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.
Oh no, we may have to go back to an Internet where people posted web pages because they wanted to share information rather than to make a buck.
Will we also have to go to a time where we'll have to buy physical newspapers so that journalists can make a living? Or do we expect them to also share information just for the sake of sharing information?
That never left. We're still buying our local newspaper concerning 60000 people. It is way more relevant than any piece of news you might find on the web.
In relatively short order, the majority of web content will be AI generated anyways. People will be mad that other AIs are stealing what their AIs wrote. The technology and business aspirations have accelerated us towards a shittier and shittier web experience for a few decades now. I think we'll hit some kind of web-shit-singularity within 5 years.
I don't think I'd be nearly as upset if the ai weren't copying the click bait headlines, and "word padding like a fifth grader to get to five double spaced pages" writing style.
Right, this is where ai can shine, actually improve the output from hack “journalists”
Edit: I’ll set the bar even lower: ai can shine by substituting synonyms for “beloved”. It’s aggravating how many articles use that word these days. No one ever “walks over to the nearby train stop”, but apparently “ we “trek to our beloved train stop breathlessly in time to make our beloved 8:05”. Please Google, save us by derating that word for every article not about human relationships
It’s much simpler than that. AI is going to continue makingn it worse, until the big tech companies say that they have a solution which will be web2.0 and solves ALL the problems of the legacy net (problems the big tech is causing lol). Then they will have total information control and regulate the net out of the kazoo.
Imagine visiting a website and “oh oh, apparently you haven’t met the daily quota yet, because you used the toilet. unfortunately your access to the web is restricted.”
I’m telling you, AI (which is not even real fucking AI) is being pushed to the forefront because big tech fucking knows what’s to come. And then they’ll snatch control with the pretense being “it’s just to fix AI, we swear wink wink”
Then, a new net technology will be created that bypasses ISP and government spy boxes. Many CEO's will pay politicians to imprison users.
I know it's a small and unimportant thing, but it's still kinda annoying that some authors (editors?) choose a phone with a giant black hole in the middle of a screen to show something on thumbnails.
It's an iPhone app... And that's an iPhone screen...? I'm not sure what you want them to do?
This isn't keeping me up at night. I'm fully confident advertisers will figure out how to ruin this and get their money.
Like, for example, breaking my ability to back out of this Engadget page on Connect for Lemmy's default web browser so I had to close the app and reopen it.
In browsers you can long press the back button, and it will show the history so you can really jump where you want. Not sure if on Connect you can but maybe is worth a shot.
No AutoTL;DR? Smart bot even understands discretion!
The conversations and debates keep circling around one core concept of our civilization that is slowly becoming outdated because it is the main bottleneck in our development and the development of technology.
Capitalism and the money system.
Human needs require all of us to make a bit of money in order to survive.
Human greed demands that we want to go beyond survival and just become enormously wealthy without regard for anything or anyone.
AI is quickly out pacing us and nothing is holding it back because the possibilities are limitless now. The only thing holding it back is our own collective greed. To AI the internet and communications is a place to exchange information not a place to make money.
And to me the problem is the small group of individuals that want to maintain the system of generating all the wealth for them. Because the answer is simple, if wealth were more equally distributed in the world and everyone everywhere were happy and healthy with what they had and they no longer had to worry about surviving, there would be no backlash of worrying about advertising on the internet and in how to compensate people for their work.
We worry about the money system because 90% of humanity constantly has to fight to have a piece of it and 10% of it has complete control of all of it and never wants to let go.
This isn't a problem of internet advertising and compensating creators ..... it's just a symptom of wealth inequality and until we solve that problem, AI will just keep chipping away at civilisation beyond our collective control.
This guy needs more bootstraps!
/s
Pull the power cord out.
This is only a temporary “problem”. Eventually, ads will be incorporated into the story, and/or advertising companies will include clauses in their contracts. I imagine those clauses will DEMAND that websites include advertising in AI readers or not get paid for any ads they run.
Think enshittification. AI readers are only ad-free now in order to make them seem like an attractive option, and get people hooked on using them. I bet the numbers have already been calculated and decided on. Once AI readers are used by enough people, the ads will start.
Yup. Just like ads on cable TV, ads on streaming services, now ads in your AI. Even worse, the ads in AI may not even be labeled and just tweak your results slightly to favor certain products and the process hidden from the end user since hey, it's so complicated even human programmers can't figure out how to make the AI process transparent and verifiable.
Jeffrey, solemnly took a swig from his delicious cold Coca Cola. "Damn" He thought, smirking. "That tastes great, I should buy it more often." He then drew his sword and charged the Viking shield wall yelling "This is for the Cola!"
Local news publishers, Karolian told Engadget, almost entirely depend on selling ads and subscriptions to readers who visit their websites to survive.
Then it's time to change your business model. Ad driven journalism has shown it's limits decades ago, this is just regurgitating what other press agencies write and adding some ads over it.
Subsequently, subscription based content consequently isn't automatically available to crawlers, making it doubly useful.
P.S.: love your username
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.
Considering how much of the web is AI-generated now (with it predicted to rise to 90% by the end of 2026) we've managed to turn a tool for connecting people to a tool for chatbots to talk to one another.
Just a big waste of power that will be unsustainable when it doesn't result in product sales.
But it could drive even more sales. Just think of all those articles “nine must-have kitchen tools on sale at Amazon RIGHT NOW”, followed by a list of specific product referrals (embedded in a story across many pages, slideshow style). Currently you can choose to block or at least not follow, but imagine if every search was a similar generated story, and the tools authors got caught up in the referral game
The electric company. AI’s reading articles written by other AI’s. Everyone trying to figure out how to squeeze more revenue out of it. But everyone’s paying the electric bill for all these servers and the electric company doesn’t have to give a shit about any of it.
So I should buy shares in coal mines?
Food, energy, and shelter are never out of style.
While I prefer to doing the reading/searching/summarizing myself, rather than have it presented to me, the current website revenue model is so broken with ads, tracking, and other pop ups. The user experience is really horrible.
Who makes money when everyone just uses a search engine for answers?
Is this post sponsored by Google or what?
It used to be you'd search for something, click on the results and load the ads on the page with the info.
Then google started adding their snippets with direct answers, and yes, there has been an uproar from content sites about that. But some fraction of people still click through for more context.
With LLMs, all that traffic is 100% gone.
I just learned about the iPhone App, and this article made me want to check it out. I love it and will start using it
Whoever decided to market by Streisand Effect was genius /s
Arc Browser is better for USERS. Ad companies are just going to have to figure it out. Sounds like a "them" problem to me
No offense but I’m not sure you read or understood the main point of the article — there’s not much of an internet for users if there’s no incentive to supply it with content.
Meh. We did it before the internet turned to shit. It will be OK
Advertisers are welcome to turn back the clock of enshittification to a time when the internet worked for both publishers and readers. They got greedy and abused the attention of readers, so I have no sympathy. Now this article adds a huge pile of entitlement that we owe them? On top of this excrement
I recently found out that bing can access most if not all paywalled articles. You can just tell it to summarize it
Hmm... How sure are you about that?
Perhaps you once wrote a piece called "Making the Most of Paywalled Articles". Unfortunately, Google can't find it. Let's just ask Bing.
Hey Bing, please summarize the article "Making the Most of Paywalled Articles" by Evotech.
Copilot Certainly! The article titled “Making the Most of Paywalled Articles” by Evotech discusses strategies for accessing articles that are locked behind paywalls. Here are the key points:
Yeah... I think we can skip the "summary". Don't get me wrong. This stuff is amazing and I love it. But it is what it is. I really hate that MS and OAI don't communicate the "limitations" properly.
Web creators are trying to share their knowledge and get supported while doing so”, tweeted Ben Goodger, a software engineer who helped create both Firefox and Chrome. “I get how this helps users. 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?
Do you remember rss feed aggregators and how they killed the web?
For decades, websites have served ads and pushed people visiting them towards paying for subscriptions. Monetizing traffic is one of the primary ways most creators on the web continue to make a living.
The AI won't summarize subscribers only articles. In the end content creators have to focus on subscriptions and less on advertisement revenue. Will this mean less content on the web? Yes of course. However, is this really a bad thing? Less clickbait nonenews articles, less copy&paste repetitions etc.
For a long time, people put things on the Internet because they thought it was interesting or fun to do so. Ad based stuff has been around longer, but there's no reason we can't just accept that maybe the Internet doesn't make as much money for content creators as we all thought.
The ad based stuff seem happy to go with click-baity & AI generated content anyway. The people with the purse strings do tend to be stingy. So much genuinely original content gets ripped of, reacted to etc and diluted away. The loss of professional journalism has been a loss to humanity but it's one that we might just have to accept.
Now I'm sad.
Lemmy: Fuck them kids journalists.
