[HN Gopher] The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuv...
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The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela
Author : rkaveland
Score : 426 points
Date : 2025-06-07 17:04 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (kaveland.no)
(TXT) w3m dump (kaveland.no)
| boothby wrote:
| > These days, I find that I am using multiple search engines and
| often resort to using an LLM to help me find content.
|
| For a few months, I've been wondering: how long until advertisers
| get their grubby meathooks into the training data? It's trivial
| to add prompts encouraging product placement, but I would be
| completely shocked if the big players don't sell out within a
| year or two, and start biasing the models themselves in this way,
| if they haven't already.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| fortunately for our investors we have found a way to solve this
| with more ai
| quesera wrote:
| "AI is like XML -- if it's not working for you, you're not
| using enough of it."
| dhosek wrote:
| I kind of look forward to freshman composition essays "written"
| with AI that are rife with appeals to use online casinos.
| huskyr wrote:
| Can't wait for all school essays promoting dubious crypto
| schemes of some sort.
| nperez wrote:
| I'm not going to disagree because greed knows no bounds, but
| that could be RIP for the enthusiast crowd's proprietary LLM
| use. We may not have cheap local open models that beat the
| SOTA, but is it possible to beat an ad-poisoned SOTA model on a
| consumer laptop? Maybe.
| rusk wrote:
| On the flip side, there could be a cottage industry churning
| out models of various strains and purities.
|
| This will distress the big players who want an open field to
| make money from their own adulterated inferior product so
| home grown LLM will probably end up being outlawed or
| something.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Yes, the future is in making a plethora of hyper-
| specialized LLM's, not a sci-fi assistant monopoly.
|
| E.g., I'm sure people will pay for an LLM that plays Magic
| the Gathering well. They don't need it to know about German
| poetry or Pokemon trivia.
|
| This could probably done as LoRAs on top of existing
| generalist open-weight models. Envision running this
| locally and having hundreds of LLM "plugins", a la phone
| apps.
| rolandog wrote:
| If future LLM patterns mimic the other business models, 80%
| of the prompt will be spent preventing ad recommendations and
| the agent would in turn reluctantly respond but suggest that
| it is malicious to ask for that.
|
| I'm really looking forward to something like a GNU GPT that
| tries to be as factual, unbiased, libre and open-source as
| possible (possibly built/trained with Guix OS so we can
| ensure byte-for-byte reproducibility).
| J_McQuade wrote:
| "here is how to to translate this query from T-SQL to PL-SQL...
| ..."
|
| "... but if you used our VC's latest beau, BozoDB, it could be
| written like THIS! ... ..."
|
| 9 months, max. I give it 9 months.
| mike_ivanov wrote:
| "T-SQL to PL-SQL" -> (implies an > 40 age, most likely being
| an Ask TOM citizen, a consultant with >> 100K annual income,
| most likely conservative, maybe family with kids, prone to
| anxiety/depression, etc) -> This WORRY FREE PEACE OF MIND
| magic pill takes America by storm, grab yours before it's too
| late!
| moron4hire wrote:
| It's kind of already happening. For example, if you ask an LLM
| for advice on building an application, it's going to pigeon-
| hole you into using React.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| That's because of statistical likelihood and abundance of web
| content about React which seems to be kinda default choice.
| Had to be a looong con if it was an ad.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Are people putting up vast arrays of websites to promote
| products/politics solely to sway LLM-feeding crawlers yet?
| Lu2025 wrote:
| I've seen those content mills since before Covid.
| hnbad wrote:
| Or for a more concerning example, GitHub is owned by
| Microsoft who want to sell cloud services so it stands to
| reason it would be in their interest to have GitHub Copilot
| steer developers towards building applications using
| architectural patterns that lend themselves more to using
| those cloud services, e.g. service-oriented architecture even
| when it is against the developer's interests.
|
| This doesn't have to be as blunt as promoting specific
| libraries or services and it's a bias that could even be
| introduced "accidentally".
| morkalork wrote:
| I can absolutely assure you that SEO companies are already
| marketing AI strategies oriented around making content easily
| and preferentially consumable by LLMs and their vendors.
| paulgerhardt wrote:
| GEO model relevance is the only thing that matters:
| https://a16z.com/geo-over-seo/
| zerocrates wrote:
| The providers can sell inclusion in the system prompt to
| advertisers. Run some ad-tech on the first message before it
| goes to the LLM to see whose gets included.
| kijin wrote:
| For most advertisers, sure, there's no need to go all the way
| back to the training data. Advertisers want immediate
| results. Training takes too long and has uncertain results.
| Much easier to target the prompt instead.
|
| If you're someone like Marlboro or Coca-Cola, on the other
| hand, it might be worth your while to pollute the training
| data and wait for subtle allusions to your product to show up
| all over the place. Maybe they already did, long before LLMs
| even existed.
| rightbyte wrote:
| The annoying part is that we part of the "pollution" since
| we namedrop Coca Cola etc.
| robocat wrote:
| > Marlboro or Coca-Cola
|
| Your product placement is appropriately ironic.
| gofreddygo wrote:
| > how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into
| the training data
|
| You're so right. it's not an if anymore, but when. and when it
| does, you wouldn't know what's an ad and what isn't.
|
| In recent years i started noticing a correlation between
| alcohol consumption and movies. I couldn't help but notice how
| many of the movies I've seen in the past few years promote
| alcohol and try to correlate it with the good times. how many
| of these are paid promotions? I don't know.
|
| and now, after noticing, this every movie that involves alcohol
| has become distasteful for me mostly because it casts a shadow
| on the negative side of alcohol consumption.
|
| I can see how ads in an LLM can go the same route, deeply
| embedded in the content and indistinguishable from everything
| else.
| HSO wrote:
| Ha, now try cigarettes/smoking! At least low level alcohol
| consumption is only detrimental to the drinker. Cigarettes
| start poisoning the air from the moment they are lit, and
| like noise pollution there is no boundary. I hate them or
| thrir smokers with a vengeance and the foreign satanic cabal
| that is ,,hollywood" sold everyone out for their gold calf
| tobacco money
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| But a drunkard might sit behind the wheel, at which point
| it becomes detrimental to everyone on the road...
|
| And there are countless books and movies where the hero has
| drinks, or routinely swigs some whisky-grade stuff from a
| flask on his belt to calm his nerves, then drives.
| chgs wrote:
| Driving itself kills more people in the us every month
| than 9/11, yet has been glamourised for a century
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| It's just that bad drivers are abundant in the US, and
| driving is way underregulated for such a car-centric
| country.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| I think that your negative view of alcohol is making you a
| bit conspiratorial. It's an extremely deeply ingrained thing
| in western culture, you don't need to resort to product
| placement to explain why filmmakers depict it. People
| genuinely do have a good time drinking.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > People genuinely do have a good time drinking.
|
| This depends a lot on the person. I, for example, would
| much more associate "reading scientific textbooks/papers"
| with having a good time. :-D
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| Sure, I was using a generic sentence [1] not universal
| quantification!
|
| [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/generics/
| immibis wrote:
| It's that way because of successful marketing - just like
| smoking, or cars, or fast food.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Beer, spirits etc was a big thing way before the printing
| press.
| graemep wrote:
| People enjoyed drinking long before there was marketing.
| People have been enjoying alcohol for literally tens of
| thousands of years. It has been associated with
| celebrations for many thousands (e.g. Jesus giving people
| alcohol to keep a wedding reception going - and that is
| just something that comes to mind - I am sure there are
| MUCH earlier examples someone familiar with older stuff
| can come up with).
|
| I would correct it to anti-alcohol sentiment being
| ingrained in American culture (as it is in some others,
| such as the Middle East) rather than western culture. Its
| an American hang-up, as with nudity etc.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Alcoholism was so rampant in the US that enough states
| ratified a constitutional amendment making it illegal.
|
| It wasn't enough to kill alcohol consumption entirely,
| but it did cut back on the culture of overindulgence as
| measure by death rates before and the years after.
|
| Other countries also banned alcohol in this time period,
| and new Zealand voted for it twice but never enacted the
| ban.
| Lu2025 wrote:
| Right? A woman comes home and immediately pours herself a
| large glass of red wine, without even washing hands or
| changing into home clothes. WHO DOES THAT? Pure product
| placement.
| aardvarkr wrote:
| I think for the moment the leading AI companies are strongly
| incentivized to not succumb to the advertising curse. Their
| revenue is subscription driven and the competition is
| ridiculously fierce and immune to collusion. Everyone is trying
| to one-up everyone else and there is no moat that locks you
| into a single product. Their incentive is to score as high as
| possible on benchmarks in order to drive up their user base in
| order to increase subscriptions. Any time spent on implementing
| advertising is time their adversaries are spending making their
| models better. Let's hope the competition stays fierce so that
| we don't get enshitification anytime soon
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| The adds can be outside of the AI reply-pane. Just like adds
| are outside of Google search results.
| immibis wrote:
| ? Google search ads aren't outside of the results. They
| used to be, until they realized they got more clicks if
| they weren't.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Not anymore they're not, they're tightly integrated.
| myaccountonhn wrote:
| You can start with subscription, then add ads on top. When
| you constantly need growth that's kind of the logical
| conclusion.
| shwouchk wrote:
| this is already happening in full force. sota models are
| already poisoned. leading providers already push their own
| products inside webchat system prompts.
| rodgerd wrote:
| There are already companies promising to attack Wikipedia and
| product LLM-bait YouTube content. Ship's sailed.
| vintermann wrote:
| Sure, but what makes you think they will actually deliver
| that? There's no honor among spammers. If there's an obvious
| idea with new tech, 100 sleazy startups will claim to offer
| it, without even remotely having it.
| reubenmorais wrote:
| Google has been working on auctioning token-level influence
| during LLM generation for years now:
| https://research.google/blog/mechanism-design-for-large-lang...
| sph wrote:
| Google: ruining their core product for that sweet ad money.
| junga wrote:
| Ads are Google's core product, isn't it?
| Parae wrote:
| Their core product is software meant to make sweet ad
| money.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Google's core product has always been advertisement. They
| sell advertisements to companies looking to advertise, and
| they bring in tens of billions in revenue from that
| business. In effect, their core product is you: they're
| selling your eyeballs.
|
| If the bait that they used to bring you to them so they
| could sell your eyeballs has finally started to rot and
| stink, then why do people continue to be attracted by it?
| You claim they've ruined their core product, but it still
| works as intended, never mind that you've confused what
| their products actually are.
| willvarfar wrote:
| And just over a year ago now the OpenAI "preferred publisher
| program" pitch deck to investors leaked.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40310228
| jedbrooke wrote:
| not quite ads in LLMS, but I had an interesting experience with
| google maps the other day. the directions voice said "in 100
| feet, turn left at the <Big Fast Food Chain>". Normally it
| would say "at the traffic light" or similar. And this wasn't
| some easy to miss hidden street, it was just a normal
| intersection. I can only hope they aren't changing the routes
| yet to make you drive by the highest bidder
| collingreen wrote:
| This is devilish. I'm adding your idea to my torment nexus
| list.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| "Continue driving on Thisandthat Avenue, and admire the
| happy, handsome people you see on your right, shopping at
| Vuvuzelas'R'Us, your place for anything airhorn!"
| dizhn wrote:
| I am still waiting for navigation software to divert your
| route to make sure you see that establishment. From your
| experience, it seems like we're close to that reality now.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Most users want the best directions possible from their maps
| app, and that includes easily recognizable landmarks, such as
| fast food restaurants.
|
| "Turn left at McDonalds" is what a normal person would say if
| you asked for directions in a town you don't know. Or they
| could say "Turn left at McFritzberger street", but what use
| would that be for you?
|
| Although I've had Google Maps say "Turn right after the
| pharmacy", and there's three drug stores in the
| intersection...
| jerf wrote:
| I've had this done at a sufficient variety of different
| places that I don't think it's advertising.
|
| I'm also not particularly convinced any advertisers would pay
| for "Hey, we're going to direct people to just drive by your
| establishment, in a context where they have other goals very
| front-and-center on their mind. We're not going to tell them
| about the menu or any specials or let you give any custom
| messages, just tell them to drive by." Advertisers would want
| more than just an ambient mentioning of their existence for
| money.
|
| There's at least two major classes of people, which are,
| people who take and give directions by road names, and people
| who take and give directions by landmarks. In cities,
| landmarks are also going to generally be buildings that have
| businesses in them. Before the GPS era, when I had to give
| directions to things like my high school grad party to people
| who may never have been to the location it was being held in,
| I would always give directions in both styles, because
| whichever style may be dominant for you, it doesn't hurt to
| have the other style available to double-check the
| directions, especially in an era where they are non-
| interactive.
|
| (Every one of us Ye Olde Fogeys have memories of trying to
| navigate by directions given by someone too familiar with how
| to get to the target location, that left out entire turns, or
| got street names wrong, or told you to "turn right" on to a
| 5-way intersection that had two rights, or told you to turn
| on to a road whose sign was completely obscured by trees, and
| all sorts of other such fun. With GPS-based directions I
| still occasionally make wrong turns but it's just not the
| same when the directions immediately update with a new
| route.)
| drdrek wrote:
| Assume that if you thought about it its already too late. I've
| been to an AI SEO session by our VC. It was a guide on how to
| find chatbot primary sources for a keyword and then seeding
| that source with your content.
|
| Advertisers and spammers have the highest possible incentive to
| subvert the system, so they will. Which is only one step worse
| (or better depending on your view) than letting a mega corp
| control all the flow of information absolutely.
|
| Welcome to the new toll booth of the internet, now with 50%
| less access to the source material (WOW!), I hope you have a
| pleasant stay.
| Lu2025 wrote:
| > advertisers
|
| This kind of ads is also impossible to filter. Everyone
| complains about ads on YouTube or Reddit but I never see any
| with my adblocks. Now we won't be able to squash them.
| gerdesj wrote:
| I am deliberately keeping away from LLMs for search. I'm old
| enough to remember finally ditching Altavista for the new upstart
| Google. I did briefly flirt with Ask Jeeves but it was not good
| enough.
|
| I don't think anyone has it sorted yet. LLM search will always be
| flawed due to being a next token guesser - it cannot be trusted
| for "facts". A LLM fact is not even a considered opinion, it is
| simply next token guessing. LLMs certainly cannot be trusted for
| "current affairs" - they will always be out of date, by
| definition (needs training)
|
| Modern search - Goog or Bing or whatever - seem to be somewhat
| confused, ad riddled and stuffed with rubbish results at the top.
|
| I've populated a uBlacklist with some popular lists and the
| results of my own encounters. DDG and co are mostly useful now,
| for me.
| myself248 wrote:
| I miss Altavista every day. Case-sensitive search is how you
| tell DOS from DoS. Putting "exact phrases" in quotes no longer
| seems to work. Then they added insult to injury by forcing you
| to +mandate a term otherwise they might just ignore it. Now
| that no longer works either.
|
| I've entirely given up on Google.
|
| I've made extensive shortcuts so I can directly search various
| sites straight from my location bar: wikipedia, wiktionary,
| urbandictionary, genius, imdb, onelook, knowyourmeme, and about
| two dozen suppliers/distributors/retailers where I regularly
| shop.
|
| If I need something that's not on that list, I'll try some
| search engines but I start with the assumption that I'm not
| going to find it, because the battle for search is lost.
| sgarland wrote:
| Altavista was the OG. I remember it being cantankerous and
| requiring you to specific in how you searched, but if you
| knew how to use it, it was unmatched. Until Google.
| devilbunny wrote:
| It was fast, which almost nothing else was at the time.
|
| And if people on dialup connections think you're slow, it's
| because you are.
| ars wrote:
| When Google came out it was way better than Altavista,
| people switched instantly. Specifically Altavista looked at
| how often a search term was in the result, which wasn't
| always a helpful thing. Google also noticed if search terms
| were near each other in a page which was really helpful,
| otherwise you would get forums with one search term in one
| message, and the other far away in an unrelated message.
| Google fixed that.
|
| The web has changed these days, it's an adversarial system
| now, where web results are aggressively bad and constantly
| trying to trick you. Google is much harder to implement
| now.
| myself248 wrote:
| When Google came out, I started using it for some things,
| because yes it was better at some things, but I didn't
| stop using Altavista. Stayed with it until the very end,
| for cases where I could be certain that I knew the exact
| words that'd be in the page, and Google just sucked at
| that.
|
| These days I can't even -exclude terms that I know would
| only appear in the wrong results, Google will show me
| those results anyway. Nothing about adversarial SEO
| requires them to ignore my input, that's a different
| choice.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > I've entirely given up on Google.
|
| I have used Google very little for about 3 years now.
| Sometimes when DDG fails to find what I'm looking for I'll
| try Google. It rarely works better.
| spauldo wrote:
| It's really strange, while I agree Google's results aren't as
| good as they used to be, they're still miles ahead of DDG for
| me. Is it because I still use keyword search like it's the
| early 2000s?
|
| I tried to switch to DDG because Google was blocking
| Hurricane Electric IPv6 tunnels. DDG is still my homepage but
| I usually end up clicking the bookmark I made for
| ipv4.google.com. I wish I knew why DDG works for all you
| people but it's horrible for me.
| cheschire wrote:
| Isn't DDG basically Bing with a privacy layer?
| spauldo wrote:
| That's what I've been told. I haven't tried Bing directly
| because... eww... but I assume the results would be
| similar to DDG.
| jononor wrote:
| Does you Google actually respect the keywords? For me, most
| of the times it replaces words with "synonyms" (mostly
| wrong context or not really replaceable). And results are
| pretty crap as a result - no what I was looking for, but
| just much more common/generic stuff.
| spauldo wrote:
| If I put them in quotes, yeah.
| Lu2025 wrote:
| Correct. Google became unusable around 2020. I search
| Wikipedia directly and rely on Duck for other needs. As
| rudimentary as it is for uncommon languages such as
| Ukrainian, DDG it's still better than Google. Shame on them.
| username223 wrote:
| > Putting "exact phrases" in quotes no longer seems to work.
| Then they added insult to injury by forcing you to +mandate a
| term otherwise they might just ignore it. Now that no longer
| works either.
|
| I don't understand why they got rid of these escape hatches.
| Sometimes I want the "top" pages containing precisely the
| text I enter -- no stemming, synonyms, etc. Maybe it
| shouldn't be the default, but why make it impossible?
|
| In my ideal search world, there would also be an option to
| eliminate any page with a display ad or affiliate link.
| Sometimes I only want the pages that aren't trying to make
| money off of me.
| rustcleaner wrote:
| I have a solution: search engine which uses machine
| learning to score the "commercialness" of a page. By
| commercialness, I mean: is it a table of products with
| prices; does it have buy buttons; does it use a lot of
| tracking and analytics; does it have a cart; is there a lot
| of product talk (and is it overbiased positively); how are
| all the pages within a couple link-degrees scoring; ...
| (and more). Then, give users a slider which right side
| means no filtering, left side means basically only return
| universities, Wikipedia, and PBS tier results.
|
| This has to track number of ads and trackers in a page and
| not just be about product pages. This measure should also
| fight SEO spam, as the tracking and advertising elements
| would cause SEO spammers to lose rank on the engine
| (disincentivising an arms race).
|
| Add in the patently obvious need for the poweruser's 2nd
| search bar, which takes set notation statements and at
| least one of a few popular powerful regex languages, and
| finally add cookie stored, user-suppliable domain
| blacklists and whitelists (which can be downloaded as a
| .txt and reuploaded later on a new browser profile if
| needed). I never ever want to see Experts Exchange for any
| reason in my results, as an immediately grasped example.
| Give the users more control, quit automagicking everything
| behind a conversationally universal idiot-bar!
| username223 wrote:
| I use uBlacklist to get rid of Expert Sexchange and
| similar low-quality sites in search results, and it seems
| to work well enough.
|
| An "advanced mode" supporting literal keywords (with and
| without stemming) and boolean operators wouldn't cost the
| search companies anything. I think supporting regexp
| search would be hard: do you search your index for fixed
| substrings and expand around them? I'm not a search
| person...
|
| I don't think you'd need much in the way of machine
| learning to filter out the spam. There are relatively few
| third-party display ad servers and affiliate networks,
| and those are the main lazy ways to make money. There's
| no need to filter out all commercial content; just
| getting rid of the "passive income" bros would be enough.
| shpx wrote:
| If you ask ChatGPT 4o about a current event it will google
| things (do some sort of web search) and summarise the result.
| vintermann wrote:
| and often I have to tell it to don't search, because it will
| just pull SEO polluted answers from Google and launder then
| slightly.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| The web is in such a bad state, I think there is probably an
| opportunity for traditional publishers (or somebody else, like a
| university) to start a walled garden web. A vast trove of
| interesting, and valuable information on every topic. No
| shopping, no ads. Just the content you would find in the library.
|
| People used to spend money on books and magazines, I'm sure some
| of them could be convinced to sign up for a Netflix of books and
| magazines.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| We already have that and it's Wikipedia.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Can you imagine how much better it would be if people were
| paid to create the content!
| bawolff wrote:
| I think it would be worse. Money tends to ruin
| collaborative communities.
| melagonster wrote:
| They should offer more money. Wikipedia invited some
| professor writing. thye take responsibility for their
| whole life on job.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| Professors don't necessarily want to waste their time
| fighting with Wikipedia admins.
| ars wrote:
| It doesn't need to be collaborative, people write books
| for money all the time.
|
| It's how the vast majority of human knowledge has been
| stored and perpetuated for millennia.
|
| This new business of people writing up their knowledge
| for free (wikpedia, stackexchange, forums, reddit, etc)
| is relatively new, and only semi-working.
| yreg wrote:
| I don't think it would (and could) be any better.
|
| That being said Wikipedia is not a substitute of the "old"
| web.
| cbsmith wrote:
| Some curious misconceptions here about how the search industry
| works.
|
| There's a _very_ strong financial incentive for ad-powered search
| engines to keep SEO spam out of search results, because that
| makes advertisers more willing to pay for search placement. A
| publicly run search engine would not have those incentives and
| would be at if anything graver risk of a "tragedy of the
| commons" type scenario where the engine is overtaken with spam.
|
| Yes, there are perverse incentives to populate search engine
| results with paid placements, but the best corrective force I can
| think of is having more competition in the search space. As long
| as people are willing to try other search engines (spoiler: for
| the most part, they are currently not), this creates a strong
| incentive to ensure that paid placements that harm the search
| experience are kept to a minimum.
|
| ...and I think the concerns about profitability of the LLM space
| is completely missing the larger agenda. Even if public use of
| OpenAI and its competitors NEVER TURNS A PROFIT, there is
| tremendous economic opportunity that investors expect to realize
| from a company with intelligent/powerful LLMs. _That_ is why they
| are pumping so much money into these companies.
| nehal3m wrote:
| This reeks of "communism is when capitalism" to me, because:
|
| >A publicly run search engine would not have those incentives
| and would be at if anything graver risk of a "tragedy of the
| commons" type scenario where the engine is overtaken with spam.
|
| But then how come that is exactly what is happening with modern
| search engines? It's just always advertising that comes along
| and fucks up a good thing.
| hnbad wrote:
| If "the government" were to run Google Search, it would be
| bad because nobody cares about making it good because profit
| is the only motivating force for organizations.
|
| Because Google runs Google Search, it's instead only bad
| because profit motivates Google to push its services,
| increase ad impressions/interactions and incentivize users to
| not actually leave the search engine result page (e.g. by
| citing or summarizing content of the related web pages on the
| result page).
|
| And because competition is good that means Google actively
| competing with the sites it indexes for the attention of its
| users is a good thing even if those sites losing out and
| failing would result in worse search results over time.
|
| Hang on, maybe "content stealing" really already was a
| problem before LLMs made it their entire MO and those greedy
| newspaper publishers were onto something when they complained
| about Google lifting their news feeds even if it provided
| "exposure" for them.
| cess11 wrote:
| "There's a very strong financial incentive for ad-powered
| search engines to keep SEO spam out of search results"
|
| No. Shitty results keep people exposed to ads for longer, on
| average.
|
| 'A publicly run search engine would not have those incentives
| and would be at if anything graver risk of a "tragedy of the
| commons" type scenario where the engine is overtaken with
| spam.'
|
| You might be pleasantly surprised by the main work of the 2009
| Nobel prize winner in economics, Elinor Ostrom's Governing the
| Commons.
| willvarfar wrote:
| This stopped being true when Google brought Doubleclick?
|
| Google gets money from sending users to ad-laden sites. They
| get to double-dip.
|
| If Google _didn't_ own Doubleclick etc, then there would be an
| incentive for them to prioritise content over content farms
| etc.
| hug wrote:
| The author would do well to check out Kagi -- the search results
| for all of the suggested queries are, to my eye, better than the
| results they found.
|
| Given that Kagi's higher tier plans come with search-enabled LLM
| chat interfaces, and those searches use Kagi's results (which,
| again, appear to be superior) it seems to me that you get the
| best of both worlds: Better search, and better search results to
| feed into your search-enabled LLM queries.
|
| I am not affiliated with Kagi or anything, it's just honestly
| that good a product.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I second the recommendation for Kagi. It just blows all
| competitors out of the water in my opinion, and I'm happy to
| pay for it as long as they keep that quality up.
| mplanchard wrote:
| Third. The ability to uprank sites makes the "finding known
| content" use case absolutely amazing. The specific postgres
| docs case in the blog post is one I am constantly using kagi
| as my external brain for.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| I've been using Preplexity lately while learning to use Yamaha
| SeqTrack synthesizer. I have the UserGuide, but I find it
| easier and faster to ask Preplexity for things like "How do I
| mute a track?".
|
| It never occurred to me I could use Google this way. And it is
| a novel idea to me, that it seems to be better to use AI than
| read a manual.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| If Google's LLM is trained on the SeqTrack manual, then yes.
|
| If it's not then it will just invent some plausible-souding
| bullshit that doesn't actually work.
|
| After the fifth time you get burnt by this the whole LLM
| experience starts to sour.
| pjerem wrote:
| Happy customer of Kagi here too. However if I'm being honest,
| I'm starting to get LLM generated content in Kagi results.
|
| Don't think it's their fault or that it happens more than
| everywhere else neither what they could do about it but it
| happens.
| sph wrote:
| I am pretty sure 50% of my search results on Kagi (or Google
| or Bing) are LLM-generated. You can search anything and find
| a dozen websites that, surprise, have a page dedicated
| exactly to that topic, organized in three or four neat
| sections.
|
| The internet is dead and is starting to smell.
| rkaveland wrote:
| Author here. I will be trying out Kagi for some time. Search is
| worth paying money for. Thanks for the heads-up!
| emacdona wrote:
| Lately, I've been more and more disappointed with Kagi. It
| seems to be falling victim to the same SEO spam. For example,
| today I was wondering what Scala devs use as alternative to
| Akka. I searched for "scala akka alternative". Try the same
| (using Kagi). I get mostly listicles and SEO spam. I have to
| scroll halfway down the page to see links to "Pekko" and
| "Zio"... and they are hard to separate from the noise. This is
| just my most recent example... it just "feels" like this
| happens a lot more, even with Kagi now.
|
| However, the reason I started paying for Kagi was because they
| let me completely block websites from search results -- and
| they still let me do that. That feature alone will keep me as a
| paying customer for the near term.
| emacdona wrote:
| To be fair to Kagi:
|
| This was in the top three results, and I can't tell if it's
| "real", or just a page created to capture those exact search
| terms!
|
| https://akkaalternatives.com/
|
| If the goal of that site really is just to capture clicks via
| very specific web searches... and people are creating sites
| like that at scale... what hope do we have of saving the web?
| :-(
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| i would probably pay for kagi if there was a premium tier that
| excluded LLM features.
| iamkeithmccoy wrote:
| > AIs are much better at responding to my intent, and they rarely
| attempt to sell me anything
|
| Yet. It's only a matter of time before AI becomes ad-riddled and
| enshittified.
| bdangubic wrote:
| they won't as long as you are paying $200+/month
| vintermann wrote:
| Bold to assume they won't try to double-dip and profit from
| you in more than one way. Cable TV got ads, subscription
| newspapers got ads (and advertorials). Just because it's not
| free doesn't mean you aren't the product.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| In that moment you cancel your subscription. Why does this
| argument come up again and again? The past, present, and
| future are not the same thing. You should especially notice
| that when having a meal.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Cable never claimed to be ad-free; it's an old wives tale.
| chgs wrote:
| If they can make an extra $20 from adverts on to they will.
|
| Sky TV makes 10 times as much from subscription as adverts
| but spends 30% of the time showing you adverts. London
| underground revenue is a similar ratio - for every PS9
| tickets they make PS1 in adverts. If I go to the cinema they
| spend 20 minutes showing adverts to people who spent PS50 on
| tickets and popcorn.
|
| Companies shave very little incentive not to make things shit
| with adverts. The measurable cost to them is tiny, the cost
| to the rest of the world is massive. Odeon won't attribute
| lost revenue from my reduced visits to their adverts, but
| will measure the 50p or whatever they get.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| How did that work for cable and satellite TV and streaming
| services and and and
| horsawlarway wrote:
| So at least in one sense - there is a tantalizing prospect here
| for AI that was lost for search engines.
|
| Model weights are snapshots, and we can preserve them.
|
| It would be like if we could keep a snapshot of the search
| index for google every 6 months. Doesn't matter if the
| "current" version is garbage, if my search target exists in an
| older copy that's not as corrupted, and I can choose to use
| that instead.
|
| And at least this time around, I think this was built in from
| the start - you pin against a specific model for most serious
| business use-cases.
|
| I can store open model weights locally, cheaply.
|
| ---
|
| So I 100% agree that the ads are going to come (I can't forsee
| any possible alternative outside of banning ad based content
| promotion - which as an aside... I'm strongly in favor of
| proposing as serious legislation, particularly in the context
| of AI).
|
| But this time the ad riddled version still has to be better
| than the old version I can boot up and run.
|
| It'll be interesting to see how that tension plays out.
| WiggleGuy wrote:
| I built a portal that makes it easier to query against multiple
| different search engines (https://allsear.ch/). It's open source,
| free, all that. I must say, building it really expanded my view
| of the internet.
|
| I am also a heavy Kagi and Reddit user for search, and usually
| that's enough. But when it's not, its concerning how much better
| other search engines can be, especially since non-tech savvy
| folks will never use them.
| ccvannorman wrote:
| using my default browser (brave) and pressing "enter" (doing a
| search) did not do anything. The page just sits there.
|
| apparently, I need to make a selection of a search engine to
| use this.
|
| I would not use this as a replacement for my duckduckgo or
| google searches simply because of the UX of not being able to
| type a query and press "enter" as the default.
| magarnicle wrote:
| So why aren't real libraries like this? Can you fund the internet
| the same way?
| DoctorOW wrote:
| The equivalent of the library for online research _IS_ real
| libraries. Your library card likely gives you access to ad free
| online resources, I know mine does and I 've been a patron of
| several libraries as I've moved around.
| hnbad wrote:
| Because real libraries are not for-profit enterprises and have
| a negative (or at least extremely unimpressive) ARR.
| Incidentally their leadership positions also don't provide
| anywhere near the levels of compensation you'd expect for a
| C-level position at an equally large company.
|
| Asking for "the Internet" to be funded the same way as real
| libraries is quite the contrary to the dominant cultural
| narrative which asks for public services and entire governments
| to be operated "like a business", which usually means cutting
| funding, selling assets, doing layoffs and eventually scrapping
| it for parts once it has become predictably defunct.
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| In the UK 190 libraries have been closed in the last five
| years. Before closure some of these only opened 2 days a week.
| It's common for libraries which remain open to be staffed by
| unpaid volunteers. My point is that the funding model for
| libraries is not exactly a massive success! I expect these
| libraries would have accepted advertising funding before they
| chose closure.
|
| I'm not aware of any advertising funded libraries although I'm
| sure the idea has been considered. I think that in the physical
| world the cost per visitor in a library is probably too high
| for such a funding model to be successful. Also the library is
| not typically visited by the highest value advertising targets
| limiting the amount which can be raised this way. I think these
| are probably the real reason why real libraries aren't like
| this!
| graemep wrote:
| I think that is more the result of bad government than
| anything else. Libraries are a low profile resource with long
| term benefits (e.g. improving education and quality of life)
| in ways that are not immediately captured by metrics.
|
| They are incredibly good value for money, if you understand
| the benefits and take a long view. However, politically they
| are an easy thing to cut.
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| This is nothing to do with libraries being good or bad
| value though.
|
| Libraries are not advertising funded because advertisers
| are not very interested.
|
| If advertisers were interested then these libraries would
| likely be just as infested with adverts as the internet.
|
| If we tried to fund the internet in the same way as
| libraries advertisers would still be strongly incentivised
| to show adverts and would still work hard to find ways to
| do so. So it's not clear the situation would change much if
| there was government funding for content creators.
| Peteragain wrote:
| A proposal for a solution. The data is the unique selling point.
| Put that in public hands with an API, published algorithms, and
| it's own development team. The free market can then sell user
| interfaces, filters, and whatever. The metaphor is roads (state
| managed) and vehicles (for profit). Today I can (physically) go
| to the British Library and get any published book, or go on line
| and pay for the privilege.
| eviks wrote:
| > These days, I find that I am using multiple search engines and
| often resort to using an LLM to help me find content.
|
| > This is just my anecdata
|
| Not a single example, so it's not even that, just vibes
|
| > the past few years. There's recent science to read about the
| quality of search.
|
| Let's look at the "science"
|
| > We monitored Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo for a year on 7,392
| product review queries.
|
| Oh, so there is nothing about the past few years either. And this
| isn't "search", but a very narrow category of search that is one
| of the prime targets for SEO scam, so it's always been bad, and
| the same incentives made review content highly suspect before any
| SEO was ever involved.
|
| Which multiple engines can help you here? Which LLMs?
| petesergeant wrote:
| I mean sure, but also, I feel like the ability to query an LLM
| for something is an invaluable resource I never had before and
| has made knowledge acquisition immeasurably easier for me. I
| definitely search the web much, much less when I'm trying to
| learn something.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| This is another article that, for me, sort of walks right by the
| answers without realizing it. As I was reading, I was thinking
| "does this person really not think AI is going to be flooded with
| ads soon enough?" Then they asked the LLM that, and it basically
| said yes, and then the response. . . to go "Hmmm, I wonder if
| that will happen"? Yes, of course it's going to happen. Imagine
| if this was 20 years ago wondering whether ads would infect
| search engines or the web would be flooded with sites which are
| ads masquerading as actual content. Why would we believe anything
| different of AI? The only way it won't happen is if we decide we
| don't want it, instead of accepting it as inevitable.
|
| And well, the article is ostensibly about AI, but then at the
| end:
|
| > The investors aren't just doing this to be nice. Someone is
| going to expect returns on this huge gamble at some point. > ...
| > The LLM providers aren't librarians providing a public service.
| They're businesses that have to find a way to earn a ridiculous
| amount of money for a huge number of big investors, and
| capitalism does not have builtin morals.
|
| Those are the things that need to change. They have nothing to do
| with AI. AI is a symptom of a broken socioeconomic system that
| allows a small (not "huge" in the scheme of things) number of
| people to "gamble" and then attempt to rig the table so their
| gamble succeeds.
|
| AI is a cute bunny rabbit and our runaway-inequality-based
| socioeconomic system is the vat of toxic waste that turned that
| innocent little bunny into a ravening mutant. Yes, it's bad and
| needs to be killed, but we'll just be overrun by a million more
| like it if we don't find a way to lock away that toxic waste.
| itzjacki wrote:
| > They have nothing to do with AI.
|
| Not inherently, but I think LLM services (and maybe other AI
| based stuff) are corruptible in a much more dangerous way than
| the things our socioeconomic system has corrupted so far.
|
| Having companies pay to end up on the top of the search engine
| pile is one thing, but being able to weave commerciality into
| what are effectively conversations between vulnerable users and
| an entity they trust is a whole other level of terrible.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| > Imagine if this was 20 years ago wondering whether ads would
| infect search engines or the web would be flooded with sites
| which are ads masquerading as actual content
|
| Many of us - naively, in hindsight - really did hope this
| wouldn't happen at the scale it did, and were appalled at how
| many big players actively participated in speeding up the
| process.
|
| I guess it's similar to how a lot of white folks thought racism
| was over until Obama came along and brought the bigots out of
| the woodwork.
|
| > lock away that toxic waste
|
| The jarring conclusion I keep trying to see a way around but no
| longer can is that the toxic waste is part of humanity. How do
| we get rid of it, or lock it away? One of the oldest questions
| our species has ever faced. Hard not to just throw up your
| hands and duck back into your hidey-hole once you realize this.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| > Many of us - naively, in hindsight - really did hope this
| wouldn't happen at the scale it did, and were appalled at how
| many big players actively participated in speeding up the
| process.
|
| Sure, maybe so. But now with hindsight we can see what
| happened and we should realize that it's going to happen
| again unless we do something.
|
| > The jarring conclusion I keep trying to see a way around
| but no longer can is that the toxic waste is part of
| humanity. How do we get rid of it, or lock it away? One of
| the oldest questions our species has ever faced. Hard not to
| just throw up your hands and duck back into your hidey-hole
| once you realize this.
|
| I think both bad and good are part of humanity. In a sense
| this "toxic" part is not that different from the part that
| leads us to, say, descend into drug addiction, steal when we
| think no one is looking, leave a mess for other people to
| clean up, etc. We can do these negative things on various
| scales, but when we do them on a large scale we can screw one
| another over quite egregiously. The unique thing about humans
| is our ability to intentionally leverage the good aspects of
| our nature to hold the bad aspects in check. We've had
| various ways of doing this throughout history. We just need
| to accept that setting rules and expectations and enforcing
| them to prevent bad outcomes is no less "natural" for humans
| than giving free rein to our more harmful urges.
| willvarfar wrote:
| My dream solution:
|
| The EU creates an institution for public knowledge, a kind of
| library+tech solution. It probably funds classic libraries in
| member countries, but it also invests in tech. It dovetails
| nicely into a big push to get science to thrive in the EU etc.
|
| The tech part makes a in-the-public-interest search engine and
| AI.
|
| The techies are incentivised to try and whack-a-mole the classic
| SEO. E.g. they might spot pages that regurgitate, they might
| downscore sites that are ad-driven, they might upscore obvious
| sources of truth for things like government, they might downscore
| pages whose content changes too much etc.
|
| And the AI part is not for product placement sale.
|
| This would bring in a golden age of enlightenment, perhaps for -
| say - 20 years or so, before the inevitable erosion of base
| mission.
|
| And all the strong data science types would want to work for it!
| graemep wrote:
| > The tech part makes a in-the-public-interest search engine
| and AI.
|
| Which will be provided by a private sector contractor and it
| goes to the lowest bidder who offsets their costs with
| advertising.
| willvarfar wrote:
| hey! it's my dream, and in my dream world it would be
| commissioned from academia :)
| beAbU wrote:
| I hope the academia of your dreams create code that is not
| like real-world academia :)
| wood_spirit wrote:
| Academia has the full gamut of software quality. A good
| example what springs to mind is Wirths operating systems
| work at ETH.
|
| In the same way that the early google made it great to
| put top minds on mundane problems, let's imagine that an
| institute can make a knowledge-first search engine and
| AI. It's about aligning incentives.
| arn3n wrote:
| God, I'd love to work for something like this.
|
| The closest equivalent thing we have today is (in my mind)
| places like the Apache Foundation or LetsEncrypt, places that
| run huge chunks of open source software or critical internet
| structure. An "Apache for search" would be great.
| tokai wrote:
| No, the closest equivalent are the various national
| libraries.
| eps wrote:
| I have a friend who worked for the Apache Foundation. From
| what he described, it was a burecracy nightmare and advanced
| office politics in equal measures. He left because of that.
| ranyume wrote:
| You make it sound like the techies will be their own boss.
| Sorry, but politicians are in charge.
| svnt wrote:
| The democratically-elected politicians are in charge of
| creating an environment where capitalists can capitalist
| without consuming everything in the process.
|
| This is pretty much the best arrangement we have come up with
| so far in human civilization. You seem to be suggesting a
| tragedy of the commons is instead the ideal we should strive
| for.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Sounds like Wikipedia, except for the EU ownership.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I have to say the best part about this fanfic is the choice of
| hero. It's like having Karl Marx be the protagonist of Atlas
| Shrugged. Highly entertaining.
| DavidPiper wrote:
| > The LLM providers [are] businesses that have to find a way to
| earn a ridiculous amount of money for a huge number of big
| investors, and capitalism does not have builtin morals. What
| externalities will the broader public end up paying?
|
| I actually have a theory about this. I hate it, but I can
| absolutely imagine this future.
|
| I'm going to specifically talk about the software engineering
| industry, but let's assume that LLMs progress to the stage where
| "vibe coding" can be applied to other areas ("vibe writing",
| "vibe research", "vibe security", "vibe art", "vibe doctors",
| "vibe management", "vibe CEOs", etc.)
|
| It only takes a few years of "vibe coding graduates" to be
| successful in their work to create a new class of software
| engineer - this is in fact what AI companies are actively
| encouraging / envisioning as the future. Assuming this happens in
| the next few years, we're still in the phase where AI companies
| are burning money acquiring as many of these users as possible.
|
| In about 5 years, some of those vibe coders will become vibe
| managers, and executives will no doubt be even more invested in
| LLMs as the solution to their problems.
|
| At a certain tipping point, a large part of the industry can't
| actually function effectively without LLMs. I don't know when
| this point will be, but vibe coders (or other vibe <industry>ers)
| don't have to be a majority, they just have to be a large enough
| group.
|
| Suddenly AI companies have all their losses called in and they
| have to pay back their VCs.
|
| LLM usage prices skyrocket.
|
| ----
|
| Four things happen across 2 axes:
|
| - [A] Companies that can afford to pay skyrocketing LLM costs,
| vs. [B] those that can't
|
| - [C] Companies that have reached a critical mass of vibe coders,
| vs. [D] those that haven't
|
| ----
|
| [BC] These companies collapse. They don't have talent and they
| can't afford to outsource it to LLMs anymore.
|
| [BD] These companies lay off all their vibe coders because they
| can't afford LLMs anymore. They survive on the talent they
| retain, but this looks very different if you're a large or small
| business. Small businesses probably fail too.
|
| [AC] These companies see an enormous increase in costs that they
| cannot avoid. Large layoffs likely, but widespread vibe coding
| continues.
|
| [AD] These companies have a decision to make: lay off all their
| vibe coders, or foot the LLM bill. The action they take will
| depend on their exact circumstances. Again, most small business
| in this situation probably fail.
|
| ---
|
| The real question is, for the surviving vibe companies [AC, AD].
| Will they be able to sustain such high costs in the long-run, and
| even if they can, will enough be able to sustain them to
| successfully pay back all the AI companies' losses to that date?
|
| Interesting times ahead, maybe.
| Kiyo-Lynn wrote:
| The current search engines really feel like a librarian who's
| always trying to sell you something. I just want to find a simple
| answer, but I keep getting led to all kinds of other pages. I
| believe if search engines were more like public libraries,
| focused on providing information rather than recommending things
| for commercial reasons, the experience would be so much better.
| therein wrote:
| Did Google take another nosedive? I genuinely truly did not use
| it once in the last 6 months. Kagi actually works as a complete
| substitute now.
| karel-3d wrote:
| The money situation is what gives me pause with LLMs.
|
| The amount of money it's burned on this is giant; those companies
| will need to make so much money to have any possibility of
| return. The idea is that we will all spend more money on AI that
| we spend on phones, and we will spend it on those companies
| only... I don't know, it just doesn't add up.
|
| As a user it's a great free ride though. Maybe there IS such a
| thing as a free lunch after all!
| Mistletoe wrote:
| I'm constantly confused why Google wants me to use Gemini so
| much. Why would they want me to use an AI that doesn't show
| ads, isn't their search, and costs them money to generate the
| responses? The instant we see ads in LLMs we will stop using
| them, it will be as abrupt and as annoying as the vuvuzela
| example because using an LLM is a very intimate interaction. It
| will feel much more jarring when your intimate chat friend
| becomes a used car salesman to you. I get that AI=stock go up
| right now but it seems like they are poisoning their own well
| deeply down this path.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > I'm constantly confused why Google wants me to use Gemini
| so much. Why would they want me to use an AI that doesn't
| show ads, isn't their search, and costs them money to
| generate the responses? The instant we see ads in LLMs we
| will stop using them, it will be as abrupt and as annoying as
| the vuvuzela example _because using an LLM is a very intimate
| interaction_.
|
| I think with the last sub-clause (that I emphasized), you
| answered your question: because the conversation is more
| intimate, Google learns more about your "true interests", be
| it to make advertising to you more targeted, or for more
| sinister purposes.
| lipowitz wrote:
| Google thinks it is going to charge a monthly fee for Gemini
| so they are basically correcting their model to be user paid
| in the switch from search to LLM.
|
| They are also trying to reduce workers in search, etc,
| somewhat through the trained LLMs so the other idea is that
| they have lower costs per user.
|
| I don't think many people will pay monthly fees or will want
| to pay them for each platform they use which is why they all
| tend to do so many questionable integration attempts to try
| to get users to not want to use a separate LLM of their
| choice in a browser instead.
| k__ wrote:
| This.
|
| Gemini Pro requires a monthly subscription.
|
| Seems like a pretty straightforward business model.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| How many would really pay though? I certainly wouldn't.
| Would you pay for Google search?
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| If you're going to use an LLM instead of their search better
| to keep you on their estate. Presumably they're using
| responses to tune a personalisation layer, or in some way,
| they can use to modify their advertising algos?
| fragmede wrote:
| > The instant we see ads in LLMs we will stop using them
|
| You mean like how the instant we see ads on YouTube we will
| stop using it?
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| Or like how the instant Netflix disables password sharing,
| we will stop subscribing to it.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The instant we see ads in LLMs we will stop using them
|
| But what if you don't see distinct ads? LLM advertising can
| just be paid-for bias in the generated content.
| lblume wrote:
| Moreover, the bias could be arbitrarily subtle. This is
| something that really worries me about black box AI
| systems.
| MrGilbert wrote:
| I'd argue that, at some point, this behavior will surface
| enough that it gets interesting for government to take a
| look at it. At least in my country, ads need to be
| labeled as such - I don't think this is going to change.
| Lu2025 wrote:
| The entire business model of tech is to fly under the
| radar of regulations. They can't even force the bastards
| to stop tormenting us with cookie pop-ups, i seriously
| doubt the government will do much.
| bjt wrote:
| What marketing department on earth is going to pay for an
| ad campaign so subtle that they can't even tell if it's
| running?
|
| Ad budgets aren't bottomless. People making decisions
| about them have a lot of options for where to spend. They
| want provable attribution so they can tell which channel
| is giving them the most bang for the buck. If that
| exists, then the ads will be discernible.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I saw my first AI ad yesterday, in Microsoft Copilot,
| recommending a Jetbrains product.
| 9dev wrote:
| Google has this pesky problem of carrying almost all their
| eggs in one basket: The moment their ad business doesn't work
| anymore, the behemoth that Google is will come down to its
| knees. But due to the way the company is structured, they
| need search to drive users to the ads, and it's all one big
| mess of entangled revenue streams that can't be touched for
| fear of breaking something.
|
| Now if AI turns out to be the next big thing, they can steer
| differently next time, sell subscriptions, and avoid all that
| entanglement with multi-sided markets and layered revenue
| strategies. At least that's my take.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| >The moment their ad business doesn't work anymore, the
| behemoth that Google is will come down to its knees.
|
| Which makes it all the weirder that they seem to be
| intentionally sabotaging it by nerfing Search into
| unusability.
| Marazan wrote:
| The slow destruction of Google search is and will
| continue to be revenue positive for Google right up until
| the point where it isn't.
|
| Eventually they will break the "trust thermocline" in
| their search results and that will blow it up but on the
| way they'll keep making more and more money from every
| damaging change they make.
| woooooo wrote:
| Crucially, the people driving each incremental change get
| to celebrate the extra revenue they drove and get
| promoted for it.
| autoexec wrote:
| > they need search to drive users to the ads
|
| Why? The websites we visit can still be infested with
| google's ads, and so can our gmail accounts, and so can the
| youtube videos we watch, and they can push ads directly
| onto our cell phones 24/7. Google has plenty of ways to
| force ads into your life.
|
| Google used to need search in order to build extensive
| dossiers on everyone. It told them what people were looking
| for online. What they were interested in. Now Google has
| their cell phones, their browser, and their DNS servers
| doing that for them. Most people are handing all of their
| browsing history to Google. Google doesn't need search,
| which is why it's been allowed to atrophy into uselessness.
| fragmede wrote:
| This _was_ true, and is why Google didn 't come out with
| ChatGPT themselves 5 years earlier. But since OpenAI's come
| to take their lunch, they understand this predicament and
| are pivoting.
| dismalaf wrote:
| Because Gemini has paid tiers. Also to prevent users from
| going to other providers.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| > The instant we see ads in LLMs we will stop using them
|
| People didn't stop using Google Search, Facebook, Instagram,
| YouTube, TikTok and a myriad other services and products (and
| things like TV before those) because they got ads.
| tartoran wrote:
| It's not just ads but plenty of dark patterns. At some
| point as a user you no longer have much control and no
| longer get what you were looking for and decide to leave.
| But the slow boiling leaves a lot of frogs in the pan, it
| will probably be a slow decay before death. To me browsing
| the net is unusable without ad blockers but there are many
| users out there who don't know what ad blockers are.
| closewith wrote:
| > The idea is that we will all spend more money on AI that we
| spend on phones, and we will spend it on those companies
| only... I don't know, it just doesn't add up.
|
| My companies currently spend more on AI than phones - hardware
| and subscriptions. It's now the second highest expense to
| salaries and director's remuneration.
| Mizza wrote:
| What are you doing with it?
| multjoy wrote:
| Anything that could possibly justify the expense, I
| suspect, whether it is the right thing or not.
| closewith wrote:
| Isn't that true of all software development?
|
| But we are lily-white both legally and ethically. One of
| the perks to a lifestyle business beholden to no
| investors.
| closewith wrote:
| We make compliance software for EU enterprises that helps
| them remain GDPR compliant when writing software. We use
| agentic LLMs in our client-facing software development,
| which is largely industry-specific CRUD apps that use our
| existing APIs.
| immibis wrote:
| More hopeful explanation: they'll never make their money back
| and this is either part of the great rebalancing or great
| collapse of the economic forces that be.
| sheiyei wrote:
| <AIs are much better at responding to my intent, and they
| rarely attempt to sell me anything> YET.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Remember, Google also didn't have ads interspersed with their
| search results for over 12 2 years
| kristianc wrote:
| That wasn't out of benevolence, that's because they hadn't
| discovered the ads business model yet. The genie is well
| and truly out of the bottle now.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| They're on record as talking about how Google has better
| results _because_ it doesn 't have ads.
| passwordoops wrote:
| At that time and it's what got them the market share.
| Once they achieved monopoly status "Don't be Evil" was
| quietly replaced by "You call that an acceptable
| margin?!"
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| They always knew.
|
| > The goals of the advertising business model do not
| always correspond to providing quality search to users.
|
| - Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-
| Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
|
| http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
| jkaptur wrote:
| Google was founded in 1998 and you could buy ads on the
| search results page in 2000.
| https://googlepress.blogspot.com/2000/10/google-launches-
| sel...
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Ads on the page aren't the same thing as ads interspersed
| with the results. The ads used to be in a sidebar, or in
| an inset with a different background color that appeared
| above all results.
|
| Read your own link:
|
| > For example, entering the query "buy domain" into the
| search box on Google's home page produces search results
| and an AdWords text advertisement that appears to the
| right of Google's search results
|
| > Google's quick-loading AdWords text ads appear to the
| right of the Google search results and are highlighted as
| sponsored links, clearly separate from the search
| results. Google's premium sponsorship ads will continue
| to appear at the top of the search results page.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| It's crazy on the web when you point out that google or
| google products used to be much better in the past
| someone will come out of nowhere to tell you it's always
| been that way
|
| what is this instinct? anyone that's over the age of 25
| would know
| h2zizzle wrote:
| Many people who post here are, were, or would like to be
| Googlers. Maybe not so much astroturfing ao much as a
| kind of corporate hasbara (though maybe both).
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Maybe not so much astroturfing as much as a kind of
| corporate hasbara
|
| What's the difference? In astroturfing, someone pays
| people to form an organization, claim to have no external
| support, and do some kind of activism.
|
| In hasbara, the government of Israel pays people to not
| form an organization, claim to have no external support,
| and do various kinds of pro-Israel and pro-Jew activism.
| This looks like astroturfing with the major vulnerability
| of the no-external-support claim shored up.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| Fair. The main difference is that people here don't like
| it when you call it astroturfing.
| krisoft wrote:
| > what is this instinct?
|
| "The rules were you guys weren't going to fact check."
|
| The instinct is about pointing out factual inaccuracies.
| What they wrote is either correct, or not. If it is not,
| and someone knows better they can and should point that
| out.
|
| If you, or some other commenter, have a fuzzy feeling
| that google is worse than it used to be you are free to
| write that. You are perfectly entitled to that opinion.
| But you can't just make up false statements and expect to
| be unchallenged and unchallengeable on it.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Except that jkaptur is the one making up false
| statements, and then providing "citations" that
| contradict him. I don't think an instinct to point out
| inaccuracies can explain that. There would have to be
| inaccuracies to point out first.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| If you believe stuff like this isn't actual astroturfing,
| you must face that from _somewhere_ there seems to exist
| a deeply ingrained belief from a subset of _extremely_
| vocal and argumentative people that Google is amazing and
| if it isnt well that's just how the web is now (ignore
| the google man behind the curtain that created the modern
| web in the first place) and if it's not that well, it's
| _always_ been this way (even if it hasn't).
|
| There is a very strong stance on this site against
| talking about astroturfing, and I understand it. But for
| the life of me, I cannot figure out where this general
| type of sentiment originates. I don't know any google
| enthusiasts and am not sure I've ever met one. It's a
| fairly uncontroversial take on this website and in the
| tech world that google search has worsened (the degree of
| which is debateable). Coming out and saying boldly "no it
| isn't, you're lying" is just crazy weird to me and again
| I'm very curious where that sentiment comes from.
|
| see some of the sibling and aunt/uncle comments in this
| thread to get at a little of what I'm talking about.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| There was a pretty insane comment in this genre a month
| ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43951164
|
| > If Google [had been] broken up 20 years ago [...]
| [e]veryone would still be paying for email.
|
| Some people don't have the foggiest idea what they're
| talking about. But I don't really see that as suggesting
| they're part of an organized campaign.
| cgriswald wrote:
| All I see here is someone making a claim and someone else
| making a different claim. They may have erroneously
| intended the claim in opposition, either missing or
| interpreting differently the 'interspersed' qualifier.
| Or, alternatively, they may believe when _any_ ads
| appeared is more meaningful in the context of this
| discussion.
|
| I think Google search has gone downhill tremendously to
| the point of near uselessness and have been a Kagi
| subscriber for awhile, but I don't see astroturf in this
| instance. Do you have other examples?
| autoexec wrote:
| I was a google fan back when they first started and were
| just a search engine. Search engines like Yahoo and
| excite became massively bloated and ad-filled while
| google was clean and fast.
|
| I wasn't a fan for very long. Google got creepy fast, and
| at this point their search is becoming useless, but for a
| short time I really thought that Google is amazing and I
| was an enthusiast.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Other than the fact the parent comment to this subthread
| is posting a literal factual innacuracy regarding the
| history of ads on google - It's not just one guy's "fuzzy
| feeling." It's been written about in so many thousands of
| words over the last two years and is the general
| sentiment across the tech space. It's sort of the major
| reason big companies like chatGPT, and smaller ones like
| Kagi are trying to swoop in and fill this void. it's
| fairly obvious to anyone paying attention.
|
| You can sealion with posts like this all you want but
| every time someone counters a post like this with ample
| evidence it gets group downvoted or ignored. You are also
| making an assertion that you're free to back with
| evidence, that google and google products are not
| noticeably worse than 10 years ago.
|
| here's one study that says yes, it is bad:
|
| https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff
| _20...
|
| Since we don't have a time machine and can't study the
| google of 2015 we have to rely on collective memory,
| don't we? You proclaiming "it's always been this way" and
| saying any assertion otherwise is false is an absolutely
| unfalsifisble statement. As I said, anyone over 25 knows.
|
| Besides perusing the wealth of writing about this the
| last two years or so, in which the tech world at large
| has lamented at how bad search specifically has gotten -
| we also see market trends where people are increasingly
| seeking tools like chatGPT and LLM's as a search
| replacement. Surely you, a thinking individual, could
| come to some pretty obvious conclusions as to why that
| might be, which is that google search has got a lot
| worse. The language models well known to make up stuff
| and people still are preferring them because search is
| somehow even _less_ reliable and definitely more
| exhausting, and it was not always this way. If it was
| always this way, why are so many people turning to other
| tools?
| Xss3 wrote:
| But they weren't interspersed they were in a sidebar.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| And they were actually _praised_ when they did start doing
| ads because they weren 't as obtrusive as the existing
| heavy duty in-your-face Flash animations and they were
| relevant to a user.
|
| It quickly turned Google into the biggest / most valuable
| internet company of all time ever, and it still wasn't
| enough for them.
|
| I've had adblockers running for as long as I can remember
| so I'm blisfully unaware of how bad it is now... mostly, I
| don't have adblockers on my phone and some pages are
| unusable.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| When ads are too many blame website owners, as far as I
| know Google does not hijack websites to put more ads.
|
| Ads done right is the least bad way of supporting free
| stuff for people who don't want to pay the cost. But
| people with ubo punish all sites regardless of whether
| they do ads nicely or not.
|
| You are right now writing in a thread about upcming
| future where promotion is embedded in the content so that
| content itself is one big ad disguised as whatever. Do
| you really think it's a better alternative to clearly
| delimited and unmistakeable ads?
| d_phase wrote:
| You obviously haven't been A/B tested yet. I got very obvious
| advertisements in a super simple question I asked last week
| to ChatGPT. The question was "When was the last year it was
| really smokey in Canada" it answered in one paragraph, then
| gave me about 6 paragraphs of ads for air purifiers, masks
| etc.
|
| I'd guess we're only 6-12 months out from a full
| advertisement takeover.
| sheiyei wrote:
| It was a quote, which I failed to format in this app I use.
| Marazan wrote:
| The simpler explanation is that ChatGPT is trained on
| webpages that have been SEO'd to death.
|
| So you are just getting SEO'd pages (i.e ads) regurgitated
| to you.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is of course, absolutely, master sahib boss man.
|
| Have you considered buying a ChatGPT filter/scrubber to
| clean your results? Only $9.99 a month! Not available in
| all areas, not legal in most of the world.
|
| ;) and </s>
| bandoti wrote:
| I think it's time folks dust off their library cards :)
|
| Or support an open source AI model.
|
| I stopped using ChatGPT when it started littering my
| conversation with emojis. It acts like one of those
| overzealous kids on Barney.
| Llamamoe wrote:
| It's very possible that they never will, that instead the
| advertising will be so subtle nobody will be able to detect
| it. Including phrases similar to what products, brands, and
| their actual ads use in positive contexts, sentences that
| don't mention but make you think of products, being just
| slightly likely to bring a brand up than its competitor, and
| a tiny bit more critical of it, etc.
|
| The goal isn't to have an ad->purchase, the goal is to make
| sure the purchase is more likely in the long term.
| Lu2025 wrote:
| This gave me creeps. Modern tech is good an opening up new
| dimensions of dystopian hell.
| manosyja wrote:
| Don't worry, Doomguy will seal the inter-dimensional
| portal and kill the icon of sin
| Melonai wrote:
| I don't think Sam Altman enjoys being called that. :)
| joegibbs wrote:
| I think subliminal advertising is banned in quite a few
| countries - not sure about the US - so it might be a
| problem internationally. I know that here in Australia
| there was a big scare about it in the mid 2000s, some
| station was cutting 100ms ads into shows. Not sure about
| the efficacy of it though, I'm sure it would be better if
| you watched a whole ad.
| JambalayaJimbo wrote:
| TV shows and movies often have subliminal ads. A
| character will use a specific type of phone for example.
| inejge wrote:
| That's not subliminal, that's plain old product
| placement.
| Llamamoe wrote:
| How are you going to prove that a few thousand weights
| among billions on a privately owned server were actually
| amplified or ablated post-training?
| sumtechguy wrote:
| Edward Bernays created a method to get people to
| buy/hate/like things. It is used all the time. Its
| manipulative and shockingly effective. You will never see
| it coming. It is used all the time on everyone for any
| plethora of subjects. Subliminal advertising while mildly
| effective can not hold a candle to the Edward Barnays
| method of selling.
| rustcleaner wrote:
| Meme magic, is what I call it. Like how the stage
| magician moves whole islands for the crowd, TV magicians
| move whole populations by changing their internal
| representative models of reality.
|
| This is the machine that magicians program for:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo_e0EvEZn8
| layer8 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it would be measurable. How else would
| advertisers pay for it? And given that advertisers would
| know about it, it would also be generally known. I wager
| that enough people and businesses would reject it, if it
| isn't outright illegal in the first place.
| dwighttk wrote:
| Maybe OpenAI will just have a range of products they
| manufacture and push
| Llamamoe wrote:
| Who says it has to be measurable in the output? It could
| be correlated with searches and purchases of
| fingerprinted users/demographics, or even just
| temporally.
| autoexec wrote:
| It it makes them money, businesses will do it even if it
| is outright illegal
| karaterobot wrote:
| I agree they'd love to do that in theory, and it seems
| technically feasible. What gives me hope on that front is
| that marketers and advertisers (let alone the companies
| that pay them) have never shown the slightest capacity for
| that level of subtlety. The most sophisticated adtech
| today, produced by networks of massive data collection and
| analysis, ultimately just tries to shove as many loud,
| disruptive ads in your face as possible.
|
| I think if you had this incredible technology that could
| manipulate language to nudge readers in the softest
| possible way toward thinking a little bit more about buying
| some product, so that in aggregate you'd increase sales in
| a measurable way that nobody would ever notice, it would
| just quickly just devolve into companies demanding the
| phrase "BUY MORE REYNOLDS GARBAGE BAGS!!!!!!!!" at least 7
| times.
| cgriswald wrote:
| I've noticed this even with product placement in film and
| television. It's not enough that Super Agent X drives a
| Palmora Targon, they just have to pan, zoom, tilt the
| camera to include a shot of the Palmora logo perfectly
| centered in frame for a few seconds as the car careens
| off a cliff. I'm only surprised the protagonist isn't
| also talking about how well the car has served him with
| its <insert technical details> as he laments its loss
| while he parachutes to safety.
| GLdRH wrote:
| Community made me buy a honda.
| sandy_coyote wrote:
| This is credible simply because this is how advertising
| works. Product placement, free products for celebs, modern
| life awash in images that make us desire things.
| usefulcat wrote:
| > It's very possible that they never will, that instead the
| advertising will be so subtle nobody will be able to detect
| it.
|
| I was going to write a rebuttal to this, about how more
| subtle forms of advertising are likely not very effective,
| and then I remembered subliminal advertising.
|
| It's largely been banned (I think), but probably only
| because it's relatively easy to define and very easy to
| identify. In the case of LLMs, defining what they shouldn't
| be allowed to do "subliminally" will be a lot harder, and
| identifying it could be all but impossible without inside
| knowledge.
| jandrese wrote:
| Yeah, the laws against subliminal advertising were
| written in a rather knee jerk reaction to the creepiness
| of the entire concept instead of as a result of careful
| study and analysis.
|
| How effective is it? We don't know, but there is nothing
| of potential value to lose so nobody really cared. Just
| ban it and move on.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > It's very possible that they never will
|
| Oh come on.
|
| Genuinely.
|
| Come on.
|
| Look at _every single tech innovation of the last 20 years_
| and say that again.
| conception wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1kan9c1/the_enshit.
| ..
|
| Too late!
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| thank you. the idea that this will be the one thing that
| doesn't get enshittified when it's being so heavily pushed by
| the people who enshittified everything else is frankly absurd
| jameshart wrote:
| The race right now is to get your product embedded as highly
| recommendable in the training data sets the AIs are learning
| from.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| I would wager that the most prevalent use of AI today is to
| sell you ads. Whether through market analysis, campaign
| analysis, content optimization, and content generation.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| "It has cost a lot of money and therefore they will try very
| hard to make it back". I don't think it really makes sense.
| Companies will always try to make the maximum amount of money
| anyway.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Obviously true.
|
| OTOH, there are _far_ too many people who desperately want to
| believe in cool new stuff really being free, without any
| "gotcha" down the line.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| No? Some companies are mission-driven. Some are ran by people
| with ethical scruples, and/or who will forego short-term
| profit for long-term brand image. Some (allegedly) have been
| infiltrated or taken over by bad actors who purposely
| sabotage the company's profitability. Some are private and
| simply do as they wish.
|
| I wish we wouldn't mindlessly repeat these platitudes. Try
| and falsify your statements before posting.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Some are or at least start that way, but they exist in a
| competitive market.
|
| In our current regulatory and economic environment, it
| appears that mission-driven, long-term oriented, ethical
| companies are typically out-competed by finance-driven,
| short-term oriented, greedy companies.
|
| The article describes the struggle of using a search engine
| in 2025. Which is to say, using Google in 2025. Search
| engines benefit greatly from huge economies of scale, and
| most websites are optimized for Google SEO and for their ad
| network. Sure, the folks at DuckDuckGo (my search engine)
| or Kagi appear to be your good sort of company, but the
| revenue and popularity of those companies is a rounding
| error in comparison to Alphabet, Inc. They can't afford the
| crawlers and infrastructure of the big finance-oriented
| players, they can't convince most websites to optimize for
| their engine, and most people don't even know they exist.
|
| Sure, there's a handful of people running the equivalent of
| a small-town grocery with local farm-sourced produce and
| hand-selected general goods as a passion project, working
| long hours and slowly chewing through their savings. And
| there are a handful of people who feel that the existence
| of such a place is important, and shop there out of
| principles in spite of the incentives and penalties
| associated with that behavior. But most of the country is
| overrun by Dollar Generals and Wal Marts.
| jerf wrote:
| Yes, but there are definitely levels of desperation.
| Companies confident that "somehow, it'll all work out" are
| quite different than "oh crap the money is gone we need
| revenue _now_ ". We're probably entering that transition
| sometimes this year.
| HappMacDonald wrote:
| Google is certainly showing unusual signs of revenue
| wringing desperation at the end-user level in the past year
| or so.
| Lu2025 wrote:
| Regarding money, they label a lot of expenses as R&D and write
| them off taxes. Taxpayers foot the bill to some extent.
| andruby wrote:
| That's not how accounting works. Companies pay salaries and
| pay for hardware. They don't make profit so they don't pay
| taxes.
|
| By labeling the salaries as R&D assets and amortizing that
| over 5 years (instead of taking it completely in the first
| year), they're more likely to make "accounting" profit and
| pay taxes in the early years.
|
| Those legislative changes will likely move forward the taxes
| being paid.
|
| But to your point: not paying taxes because a company is
| investing doesn't mean taxpayers are footing the bill. It
| does mean the company isn't contributing to paying taxes
| while it is in "growth investing" mode.
| jonplackett wrote:
| They're all investing with the assumption they can be the
| 'winner' and take all the spoils.
|
| Maybe nvidia can be a winner selling shovels but it seems like
| everyone else will just be fighting each other in the massive
| pit they dug.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| NVIDIA is already a winner selling shovels.
|
| They don't need a winner, they want the race to continue as
| long as possible.
| Xss3 wrote:
| Ai is in its early youtube phase. Everyone loves that it's free
| and adfree and that its algorithm's primary purpose is to serve
| relevant content not profitable content, everyone knows it
| can't stay that way, and we are all waiting for the
| enshittification to kick in on the march to profitability.
|
| The question is, will AI chat or search ever be profitable?
| What enshittification will happen on that road? Will AIs be
| interrupting conversations to espouse their love of nordvpn or
| raid shadow legends?
| tartoran wrote:
| I'm aware this is going to happen. but you don't think
| offline solutions will be more prevalent by the time openai
| jacks up the costs? These companies have no real moats unless
| they start doing something social so they have a network of
| captive audience or something like that.
| yuck39 wrote:
| Many of the traditional SEO players are now figuring out how
| to game the system to get their customers to show up more
| frequently in LLM responses.
|
| Once the pressure to turn a profit is high enough the big
| players surely won't just leave that money on the table.
|
| The scary part is that even if we end up paying for "ad-free"
| LLM services how do we really know if it is ad-free?
| Traditional services are (usually) pretty clear on what is an
| ad and what isn't. I wouldn't necessarily know if raid shadow
| legends really is the greatest game of all time or if the
| model had been tuned to say that it is.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| What I'm seeing at work now is the companies selling AI stuff
| to companies - mostly Microsoft in my neck of the woods. For me
| as an employee, using copilot is a trivial thing, not my
| wallet. But just like with AWS where a developer doesn't really
| need to worry about how many machines their merge request
| starts up and lets run, the bills will start to creep up to the
| companies.
|
| For now Copilot is a fixed $20 / month / person, but it's only
| a matter of time before it becomes metered, or the advanced
| models cost more credits. This is also why they're pushing for
| agents, because a single query is cool and all, how much it
| costs in compute is reasonably predictable, but an agent can do
| a lot of interesting things and do 100x the usage of a single
| query, and put 100x the charge on the corporate credit card.
|
| It'll probably have a chilling effect, with companies being
| like "ok maybe let's tone down a bit on the AI usage", just
| like how they hire consultants to bring down their runaway AWS
| costs.
| jraph wrote:
| > Maybe there IS such a thing as a free lunch after all!
|
| A free lunch that costs our environment though, which is a big
| caveat :-)
| scrollaway wrote:
| Maybe.
|
| But to be honest, optimizing monstrously slow processes that
| cost weeks of human labour by automating them, that saves a
| ton of energy as well. It's not zero sum, as the humans spend
| that energy elsewhere, but ideally they spend it on more
| productive things.
|
| This calculus can very quickly offset whatever energy is
| wasted generating cartoon images of vuvuzelas.
| jraph wrote:
| > optimizing monstrously slow processes that cost weeks of
| human labour by automating them, that saves a ton of energy
| as well
|
| Yes, I do agree with this. However, that's only good as
| long as there wasn't a better way of optimizing them.
| Assuming we'd not be better off getting rid of those costly
| process altogether.
|
| > ideally they spend it on more productive things
|
| Same gotcha as mentioned in my other comment: "productive"
| in our growth economy often means "damaging to the
| environment", because we are collectively spending a lot of
| our time producing garbage and that's not something we
| should really optimize. Most of us work a fixed amount of
| hours so it's not like we are doing ourselves any favor by
| optimizing time in the end.
|
| In another system, I wouldn't say. I'm generally _for_
| freeing up time for us so we can have better lives.
| sheiyei wrote:
| Humans will have the privilege of using that time to take
| out the trash and be taxi drivers for drug users
| tartoran wrote:
| The free lunch creates a lot of dependency on AI so when the
| lunch isn't free anymore it will bite hard.
| returningfory2 wrote:
| The idea that LLMs are uniquely bad for the environment has
| been debunked. https://andymasley.substack.com/p/individual-
| ai-use-is-not-b...
| jraph wrote:
| I've already seen this.
|
| I'm not convinced. This article focuses on individual use
| and how inconsequential it is, but it seems like to me it
| dismisses the training part that it does mention a bit too
| fast to my taste.
|
| > it's a one-time cost
|
| No, it's not. AI company _constantly_ train new models and
| that 's where the billions of dollars they get go into.
| It's only logical: they try to keep improving. What's more,
| the day you stop training new models, the existing models
| will "rot": they will keep working, but on old data, they
| won't be fresh anymore. the training will continue,
| constantly.
|
| An awful quantity of hardware and resources are being
| monopolized where they could be allocated to something
| worthier, or just not allocated at all.
|
| > Individuals using LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini
| collectively only account for about 3% of AI's total energy
| use after amortizing the cost of training.
|
| Yeah, we agree, running queries is comparatively cheap
| (still 10 times more than a regular search query though, if
| I'm to believe this article (and I have no reason not to))
| _after amortizing the cost of training_. But there 's no
| after, as we've seen.
|
| As long as these companies are burning billions of dollars,
| they are burning some correlated amount of CO2.
|
| As an individual, I don't want to signal to these
| companies, through my use of their LLMs, that they should
| keep going like this.
|
| And as AI is more and more pervasive, we are going to start
| relying on it very hard, and we are also going to train
| models on everything, everywhere (chat messages, (video)
| calls, etc). The training is far from being a one shot
| activity and it's only going to keep increasing as long as
| there are rich believers willing to throw shit-tons of
| money into this.
|
| Now, assuming these AIs do a good job of providing accurate
| answers that you don't have to spend more time on
| proofreading / double checking (which I'm not sure they
| always do), we are unfortunately not replacing the time we
| won by nothing. We are still in a growth economy, the time
| that is freed will be used to produce even more garbage, at
| an even faster rate.
|
| (I don't like that last argument very much though, I'm not
| for keeping people busy at inefficient tasks just because,
| but this unfortunately needs to be taken in account - and
| that's, as a software developer, a harsh reality that also
| applies to my day to day job. As a software developer, my
| job is to essentially automatize tasks for people so they
| can have more free time because now the computers can do
| their work a bit more. But as a species, we've not
| increased our free time. We've just made it more fast-paced
| and stressful)
|
| The article also mentions that there are other things to
| look into to improve things related to climate change, but
| the argument goes both ways: fighting against power hungry
| LLMs don't prevent you from addressing other causes.
| usrusr wrote:
| There are _many_ phones that won 't be bought when businesses
| can substitute some of their workforce with LLM. That market is
| not about B2C at all.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Yes, the question everybody awake is asking is how long until
| all the LLM corporate initiatives die? Because as useful as
| those things can be, they just can't do enough to justify that
| cost.
|
| But there are free (to copy) ones, and smaller ones. And while
| those were built from the large, expensive models, it's not
| clear if people won't find a way to keep them sustainable. We
| have at minimum gained a huge body of knowledge on "how to talk
| like people" that will stay there forever for researchers to
| use.
| troyvit wrote:
| > We have at minimum gained a huge body of knowledge on "how
| to talk like people" that will stay there forever for
| researchers to use.
|
| This is spot on. I think we'll be able to capitalize on other
| talents of "AI" once we recognize the big shift is done
| happening. It's like five years after the Louisiana Purchase:
| we have a bunch of new resources but we've barely catalogued
| them, let alone begun to exploit them.
|
| > how long until all the LLM corporate initiatives die?
|
| Sooner than I personally thought, and I place a lot of that
| with Apple's. They've led the way in hardware that supports
| LLMs, and I believe (hope?) they'll eventually wipe out most
| hosted chat-based products, leaving the corporate players to
| build APIs and embedded products for search, tech support,
| images, etc. The massive amounts of capital going into
| OpenAI, Anthropic, etc., will ebb as consumer demand falls.
|
| I hope for this because the question I keep asking is, how
| can our energy infrastructure sustain the huge demand AI
| companies have without pushing us even further into a climate
| catastrophe?
| chasd00 wrote:
| > This is spot on. I think we'll be able to capitalize on
| other talents of "AI" once we recognize the big shift is
| done happening. It's like five years after the Louisiana
| Purchase: we have a bunch of new resources but we've barely
| catalogued them, let alone begun to exploit them.
|
| one thing about LLMs used as a replacement for search is
| they have to be continually retrained or else they become
| stale. Lets say a hard recession hits and all the AI
| companies go out of business but we're left with all these
| models on huggingface that can still be used. Then, a new
| programming language hits the scene and it's a massive hit,
| how will LLMs be able to autocomplete and add dependencies
| for a language they've never seen before? Maybe an analogy
| could be asking an LLM to translate a written language you
| make up on the spot to English/other language.
| autoexec wrote:
| > As a user it's a great free ride though. Maybe there IS such
| a thing as a free lunch after all!
|
| if you consider the massive environmental harm AI has and
| continues to cause, the people whose work has been stolen to
| create it, the impacts on workers and salaries, and the abuses
| AI enables that free lunch starts looking more expensive.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| What is this massive environmental harm? That sounds like
| hyperbole.
| ksenzee wrote:
| They're restarting coal-fired power plants to run AI
| datacenters. I don't know what your personal threshold is
| for "massive" environmental harm, but that meets mine.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| What's a specific example of that?
| svnt wrote:
| It has been widely reported. Here is an example not of a
| coal-fired but diesel and gas mobile power sources. If
| you spend time looking you will have no trouble finding
| sources.
|
| > Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
| issued a rule clarification allowing the use of some
| mobile gas and diesel power sources for data centers. In
| a statement accompanying the rule, EPA Administrator Lee
| Zeldin claimed that the Biden administration's focus on
| addressing climate change had hampered AI development.
|
| > "The Trump administration is taking action to rectify
| the previous administration's actions to weaken the
| reliability of the electricity grid and our ability to
| maintain our leadership on artificial intelligence,"
| Zeldin said. "This is the first, and certainly not the
| last step, and I look forward to continue working with
| artificial intelligence and data center companies and
| utilities to resolve any outstanding challenges and make
| the U.S. the AI capital of the world."
|
| https://www.newsweek.com/ai-race-fossil-powered-
| generators-a...
| baggy_trough wrote:
| I spent some time and could not find a specific example.
| You haven't shown one here, either.
| svnt wrote:
| Here is one: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/doe-coal-
| fired-power-plant-...
|
| Here is another: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/trump-
| coal-executive-order-...
| baggy_trough wrote:
| Sorry, but they simply are not.
| jimstr wrote:
| What about
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/apr/24/elon-
| musk...
| svnt wrote:
| FTA:
|
| > In another move, DOE on Tuesday said it was offering
| loan guarantees for coal-fired power plant projects, such
| as upgrading energy infrastructure to restart operations
| or operate more efficiently or at a higher output.
|
| Please elaborate.
| coryrc wrote:
| trump stooge activities cannot be blamed on data centers.
| The relevant technical authorities did not want this.
| svnt wrote:
| What are you talking about? This is literally the only
| mechanism to allow coal-fired plants to avoid sunsetting
| on schedule.
|
| Who are the "relevant technical authorities"?
| coryrc wrote:
| "DOE issued the emergency order without a request from
| the plant owner, transmission provider or grid operator"
| yencabulator wrote:
| Oh yes environmentalism is clearly why the data center
| owners themselves are running generators 24/7.
| autoexec wrote:
| https://www.iwf.org/2025/02/13/as-power-demand-rises-
| existin...
|
| https://www.alleghenyfront.org/homer-city-pennsylvania-
| gas-p...
|
| https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-should-
| restart-sh...
| gknoy wrote:
| Training AI models uses a large amount of energy (according
| to what I've read / headlines I've seen /etc), and
| increases water usage. [0] I don't have a lot to offer as
| proof, merely that this is an idea that I have encountered
| enough that I was suprised you hadn't heard of it. I did a
| very cursory bit of googling, so the quality + dodginess
| distribution is a bit wild, but there appear to be
| indiustry reports [2, page 20] that support this:
|
| """ [G]lobal data centre electricity use reached 415 TWh in
| 2024, or 1.5 per cent of global electricity consumption....
| While these figures include all types of data centres, the
| growing subset of data centres focused on AI are
| particularly energy intensive. AI-focused data centres can
| consume as much electricity as aluminium smelters but are
| more geographically concentrated. The rapid expansion of AI
| is driving a significant surge in global electricity
| demand, posing new challenges for sustainability. Data
| centre electricity consumption has been growing at 12 per
| cent per year since 2017, outpacing total electricity
| consumption by a factor of four. """
|
| The numbers are about data center power use in total, but
| AI seems to be one of the bigger driving forces behind that
| growth, so it seems plausible that there is some harm.
|
| 0: https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-
| environmen... 1: https://www.itu.int/en/mediacentre/Pages/P
| R-2025-06-05-green... 2: (cf. page 20) https://www.itu.int/
| en/ITU-D/Environment/Pages/Publications/...
| baggy_trough wrote:
| I agree that there is some incremental electricity usage.
| I do not think it can be characterized fairly as "massive
| environmental harm".
| autoexec wrote:
| As an example, Ren and his colleagues calculated the
| emissions from training a large language model, or LLM,
| at the scale of Meta's Llama-3.1, an advanced open-weight
| LLM released by the owner of Facebook in July to compete
| with leading proprietary models like OpenAI's GPT-4. The
| study found that producing the electricity to train this
| model produced an air pollution equivalent of more than
| 10,000 round trips by car between Los Angeles and New
| York City. (https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2024/12/09/ais-
| deadly-air-poll...)
|
| see also:
|
| https://www.techrepublic.com/article/news-ai-data-
| centers-dr...
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-computer-
| scient...
| root_axis wrote:
| > _10,000 round trips by car between Los Angeles and New
| York City._
|
| That seems like very low impact, especially considering
| training only happens once. I have to imagine that the
| ongoing cost of inference is the real energy sink.
| autoexec wrote:
| It doesn't happen only once. It happened once, for one
| version of one model, but every model (and there are
| others much larger) has its own cost and that cost is
| repeated with each version as models are continuously
| being retrained
| ahepp wrote:
| > The study found that producing the electricity to train
| this model produced an air pollution equivalent of more
| than 10,000 round trips by car between Los Angeles and
| New York City.
|
| I am totally on board with making sure data center energy
| usage is rational and aligned with climate policy, but
| "10k trips between LA and NY" doesn't seem like something
| that is just on its face outrageous to me.
|
| Isn't the goal that these LLMs provide so much utility
| they're worth the cost? I think it's pretty plausible
| that efficiency gains from LLMs could add up to 10k cross
| USA trips worth of air pollution.
|
| Of course this excludes the cost of actually running the
| model, which I suspect could be far higher
| coryrc wrote:
| USA uses 21.3 TWh of petroleum per day for
| transportation. Even _if_ AI was fully responsible for
| all data center usage (it is not even close) we 're
| quibbling over 20 days of US transportation oil usage,
| which actually has devastating effects on the
| environment.
|
| Data centers are already significant users of renewable
| electricity. They do not contaminate water in any
| appreciable amount.
| astrange wrote:
| There's an "AI is using all the water" meme online
| currently (especially on Bluesky, home of anti-AI
| scolds), which turns out to come from a study that
| counted hydroelectric power as using water.
| umvi wrote:
| > the people whose work has been stolen to create it
|
| "Stolen" is kind of a loaded word. It implies the content was
| for sale and was taken without payment. I don't think anyone
| would accuse a person of stealing if they purchased GRRM's
| books, studied the prose and then used the knowledge they
| gained from studying to write a fanfic in the style of GRRM
| (or better yet, the final 2 books). What was stolen? "the
| prose style"? Seems too abstract. (yes, I know the counter
| argument is "but LLMs can do more quickly and at a much
| greater scale", and so forth)
|
| I generally want less copyright, not more. I'm imagining a
| dystopian future where every article on the internet has an
| implicit huge legal contract you enter into like "you are
| allowed to read this article with your eyeballs only,
| possibly you are also allowed to copy/paste snippets with
| attribution, and I suppose you are allowed to parody it, but
| you aren't allowed to parody it with certain kinds of
| computer assistance such as feeding text into an LLM and
| asking it to mimic my style, and..."
| autoexec wrote:
| AI has been trained on pirated material and that would be
| very different from someone buying books and reading them
| and learning from them. Right now it's still up to the
| courts what counts as infringing but at this point even
| Disney is accusing AI of violating their copyrights
| https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/11/business/media/disney-
| uni...
|
| AI outputs copyrighted material: https://www.nytimes.com/in
| teractive/2024/01/25/business/ai-i... and they can even be
| ranked by the extent to which they do it:
| https://aibusiness.com/responsible-ai/openai-s-gpt-4-is-
| the-...
|
| AI is getting better at data laundering and hiding evidence
| of infringement, but ultimately it's collecting and
| regurgitating copyrighted content.
| astrange wrote:
| > at this point even Disney is accusing AI of violating
| their copyrights
|
| "even" is odd there, of course Disney is accusing them of
| violating copyright, that's what Disney does.
|
| > AI is getting better at data laundering and hiding
| evidence of infringement, but ultimately it's collecting
| and regurgitating copyrighted content.
|
| That's not the standard for copyright infringement; AI is
| a transformative use.
|
| Similarly, if you read a book and learn English or facts
| about the world by doing that, the author of the book
| doesn't own what you just learned.
| kod wrote:
| Facts aren't copyrightable. Expression is. LLMs reproduce
| expression from the works they were trained on. The way
| they are being trained involves making an unlicensed
| reproduction of works. Both of those are pretty
| straightforwardly infringement of an exclusive right.
|
| Establishing an affirmative defense that it's
| transformative fair use would hopefully be an uphill
| battle, given that it's commercial, using the whole work,
| and has a detrimental effect on the market for the work.
| yencabulator wrote:
| > AI is a transformative use.
|
| Reproducing a movie still well enough that I honestly
| wouldn't know which one is the original is
| transformative?
| quantified wrote:
| Stolen doesn't imply anything is for sale, does it? Most
| things that are stolen are not for sale.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| > It implies the content was for sale and was taken without
| payment
|
| that's literally what happened in innumerable individual
| cases, though.
| strangattractor wrote:
| I think there is case to be made that AI companies are
| taking the content - providing people with a modified
| version of that content and not necessarily providing
| references to the original material.
|
| Much of the content that is created by people is done so to
| generate revenue. They are denied that revenue when people
| don't go to their site. One might interpret that as theft.
| In the case of GRRM's books - I would assumed they were
| purchased and the author received the revenue from the
| sale.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Yes, there are ethical differences to an individual doing
| things by hand, and a corporation funded by billions of
| investor dollars doing an automated version of that thing
| at many orders of magnitude in scale.
|
| Also, LLMs don't just imitate style, they can be made to
| reproduce certain content near-verbatim in a way that would
| be a copyright violation if done by a human being.
|
| You can excuse it away if you want with reduction ad
| absurdum arguments, but the impact is distinctly different,
| and calls for different parameters.
| kulahan wrote:
| The silver lining on this very dark cloud is that it seems to
| have renewed interest in nuclear power, though that was
| inevitable with the coming climate crisis I suppose.
| yencabulator wrote:
| At a time when solar & batteries were just getting great,
| nah.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _The amount of money it 's burned on this is giant_
|
| It's big, but it's honestly not _that_ big. Most importantly,
| costs will quickly come down as we realize the limits of the
| models, the algorithms are optimized and even more-dedicated
| hardware is built. There 's no reason to think it isn't
| sustainable, it will add up just fine.
|
| But yes, it will attract a ton of advertising, the same curve
| every service goes through, like Google Search, YouTube,
| Amazon, etc. Still, just like Google and Amazon (subtly) label
| sponsored results, I expect LLM's to do the same. I don't think
| ads will be built into the main replies, because people will
| quickly lose trust in the results. Rather they'll be fed into a
| _separate_ prompt that runs alongside the main text, or
| interrupts it, the way ads currently do, and with little labels
| indicating paid content. But the ads _will_ likely be LLM-
| generated.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > the same curve every service goes through
|
| This is honestly why I struggle to get excited for _anything_
| in our industry anymore. Whatever it is it just becomes yet
| another fucking vector for ad people to shove yet more
| disposable shit in front of me and jingle it like car keys to
| see if I 'll pull out a credit card.
|
| The exception being the Steam Deck, though one could argue
| it's just a massive loss-leader for Steam itself and thus
| game sales (though I don't think that would hold up to
| scrutiny, it's pretty costly and it's not like Valve was
| hurting for business but anyway) but yeah. LLMs will
| absolutely do the exact same, and Google's now fully given up
| on making search even decent, replacing it with shit AI
| nobody asked for that will do product placements any day now,
| I would bet a LOT of money on it.
| exceptione wrote:
| > I don't think ads will be built into the main replies,
| > because people will quickly lose trust in the results.
|
| The 'best' ads will be those the public doesn't recognize.
| Surf the internet without an ad blocker and you will die from
| a heart attack. This is a matter of conditioning users. It
| will take some time. Case in point: people already give up on
| privacy because "Google knows about everything already",
| which reflects a normalization of abuse, as we started from
| trust and norms ("don't be evil").
|
| So, can they? yes. Will they? yes.
| babypuncher wrote:
| We went through this with all the Silicon Valley "disruptors"
| in the '00s and '10s. It's fun while they're focused solely on
| burning VC money to build a massive userbase, but as soon as
| they decide it's time to start actually making money the deal
| gets a lot less sweet. Only by that time, most of the
| competitors are gone and you don't have much choice.
| adverbly wrote:
| > The idea is that we will all spend more money on AI that we
| spend on phones
|
| AI is not a consumer product.
|
| Businesses will pay for AI. They will use it for whatever they
| are building. We will buy what those businesses build.
|
| The medium term here is that AI is going to become part of the
| value chain. It's gonna be like stripe or insurance or labor.
| thih9 wrote:
| Speculation:
|
| AI companies want the cultural shift, i.e. get everyone used to
| having their data, art, work, etc, turned into models. Plus
| they want the PR, i.e. AI agents to be seen as helpful,
| friendly and genuinely useful. They want this to happen fast
| and before legislators react too. Releasing for free seems safe
| and efficient.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| And this is already happening. I have a few acquaintances
| that will ask ChatGPT thinks they could readily find on
| Wikipedia, or use it as a shortcut for mental effort. They've
| become dependent, even addicted, to this patient butler that
| can work and think for them; who cares if it makes some
| mistakes? They'll just ask it more.
|
| Once enough people become like this, they will gladly pay to
| keep it, they'll consider it a basic necessity.
| spaceguillotine wrote:
| this is a perfect example of the VC churn, they hope to get
| unattainable and unsustainable results and don't care what
| happens to anyone that was doing it sustainably before they
| came around.
|
| The internet has become total garbage now all because a few men
| wanted to make a bunch of money by making silicon do the
| thinking for them.
|
| AI is the quickest route to ruin and ending up with humans like
| in Idiocracy devoid of critical thinking, and the output of
| LLMs is so bad to read, students are just turning in the worst
| papers using LLMs and learning nothing.
|
| At first my school banned use of them but then Microsoft tipped
| their hand because they donate a lot of money and now everyone
| is allowed to use AI and they got rid of the requirement to use
| MLA Citations so everything turned into slop.
| strangattractor wrote:
| > As a user it's a great free ride though. Maybe there IS such
| a thing as a free lunch after all!
|
| I remember when search was a free ride. The articles that I
| found in searches where relevant and there was no wordy boiler
| plate AI content specifically designed to get me to see all the
| advertising on the page. There is no free ride - AI will
| accelerate the enshittification of the Web by orders of
| magnitude. Barriers to garbage content generation are rapidly
| approaching 0.
| Exoristos wrote:
| Doesn't it seem suspect that a product with such massive
| investment is made available for little or no cost? Either it's
| garbage (you don't get AutoCAD for free: you get meme
| generators), and investors are getting soaked; or it's digital
| gold, and consumers are being lured in for unobvious
| exploitation.
| pajamasam wrote:
| SEO spam was still easy enough to spot and skip through in search
| results before the masses of LLM-generated content took over.
|
| They seem to generate extremely specific websites and content for
| every conceivable search phrase. I'm not even sure what their end
| goal is since they aren't even always riddled with affiliate
| links.
|
| Sometimes I wonder if the AI companies are generating these low-
| quality search results to drive us to use their LLMs instead.
| Retr0id wrote:
| > they aren't even always riddled with affiliate links.
|
| Presumably the goal is to build up a positive-ish reputation,
| before they start trying to monetize it. Or perhaps to sell the
| site itself for someone else to monetize, on the basis of the
| number of clicks it's getting per month.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> I would rather use a library where the librarians don't have
| financial incentives to show me certain kinds of books more often
| than others._
|
| Oh, you sweet summer child...
|
| I have family that used to be in charge of dealing with
| institutional corruption. In particular, public service
| corruption.
|
| It's bad. Very, _very_ bad. When "public servants" are paid less
| than their private counterparts, are routinely treated like crap
| by their employers, as well as those they serve, and they are in
| charge of services that could be incredibly lucrative to others,
| you're guaranteed to get corruption.
|
| "Let's just use AI!" is the rallying cry.
|
| Now, let's examine a scenario, where the folks that can make
| money from the service, also run the tools that implement the
| service...
| rightbyte wrote:
| What are you claiming here? That librarians get kickbacks on
| certain books?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Probably in that case (the hypothetical), but everyone knows
| librarians do it for the bananas.
|
| _ook_
| elif wrote:
| Completely agree with this post I don't even think he's
| exaggerating.
|
| I tried to search the full name of a specific roof company in my
| area in quotes, and they weren't in the first page of results.
| But I got so many disclosed and not disclosed ads for OTHER
| contractors.
|
| SEO has turned search engines into a kind of quasi-mafia
| "protection" racket.. "oh you didn't pay your protection fee,
| wouldn't it be a shame if something happened to your storefront?"
| GnarfGnarf wrote:
| What makes the author think we are entitled to free search? How
| much would you pay for ad-free search? The "golden era" of free
| search was just setting us up for the plucking.
| zkmon wrote:
| Selling has poisoned human life. As someone who grew on a farm,
| with a culture that never bothered to sell anything, and never
| cared to impress anyone, we pitied on the pathetic business/sales
| people and anyone who tries to impress other through art/acts
| etc. The street performer such as drama artists and acrobats got
| some kind give-aways.
|
| Today, I can't watch any TV without immediately realizing that
| every face I see on TV is forced to sell their expression and
| talk. They are basically selling, not expressing their true
| feelings. Every great movie, actor, great singer, great anchor -
| everyone. There is nothing natural in human interactions any
| more.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| This example falls apart because libraries are paid for by taxes.
|
| I wish I could violently shake every internet user while yelling
| _" If you are not paying money for it, you cannot complain about
| it"_
|
| The librarian is selling you a vuvuzela because that is the only
| way the library has been able to keep the lights on. They offered
| a membership but people flipped out "Libraries are free! I never
| had to pay in the past! How dare you try and take my money for a
| free service!". They tried a "Please understand the service we
| provide and give a donation" but less than 2% of people donated
| anything. Never mind that there is a backdoor that you can use,
| allowing you to never need to interact with a librarian while
| fully utilizing the libraries services (that the library still
| pays for).
|
| The internet was ruined by people unwilling to pay for it. And
| yes, I know the internet was perfect in 1996, I have a pair of
| rose colored glasses too.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >Yet these days I find that I often can no longer convince the
| search engine to give me what I want, even when I know it exists
| and can describe the shape in detail. These days, I find that I
| am using multiple search engines and often resort to using an LLM
| to help me find content.
|
| A couple months ago, I spent a week or two writing some shell
| scripts to exhaustively mine one of those pdf hosting companies,
| looking for digital copies of Paste magazine. I only became aware
| that they might still exist after having spent at least a week
| trudging through Wayback Machine's archives of the old Paste
| website. I think I managed to get 8 or 9 issues total.
|
| Search is dead. There was a time when I could probably have found
| those with a careful Google search in under an hour.
| pengaru wrote:
| You'd have to be pretty daft to not imagine your future LLM
| conversations being corrupted by private interests, in far more
| subtle ways than the obvious ads littering search results.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I think it's a bit naive to think that companies like OpenAI will
| be content with their monthly user subscription fees and not seek
| to monetize their content through ads. Yahoo and Google didn't
| have ads either at the beginning (neither did Facebook or
| Instagram). And the reason why Google became the dominant tech
| company aka money-maker it is today is because of Adwords.
| jeffbee wrote:
| There is a good article scattered within this article, but
| unfortunately it is hard to take seriously when it claims to be
| based on "research" entitled "Is Google Getting Worse" which is
| one of the most misleading papers of the last few years. That's
| the title and everyone just closes the tab. University
| researchers have proved that Google is getting worse! There was a
| paper! But the problem with the paper is that _none_ of the
| search results it evaluates are from Google.
| hennell wrote:
| It's an interesting article although I think it's rather telling
| that the authors search of "postgres slow database" seems to
| disappear in the LLM section. It mentions the adds disappeared,
| but no mention of the solutions found or the amount of time or
| changes to how they searched/added the question.
|
| I've found AI helpful for answering questions, but better at
| plausibly answering them, I still end up checking links to verify
| what was said and where it's sourced from. It saves frustration
| but not really time.
| culebron21 wrote:
| Absolutely agree. Especially Google search results became generic
| and useless. Their Youtube search is a list of 3 generic links
| and then just complete junk. DuckDuckGo had been lagging behind
| Google for years, but around 2022 it became on par if not
| superior.
| gkn wrote:
| Google is the greatest shopping center in the world and I must
| admit; I really do like it. Must be more shoppers around than the
| information seekers it seems.
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