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Google pays publishers to test AI tool that scrapes sites to craft new content
- visarga 3y ago> It’s hard to argue that stealing people’s work supports the mission of the news. This is not adding any new information to the mix. Not so different from current publications. Most human written news is also based on repackaging Twitter and press agencies. Few journalists actually gather original content. Should be OK to copy news information from any source without consent, its fact based not creative data.
- 999900000999 3y agoIronically I had a side project that essentially summarized stories from RSS feeds and reposted them on my own blog. I provided full attribution and links to the original articles. Applied for AdSense and was denied as a low quality website. Not that I expected to make much anyway. Now basically the same thing is an official Google project.
- htrp 3y agoIt's cool when they do it, it's a problem when you do it
- andro_dev 3y agoPodcast: Why Google Is Shit Now This week we go long on Google News and AI, and why Google Search is worse now. We also discuss a phone spy tool that can monitor billions. https://www.404media.co/podcast-why-google-is-shit-now-404-media-week-22/ https://www.404media.co/podcast-why-google-is-shit-now-404-m...
- ChrisLTD 3y agoThis seems like a great way to poison the well. But maybe Google already plans on search dying out and they are scrambling to find the next big thing?
- gundmc 3y agoI could see this going horribly wrong, but honestly a LLM that scrapes local government data sources, police blotters, etc, highlights important or interesting information and makes it understandable sounds pretty great.
- shp0ngle 3y agoOne friend once told me, even a few years before ChatGPT, that they use AI to generate daily horoscopes in his online newspaper. Using far more simple models. Nobody ever noticed.
- mtmail 3y ago20 years ago (HTML was still king, Javascript hardly used) I worked on a horoscope product. The data provider had all daily/weekly/monthly horoscopes of the coming year ready. Whatever their process, I assume manual, must have been straight forward.
- kozinc 3y agoWell horoscopes do tend to be general enough they might as well apply to nearly everybody, so I'd believe it.
- Filligree 3y agoDidn't they notice the accuracy of the predictions went down? /s
- stabbles 3y agoThe AI might as well look like this old_horoscopes[rand() % N] and nobody will ever notice.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 3y ago"Handmade" or "manmade" is about to have a whole new relevance on the internet. I'm sure I'm in the minority, but the mere suggestion that some purportedly creative "content" (ugh, that word sounds like saying "sausage meat") is AI generated makes me completely lose interest. Soon enough that might make me lose interest in whole swathes of the internet, but I can't deny that's been an ongoing process regardless for a while anyways.
- ActionHank 3y agoAfter their recent over-censorship of Gemini I look forward to Google's fair, even handed, completely unbaised approach to the delicate topic of race relations and tensions as the world's population slowly seems to descend into more hatred for each other over silly differences. /s
- greenie_beans 3y agoagreed, but i see this as an opportunity for creative people to make art and communicate things that a computer can't. i'm skeptical that an AI can write a great novel about the matters of the heart and feels like it's alive (not without trying). i think, in the age of generic AI content, that some people will be seeking authenticity even more than we do now.
- rchaud 3y agoSo as long as creative people can overturn the momentum of the largest corporations sinking billions of financial and political capital into making AI synonymous with computing, we'll be OK? /s
- greenie_beans 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arts_and_Crafts_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arts_and_Crafts_movement
- dogman144 3y agoCreative people hate this trend and don’t work that way (see possible optimizations via the grateful computer overlords). Source - know a lot of artists and writers. The creative classes already trusted this stuff the first round in 2008+, and it ate their lunch.
- spking 3y agoWhat happens once the stipend goes away? What happens when the tool stops being “free”? I know these publishers are desperate for lifelines at the moment but I hope they are thinking ahead to the time that Google no longer needs them or their content.
- RyanHamilton 3y agoMore like what if long term google cuts out the publishers. I mean when someone googles X, show or generate the article now. They only need the publishers now to get a human feedback loop.
- ipaddr 3y agoThey still want social and kagi traffic. But the lack of google traffic will turn on them.
- a_gnostic 3y agoThere is exactly one form of organization that wants the sort of Gleichschaltung that comes from this sort of tool, and it is not funded voluntarily.
- bdjsiqoocwk 3y agoGoogle is doing the thing that it punishes other publishers for doing? Whaaaaa? /s
- john___matrix 3y agoI don't really see how this isn't just content theft at this point. Pointing at "inspiration sites" and just rewording their content feels pretty scummy at best. At what point are content creators and publishers going to be paid for or given the option to block AI scraping tools using their material so blatantly to generate income for other companies and publishers?
- randomdata 3y ago> Pointing at "inspiration sites" and just rewording their content Sounds like Reddit, minus the AI part. Any time someone might be on the verge of an original thought there it gets shot down with something akin to "[citation needed]", followed by strong social pressure for the user to stop participating if they can't manage just rewording "inspiration sites". What's special about AI here?
- emmo 3y agoScope
- randomdata 3y agoWhat kind of scope?
- a_gnostic 3y agoYou wouldn't download a car.
- Delumine 3y agoWhy are they funding this? I don't want to read AI-generated news.
- JohnMakin 3y agoWould anyone? They don't care. It's so beyond the pale now it's almost gone into satire.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rightbyte 3y agoThere are some sites that don't use Adsense. I guess Google want adfarms with adsense copying their content?
- hef19898 3y agoThere is no way this behaviour would be illegal, right?
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago> I don't want to read AI-generated news. I didn't think you were right. But you're right. create aggregated content more efficiently by indexing recently published reports generated by other organizations, like government agencies and neighboring news outlets, and then summarizing and publishing them as a new article.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y agoWhat is being scraped: using factual content from public data sources—like a local government’s public information office or health authority. edit: what is also being scraped: like government agencies and neighboring news outlets I yield to the pessimists.
- starbugs 3y ago> I yield to the pessimists. To give you an optimistic perspective: I don't think it qualifies as pessimism to point out obvious issues with some of the "approaches" currently developing in this field. If enough people do it, maybe something will change for the better?
- ametrau 3y agoI don’t think this is a new problem. It’s was solved with copyright laws. And you can now enjoy original output. The law just needs to catch up (and hopefully quickly).
- a_gnostic 3y agoI wonder who curates the AI blocklist, and how skipping sites will affect the internal bias.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoCan't wait for google to die out. Glad to see they are on their way.
- zooq_ai 3y agoHa Ha! This is the exact sentiment HN had about Meta/Facebook about 18 months ago. This entire thread is a reminder as to how out of touch and naive most HN commentary are when it is outside their area of a very narrow field of expertise.
- ipaddr 3y agoFacebook usage/imagine has dropped. Fights with congress. Average person moving to other socials. Mark was planning a run for president which is dead. Metaverse stalled. Plenty of money, ad revenue and other social networks they control. IBM is still around. It took yahoo forever to die. The corpse of altavista and ask jeeves still make money.
- zooq_ai 3y agoStep outside the HN bubble my friend https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-global-dau/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-global-d...