Who makes money when AI reads the internet for us?
Instead of displaying links, Arc Search's “Browse for Me” feature reads the first handful of pages and summarizes them into a single, custom-built, Arc-formatted web page using large language models from OpenAI and others. Critics say that's a problem.
This is what I wondered about a few months ago when people were saying that ChatGPT was a 'google killer'. So we just have 'AI' read websites and sum them up, vs. visiting websites? Why would anyone bother putting information on a website at that point?
We are barreling towards this issue. StackOverflow for example has crashing viewer numbers. But an AI isn't going to help users navigate and figure out a new python library for example, without data to train on. I've already had AIs straight up hallucinate about functions in R that actually don't exist. It seems to happen primarily in the newer libraries, probably with fewer posts on stackexchange about them
AI isn’t going to help users navigate and figure out a new python library for example
Current AI will not. Future AI should be able to as long as there is accurate documentation. This is the natural direction for advancement. The only way it doesn't happen is if we've truly hit the plateau already, and that seems very unlikely. GPT-4 is going to look like a cheap toy in a few years, most likely.
And if the AI researchers can't crack that nut fast enough, then API developers will write more machine-friendly documentation and training functions. It could be as ubiquitous as unit testing.
Thank you to Arc for reminding me how much I enjoy browsing the internet and its many unique pages — these soulless generated results are the opposite of what I want.
More and more of the Internet is being ai generated, so you'll get to choose from a soulless summary or soulless SEO spam.
There will be alternatives I think. Maybe the web turns into even more trash but then there will be alternatives for people who knows where to look.
I guess it's the fate of the web to become cable TV. But that doesn't mean we have to watch that content.
If I want to get them quick, I'd take them soulless and summarized.
How does it help creators? Without them there is no web…” After all, if a web browser sucked out all information from web pages without users needing to actually visit them, why would anyone bother making websites in the first place
This reminds me of when Mozilla was 0.9 and the web was just taking the baton from Gopher.
When Ben suggests there would be no web without monetization, he seems to forget WHEN HE WAS THERE before the sellout.
Definitely not the IT people keeping their ai servers running, that's for sure.
TIL IT is volunteer work.
Why does everything have to be about money?
Well people who make content are already suffering for a collapse of ad prices. News sites are shutting down left and right. Not everything is about money, but they need revenue or external support to continue operating.
I see the advent of AI browsers much like ad blockers; the web has become increasingly user-hostile and users are pushing back. Advertising was never sustainable, and that has only become more apparent over the past decade. This is a long-overdue comeuppance. The cost of the advertising economy is extraordinary and cannot be measured in mere dollars.
I miss the internet from the 90s, when sites were information-dense and operated mostly as a public service by enthusiasts, usually for free. Of course, that was not sustainable as the Internet became more popular, because the cost of serving a thousand people was, like, couch-cushion money, but the cost of serving billions of people...well, I don't have millions of couch cushions to plunder.
But also, the cost of web site operation today is artificially high, largely because of advertising and the incentives that an ad-driven market creates. What was once a few KB of text is now many MB of ads, scripts, layouts, and graphics, or even GB of videos, all for the sake of manipulating users into viewing more ads. Commercial sites do not compete on the quality of information; they compete over ad impressions. This was not borne out of need, but out of economic incentives that are misaligned with the needs of society, individuals, and, yes, even content producers.
This isn't new, of course. I remember the same conversations back in the 90s and early 2000s. First with Sherlock, then later with Google.
It's not about profit. It's about being compensated for one's hard work which was appropriated without permission by giant corporations
Lesson #1 on the Internet.
Put something on it, expect it to be there forever. You never own whatever you put out there. Both text, pictures nor video.
Maybe companies should realise this too.
