenty of other things I've searched for recently, were ChatGPT simply doesn't make sense. One example is looking for trusted reviews of kitchen appliances, and things to do on vacation. Right now, ChatGPT doesn't provide good answers to questions in the form of "What is a good source for information of type X?", but that is really a limitation of the source data (text from a current web crawl will, superficially, tend to reflect information rather than meta analysis), rather than the model as such, and transforming PageRank style graph data into a verbalized form suitable for an LLM to be trained on ought to be possible. Something equivalent has already been done for knowledge graphs, for example: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.12688 https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.12688 https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.08184 https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.08184
  - albntomat0 4y ago
    Interesting! Thanks for sharing. I’d be curious to see how such things, if implemented, fare under the adversarial conditions that current reviews and SEO are in.
kenjackson 4y ago
Just seems like evolution. Like how you don't make money selling albums anymore. The world will look different. Here's one possible world... Everything is paywalled. And you basically can pay to subscribe to services that have information, news, stories, etc... and those get fed into "your GPT". You can also add your emails and chats into this as well. Just one thought.

by emrah 4y ago

nicbou 4y ago

In the end someone needs to do the original research, to go out and take pictures of stuff. If these people are no longer entitled to the sweat of their brow - not even attribution - why would they bother? I'm one of those people. If it comes to that, I'll have to find another line of work. I won't just start doing it for free.

autoexec 4y ago
The internet was filled with people posting useful content and photos long before the ad industry showed up and shat on everything. People love to share their passions and knowledge with others and will happily do it for free. Who is paying you to post comments here? An internet where clicks and ad pushes don't drive content might look different, but it certainty wouldn't be devoid of content.
- nicbou 4y ago
  I'd keep writing comments and the occasional blog post, but I might not devote my life to documenting German bureaucracy, as I currently do. That's by far my most valuable contribution. It's a bit like how I love to cook for friends on the weekends, but don't volunteer as a line cook in restaurants. Without any reward, I'd have to get a job and I'd have far less time to write. You can't run everything on sheer passion. Some valuable things depend on creators getting rewarded for their work.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    With an internet that didn't run on ads we'd lose some things for sure. Some of them useful or entertaining, but we'd also lose a lot of the SEO/contentfarm garbage and it'd be a huge win for people's privacy. How successful have you been with getting tips and how does that compare to the income ads generate for you?
    - nicbou 4y ago
      You dismiss most of the internet so casually that you seem to argue in bad faith. Most of the useful internet monetises its traffic one way or another, and not just with privacy-invading ads. My website looks and works the same with an ad blocker, and it's as far from blogspam as it gets. I'll leave it at that, and invite you to flex your imagination a bit. Think of all the websites you depend on that would not survive having zero revenue.
- twelve40 4y ago
  so... given that right now ChatGPT works on a set of finite, curated datasets (not the whole entire web like Google) and doesn't credit the authors of its information whatsoever, you are saying if it becomes prominent and destroys all traditional search traffic to website content authors, they will just happily keep posting quality content into the void, even though nobody except a mindless digester robot will read it? (since they will get no search traffic and will never get any credit of any kind for their work)
  - autoexec 4y ago
    Probably? I mean, it's not as if only the AI will read it if that AI is passing along the information to others. The AI would just the interface people use to access the information. A do think a lot of people put stuff online just to be helpful. What amounts to "credit" is often very abstract. For the early web, counting page views and watching visitor counters increment was somewhat satisfying, but a lot of communication online is pseudo-anonymous. What's the "credit" we get here? Karma awarded to a pseudonym? If I leave a review on amazon, no one seeing it (but amazon) will ever know it was me, but it's nice to see others mark the review as having been helpful to them. An AI interface to information found online could provide something similar. For most people at least, I don't think that a lack of personal recognition or reward invalidates the sanctification they get from even the smallest acknowledgement that they've contributed to something. It also seems like much of the absolute worst things online exist only to optimize page views and monetary reward. Being freed of so much of that trash would be pretty nice.
    - nicbou 4y ago
      I put helpful content online for free on my personal blog. The karma I get comes from the occasional thankful email, and coffee with strangers with similar interests. I don't even measure traffic. I just like to know that people land there and find what they need. If this corpus that took countless hours to create was distilled by an AI, it would feel completely pointless to extend it. Imagine writing a book knowing that no one will see it, but that an in-house writer at the publishing house will read it once and write its own version. They'll get credited and paid, but you won't. Some people are okay with that, but probably not the people whose words you read all day, either to solve a problem or entertain yourself.

albntomat0 4y ago

I think it depends on the type of content. I've primarily used ChatGPT for additional explanations of programming terms (e.g. C++ lambdas & capturing local variables, validated against my code and other sources). The results from Google for the same query are a bunch of overly long, SEO'd crap, covered in ads. There are plenty of other things I've searched for recently, were ChatGPT simply doesn't make sense. One example is looking for trusted reviews of kitchen appliances, and things to do on vacation. I need to be careful with those as well, given the incentives around human reviews. I'm skeptical that market will be disrupted by a language model, while also being the most relevant for advertisers.

webmaven 4y ago
> There are plenty of other things I've searched for recently, were ChatGPT simply doesn't make sense. One example is looking for trusted reviews of kitchen appliances, and things to do on vacation. Right now, ChatGPT doesn't provide good answers to questions in the form of "What is a good source for information of type X?", but that is really a limitation of the source data (text from a current web crawl will, superficially, tend to reflect information rather than meta analysis), rather than the model as such, and transforming PageRank style graph data into a verbalized form suitable for an LLM to be trained on ought to be possible. Something equivalent has already been done for knowledge graphs, for example: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.12688 https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.12688 https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.08184 https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.08184
- albntomat0 4y ago
  Interesting! Thanks for sharing. I’d be curious to see how such things, if implemented, fare under the adversarial conditions that current reviews and SEO are in.

kenjackson 4y ago

Just seems like evolution. Like how you don't make money selling albums anymore. The world will look different. Here's one possible world... Everything is paywalled. And you basically can pay to subscribe to services that have information, news, stories, etc... and those get fed into "your GPT". You can also add your emails and chats into this as well. Just one thought.