6 ms·

What will happen if: Website owners decide to stop publishing because it’s not rewarded by a real human visit anymore? Then perplexity and the like won’t have

by baxtr 2y ago

What will happen if: Website owners decide to stop publishing because it’s not rewarded by a real human visit anymore? Then perplexity and the like won’t have new information to train their models on and no sites to answer the questions. I think there is a real content dilemma here at work. The incentives of Google and website owners were more or less aligned. This is not the case with perplexity.

lolinder 2y ago
What is a "visit"? TFA demonstrates that they got a hit on their site, that's how they got the logs. Is it necessary to load the JavaScript for it to count as a visit? What if I access the site with noscript? Or is it only a visit if I see all your recommended content? I usually block those recommendations so that I don't get distracted from the article I actually came to read—is my visit a less legitimate visit than other people's? What exactly is Perplexity doing here that isn't okay that people don't already do with their local user agents?
- alt227 2y ago
  > TFA demonstrates that they got a hit on their site Whats stopping perplexity caching this info say for 24 hours, and then redisplaying it to the next few hundred people who request it?
  - lolinder 2y ago
    Then they don't get the extra hits. So is that it—is a "visit" important because of the data that you're able to collect from the visit? Does this place HN's rampant use of archive.md on the same moral footing as Perplexity?
- denton-scratch 2y ago
  > What exactly is Perplexity doing here that isn't okay that people don't already do with their local user agents? It's in the title of TFA: they're being dishonest about who they are. PerplexityBot seems to understand that robots.txt is addressed to it. It's understood that site operators have a right to use the User-Agent to discriminate among visitors; that's why robots.txt is a standard. Crawlers that disrespect the standard have for many years been considered beyond the pale; thieves and snoopers. TFA's complaint is entirely justified.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    > It's in the title of TFA: they're being dishonest about who they are. PerplexityBot seems to understand that robots.txt is addressed to it. First, I'm ignoring the output of Perplexity. I have no reason to believe that they gave the LLM any knowledge about its internal operations, it's just riffing off of what OP is saying. Second, PerplexityBot is the user agent that they use when crawling and indexing. They never claimed to use that user agent for ad hoc HTTP requests (which are notably not the same as crawling). Third, I disagree that anyone has an obligation to be honest in their User-Agent. Have you ever looked at Chrome's user agent? They're spoofing just about everyone, as is every browser. Crawlers should respect robots.txt, but I'd be totally content if we just got rid of the User-Agent string entirely.
    - denton-scratch 2y ago
      > (which are notably not the same as crawling) Is that a distinction without a difference? I think the robots.txt RFC was addressed specifically to crawlers; so technically "ad hoc" requests generated automatically (i.e. by robots) aren't included. But the distinction operators would like to make is between humans and automata. Whether some automaton is a crawler or not isn't relevant.
      - lolinder 2y ago
        Actually, no, the fact that it's a crawler is the most important fact. The reason why website operators care at all about robots accessing their site (as distinct from humans controlling a browser) is historically one of two reasons: * The pattern of requests can be very problematic. Impolite crawlers are totally capable of taking down a website by hitting it over and over and over again for hours in a way that humans won't. * Crawlers are generally used to build search indexes, so instructing them about URLs that would be inappropriate to have show up in a search is relevant. The behavior that OP is complaining about is that when the user pastes a URL into Perplexity, Perplexity fetches that URL. Neither the traffic pattern nor the persistence profile are remotely similar to typical crawler behavior. As far as I can see there's almost nothing to distinguish it from someone using Edge and then using Edge's built-in summarizer.
- baxtr 2y ago
  A visit is a human reader. At the very least they get exposed to your website name. Notice your product/service if you get lucky. Become a customer at a later visit. We are talking about cutting the first step off so that everything which may come afterwards is cut off as well.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    The behavior that TFA is complaining about is that when the user drops a link to a site into Perplexity it is able to summarize the content of that link. This isn't about the discoverability aspect of Perplexity, they're specifically complaining that the ad hoc "summarize this post" requests don't respect robots.txt [0]. That's what I'm arguing in favor of and that's the behavior that TFA is attacking. [0] Which, incidentally, is entirely normal. robots.txt is for the web crawler that indexes, not for ad hoc requests.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    In other words, content is bait, reward is a captured user whose attention - whose sanity, the finite amount of life - can be wasted or plain used against them. I'm more than happy to see all the websites with attention economy business models to shut down. Yes, that might be 90% of the Internet. That would be the 90% that is poisonous shit.
    - baxtr 2y ago
      The attention economy will never die. Attention will only shift. From websites to aggregators like perplexity.
      - TeMPOraL 2y ago
        Perplexity isn't playing in the attention economy unless they upsell you, advertise to you, or put any other kind of bullshit between you and your goal. Attention economy is (as the name suggests) about monetizing attention; it does so through friction.
        2y ago
bko 2y ago
How would an LLM training on your writing reduce your reward? I guess if you're doing it for a living sure, but most content I consume online is created without incentive (social media, blogs, stack overflow). I write a fair amount and have been for a few years. I like to play with ideas. If an llm learned from my writing and it helped me propagate my ideas, I'd be happy. I lose on social status imaginary internet points but I honestly don't care much for them. The craziest one is the stack overflow contributors. They write answers for free to help people become better programmers but they're mad an llm will read their suggestions and answer questions that help people become better programmers. I guess they do it for the glory of having their handle next to the answer?
- alt227 2y ago
  > The craziest one is the stack overflow contributors. They write answers for free to help people become better programmers. In my experience they do it for points and kudos. Having people get your answers from LLMs instead of your answer on SO stops people from engaging with the gamification tools and so users get less points on the site.
  - apantel 2y ago
    Yeah. I don’t think people do much of anything for truly no reward. Most people want to directly impact and be recognized by others.
- noduerme 2y ago
  I think a concern for people who contribute on Stack Overflow is that an LLM will pollute the water with so many subtly wrong answers that the collective work of answering questions accurately will be overwhelmed by a tsunami of inaccurate LLM-generated answers, more than an army of humans can keep up with checking and debugging (or debunking).
  - nradov 2y ago
    It's nice that people are willing to create content on Stack Overflow so that Prosus NV can make advertising revenue from their free labor. But ultimately only a fool would trust answers from secondary sources like Stack Overflow, Quora, Wikipedia, Hacker News, etc. They can be useful sources to start an investigation but ultimately for anything important you still have to drill down to reliable primary sources. This has always been true, and the rise of LLMs doesn't change anything. For what it's worth, the Stack Exchange terms of service do prohibit AI generated content. I'm not sure how they actually enforce that, and in practice as the LLMs improve it's going to be almost impossible to reliably detect. https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/gen-ai-policy https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/gen-ai-policy
nradov 2y ago
A lot of the public website content targeted towards consumers is already SEO slop trying to sell you something or maximize ad revenue. If those website owners decide to stop publishing due to lack of real human visits then little of value will be lost. Much of the content with real value for consumers has already moved to sites that require registration (and sometimes payment) for access. For technical content of value to professionals, much of that is hosted by vendors or industry organizations. Those tend to get their revenue in other ways and don't care about companies scraping their content for AI model training. Like the IETF isn't going to stop publishing new RFCs just because Perplexity uses them.
ADeerAppeared 2y ago
> I think there is a real content dilemma here at work It's not really a dilemma. This is exactly what copyright serves to protect authors from. Perplexity copied the content, and in doing so directly competes with the original work, destroying it's market value and driving the original author out of business. Literally what copyright was invented to prevent. It's the exact same situation as journalists going after Google & social media embeds of articles, which these sites propagandized as "prohibiting hyperlinking", but the issue has been the embedded (summary of the) content. Which people don't click through, and this is the entire point of those features for platforms like Facebook; Keeping users on facebook and not leaving. This is why quite a few jurisdictions agreed with the journalists and moved to institute restrictions on such embedding. By all practical considerations, perplexity is doing the exact same thing and trying to deflect with "we used an AI to paraphrase". > The incentives of Google and website owners were more or less aligned. The key difference here is that linking is and always has been fine. Google's Book search feature is fair use because the purpose is to send you to the book you searched for, not substitute the book. Google's current AI summary feature is effectively the same as Perplexity. People don't click through to the original site, the original site doesn't get ad impressions or other revenue, and is driven out of business. > What will happen if: What will happen is what already is happening: Journalists are driven out of business, replaced by AI slop. And then what? AI needs humans creating original content, especially for things like journalism and fact-finding. It'd be an eternal AI winter, all LLMs doomed to be stuck in 2025. It's in every AI developer's best interest to halt the likes of Perplexity immediately before they irreparably damage the field of AI.
- skeledrew 2y ago
  I see no competition. I use Perplexity regularly to give me summaries of articles or to do preliminary research. If I like what I'm seeing, then I go to the source. If a source chooses to block their content because they don't want it to be accessed by AI bots then they reduce even further the chance of me - and increasingly more persons - touching their site at all.
  - __loam 2y ago
    "Let us steal your content or you won't get any traffic" sounds extortionate

by baxtr 2y ago

lolinder 2y ago

What is a "visit"? TFA demonstrates that they got a hit on their site, that's how they got the logs. Is it necessary to load the JavaScript for it to count as a visit? What if I access the site with noscript? Or is it only a visit if I see all your recommended content? I usually block those recommendations so that I don't get distracted from the article I actually came to read—is my visit a less legitimate visit than other people's? What exactly is Perplexity doing here that isn't okay that people don't already do with their local user agents?

alt227 2y ago
> TFA demonstrates that they got a hit on their site Whats stopping perplexity caching this info say for 24 hours, and then redisplaying it to the next few hundred people who request it?
- lolinder 2y ago
  Then they don't get the extra hits. So is that it—is a "visit" important because of the data that you're able to collect from the visit? Does this place HN's rampant use of archive.md on the same moral footing as Perplexity?
denton-scratch 2y ago
> What exactly is Perplexity doing here that isn't okay that people don't already do with their local user agents? It's in the title of TFA: they're being dishonest about who they are. PerplexityBot seems to understand that robots.txt is addressed to it. It's understood that site operators have a right to use the User-Agent to discriminate among visitors; that's why robots.txt is a standard. Crawlers that disrespect the standard have for many years been considered beyond the pale; thieves and snoopers. TFA's complaint is entirely justified.
- lolinder 2y ago
  > It's in the title of TFA: they're being dishonest about who they are. PerplexityBot seems to understand that robots.txt is addressed to it. First, I'm ignoring the output of Perplexity. I have no reason to believe that they gave the LLM any knowledge about its internal operations, it's just riffing off of what OP is saying. Second, PerplexityBot is the user agent that they use when crawling and indexing. They never claimed to use that user agent for ad hoc HTTP requests (which are notably not the same as crawling). Third, I disagree that anyone has an obligation to be honest in their User-Agent. Have you ever looked at Chrome's user agent? They're spoofing just about everyone, as is every browser. Crawlers should respect robots.txt, but I'd be totally content if we just got rid of the User-Agent string entirely.
  - denton-scratch 2y ago
    > (which are notably not the same as crawling) Is that a distinction without a difference? I think the robots.txt RFC was addressed specifically to crawlers; so technically "ad hoc" requests generated automatically (i.e. by robots) aren't included. But the distinction operators would like to make is between humans and automata. Whether some automaton is a crawler or not isn't relevant.
    - lolinder 2y ago
      Actually, no, the fact that it's a crawler is the most important fact. The reason why website operators care at all about robots accessing their site (as distinct from humans controlling a browser) is historically one of two reasons: * The pattern of requests can be very problematic. Impolite crawlers are totally capable of taking down a website by hitting it over and over and over again for hours in a way that humans won't. * Crawlers are generally used to build search indexes, so instructing them about URLs that would be inappropriate to have show up in a search is relevant. The behavior that OP is complaining about is that when the user pastes a URL into Perplexity, Perplexity fetches that URL. Neither the traffic pattern nor the persistence profile are remotely similar to typical crawler behavior. As far as I can see there's almost nothing to distinguish it from someone using Edge and then using Edge's built-in summarizer.
baxtr 2y ago
A visit is a human reader. At the very least they get exposed to your website name. Notice your product/service if you get lucky. Become a customer at a later visit. We are talking about cutting the first step off so that everything which may come afterwards is cut off as well.
- lolinder 2y ago
  The behavior that TFA is complaining about is that when the user drops a link to a site into Perplexity it is able to summarize the content of that link. This isn't about the discoverability aspect of Perplexity, they're specifically complaining that the ad hoc "summarize this post" requests don't respect robots.txt [0]. That's what I'm arguing in favor of and that's the behavior that TFA is attacking. [0] Which, incidentally, is entirely normal. robots.txt is for the web crawler that indexes, not for ad hoc requests.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  In other words, content is bait, reward is a captured user whose attention - whose sanity, the finite amount of life - can be wasted or plain used against them. I'm more than happy to see all the websites with attention economy business models to shut down. Yes, that might be 90% of the Internet. That would be the 90% that is poisonous shit.
  - baxtr 2y ago
    The attention economy will never die. Attention will only shift. From websites to aggregators like perplexity.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      Perplexity isn't playing in the attention economy unless they upsell you, advertise to you, or put any other kind of bullshit between you and your goal. Attention economy is (as the name suggests) about monetizing attention; it does so through friction.
      - 2y ago

bko 2y ago

How would an LLM training on your writing reduce your reward? I guess if you're doing it for a living sure, but most content I consume online is created without incentive (social media, blogs, stack overflow). I write a fair amount and have been for a few years. I like to play with ideas. If an llm learned from my writing and it helped me propagate my ideas, I'd be happy. I lose on social status imaginary internet points but I honestly don't care much for them. The craziest one is the stack overflow contributors. They write answers for free to help people become better programmers but they're mad an llm will read their suggestions and answer questions that help people become better programmers. I guess they do it for the glory of having their handle next to the answer?

alt227 2y ago
> The craziest one is the stack overflow contributors. They write answers for free to help people become better programmers. In my experience they do it for points and kudos. Having people get your answers from LLMs instead of your answer on SO stops people from engaging with the gamification tools and so users get less points on the site.
- apantel 2y ago
  Yeah. I don’t think people do much of anything for truly no reward. Most people want to directly impact and be recognized by others.
noduerme 2y ago
I think a concern for people who contribute on Stack Overflow is that an LLM will pollute the water with so many subtly wrong answers that the collective work of answering questions accurately will be overwhelmed by a tsunami of inaccurate LLM-generated answers, more than an army of humans can keep up with checking and debugging (or debunking).
- nradov 2y ago
  It's nice that people are willing to create content on Stack Overflow so that Prosus NV can make advertising revenue from their free labor. But ultimately only a fool would trust answers from secondary sources like Stack Overflow, Quora, Wikipedia, Hacker News, etc. They can be useful sources to start an investigation but ultimately for anything important you still have to drill down to reliable primary sources. This has always been true, and the rise of LLMs doesn't change anything. For what it's worth, the Stack Exchange terms of service do prohibit AI generated content. I'm not sure how they actually enforce that, and in practice as the LLMs improve it's going to be almost impossible to reliably detect. https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/gen-ai-policy https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/gen-ai-policy

nradov 2y ago

A lot of the public website content targeted towards consumers is already SEO slop trying to sell you something or maximize ad revenue. If those website owners decide to stop publishing due to lack of real human visits then little of value will be lost. Much of the content with real value for consumers has already moved to sites that require registration (and sometimes payment) for access. For technical content of value to professionals, much of that is hosted by vendors or industry organizations. Those tend to get their revenue in other ways and don't care about companies scraping their content for AI model training. Like the IETF isn't going to stop publishing new RFCs just because Perplexity uses them.

ADeerAppeared 2y ago

> I think there is a real content dilemma here at work It's not really a dilemma. This is exactly what copyright serves to protect authors from. Perplexity copied the content, and in doing so directly competes with the original work, destroying it's market value and driving the original author out of business. Literally what copyright was invented to prevent. It's the exact same situation as journalists going after Google & social media embeds of articles, which these sites propagandized as "prohibiting hyperlinking", but the issue has been the embedded (summary of the) content. Which people don't click through, and this is the entire point of those features for platforms like Facebook; Keeping users on facebook and not leaving. This is why quite a few jurisdictions agreed with the journalists and moved to institute restrictions on such embedding. By all practical considerations, perplexity is doing the exact same thing and trying to deflect with "we used an AI to paraphrase". > The incentives of Google and website owners were more or less aligned. The key difference here is that linking is and always has been fine. Google's Book search feature is fair use because the purpose is to send you to the book you searched for, not substitute the book. Google's current AI summary feature is effectively the same as Perplexity. People don't click through to the original site, the original site doesn't get ad impressions or other revenue, and is driven out of business. > What will happen if: What will happen is what already is happening: Journalists are driven out of business, replaced by AI slop. And then what? AI needs humans creating original content, especially for things like journalism and fact-finding. It'd be an eternal AI winter, all LLMs doomed to be stuck in 2025. It's in every AI developer's best interest to halt the likes of Perplexity immediately before they irreparably damage the field of AI.

skeledrew 2y ago
I see no competition. I use Perplexity regularly to give me summaries of articles or to do preliminary research. If I like what I'm seeing, then I go to the source. If a source chooses to block their content because they don't want it to be accessed by AI bots then they reduce even further the chance of me - and increasingly more persons - touching their site at all.
- __loam 2y ago
  "Let us steal your content or you won't get any traffic" sounds extortionate