@caseynewton Casey, a fundamental issue here, that feels like it’s just skipped over consistently is whether those in-search AI results are *correct* and *true*.
I propose that they are not, and they never can be, because Google has not, and can not solve for “Garbage In, Garbage Out”, because the garbage was already ingested.
@grissallia @caseynewton
I see your point, and frankly agree. One thing to consider though is if the general public (the people who would love to get their answer right on the Google page) would even care. Unless the AI summary is very obviously incorrect, I suspect they'll believe it.
Heck, if I'm googling something, I generally don't know the answer and won't be able to determine if the AI summary is slightly incorrect or wrong in a not-so-obvious way.
Everybody on the outside is screaming about it. Everybody who's salary depends on pushing out AI is deflecting.
Yes, people will 100% trust what the computer tells them. Right up until it causes enough trouble that society just gives up on ever using Google for anything. But it'll have to be that bad for people to come to their skeptical senses. Google is working on either killing itself, or civilization. That's both options.
@caseynewton "...a company that once proudly served as an entry point to a web that it nourished with traffic and advertising revenue has begun to abstract that all away into an input for its large language models."
Curious to see if a LLM, once built, can sustain itself without new human generated content. Why build your new 'fields of dreams' on the web, if users are never going to come anyway.
@caseynewton I know it’s beside the point, but
God damn, that is such a good headline.
So, AI as a mass-stealing of copyrighted content will just extend from code and human created content to all other websites? I wonder how the large content providers will like it.
@caseynewton Sundar Pichai — the one who gave the destroyer of Yahoo Search the keys to the kingdom of Google:
Wanna listen to this story instead? Check out this week's Better Offline podcast, "The Man That Destroyed Google Search," available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. UPDATE: Prabhakar has now been deposed as head of search, read here for more details. This is the story
But, it's not just about humans doing the Googling.
The information people want has to come from humans in the real world. If you ask Google for a cake recipe, someone somewhere has to have baked cakes and written it down, and it won't be anyone at Google.
This is Google stealing the info, and not giving anything back at all. AI/LLM search isn't going to be sustainable if actual knowledge is just co-opted by Google with zero credit to its creators. Why would anyone bother publishing cake recipes if it just gets slurped and stolen instantly?
Where is Google going to get data to steal if they've destroyed the web?
Google has lost the ability to look further than the quarterly share dividend, the fate of many tech companies. Now they're living off the efforts of other tech companies, stealing their ideas, the end-game.
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