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What search has done to news has for decades been the canary in the coalmine for what AI is doing to art now. Because news has weaker copyright protections tha

What search has done to news has for decades been the canary in the coalmine for what AI is doing to art now. Because news has weaker copyright protections than original artwork ("can't copyright facts"), Google et. al. have been free this whole time to use news as a data input and pull traffic away from the original sources. The end result is what has happened to the news industry, and we can extrapolate what will happen to commercial art if copyright protections on artworks are discovered to be similarly weak.

delfinom 3y ago
That's the thing though. Google doesn't cough up the article content. It just shows headlines with links to the article for people to read. It's nothing like the AIs which are actually generating the entire content from questionable source rights. Is the real story that nobody wants to admit the majority of people don't read past the headline? Because that's a pretty stark reflection on how journalism as a field should maybe not exist then. Hah.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  The majority of people don't read past the headline, and the majority of people don't care if the art on a billboard came from a human or a machine. It is possible that some human practices aren't compatible with a simple capitalist model of sustaining them.
realusername 3y ago
Nothing is AI based here, the newspaper give themselves what they want to show on Google. So of they are not okay with the content they send, they can just send an empty string instead. The newspapers are in full control here and always have been.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  Except that they're not, because they know that in this modern era, people use search to find information. So if they don't want to become irrelevant, they have to play the game; they can't just robots.txt-exclude Google, they'll be tossed into the wastebin of history against other news sources that people can just find with a click. It's not real choice when the choice is "Let this company harvest your information or become obsolete." Similarly, artists in this modern era are stuck because to be relevant, they have to show off online (where the eyeballs are) but everything they put up online can become fodder for an AI synthesizer.
  - realusername 3y ago
    It's not any different than the newspaper stalls of the past. The newspapers show their title and cover for free on the street as well to get somebody to pick them up. And same as in the past, nobody wanted to show a blank page on the street either. Where the newspapers are struggling in isn't getting traffic but in converting this traffic to paid customers and Google isn't responsible of any of that problem.

delfinom 3y ago

That's the thing though. Google doesn't cough up the article content. It just shows headlines with links to the article for people to read. It's nothing like the AIs which are actually generating the entire content from questionable source rights. Is the real story that nobody wants to admit the majority of people don't read past the headline? Because that's a pretty stark reflection on how journalism as a field should maybe not exist then. Hah.

shadowgovt 3y ago
The majority of people don't read past the headline, and the majority of people don't care if the art on a billboard came from a human or a machine. It is possible that some human practices aren't compatible with a simple capitalist model of sustaining them.

realusername 3y ago

Nothing is AI based here, the newspaper give themselves what they want to show on Google. So of they are not okay with the content they send, they can just send an empty string instead. The newspapers are in full control here and always have been.

shadowgovt 3y ago
Except that they're not, because they know that in this modern era, people use search to find information. So if they don't want to become irrelevant, they have to play the game; they can't just robots.txt-exclude Google, they'll be tossed into the wastebin of history against other news sources that people can just find with a click. It's not real choice when the choice is "Let this company harvest your information or become obsolete." Similarly, artists in this modern era are stuck because to be relevant, they have to show off online (where the eyeballs are) but everything they put up online can become fodder for an AI synthesizer.
- realusername 3y ago
  It's not any different than the newspaper stalls of the past. The newspapers show their title and cover for free on the street as well to get somebody to pick them up. And same as in the past, nobody wanted to show a blank page on the street either. Where the newspapers are struggling in isn't getting traffic but in converting this traffic to paid customers and Google isn't responsible of any of that problem.