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OpenAI just put the final nail in the coffin of the open World Wide Web

76 points by mindwok 2y ago

cjtrowbridge 2y ago
This is only a threat to rent seeking, not the open web.
- NewJazz 2y ago
  Is it? If everyone gets their information 100% filtered through a black box llm, the open web becomes something like the CLI. Foreign, confusing, and not well understood by the general public. Imagine having a filter list enabled in ublock origin that was controlled by amazon or google or Microsoft. And oh wait, you can't even know what gets filtered. Remember that people generally consume more than they produce on the internet. For certain demographics, that ratio is very extreme.
  - ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y ago
    > If everyone gets their information 100% filtered through a black box llm, the open web becomes something like the CLI. Foreign, confusing, and not well understood by the general public What? People understand the CLI. Many just don't prefer to use computers that way when alternatives like graphical user interfaces exist. If anything it will be like GUIs to CLIs, depending on where the UX settles. There are people imagining interactive generative search with generative interfaces, etc. In my cynical opinion, Operator is probably a push in the direction of getting reinforcement learning out of current user interfaces. It is all about getting developers and other users to dig their way out of employment for temporary gains.
awesomeMilou 2y ago
Isn't this exactly what Cloudflare Turnstile was build to prevent? I can't imagine companies will continue to just give up data to OpenAI. And I mean, most large companies with valuable data have begun selling it to OpenAI. Nobody is giving away anything for free at this point. And besides, from what I've heard about it on here and elsewhere, Google has already made AdSense an unsustainable income source for websites, with all their requirements for suitable ad placement.
- hipadev23 2y ago
  Which users do you think are going to intentionally utilize the captcha-enabled manual-labor-required platforms to do these things (book/reserve/order something) when there’s a faster and easier choice available? Assuming it actually works and doesn’t hallucinate nonstop, imo it’s going to kill off the “humans browse a website and order something” in the same way e-commerce killed off catalog and phone ordering systems.
  - awesomeMilou 2y ago
    > captcha-enabled manual-labor-required Maybe check what Turnstile is/does before commenting? Cloudflare only needs you to solve captchas periodically and then they use your browser fingerprint to classify you as a human accessing a site. Towards the rest of your comment: I don't understand how this is a bad thing? As far as I know, TripAdvisor gets a commission on all sales, so do most e-commerce providers as that's how e-commerce works? I don't understand your argument.
    - hipadev23 2y ago
      Turnstile is an anti-bot measure. I’m saying users will flock to using bots because it’s easier. Which means sites that require human-at-keyboard will lose business over time by restricting the “easier” route. Exactly how e-commerce killed off so many holdouts that insisted on in-store/catalog/phone purchases when the internet was growing.
      - awesomeMilou 2y ago
        I still don't get your point. When buying a product with a lot of competition, how is Operator different than a price comparison or review site? I can see it driving purchasing decisions, but I can't see it killing off the actual shop sites? Because the shop is getting a _comission_ on the sale. I'm getting an ever growing vibe off HN that for a website where a ton of people work on tech, or even in e-commerce serving content to people, they seem to have an awful understanding of consumer behavior.
veryrealsid 2y ago
Personally I think until we trust AI agents to get the _best_ answer for us we’ll still need manually checking. For example in the TripAdvisor example, would you really trust that OpenAI has gotten you the best answer? Personally I wouldn’t.
- hipadev23 2y ago
  How certain are you that the source itself is trustworthy? Tripadvisor, yelp, and amazon are filled with fake/paid reviews along with the absence of negative reviews which premium members have paid to remove.
  - JKCalhoun 2y ago
    My thoughts exactly. Most here will remember accusations that Yelp was taking down negative reviews (were there even suggestions of payola?) I feel sometimes people grossly overestimate how valuable the web really is. Or at least the majority of it. Wikipedia, archive.org, or my guilty pleasure, YouTube — only a handful of sites really stand out for me. If the rest crashed and burned I'd probably bicycle more.
nippoo 2y ago
Or is this the end of the intrusive, tracking, eyeball-grabbing online advertising industry? Because I'm not sure that would be such a bad thing!
- lupire 2y ago
  And the beginning of intrusive, tracking, subtly manipulative bot industry?
- normalocity 2y ago
  Not sure why AI agents wouldn't also be connected to an ad platform eventually. Google does this currently. While the author says that they are bypassing Google, that's not most people, and Google's results are front-loaded with AI answers, so Google results are already giving you specific answers, hallucinations and all. Not sure why average users would long-term switch to not-Google if Google can give them the amount of AI assistance that want or don't want.
lobochrome 2y ago
The question for me is, whether the web still has enough distributed creative spirit left, so that individuals still feel a need to create. I.e. instead of feeding my reviews to the rent seeking giants, I can just publish them on my own and they’ll be helpfully ingested and made useful by chattyG. The dis-aggregation of the aggregators?
- awesomeMilou 2y ago
  It's en-enshittification. And once OpenAI gains the lead in AI development and starts rent seeking, it's going to be enenenshittification.
  - JKCalhoun 2y ago
    Then the web will look like the static on a TV tuned to a long gone station and then it too will be forgotten.
localghost3000 2y ago
Total click bait title. The entire premise is based on the assumption that these agents will actually do the correct task every time. No one. And I mean NO ONE is going to delegate anything like travel or purchasing items to an AI. They just get it wrong too much.
- hipadev23 2y ago
  Much of the same commentary was confidently asserted during the 90’s about online shopping, stock trading, and dating.
  - localghost3000 2y ago
    I think that’s a fair point although I think this is a very different animal. When it comes to money, or really any kind of action that has consequences, you want the assurance of a deterministic outcome. That is simply not possible with this technology. Maybe it will be but I’ve seen nothing to indicate that so far.
    - Nathanba 2y ago
      People even let the cars drive on their own and they take their hands off the wheel. Letting an AI do a purchase is far less risky. People are fine with things like this as long as it appears to work reliably enough.
      - localghost3000 2y ago
        Again. Different animal. That’s highly regulated and in limited markets. You also need to pay close attention so you can grab the wheel when it gets things wrong. And it does. A lot. The underlying tech is not the same either.
        Nathanba 2y ago
        Yes, it's even easier in this market with no regulations and less risk so browser and software automation via AI will happen far faster.
veqq 2y ago
Nice to see a microblog platform being used
- alberth 2y ago
  What makes it a “microblog”?
yakshaving_jgt 2y ago
I’m not sure I disagree with the point of the article, but I disagree with the specific examples given. I don’t think “human data” quite works like that. TripAdvisor isn’t the authority on what is and isn’t a desirable experience. In fact, a legitimate strategy for researching where to go and what to do on a trip can be to see what’s popular on TripAdvisor and explicitly rule those options out. Reviews are generally pretty useless unless you know something about the reviewer in order to qualify their opinion. Magaluf is a highly rated tourist destination among some people in society, but I sure as hell don’t want to go there. AI can’t just aggregate all the opinions and say “Ok specific individual, I’ve checked the internet and here’s what the internet has decided.”
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y ago
Operator costs $200/mo to try. It doesn't work well. There are regulations still being debated around this. I know, lets make an article full of wild speculations concerning it!
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  I don't know. As even the likes of Stephen Fry point out, you can talk about the deficiencies of AI (or the cost), but just months from now things will have dramatically changed and your comments will be obsolete. To me it makes more sense to talk about what may well be coming than to, I don't know, wait to be run over by it.
  - ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y ago
    I am talking about what is now, why would I care if my comments will become obsolete? The facts and claims in this article too will have changed, come to pass, or be realized. The author speculating that AI will solve interacting with user interfaces is something that has yet to be seen. They are making a gigantic leap from (not verbatim quotes, just making a point) "I saw one example of Operator doing (what Claude computer use did back in October, and other projects before that)" to "I think advertising is blown" and "I think search is doomed" to "Sadly I think the open web is about to die.". Also, people have been talking about this for a few years now. Is there any evidence of it happening yet?
Dalewyn 2y ago
Middlemen are predestined to death at some point or another unless they can keep demonstrating a compelling service, a reason to exist. Banks are an example of middlemen who continue to exist because they provide a compelling service (everyone needs to store and move monies). Travel companies are an example of middlemen who died because they couldn't provide a compelling service (everyone can do their own bookings now directly with airlines, hotels, et al.). If "AI" puts search engines like Google Search and data aggregators like Yelp out of business, then that's because their services are not compelling. Good riddance. Middlemen continuing to exist without providing compelling services are just collecting free rent, nobody should have to pay rent for nothing. As regards the "open" internet, that died a long time ago when most use cases for the internet centralized on a handful of websites and services. "AI" doesn't change the fact most group conversations happen on Reddit now, that most direct communications happen over Discord or Teams (or email) now, that most traffic gets routed through Cloudflare now, that most companies contract with Amazon Web Services for servers now, that everyone speaks Chrome now, and so on.
idlewords 2y ago
There was similar hype around "intelligent agents" taking over the web back in the early 2000's, that might serve as a good corrective. Does anyone know a good writeup about it?
corimaith 2y ago
Personally, I think the Author's point about getting Operator to just book your holidays for you or to rely on it for automatically recommending the "best" restaurants or so is ironically just a return to the past when we hired some agencies or friends to do these things for us also. Well, the return of such systems might also open in turn opportunities for arbitarge again; when savvy user who took the time to observe things directly could get better deals.
- aerodog 2y ago
  Wow, you had agencies and friends to do these things for you?
  - do_not_redeem 2y ago
    Travel agents were quite common in ye olden days before the internet.
    - IYasha 2y ago
      There are plenty of them today. Though agency-organized trip is times more expensive.
  - lupire 2y ago
    This was the "concierge" industry which was Google for us dinosaurs.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    Yes, and good ones were worth every penny. You can book things online for yourself, but what do you know about the area you are visiting? An agent can recommend things that you would never even think of as being something needing consideration. Even just a phone number to call if you get in a bind.
darepublic 2y ago
> Previously if I wanted to know about the French Revolution, I would have Googled it, and likely landed on Wikipedia and maybe 2 or 3 specialty sites. Now, I just ask ChatGPT This is a common sentiment. I have been using chatgpt for various things, and there are times when I will turn to it for technical help, sysadmin or figuring out some shell / cli commands. However by and large I definitely still prefer googling something. I would much rather read a wikipedia article of the French Revolution than trust whatever chatgpt had to say about it. I figure chatgpt is just spitting out the very same wikipedia article with some rewording and the occasional hallucination and I would rather just read straight from the source. Same with programming questions - between reading a stack overflow thread with the answer and chatgpt I feel a lot better reading stackoverflow, seeing the context the replies, the alternatives etc. and deciding based on that rather than just trusting gpt.
- xmprt 2y ago
  ChatGPT helps me get an initial grasp of the topic from which I can come up with more questions and research to do on my own. Usually I don't use ChatGPT as a source but rather a springboard for ideas.
  - est31 2y ago
    This is what was often said about Wikipedia. Don't use it as main source of information, but using it as a starting point is fine (if it's just to get a list of sources it quotes).
    - bestham 2y ago
      This begs the question; Is stills still how people use Wikipedia?
- jahnu 2y ago
  Shout out to duck.com My default
- jredwards 2y ago
  I enjoy phind.com if I want an AI to summarize a topic. Because while it will give me a nice LLM summary, it will also cite its sources. Whatever particular aspect of the summary intrigues me is what I'll then go look at the original source for.
lolinder 2y ago
Long before OpenAI killed the open web, advertising suffocated it. Advertising is the reason why it would even occur to anyone that it would be more fun to just have a robot book them a vacation than to deal with the misery that is every internet booking website. Something like Operator may well be the death of the ad-funded web—as TFA observes, who is going to see the ads? But the reason why a tool like Operator has why sort of appeal is because advertising already killed the open web and replaced it with a lifeless corpse.
- MattGaiser 2y ago
  Even if there were no ads, having a robot book your trips would still be nicer as it is still work to do. We used to have travel agents do all the booking instead and merely got rid of them for cost reasons.
  - walterbell 2y ago
    Robots could guide robot fans towards common physical experiences.
  - gtirloni 2y ago
    Why trust a robot that may or may not get your request right if you just go to the source and book it yourself? The experience booking anything with a travel agent was always horrible with so much back and forth, do we really want that?
    - MattGaiser 2y ago
      The work isn’t in the booking. It’s deciding where to look and comparing prices and amenities. Paying for and checking out is 5% of the customer journey here.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    Eh, I disagree. The actual booking process itself is both pretty painless and very much not something I trust to be automated. Enter my card (better yet, pick a saved one), confirm the dates and price, click confirm. I can't think of anything in there that needs to be automated more than it is. And choosing something to do should be both fun and something you'd want to do yourself—it only isn't fun because businesses aren't incentivized to make it fun, they're incentivized to try to redirect your attention away from what you actually want and instead draw you to their various sponsors.
swatcoder 2y ago
Indeed. People have spent lots of words talking about the how the saturation of generative AI output will spoil future trainig, which is true, but is most immediately a problem for the AI model developers themselves. But even with them only acting as consumers, they break almost of the economic and social bases for how the internet works. Advertisers want their ads to be seen by humans, experts/pontificators want their words to to be seen by humans, artists want their images to be seem by humans. These things provide the foundations of the internet as we know it. If online tools are being used by bots who are unaffected bu ads, and texts are summarized by bots instead of read directly, and images are synthesized dynamically instead of appreciated directly, the internet itself breaks. As the author notes, the next most likely equilibrium involves an even more commercial, more expensive, more gated, more impersonal future than we might have already seen ourselves careening towards just a few years ago. Enjoy what you've had!
- jfengel 2y ago
  I wonder if the ads affect the bots. How does anyone figure out if something is worthwhile, if they haven't used it? They have heuristics, one of which is comfort and familiarity. That's why advertising exists: to get a brand in front of your face, so you recognize it. Maybe the bots end up with a similar heuristic as they crawl their sources. Perhaps the advertisers will be perfectly happy to pay, not for human eyeballs but for the crawlers. This is, of course, absurd. But since I find the capabilities of the bots opaque, why not absurdity.
- acheron 2y ago
  Won’t someone shed a tear for the poor advertisers?
kissgyorgy 2y ago
I think OP overestimates the number of people using Operator in the foreseeable future. Also it's optimised for todays web for websites and forms and I suspect they continue develop it this way for two reasons: 1. This works TODAY, which is important for a business. 2. As others commented in this thread, people won't necessarily trust it blindly, seeing visually what it does exactly is a feature.
Fricken 2y ago
Maybe the World Wide Web will be will be reduced to a series of blog rings where nerds and oddballs share their peculiar interests and discuss eclectic ideas.
- walterbell 2y ago
  Long live the WWW (World Weird Web)
- awesomeMilou 2y ago
  I'd be delighted to see PG behind a paywall so I would never have to consume his content again, but I have the feeling the man is too affluent to ever need the side hustle.
typeofhuman 2y ago
Why book a vacation when SORA can make a video of you and your family frolicking in the summery tropics that you post to your followers? They don't know you so they won't think your lying, those people used to be called friends.
carlosjobim 2y ago
> For informational content, like Wikipedia, TripAdvisor, Yelp, recipe websites... perhaps this will end up looking something like the journalism industry that aggregate and publish the information to AI companies, so they can avoid freeloading by agents. Why publish it to AI companies? The Internet is ripe for mass syndication of textual content and putting it behind subscriptions, just as YouTube has done with video content. Syndication was the distribution and business model for this content before the WWW, the advantage we can get now is no barrier to entry and no distribution costs. (Hosting costs are so low to not even count for text). At the same time we also get rid of the ad-ridden, scam-infest, bot-crawling Internet of the current day. Said I, on an open forum where nobody pays a dime...
walterbell 2y ago
> Something else I think could happen as a result of this is a web where we verify user/client identities, the same way we currently verify server identities (via TLS certificates). The cost of running bots is plummeting. I could forsee a world where sites like Tripadvisor require a client certificate to connect. That certificate could be provided by paid services (to prevent bot spam), or maybe by device manufacturers like Apple, so you get one certificate per device to prevent bot spam. Have client certificates worked in any niche? We now have SSO by Google/Apple/Facebook/X, but those identities are also used by bots.
est31 2y ago
> For informational content, like Wikipedia, TripAdvisor, Yelp, recipe websites... perhaps this will end up looking something like the journalism industry that aggregate and publish the information to AI companies, so they can avoid freeloading by agents. I'm pretty sure Wikipedia will not do any of those things, as it's a project ran by volunteers, and they do want to disseminate their content as widely as possible. The revenue from the "please donate" feature is only used for website development and to pay the servers. For the other websites, yeah, those might change and lock things down, require accounts to browse, etc, to prevent being scraped. Already now when I look for house listings or onto linkedin, I see all sorts of bot warnings. Twitter is also authwalled, simply because they don't want people to train on it for free.
pornel 2y ago
Since the operator uses user's computer via screenshots and keyboard/mouse, it's not easy to block by IP, browser fingerprinting, or convoluted page markup. The initial implementation probably has some detectable traits in its mouse and keyboard use, but a company that could train pretty convincing text and voice models can easily train a model to move mouse naturally enough. Simple screenshots can be messed with via flicker (using persistence of vision), but that's fixable too. This cat and mouse game can end up ugly. My pessimistic prediction is that Google et al. will extend their DRM from video to entire Web pages, and sell it as a service that blocks "unauthorized" screenshots and soft mouse, along with a cryptographically-strong way to detect the closed-source Chrome. It won't be accessible, but conveniently Republicans have added accessibility to their list of woke things to destroy. Sites will submit to this and advertise it as "use Chrome to skip those horrible CAPTCHAs!"
jszymborski 2y ago
How much longer will OpenAI/Anthropic/Google be able to offer usable free tiers of their agents? Because imo this "death of the open web" is predicated on that. Furthermore, Im skeptical we'll have the generous free tiers we have today for much longer. OAI and friends can only afford to burn millions on GPU cycles for non-paying customers for so long, and so long as we can continue to do web search for free I dont really see agents being a threat.
- xeonmc 2y ago
  They will keep affording to burn cycles until free search alternatives are pushed out forever.
  - jszymborski 2y ago
    Marginalia, Brave Search, etc... are showing that free web search is not out of reach from neither a tech nor cost stand point.
gtirloni 2y ago
It's just a matter of time until AI chatbots are flooded with ads.
nis0s 2y ago
Why do people use chatGPT in favor of open source models? The performance isn’t that different for general queries, and not even that much for specialized ones.
Bjorkbat 2y ago
I have to admit it's really hard for me to take the noise about agents seriously because they keep bringing up using it for things that don't feel like chores to me, but are actually kind of delightful. I like the anticipation and excitement of planning for the big holiday. I like shopping online for new books or clothes or what have you. Suppose for a moment that agents worked 100% flawlessly (suspend whatever disbelief you have for a moment and roll with it) a large chunk of the web is still, actually, quite fun for quite a lot of people. Even if the information on the website is just as accessible through a chat interface as it is through a web browser, the website is still probably cooler and has a more fun experience vs using a chat interface. Obviously not all websites are like this, but the ones I care about are.
eucryphia 2y ago
Web 2.0 might be a solution. Algorithms competing on price. You’d get credits with your $80/month ISP bill. You could refuse to pay for anything from the CCP or the NYT.
phillipseamore 2y ago
Let's put aside that I would never trust reviews or ratings on most sites (like TripAdvisor) and imagine they are all trustworthy. "OpenAI shows an example where they ask Operator to find the highest rated day tour in Rome on TripAdvisor, and then book it." If only agents use TripAdvisor and the agents circumvent TA and purchase from the cheapest seller or straight from the supplier - who will write reviews and how would TA track sales or interest for ratings or popularity? Best case it would become a feedback loop run by the agents, worst case new data on TA would more or less stall. Without traffic or insights TA has no API to sell (unless someone wants stale and outdated data). If AI would end the WWW it's going to be a hell of a lot more expensive for consumers to subscribe to AI than having to put up with ads or buying subscriptions to services or sites. I really can't envision how AI will function when it's hoovered up the web (and any data it can find) to then being at a point were little new data is available. Will we end up with $200 a month AI subscriptions that are based on data from a handful of data brokers? Would we trust those brokers? I certainly wouldn't celebrate AI as the only interface to information, especially since we would likely end up with fewer gatekeepers than we have today. (Dead tired and hope my point comes across)
jinushaun 2y ago
I think this is overblown. At the end of the day, ChatGPT only works if it has something to scrape. Those website still need to exist for all this to work.
satisfice 2y ago
I recently had a client who used an LLM to summarize a series of video lectures I did, and then comment on them. The summaries were about 50% on the ball, 25% silent on important points, and 25% wrong and weird. Their commentary was a waste of their time and mine, as they got a partial and distorted notion of my work— but I couldn’t easily repair the damage. All I could really do is warn them that nothing they had read should be trusted.
tivert 2y ago
> On the Operator release blog, OpenAI shows an example where they ask Operator to find the highest rated day tour in Rome on TripAdvisor, and then book it. This seems fairly innocuous and cool, remember how we used to do this? You'd have to Google for day tours, browse trip advisor, likely open a few of them, then book the tour. Now, Operator does it all for us and we don't even have to interact with the middle man. That actually sounds pretty terrible, and the kind of optimization too many people will adopt to just make things bland. The decision reduced to picking the hugest number, under dumb assumption that huger is better for you (not to mention the rating could be gamed). And the user has no visibility so no opportunity to second-guess the algorithm if it's being stupid. It sounds like someone confused "faster with less friction" with "better."
chrismcb 2y ago
Previously I used a search engine that have me a bunch of results that made it easier to verify the authority and compare results. Now I just ask some random guy that may or may not give me the correct answer. That is basically what you are doing when you ask "ai"
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
"The Death of the Middleman Let's think about that - the middle man. Google, TripAdvisor, the tour providers - right now these are websites, and they support themselves by showing ads to users, or by partnering/commissions (e.g. TripAdvisor could receive revenue for directing users to day tours)." What is OpenAI if not another middleman. OpenAI does not produce its own "content". Like the other middlemen websites OpenAI relies on other peoples' content. Like the other middlemen websites who might manipulate the presentation, e.g., "ranking" of the content, OpenAI can manpulate the composition of the output. These middlemen can perform such manipulation for whatever reasons they publicly claim, e.g., eliminate bias, perform censorship and/or other, commercial reasons. Meanwhile the so-called "tech" company middleman does not disclose how this might be done. The "algorithm" is not disclosed. The operations of the middleman are non-transparent. The source and destination parties are not in control of the content. The middleman is in control.
tim333 2y ago
>final nail in the coffin of the open World Wide Web Reports of the web's death seem much exaggerated for something I use daily. OpenAI et all compete against the open web as do facebook, twitter and all the walled gardens but the web is still there and pretty indestructible by design.
LIzzyytujghf 2y ago
[dead]

76 points by mindwok 2y ago

cjtrowbridge 2y ago

This is only a threat to rent seeking, not the open web.

NewJazz 2y ago
Is it? If everyone gets their information 100% filtered through a black box llm, the open web becomes something like the CLI. Foreign, confusing, and not well understood by the general public. Imagine having a filter list enabled in ublock origin that was controlled by amazon or google or Microsoft. And oh wait, you can't even know what gets filtered. Remember that people generally consume more than they produce on the internet. For certain demographics, that ratio is very extreme.
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y ago
  > If everyone gets their information 100% filtered through a black box llm, the open web becomes something like the CLI. Foreign, confusing, and not well understood by the general public What? People understand the CLI. Many just don't prefer to use computers that way when alternatives like graphical user interfaces exist. If anything it will be like GUIs to CLIs, depending on where the UX settles. There are people imagining interactive generative search with generative interfaces, etc. In my cynical opinion, Operator is probably a push in the direction of getting reinforcement learning out of current user interfaces. It is all about getting developers and other users to dig their way out of employment for temporary gains.

awesomeMilou 2y ago

Isn't this exactly what Cloudflare Turnstile was build to prevent? I can't imagine companies will continue to just give up data to OpenAI. And I mean, most large companies with valuable data have begun selling it to OpenAI. Nobody is giving away anything for free at this point. And besides, from what I've heard about it on here and elsewhere, Google has already made AdSense an unsustainable income source for websites, with all their requirements for suitable ad placement.

hipadev23 2y ago
Which users do you think are going to intentionally utilize the captcha-enabled manual-labor-required platforms to do these things (book/reserve/order something) when there’s a faster and easier choice available? Assuming it actually works and doesn’t hallucinate nonstop, imo it’s going to kill off the “humans browse a website and order something” in the same way e-commerce killed off catalog and phone ordering systems.
- awesomeMilou 2y ago
  > captcha-enabled manual-labor-required Maybe check what Turnstile is/does before commenting? Cloudflare only needs you to solve captchas periodically and then they use your browser fingerprint to classify you as a human accessing a site. Towards the rest of your comment: I don't understand how this is a bad thing? As far as I know, TripAdvisor gets a commission on all sales, so do most e-commerce providers as that's how e-commerce works? I don't understand your argument.
  - hipadev23 2y ago
    Turnstile is an anti-bot measure. I’m saying users will flock to using bots because it’s easier. Which means sites that require human-at-keyboard will lose business over time by restricting the “easier” route. Exactly how e-commerce killed off so many holdouts that insisted on in-store/catalog/phone purchases when the internet was growing.
    - awesomeMilou 2y ago
      I still don't get your point. When buying a product with a lot of competition, how is Operator different than a price comparison or review site? I can see it driving purchasing decisions, but I can't see it killing off the actual shop sites? Because the shop is getting a _comission_ on the sale. I'm getting an ever growing vibe off HN that for a website where a ton of people work on tech, or even in e-commerce serving content to people, they seem to have an awful understanding of consumer behavior.

veryrealsid 2y ago

Personally I think until we trust AI agents to get the _best_ answer for us we’ll still need manually checking. For example in the TripAdvisor example, would you really trust that OpenAI has gotten you the best answer? Personally I wouldn’t.

hipadev23 2y ago
How certain are you that the source itself is trustworthy? Tripadvisor, yelp, and amazon are filled with fake/paid reviews along with the absence of negative reviews which premium members have paid to remove.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  My thoughts exactly. Most here will remember accusations that Yelp was taking down negative reviews (were there even suggestions of payola?) I feel sometimes people grossly overestimate how valuable the web really is. Or at least the majority of it. Wikipedia, archive.org, or my guilty pleasure, YouTube — only a handful of sites really stand out for me. If the rest crashed and burned I'd probably bicycle more.

nippoo 2y ago

Or is this the end of the intrusive, tracking, eyeball-grabbing online advertising industry? Because I'm not sure that would be such a bad thing!

lupire 2y ago
And the beginning of intrusive, tracking, subtly manipulative bot industry?
normalocity 2y ago
Not sure why AI agents wouldn't also be connected to an ad platform eventually. Google does this currently. While the author says that they are bypassing Google, that's not most people, and Google's results are front-loaded with AI answers, so Google results are already giving you specific answers, hallucinations and all. Not sure why average users would long-term switch to not-Google if Google can give them the amount of AI assistance that want or don't want.

lobochrome 2y ago

The question for me is, whether the web still has enough distributed creative spirit left, so that individuals still feel a need to create. I.e. instead of feeding my reviews to the rent seeking giants, I can just publish them on my own and they’ll be helpfully ingested and made useful by chattyG. The dis-aggregation of the aggregators?

awesomeMilou 2y ago
It's en-enshittification. And once OpenAI gains the lead in AI development and starts rent seeking, it's going to be enenenshittification.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  Then the web will look like the static on a TV tuned to a long gone station and then it too will be forgotten.

localghost3000 2y ago

Total click bait title. The entire premise is based on the assumption that these agents will actually do the correct task every time. No one. And I mean NO ONE is going to delegate anything like travel or purchasing items to an AI. They just get it wrong too much.

hipadev23 2y ago
Much of the same commentary was confidently asserted during the 90’s about online shopping, stock trading, and dating.
- localghost3000 2y ago
  I think that’s a fair point although I think this is a very different animal. When it comes to money, or really any kind of action that has consequences, you want the assurance of a deterministic outcome. That is simply not possible with this technology. Maybe it will be but I’ve seen nothing to indicate that so far.
  - Nathanba 2y ago
    People even let the cars drive on their own and they take their hands off the wheel. Letting an AI do a purchase is far less risky. People are fine with things like this as long as it appears to work reliably enough.
    - localghost3000 2y ago
      Again. Different animal. That’s highly regulated and in limited markets. You also need to pay close attention so you can grab the wheel when it gets things wrong. And it does. A lot. The underlying tech is not the same either.
      - Nathanba 2y ago
        Yes, it's even easier in this market with no regulations and less risk so browser and software automation via AI will happen far faster.

veqq 2y ago

Nice to see a microblog platform being used

alberth 2y ago
What makes it a “microblog”?

yakshaving_jgt 2y ago

I’m not sure I disagree with the point of the article, but I disagree with the specific examples given. I don’t think “human data” quite works like that. TripAdvisor isn’t the authority on what is and isn’t a desirable experience. In fact, a legitimate strategy for researching where to go and what to do on a trip can be to see what’s popular on TripAdvisor and explicitly rule those options out. Reviews are generally pretty useless unless you know something about the reviewer in order to qualify their opinion. Magaluf is a highly rated tourist destination among some people in society, but I sure as hell don’t want to go there. AI can’t just aggregate all the opinions and say “Ok specific individual, I’ve checked the internet and here’s what the internet has decided.”

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y ago

Operator costs $200/mo to try. It doesn't work well. There are regulations still being debated around this. I know, lets make an article full of wild speculations concerning it!

JKCalhoun 2y ago
I don't know. As even the likes of Stephen Fry point out, you can talk about the deficiencies of AI (or the cost), but just months from now things will have dramatically changed and your comments will be obsolete. To me it makes more sense to talk about what may well be coming than to, I don't know, wait to be run over by it.
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y ago
  I am talking about what is now, why would I care if my comments will become obsolete? The facts and claims in this article too will have changed, come to pass, or be realized. The author speculating that AI will solve interacting with user interfaces is something that has yet to be seen. They are making a gigantic leap from (not verbatim quotes, just making a point) "I saw one example of Operator doing (what Claude computer use did back in October, and other projects before that)" to "I think advertising is blown" and "I think search is doomed" to "Sadly I think the open web is about to die.". Also, people have been talking about this for a few years now. Is there any evidence of it happening yet?

Dalewyn 2y ago

Middlemen are predestined to death at some point or another unless they can keep demonstrating a compelling service, a reason to exist. Banks are an example of middlemen who continue to exist because they provide a compelling service (everyone needs to store and move monies). Travel companies are an example of middlemen who died because they couldn't provide a compelling service (everyone can do their own bookings now directly with airlines, hotels, et al.). If "AI" puts search engines like Google Search and data aggregators like Yelp out of business, then that's because their services are not compelling. Good riddance. Middlemen continuing to exist without providing compelling services are just collecting free rent, nobody should have to pay rent for nothing. As regards the "open" internet, that died a long time ago when most use cases for the internet centralized on a handful of websites and services. "AI" doesn't change the fact most group conversations happen on Reddit now, that most direct communications happen over Discord or Teams (or email) now, that most traffic gets routed through Cloudflare now, that most companies contract with Amazon Web Services for servers now, that everyone speaks Chrome now, and so on.

idlewords 2y ago

There was similar hype around "intelligent agents" taking over the web back in the early 2000's, that might serve as a good corrective. Does anyone know a good writeup about it?

corimaith 2y ago

Personally, I think the Author's point about getting Operator to just book your holidays for you or to rely on it for automatically recommending the "best" restaurants or so is ironically just a return to the past when we hired some agencies or friends to do these things for us also. Well, the return of such systems might also open in turn opportunities for arbitarge again; when savvy user who took the time to observe things directly could get better deals.

aerodog 2y ago
Wow, you had agencies and friends to do these things for you?
- do_not_redeem 2y ago
  Travel agents were quite common in ye olden days before the internet.
  - IYasha 2y ago
    There are plenty of them today. Though agency-organized trip is times more expensive.
- lupire 2y ago
  This was the "concierge" industry which was Google for us dinosaurs.
- dylan604 2y ago
  Yes, and good ones were worth every penny. You can book things online for yourself, but what do you know about the area you are visiting? An agent can recommend things that you would never even think of as being something needing consideration. Even just a phone number to call if you get in a bind.

darepublic 2y ago

> Previously if I wanted to know about the French Revolution, I would have Googled it, and likely landed on Wikipedia and maybe 2 or 3 specialty sites. Now, I just ask ChatGPT This is a common sentiment. I have been using chatgpt for various things, and there are times when I will turn to it for technical help, sysadmin or figuring out some shell / cli commands. However by and large I definitely still prefer googling something. I would much rather read a wikipedia article of the French Revolution than trust whatever chatgpt had to say about it. I figure chatgpt is just spitting out the very same wikipedia article with some rewording and the occasional hallucination and I would rather just read straight from the source. Same with programming questions - between reading a stack overflow thread with the answer and chatgpt I feel a lot better reading stackoverflow, seeing the context the replies, the alternatives etc. and deciding based on that rather than just trusting gpt.

xmprt 2y ago
ChatGPT helps me get an initial grasp of the topic from which I can come up with more questions and research to do on my own. Usually I don't use ChatGPT as a source but rather a springboard for ideas.
- est31 2y ago
  This is what was often said about Wikipedia. Don't use it as main source of information, but using it as a starting point is fine (if it's just to get a list of sources it quotes).
  - bestham 2y ago
    This begs the question; Is stills still how people use Wikipedia?
jahnu 2y ago
Shout out to duck.com My default
jredwards 2y ago
I enjoy phind.com if I want an AI to summarize a topic. Because while it will give me a nice LLM summary, it will also cite its sources. Whatever particular aspect of the summary intrigues me is what I'll then go look at the original source for.

lolinder 2y ago

Long before OpenAI killed the open web, advertising suffocated it. Advertising is the reason why it would even occur to anyone that it would be more fun to just have a robot book them a vacation than to deal with the misery that is every internet booking website. Something like Operator may well be the death of the ad-funded web—as TFA observes, who is going to see the ads? But the reason why a tool like Operator has why sort of appeal is because advertising already killed the open web and replaced it with a lifeless corpse.

MattGaiser 2y ago
Even if there were no ads, having a robot book your trips would still be nicer as it is still work to do. We used to have travel agents do all the booking instead and merely got rid of them for cost reasons.
- walterbell 2y ago
  Robots could guide robot fans towards common physical experiences.
- gtirloni 2y ago
  Why trust a robot that may or may not get your request right if you just go to the source and book it yourself? The experience booking anything with a travel agent was always horrible with so much back and forth, do we really want that?
  - MattGaiser 2y ago
    The work isn’t in the booking. It’s deciding where to look and comparing prices and amenities. Paying for and checking out is 5% of the customer journey here.
- lolinder 2y ago
  Eh, I disagree. The actual booking process itself is both pretty painless and very much not something I trust to be automated. Enter my card (better yet, pick a saved one), confirm the dates and price, click confirm. I can't think of anything in there that needs to be automated more than it is. And choosing something to do should be both fun and something you'd want to do yourself—it only isn't fun because businesses aren't incentivized to make it fun, they're incentivized to try to redirect your attention away from what you actually want and instead draw you to their various sponsors.

swatcoder 2y ago

Indeed. People have spent lots of words talking about the how the saturation of generative AI output will spoil future trainig, which is true, but is most immediately a problem for the AI model developers themselves. But even with them only acting as consumers, they break almost of the economic and social bases for how the internet works. Advertisers want their ads to be seen by humans, experts/pontificators want their words to to be seen by humans, artists want their images to be seem by humans. These things provide the foundations of the internet as we know it. If online tools are being used by bots who are unaffected bu ads, and texts are summarized by bots instead of read directly, and images are synthesized dynamically instead of appreciated directly, the internet itself breaks. As the author notes, the next most likely equilibrium involves an even more commercial, more expensive, more gated, more impersonal future than we might have already seen ourselves careening towards just a few years ago. Enjoy what you've had!

jfengel 2y ago
I wonder if the ads affect the bots. How does anyone figure out if something is worthwhile, if they haven't used it? They have heuristics, one of which is comfort and familiarity. That's why advertising exists: to get a brand in front of your face, so you recognize it. Maybe the bots end up with a similar heuristic as they crawl their sources. Perhaps the advertisers will be perfectly happy to pay, not for human eyeballs but for the crawlers. This is, of course, absurd. But since I find the capabilities of the bots opaque, why not absurdity.
acheron 2y ago
Won’t someone shed a tear for the poor advertisers?

kissgyorgy 2y ago

I think OP overestimates the number of people using Operator in the foreseeable future. Also it's optimised for todays web for websites and forms and I suspect they continue develop it this way for two reasons: 1. This works TODAY, which is important for a business. 2. As others commented in this thread, people won't necessarily trust it blindly, seeing visually what it does exactly is a feature.

Fricken 2y ago

Maybe the World Wide Web will be will be reduced to a series of blog rings where nerds and oddballs share their peculiar interests and discuss eclectic ideas.

walterbell 2y ago
Long live the WWW (World Weird Web)
awesomeMilou 2y ago
I'd be delighted to see PG behind a paywall so I would never have to consume his content again, but I have the feeling the man is too affluent to ever need the side hustle.

typeofhuman 2y ago

Why book a vacation when SORA can make a video of you and your family frolicking in the summery tropics that you post to your followers? They don't know you so they won't think your lying, those people used to be called friends.

carlosjobim 2y ago

> For informational content, like Wikipedia, TripAdvisor, Yelp, recipe websites... perhaps this will end up looking something like the journalism industry that aggregate and publish the information to AI companies, so they can avoid freeloading by agents. Why publish it to AI companies? The Internet is ripe for mass syndication of textual content and putting it behind subscriptions, just as YouTube has done with video content. Syndication was the distribution and business model for this content before the WWW, the advantage we can get now is no barrier to entry and no distribution costs. (Hosting costs are so low to not even count for text). At the same time we also get rid of the ad-ridden, scam-infest, bot-crawling Internet of the current day. Said I, on an open forum where nobody pays a dime...

walterbell 2y ago

> Something else I think could happen as a result of this is a web where we verify user/client identities, the same way we currently verify server identities (via TLS certificates). The cost of running bots is plummeting. I could forsee a world where sites like Tripadvisor require a client certificate to connect. That certificate could be provided by paid services (to prevent bot spam), or maybe by device manufacturers like Apple, so you get one certificate per device to prevent bot spam. Have client certificates worked in any niche? We now have SSO by Google/Apple/Facebook/X, but those identities are also used by bots.

est31 2y ago

> For informational content, like Wikipedia, TripAdvisor, Yelp, recipe websites... perhaps this will end up looking something like the journalism industry that aggregate and publish the information to AI companies, so they can avoid freeloading by agents. I'm pretty sure Wikipedia will not do any of those things, as it's a project ran by volunteers, and they do want to disseminate their content as widely as possible. The revenue from the "please donate" feature is only used for website development and to pay the servers. For the other websites, yeah, those might change and lock things down, require accounts to browse, etc, to prevent being scraped. Already now when I look for house listings or onto linkedin, I see all sorts of bot warnings. Twitter is also authwalled, simply because they don't want people to train on it for free.

pornel 2y ago

Since the operator uses user's computer via screenshots and keyboard/mouse, it's not easy to block by IP, browser fingerprinting, or convoluted page markup. The initial implementation probably has some detectable traits in its mouse and keyboard use, but a company that could train pretty convincing text and voice models can easily train a model to move mouse naturally enough. Simple screenshots can be messed with via flicker (using persistence of vision), but that's fixable too. This cat and mouse game can end up ugly. My pessimistic prediction is that Google et al. will extend their DRM from video to entire Web pages, and sell it as a service that blocks "unauthorized" screenshots and soft mouse, along with a cryptographically-strong way to detect the closed-source Chrome. It won't be accessible, but conveniently Republicans have added accessibility to their list of woke things to destroy. Sites will submit to this and advertise it as "use Chrome to skip those horrible CAPTCHAs!"

jszymborski 2y ago

How much longer will OpenAI/Anthropic/Google be able to offer usable free tiers of their agents? Because imo this "death of the open web" is predicated on that. Furthermore, Im skeptical we'll have the generous free tiers we have today for much longer. OAI and friends can only afford to burn millions on GPU cycles for non-paying customers for so long, and so long as we can continue to do web search for free I dont really see agents being a threat.

xeonmc 2y ago
They will keep affording to burn cycles until free search alternatives are pushed out forever.
- jszymborski 2y ago
  Marginalia, Brave Search, etc... are showing that free web search is not out of reach from neither a tech nor cost stand point.

gtirloni 2y ago

It's just a matter of time until AI chatbots are flooded with ads.

nis0s 2y ago

Why do people use chatGPT in favor of open source models? The performance isn’t that different for general queries, and not even that much for specialized ones.

Bjorkbat 2y ago

I have to admit it's really hard for me to take the noise about agents seriously because they keep bringing up using it for things that don't feel like chores to me, but are actually kind of delightful. I like the anticipation and excitement of planning for the big holiday. I like shopping online for new books or clothes or what have you. Suppose for a moment that agents worked 100% flawlessly (suspend whatever disbelief you have for a moment and roll with it) a large chunk of the web is still, actually, quite fun for quite a lot of people. Even if the information on the website is just as accessible through a chat interface as it is through a web browser, the website is still probably cooler and has a more fun experience vs using a chat interface. Obviously not all websites are like this, but the ones I care about are.

eucryphia 2y ago

Web 2.0 might be a solution. Algorithms competing on price. You’d get credits with your $80/month ISP bill. You could refuse to pay for anything from the CCP or the NYT.

phillipseamore 2y ago

Let's put aside that I would never trust reviews or ratings on most sites (like TripAdvisor) and imagine they are all trustworthy. "OpenAI shows an example where they ask Operator to find the highest rated day tour in Rome on TripAdvisor, and then book it." If only agents use TripAdvisor and the agents circumvent TA and purchase from the cheapest seller or straight from the supplier - who will write reviews and how would TA track sales or interest for ratings or popularity? Best case it would become a feedback loop run by the agents, worst case new data on TA would more or less stall. Without traffic or insights TA has no API to sell (unless someone wants stale and outdated data). If AI would end the WWW it's going to be a hell of a lot more expensive for consumers to subscribe to AI than having to put up with ads or buying subscriptions to services or sites. I really can't envision how AI will function when it's hoovered up the web (and any data it can find) to then being at a point were little new data is available. Will we end up with $200 a month AI subscriptions that are based on data from a handful of data brokers? Would we trust those brokers? I certainly wouldn't celebrate AI as the only interface to information, especially since we would likely end up with fewer gatekeepers than we have today. (Dead tired and hope my point comes across)

jinushaun 2y ago

I think this is overblown. At the end of the day, ChatGPT only works if it has something to scrape. Those website still need to exist for all this to work.

satisfice 2y ago

I recently had a client who used an LLM to summarize a series of video lectures I did, and then comment on them. The summaries were about 50% on the ball, 25% silent on important points, and 25% wrong and weird. Their commentary was a waste of their time and mine, as they got a partial and distorted notion of my work— but I couldn’t easily repair the damage. All I could really do is warn them that nothing they had read should be trusted.

tivert 2y ago

> On the Operator release blog, OpenAI shows an example where they ask Operator to find the highest rated day tour in Rome on TripAdvisor, and then book it. This seems fairly innocuous and cool, remember how we used to do this? You'd have to Google for day tours, browse trip advisor, likely open a few of them, then book the tour. Now, Operator does it all for us and we don't even have to interact with the middle man. That actually sounds pretty terrible, and the kind of optimization too many people will adopt to just make things bland. The decision reduced to picking the hugest number, under dumb assumption that huger is better for you (not to mention the rating could be gamed). And the user has no visibility so no opportunity to second-guess the algorithm if it's being stupid. It sounds like someone confused "faster with less friction" with "better."

chrismcb 2y ago

Previously I used a search engine that have me a bunch of results that made it easier to verify the authority and compare results. Now I just ask some random guy that may or may not give me the correct answer. That is basically what you are doing when you ask "ai"

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

"The Death of the Middleman Let's think about that - the middle man. Google, TripAdvisor, the tour providers - right now these are websites, and they support themselves by showing ads to users, or by partnering/commissions (e.g. TripAdvisor could receive revenue for directing users to day tours)." What is OpenAI if not another middleman. OpenAI does not produce its own "content". Like the other middlemen websites OpenAI relies on other peoples' content. Like the other middlemen websites who might manipulate the presentation, e.g., "ranking" of the content, OpenAI can manpulate the composition of the output. These middlemen can perform such manipulation for whatever reasons they publicly claim, e.g., eliminate bias, perform censorship and/or other, commercial reasons. Meanwhile the so-called "tech" company middleman does not disclose how this might be done. The "algorithm" is not disclosed. The operations of the middleman are non-transparent. The source and destination parties are not in control of the content. The middleman is in control.

tim333 2y ago

>final nail in the coffin of the open World Wide Web Reports of the web's death seem much exaggerated for something I use daily. OpenAI et all compete against the open web as do facebook, twitter and all the walled gardens but the web is still there and pretty indestructible by design.

LIzzyytujghf 2y ago

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