73 条评论
- analogpixel 13小时前I feel like AI has gotten to the point where the message is: If you want to make something (art/code/music/writing) you can do it for your own enjoyment, but you aren't allowed to make money from it anymore; only the large corporations can make money from content. If you do release something creative, it'll just be fed back into the machine to be copied over and over.
- Eyeland0 6小时前"And what does the money machine eat to shit it out? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity." -William S. Burroughs
- pembrook 6小时前Yes, the craft to mass production pipeline (democratization) is frustrating for the individual craftsman, as has been true for hundreds of years.
AI is simply the assembly line for the digital realm. It takes the trendy products of the rich (custom software, McKinsey PowerPoint decks, etc) and mass produces them in the same style so everyone can afford to buy them at Walmart.
For things where the exclusivity WAS the value (like McKinsey consulting PowerPoints), they may fall out of fashion altogether when everyone can have them. Like performative 17th century aristocrat clothing styles.
I don’t see any of the AI protestors here exclusively wearing hand-loomed fabrics and bespoke clothing and $5,000 cobbler-pounded leather boots while typing angrily on their keyboards.
I also don’t see anyone commissioning artisan chair makers and blacksmiths to create $10,000+ custom furniture to sit on while posting pessimistic comments to HN.
Nobody here seems to want to hire a carriage maker to build a custom $400,000 automobile, they seem to all go for mass produced models, betraying the local artisans.
The hypocrisy is downright silly.
The 99% collective benefits from mass production at the expense of the 1% of artisans (and ultimately the artisans benefit too given nobody is a true artisan in more than a few things). This ultimately raises living standards for everyone.
- nstart 5小时前That is a very poor comparison. Firstly, you're ignoring that behind the mass manufactured stuff, there's a lot of abused labour. People do protest that. Because of how money works, it's also impossible to avoid it.
Second, machinery that automated work isn't remotely the same. Engineers have built and refined the machines without having to go and inspect every new work that has been created by artisans each time. Creative people who have practiced the art of designing clothes and shoes stitch together and build prototypes. Entire machinery is built as an independent path away from how artisans build furniture.
There is a parallel though for how LLMs, in order to improve, gobble up all new work produced by people and never give attribution back. We see it when someone does a unique physical product design and starts selling it only for some 2 bit shop elsewhere to try and copy and sell a cheap knockoff version. The original person does all the hard work of prototyping and testing and the 2 bit shop which has access to more machinery resources buys a couple, copies it with less quality, makes a few changes, sells it, and probably outspends the original person on ad revenue too.
No, GenAI doesn't produce the exact same work as what they ingest. But style does get reproduced. And style is such a difficult problem to solve. Studio Ghibli didn't craft its signature style by accident. People prototyped and worked hard on how to design it, how to solve the problems unique to the design, created rules for it, and then painstakingly made the stories that were best told through that style. Only for the AI companies to pop out some bastardized version of it every time someone says "make my picture anime". No attribution given. No love. No homage. Just an encouragement for hordes of people to claim how easy it is without ever understanding the thought that actually went into it.
So no. It's not hypocrisy. It's recognition of these machines being information and creative laundering factories. They take and take and never give back any value that they could never create or improve on on their own. Those last words being key
- pembrook 2小时前I never thought I’d see the day when the open source “information wants to be free” crowd is complaining about intellectual property and “stylistic inspiration sources.”
The courts have already ruled on this. Creative work that is inspired by (ie. an amalgamation of) other works is not a copy. It’s how ALL creative work is generated by humans too. When enough humans get inspired/rip-off something we just legitimize it and call it a "genre."
The truth is most of the work done in the world is duplicative and not novel. LLMs are a giant compression model on that duplicative work, and if your job is to create charts and buttons out of react components for the 7,000,000th time, it turns out it’s better that AI automate that and free you up to focus on higher value tasks for humanity. Just as mass production eliminated duplicative artisanal work that made pretty much everything scarce and only available to the elite.
Did the rich elite lose some of the eccentric uniqueness in their world, and some of their previous performative signaling mechanisms (ie. putting 4 layers of hand carved crown molding in a ceiling differently than the last guy, or using $400k/yr engineers to create slightly different border radius buttons in each app)? Yes, but it comes at the benefit of the global masses who now can attain everything previously only available to elites via the AI mass production.
I loved visiting Versailles. Yet, I would never want to go back and live in that time, because there's a 99.99999% chance you aren't the guy living in it, and instead are the one who has 4 generations of your family enslaved to carve tiny sculptures into hand railings and live off gruel in a freezing cold hut while doing it. My lame, non-artisanal 2000s mass produced home is vastly superior to conditions that 99.99999% of people in the 1600s lived in.
- AlecSchueler 1小时前> I never thought I’d see the day when the open source “information wants to be free” crowd is complaining about intellectual property and “stylistic inspiration sources.”
The difference is twofold: firstly people are intrinsically driven to be creative, that even with inspiration taken there's a desire to create something fresh. As you say, not just mechanical regurgitations of pre-revolutionary French style.
Secondly, "the courts have already ruled in this?" Have they? Are we not doing the IP thing anymore? Does that go for you and I and everyone else, or only for a handful of billion dollar companies?
- lelanthran 4小时前Your analogy, I feel, is inaccurate.
This isn't only mass-produced products replacing bespoke products, it's also the strip-mining of attribution.
A better analogy is if we were to abolish trademark protection completely; anyone can go create a Nike knockoff, complete with the branding, and sell them legally.
This is what the blog post under discussion is complaining about - your labour will be laundered through the machine, and presented to an end-user with the end-user having never heard of you.
- AnthonyMouse 3小时前> This is what the blog post under discussion is complaining about - your labour will be laundered through the machine, and presented to an end-user with the end-user having never heard of you.
Isn't that what organizations do in general? A person grows your food and installed the plumbing in your house and wrote a component of the web browser you're using. Do you know their names?
- lelanthran 3小时前> Isn't that what organizations do in general? A person grows your food and installed the plumbing in your house and wrote a component of the web browser you're using.
The person growing the food I get or the plumber installing a toilet never asked for attribution because it wasn't relevant to their pay.
> Do you know their names?
As a matter of fact, for things that require attribution, I do know their names. You do too!
Like the author of this blog post - his name is right there on the site.
Now, you may say "But I'm fine with laundering attribution", but that is no different from claiming that trademark law should be effectively nullified because you don't wear trademarked clothing.
- AnthonyMouse 3小时前> The person growing the food I get or the plumber installing a toilet never asked for attribution because it wasn't relevant to their pay.
But it is though. If they do a good job then you could have customers wanting the same one again. You go to the grocery store and there is just a bin full of undifferentiated produce. Some days they're juicier than others. They came from different farms. But they don't even tell you when they switch from one to another, so how is a farmer who is doing a better job supposed to get more business or command higher prices?
> As a matter of fact, for things that require attribution, I do know their names. You do too!
Blogs include the author's name because they want to, not because they're required to. There are plenty of organizational ones that are published only in the name of the organization.
The thing that allows attribution to happen is the absence of a middle man. When you go to the farm shop at the farm itself then you get told the name of the family whose farm it is, but not when you go to Walmart. When you hire someone to build a walkway you see their face and learn their name; when the government hires them to build a sidewalk on your behalf they become a faceless abstraction.
- lelanthran 3小时前> But it is though.
Is it? Lets see your reason for thinking that.
> If they do a good job then you could have customers wanting the same one again. You go to the grocery store and there is just a bin full of undifferentiated produce. Some days they're juicier than others. They came from different farms. But they don't even tell you when they switch from one to another, so how is a farmer who is doing a better job supposed to get more business or command higher prices?
As far as I can see from the text above, you feel it should be relevant to their pay, but nothing you say makes me think that it currently is relevant to their pay.
What you think should be happening is not my point; I am only saying that it isn't happening.
> Blogs include the author's name because they want to, not because they're required to.
But that's my point! You appear to agree that the labour supplier in this specific case wants attribution, and yet you are arguing that they should not get it?
- AnthonyMouse 3小时前> As far as I can see from the text above, you feel it should be relevant to their pay, but nothing you say makes me think that it currently is relevant to their pay.
No, it currently is relevant to their pay. They would be paid a different amount if the quality of their product was attributable by the customer to the specific producer. It affects how many customers/sales they get.
> You appear to agree that the labour supplier in this specific case wants attribution, and yet you are arguing that they should not get it?
But how is that any different than any other case? If the farmer wants attribution, that doesn't mean Walmart is giving it to them.
- lelanthran 2小时前> They would be paid a different amount if the quality of their product was attributable by the customer to the specific producer.
You are proposing a hypothetical; that is not what is currently happening.
- AlecSchueler 5小时前> The hypocrisy is downright silly.
> The 99% collective benefits from mass production at the expense of the 1% of artisans
And in this case it's looking more like less than 1% benefiting at the expense of 85%?
> I don’t see any of the AI protestors here exclusively wearing ... commissioning ...
I would love to order more bespoke goods but mass production has driven most of the makers out of business and that ones that remain I can't afford. You're saying this as though I actually wanted this ugly IKEA closet.
- pembrook 5小时前> it's looking more like less than 1% benefiting at the expense of 85%?
Your model of the world is wrong. 85% (even 99%) of people do not create any art, software, music, etc.
The vast majority of people are consumers of any given craft, and the 1% of the most passionate in a given field are creators, as has always been the case. It’s the same with people who create websites vs consume them.
> mass production has driven most of the makers out of business and ones that remain I can't afford
Again, your model of the world is wrong.
There was never a time when getting everything made bespoke was cheap. You’re pretending everyone was a rich aristocrat nobleman in the past if you think this is the case.
Historically you just wouldn't have a closet or enough clothing to fill it at all.
- AlecSchueler 4小时前> 85% of people do not create any art, software, music, etc.
Etc.? I think you're overlooking a very broad range of occupations. From people getting into politics by doing newspaper summaries for party offices to people editing newspapers.
And if you're really pushing that it's 99% benefiting while 1% lose out then where do the kids whose schools get bombed or the women harassed with deepfakes fit in? Do they still benefit because they don't have to go to the trouble of writing a song about their pain?
It's the same companies and the same technologies doing all these things.
Let's not even get into the inauguration gifts in the US etc...
> You’re pretending everyone was a rich aristocrat nobleman in the past
I'm not pretending anything and my world model isn't "wrong." I don't mind having this discussion but I would ask you to mind your manners.
> There was never a time when getting everything made bespoke was cheap.
In my lifetime my family had many things made to order; from clothes to furniture. And I grew up in one of the poorest parts of the country, a working class area. But that meant that everyone worked and everyone had trades. My grandfather made me toys from scrap wood at the shipyard, my uncle was a joiner who made us better quality tables than I can get now, another was a plumber who ensured everything ran smoothly in our pipes. My aunts knitted and sewed everything we wanted. When a new fashion came out like skinny jeans they would tighten the ones we had; at Halloween I only had to say what I wanted to dress up as and the costume would appear.
Now if I go to the same area everyone is surviving on state benefits, the skills are all automated away and everyone is sitting in the same gray houses with the same gray furniture. And everyone looks miserable.
But at least no one has to do any expressionist painting to let their emotions out, they can just prompt it now and enjoy more and more consumption.
- wolvesechoes 5小时前Comparing GenAI to any previous "disruptions" (and these also had very negative consequences for large swaths of people, even if you consider them net positive) only shows ignorance of the person making a comparison.
- pembrook 2小时前The only thing showing ignorance here is your ad hominem personal attack with zero logical rebuttal of the original ideas.
Not only is it against the rules here, but if I’m so wrong and ignorant, you should be able to dismantle my argument easily!
Yet, you've acknowledged that prior disruptions have been net positive. So I'm struggling to understand your position. You seem to agree.
- wolvesechoes 1小时前So called ad hominem is perfectly reasonable argument type, not personal attack. Please, don't be such a snowflake. Saying that someone is ignorant of how history really unfolded, and therefore their claims not only on how history went, but also how the future will look like, are unsound, is very rational thing to do. Also, you cannot make logical rebuttals of ideas, as logic is concerned with relationship inside formal systems, and ideas worth considering are anything but.
You, and people like you, make analogies between current trends regarding AI and historical processes related to different inventions that were supposed to act as milestones technological progress, or even progress in general. Problem is that, primo, historical events are unique, and all historiosophical attempts so far were futile, therefore saying that "AI, in terms of social impact, is like the mass production of clothing" is completely ungrounded.
Secundo, there are important qualitative differences that make subjects of these analogies more different than alike.
Tertio, people are usually, you know, ignorant of what were the real, immediate social impacts of past inventions. For example, steam machine is being presented as thing that freed a common person from mundane, hard work, but the actual outcome was quite the opposite.
Quarto, claims like "mass production benefitted 99% of population and raised the living standards for all" are very non-trivial, and ideologically loaded, especially if you consider environmental pollution, health hazards, social atomization, worker alienation, and so on.
- Valakas_ 5小时前Just another quote to balance that one, since we can make quotes for anything and use them whenever it fits our narrative:
"Garbage in, garbage out."
- soundworlds 12小时前As someone who simultaneously makes music professionally, and works in IT professionally, it has been really interesting watching GenAI unfold, and the diverging cultures around it. It is almost like the world is splitting into two "societies":
1. One that loves AI + Big Business + very fast Innovation and disruption
2. One that loves Artisanal work + Small Business + slower but more sustainable innovation
I personally prefer living in #2, but I can totally see both "societies" continuing to exist and develop in their own ways.
Of course there is always the reality that different societies always end up interacting and affecting eachother.
- nunez 10小时前I'm almost certain there is biblical-level astroturfing happening to make camp (1) much bigger than it really is.
Otherwise, Schmidt wouldn't have drowned in a sea of boos at his commencement speech at UA.
- acdha 8小时前I think there’s also a lot of people who haven’t quite realized what side they’re on. A ton of techies confused better than average pay with being part of the upper class and didn’t realize that the average CEO/VC views us roughly the same as the janitors except more expensive and less reliable. If you’re currently working at a stable tech job, it’s easy to focus on the cool things you can do and ignore how hungry those guys are for a massive cut in salaries, how much harder it will be to get an new job, and that trying to start your own company is harder than in recent decades with more established gatekeepers and LLMs being very good at copying a successful product.
New graduates haven’t known anything else and don’t have the money to be nostalgic about a party they missed.
- lelanthran 3小时前> I think there’s also a lot of people who haven’t quite realized what side they’re on. A ton of techies confused better than average pay with being part of the upper class and didn’t realize that the average CEO/VC views us roughly the same as the janitors except more expensive and less reliable.
For all those coders who claim "coding is the smallest part of s/ware dev", they're in for a rude awakening when they realise that while it may have been a small part, it was the part that lead to high salaries.
After all, anyone who wanted to be a business analyst (i.e. spec a solution and hand it off to someone else for coding) could have had that job ages ago, but they didn't because it pays so poorly (even more poorly when all coders are moving into that role too).
- nunez 8小时前> New graduates haven’t known anything else and don’t have the money to be nostalgic about a party they missed.
Respectfully disagree. New grads entering the workforce now started college in 2022. This was during the post-COVID "Great Resignation" when offers and employee leverage were at their peak and AI wasn't that useful.
Very different from the "use AI or your fired/blackballed" age we live in now.
- pjmlp 6小时前Even that is very regional.
While tech pays well, in many countries it is seen as a regular office worker, with a similar salary level.
And if you are doing consulting is very much a gig economy job, if you're going on your own.
- somenameforme 8小时前Exactly what I was thinking when a recent big bank CEO accidentally let his contempt slip out. He referred to mass layoffs as "It's not cost-cutting. It's replacing in some cases lower-value human capital with the financial capital and the investment capital we're putting in." [1]
That "lower-value human capital" isn't janitors - it's a wide array of highly skilled professions including software engineers and many others. Of course the guy who's at the top engaging in nothing but 'unfalsifiable' fuzzy actions, and could be replaced (sans his connections/corruptions) most easily of all, is ultra-high-mega-untouchable infinity value humanity embodied.
I really don't like what big business does to people, on the bottom and the top. The fact somebody could even use the term lower-value human capital without cringing at themselves, let alone to a reporter in public - that's one hell of a bubble this guy lives in. And now we're dumping "AI" into this bubble. WCGW?
[1] - https://news.sky.com/story/standard-chartered-to-replace-low...
- soundworlds 6小时前One of the funny parts about all of this, is that janitors are likely less threatened by GenAI than information workers are.
Hell, janitors' work is less threatened by GenAI than most of the CEOs who are super-hyped about that very same GenAI.
David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs might actually work as a roadmap of sorts..
- palmotea 6小时前> One of the funny parts about all of this, is that janitors are likely less threatened by GenAI than information workers are.
But that's cold comfort, because janitors are already paid shit wages.
The insecurity about AI isn't exactly "will I keep my job?" It's "will I be thrown into a life of precarity as my skills are devalued?"
Janitors aren't threatened by GenAI, because they're already where the threats take you.
- notabotiswear 2小时前Where would information workers go after they get booted out of their market?
Every other market where they could transfer their skills to is threatened by the same hypothetical. And if they jump the collar colour divide, they’d have be limited to the least skilled ones, which includes Janitors.
Now perhaps that would still not threaten the job itself as much, but an increase in supply definitely won’t be good for the wages.
- wolvesechoes 5小时前> A ton of techies confused better than average pay with being part of the upper class
False consciousness always strikes back.
- snapplebobapple 10小时前Its probably a situation where you cant choose what you actually want so you choose closest. For me that would be camp 1 but i hate big business because of all the obvious oligopoly market power abuse. Id go back to the 60s antitrust where they were breaking up regional gas station chains if i could because it was more correct than what we are doing. Most of the big guys on nasdaq and s&p need to be broken up imo
- snapplebobapple 6小时前man... hacker news is making me sad here. The blatantly obvious stuff that leans left gets upvoted +5 and the blatantly obvious comment made by me directly before this one that leans right is -1. This place used to care more about the correct answer.
- verisimi 4小时前I think it was always about the left-leaning answers - while sharing right-leaning concerns, the consensus answer is always more legislation, closer administrative control.
- danaris 5小时前> upvoted +5
Spot the (other) Slashdot refugee! (And why were you at the Devil's Sacrament, Mr. Danaris?)
- eszed 5小时前Complaining about downvotes used to be uncouth, but whatever. :-)
For what it's worth, I'm pretty "left" - at least within the HN bubble - and I like the cut of your jib. I devoutly wish that the broader "right" cared even one iota about anti-trust / anti-monopoly enforcement.
- Gormo 2分钟前There are plenty of people who care about the underlying concerns that "anti-trust / anti-monopoly enforcement" is trying to correct, but recognize that the only mechanism ever proposed for addressing those concerns usually involves concentrating ever more power into the hands of an even larger and less accountable monopoly.
The biggest error of the "left" in most of these conversations is treating political institutions as something uniquely well-intentioned and competent, rather than understanding them as just another set of institutions in society, subject to the same incentive structures, biases, and errors as everything else.
A lot of skepticism of political interventions doesn't necessarily come from refusal to acknowledge that there is a problem, but rather from the recognition that the proposed solutions often just represent even worse instances of the same sort of problem. I think a lot of the people who've tended to support political intervention may have operated under the naive assumption that giving the federal government expansive power to intervene into our social and economic affairs could only bring net benefit; hopefully, the behavior of the current administration in the US should be something of a wake-up call.
- AnthonyMouse 3小时前> Otherwise, Schmidt wouldn't have drowned in a sea of boos at his commencement speech at UA.
That's assuming both that the audience there was a representative sample of the general population and that ~50% of an audience can't generate a sea of boos. The second one in particular is certainly wrong.
- bluegatty 6小时前No, the narratives are flooding in all directions.
A group of 22 year olds are 'hissing' because they're upset, not because they have some magic insight.
AI is real, it is overstated, the value is not comping to Main Street.
- wwweston 8小时前And it just so happens that one of the things the new tech is good for is astroturfing.
- xantronix 8小时前Who would be payrolling this astroturfing in group #1?
- Gormo 1分钟前Perhaps some of the same people and organizations who have poured funding into AI firms that have yet to attain profitability.
- oredbored 10小时前[flagged]
- marcus_holmes 11小时前I make my own furniture. I am absolutely not a carpenter. But I hate Ikea furniture - it's made of shitty, flimsy, materials, and its design priorities are all based on cost and ease of transport, not on being great furniture that will last years and be an actual asset to the home.
This is an analogy, obviously. Ikea has been innovative, and it does provide a useful service for people; if you just moved into a new place and need to furnish it as quickly and cheaply as possible, then off to Ikea you go. But it's still shitty furniture.
My furniture doesn't look great, sometimes. My joinery is not perfect. I don't have all the tools I need to do this properly. But the design goals for each are what we need to live our lives. My wife has a stupidly high bed in her office, piled mattresses so she can spread them out if we have many visitors. I made her a bedside table that matches that height. It's a complete one-off; I won't make another that size, and we probably won't need it if we move house.
My point is that we already have this split in other areas of our lives; the Vimes Theory of boots (rich people buy boots that last generations, poor people buy boots every year). Ikea furniture. Buying a mass-produced crockery from a big store, or buying hand-made crockery from a local potter. We're just adding information and code to this split.
- technotarek 11小时前I’m not a furniture maker, but I have a rather close connection to the industry. I used to hate ikea furniture. In fact I hated almost all modern furniture that mass market, that wasn’t high end. I was a huge proponent of vintage furniture ( and still am), but I have really come around on ikea. They sure still make some crap, but they also make some genuinely innovative pieces that can last if you treat them with a basic level of care. I’d specifically call out / praise a few of their beds with built in drawer solutions. A few good desks too. They also have other mostly solid wood products too. It really depends. Just my $0.02.
- rainbowDolphin 10小时前Agreed. I was a carpenter for a long time and have built everything from completely disposable structures to things that ended up in Design Within Reach.
I think Ikea is great. Sure, the cheaper stuff consists of veneered particle board at best. But they (at least used to) use thicker veneers, often include relatively high quality hardware, and make some products that are just completely solid (stainless kitchen gear, simple but serviceable pine furniture, standing desks, some bedding).
What gets to me are places like West Elm and similar companies. Mid-Century design, but it's the same veneered particle board as the much cheaper Ikea stuff, and costs far more.
- bostik 6小时前Many of Ikea's wood (wood-like?) products are pretty flimsy, designed to be built once and never moved or taken apart. (cough - all cupboards, most cabinets - cough)
But somewhat ironically their steel kitchenware is competitive with catering equipment. It may not be as well designed for maximum functionality and storage packing efficiency, but costs about the same or even less than comparable Vogue gear. Over the years I've spotted an increasing number of street food vendors using Ikea bowls and trays, so the price and availability advantage appears to be real.
- fragmede 10小时前That's the thing. Ikea's alternatives are all worse in some dimension. The Amish do make good furniture though.
- marcus_holmes 9小时前Agree completely. As I said, Ikea provide a valuable service. And I'm sure that for some pieces, quality is compatible with the core design values of cost and transportability.
And, to extend the analogy, I'm sure Google's AI results will be perfectly serviceable for some people in some situations.
But for my wife's odd, non-standard, situation I had to build it myself. And for some people's odd, non-standard, situation they'll need to construct (or find) a bespoke information service that matches their needs. That will probably cost them more and the joinery won't be as neat.
- saalweachter 10小时前There's a tier of quality that's just fine... as long as you don't move it much, either from home to home or just rearranging too much.
If you do, then the unglued joints decay and it becomes wobblier and wobblier.
- bigfatkitten 6小时前Ikea is an interesting place in that you can get something that will either last either 15 minutes or 75 years. There really isn’t much in between.
- valicord 10小时前My IKEA furniture has lasted 12 years so far, including 3 moves, with only minor cosmetic damage.
- gammarator 9小时前I have a 20 year old Malm dresser that made four moves and is doing just fine.
(I do have it screwed into the wall as it’s been recalled for tipovers.)
- jonfromsf 8小时前I think the Malm has the highest body count of any individual piece of furniture on the planet.
- Broken_Hippo 6小时前A lot of their furniture now has warnings that it must be secured to the wall - for that very reason. On their (Norwegian) website, this starts with furniture around 100cm tall, especially if it is talland thin or sits on legs.
I guess the change (and recalls) are a result of lawsuits from that same dresser.
- account42 3小时前Keep in mind that IKEA today is also not going to be the same quality as IKEA 20 years ago, even for products that still have the same name and look.
- Procrastes 11小时前I want to buy you a CMOT Dibbler Sausage for the Vimes reference. Perfect metaphor for this situation. His point was that it was the cheap boots that keep people poor, so that makes me think artist and artisan patronage will be an even bigger thing in years to come.
- tonyedgecombe 2小时前I’ve become quite doubtful about the Vimes theory because getting boots resoled involves labour so has become relatively expensive.
Also my expensive boots didn’t last a lifetime, last time I went to get them resoled I was told they had deteriorated too far.
- wanoir 10小时前> the Vimes Theory of boots (rich people buy boots that last generations, poor people buy boots every year)
This made me think of a fascinating exception to this
Luxury-brand cars usually get turned over every couple years so as to avoid their inevitable maintenance cliff
- marcus_holmes 9小时前It is an interesting exception.
The really rich people that I know of drive 10-year-old beaten-up Land Rovers, though.
I think there's a nouveau-riche slice of folks who buy "luxury" cars thinking that they confer status. There are brands like this in every industry, that adopt all the pointers of "luxury" except actual quality.
- tonyedgecombe 2小时前I see this in my village. There is a good mix of private and social housing. The private houses tend to have modest cars whereas the social houses have something flash.
- bitwize 7小时前There was a study sometime back that suggested most American millionaires live in homes of modest or at least unostentatious size and drive used cars of American make. These days it'd probably be of Japanese make, as Toyotas and Nissans are relatively cheap and last forever. Having a lot of money and showing the world that you have a lot of money are completely different goals. You'll be flat broke if you join an MLM with 99.5% certainty, but if you're a good enough salesperson they'll loan out a Mercedes or something to drive around so you can show off how rich the plan made you and "edify your upline". You're on the hook for fuel and maintenance, though.
Maybe it's the Scots-Irish in him, but my father was always one to go for the luxury stuff, but still seek out the good quality stuff at as good a price as he can manage and fix it up if it were broken. He knows how to keep a Cadillac Eldorado on the road for 20 years or more, so of course he's going to spring for the fancy if a used one turns up at a good price. In the 80s he bought a small mansion that was in a quasi-dilapidated state but had been standing since the opening years of the 20th century. We renovated it inside and out, and today it's on the National Register of Historic Places (though my parents no longer live there).
- wanoir 6小时前> still seek out the good quality stuff at as good a price as he can manage and fix it up if it were broken.
I think that's a nice story to highlight, being able to do things well and preserving that knowledge
While there can be benefits for mass producing things, what actually is produced is going to be limited by what techniques are conducive to automation. So the techniques that are hard to automate are lost from the market of provided goods and then human capital for it also gets lost (can't think of any concrete examples off the top of my head, but maybe the techniques for some elements of clothing that are now only found in couture/custom pieces). Another related idea is how there are much fewer color variations in manufactured goods now, simply because it simplifies the mass manufacturing process.
- marcus_holmes 5小时前> can't think of any concrete examples off the top of my head, but maybe the techniques for some elements of clothing that are now only found in couture/custom pieces
Maybe how clothes used to come with a decent margin on the hems so you could alter them, but now they don't?
- 28304283409234 3小时前> Toyotas and Nissans
You seem to have misspelled "Honda". ;-)
- newaccountman2 8小时前> But I hate Ikea furniture - it's made of shitty, flimsy, materials, and its design priorities are all based on cost and ease of transport, not on being great furniture that will last years and be an actual asset to the home.
I have seen/heard this a lot lately, but all the Ikea furniture I have ever had has been great. Among others, had a chair that was good for like 11 years lol
- marcus_holmes 4小时前I think this is actually a counter-example of what you think it is.
Chairs should last generations. A chair lasting 11 years is not exemplary. A chair falling apart after a few years should be the exception, and a bad thing at that.
Again, Vimes Theory: rich folks inherit furniture that their grandparents bought, and maybe need to get it re-upholstered once in their lifetime. Poor folks have to pay for new furniture every few years because it falls apart.
- perilunar 4小时前My parents bought some really nice modern furniture when they married in the early 1960s. 5 houses and 60 years later (and a few re-upholsterings), it still looks and works as beautifully as ever. My brother will probably inherit it in a few years, then his kids; it will likely get another 60 years at least.
One of my friends has a kitchen table her great grandmother owned.
Neither of us (or our parents) are rich, but good, well made furniture used to be an investment. Now most furniture is disposable.
- bmitc 10小时前Ikea has long existed before the Internet and over capitalization.
I have several Ikea pieces in my home, and I've had some for over a decade. If you build Ikea stuff properly, are selective in what you purchase, and use wood glue when constructing, then it lasts as long as anything else really.
Their flat packed designs are actually innovative. People can outfit an entire room by using a Honda Fit to transport.
- marcus_holmes 7小时前Agree completely, as I said their design priorities are cost and transportability, and they provide a valuable service. Mostly I hate the shitty laminated chipboard half their stuff is made from. If you replaced that with actual wood, and some of the weird aluminium pegs with actual dowels or joinery, it'd be fine. But that's kinda beside the point; if you did that it would be more expensive and less easily transported, and therefore wouldn't fit their priorities.
And, of course, their bedside cabinets are the wrong size for my wife's bed, so I'd have to make one anyway.
And this is just an analogy; if you like Ikea-style Google Search, then great for you. I pay for Kagi because that Ikea-style Google Search doesn't work for me.
- JohnBooty 10小时前Do you think that AI could actually free up time in your life in other areas, so that you could spend more time doing the things you love like making furniture? Or maybe help you directly in your furniture-making, by perhaps helping you to research things?
Please don't misunderstand: my point is not "AI is good."
It is problematic in many ways. My point is that I think the "AI versus actually doing cool human-crafted stuff" split is... a misguided, maybe even harmful, mental model of a more complicated reality.
- luk212 6小时前That's the promise of every new technology. Although there's been massive progress over the past 50+ years, the amount of free time that people have has actually gone DOWN (https://clockify.me/working-hours)..."I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes"...we'll see
- account42 3小时前No, because the machine consumes all of your time that it can take without literally killing you. If you manage to free some time somewhere, the machine will adapt and eat it up. We have so-called developed countries talking about raising the retirement age and cutting holidays, that's the "future" we are living in.
- eproxus 5小时前I think in a different society this could have been the case (possibly, assuming the hype is somewhat true).
But the way society is structured now? We still live in feudalism, just uplifted to modern levels of ”comfort” (if you take of your western glasses and look at the whole world. There are still people living in medieval conditions today in some places in the world).
The way it’s going it’s only going to make rich people richer, and give them more power to control this system and perpetuate it. I don’t see that drastically changing anytime soon, unless we do something about it on a societal level.
- xgulfie 10小时前What time is AI going to free up for me? Can AI go to the grocery store for me, do my laundry, do my dishes? Can it let me clock out early? The spoils of AI do not go to individuals
- DauntingPear7 10小时前AI, as it stands, only can save you time with non-human interaction “intellectual” tasks on a computer. So really not much
- fragmede 10小时前It's not AI, but there's Doordash and Rinse if that's what you're trying to optimize for. The robots will be coming out, soon enough, and then we're all in trouble though.
- AlexCoventry 10小时前It's excellent for R&D.
- notabotiswear 8小时前> Do you think that AI could actually free up time in your life in other areas, so that you could spend more time doing the things you love.
Personally, I don’t believe that would be the case. Jevon’s paradox mixed with the natural tendency to exploit others. One could argue that technology -in general- didn’t really save people time by itself, it’s regulation - a social construct, and I am counting both cultural and legal enforcement of them as well- that did. Just look at how workers in countries without your European-style protections fare. Wikipedia’s article on the Chinese 996 [1] has a nice map for deaths due to long working hours by country, notice the dominant colours for each quadrant of this (projected) globe.
Pre industrialised societies’ labourers were limited by daylight and travel distance. The modern availability and abundance of artificial lighting, mechanised transportation, and telecommunication means their grand kids are expected to -and often do- toil every waking moment.
- wolvesechoes 4小时前Direct consequence of industrial revolution was an INCREASE in workload. People worked MORE, not less. It required organization, protests, political pressure and even some bloodshed to get 8 hrs workday.
People that push for AI are not interested in making your life better.
- reactordev 7小时前I too am a musician and a, well, was a, tech person. I’m completely in the #2 camp. I enjoy AI music, AI art, but I enjoy originality more.
That said, I also think there’s an element of bullshit in the room where an LLM will look like it’s doing something profound but ultimately isn’t, or doesn’t work, or has no actual proof. This “hallucination zone”. They can still do great things but they need a solid hand holding to not get it wrong 20% of the time.
- TightFibre 4小时前As an early web guy who gets off on tech and problem solving I have long hated the industry with a passion as I see it as a fundamental brain drain for society full of bullshit jobs and bullshit people. Including of course myself. I should welcome the automation and yet my heart feels ripped out as the emperor has been laid bare with 20 odd years going up in smoke as vultures pick at the corpses of the old guard.
- jasondigitized 12小时前I predict mixtapes, with the operative word being tapes, make a big comeback.
- hunterpayne 12小时前I don't see that at all. I see spammers and propagandists love LLMs because they can use it to accomplish their goals at the expense of the rest of us. I see AI companies marketing their products hard but in ways that seem self-defeating. Seems obvious but ads shouldn't make people hate the product and the AI folks don't seem to understand this. I see lots more effort to find artisanal things because people understand how much spammy stuff is being made. So I see basically an attack on the media ecosystem and people adapting with various levels of success to those attacks. I also see it costing the platforms as now they have extra effort and expense to keep their value for their users. Nobody wants to read a bunch of LLM generated slop on the social feed.
- eikenberry 12小时前But big businesses suck at innovation so much that their primary form of innovation is through acquiring small businesses. But that is a big benefit for #2 as we need innovations to get to a sustainable system.
- nickff 11小时前The problem is that it is increasingly difficult to survive as a small business (due to constantly increasing compliance/regulatory/legal burdens), so it makes sense to ‘sell out’ as soon as possible (or just give up early). The rate of small businesses growing into large ones has been decreasing for at least 20 years.
- shimman 11小时前This is tech we are talking about. There are very little, if any, regulatory burdens in place here.
The only things that DO hurt SMBs across the board are things like paying for private health insurance and retirement plans. Two core things every worker needs but only massive corporations can truly provide.
It's why things like medicare for all and universal childcare are so popular among workers, also why things like corporate welfare are so disgusting.
- nickff 10小时前>"There are very little, if any, regulatory burdens in place here."
Speaking as someone who works in a small company that designs and manufactures embedded devices, I can tell you that many of the 'minor' regulations which are not supposed to burden small businesses actually do. My (single) biggest annoyance is the conflict minerals reporting requirements which were supposed to apply to very large companies, but have been 'passed down' to smaller suppliers (as anyone with half a brain would have expected). There are many other KYC, CBP, and other regulations which have substantial impacts as well.
- yamillove 11小时前[flagged]
- Refreeze5224 8小时前The only innovation needed to be sustainable is to recognize that capitalism is not sustainable, and never can be. But that's not a profitable innovation, so it never gets pursued.
- danaris 4小时前That's not at all a benefit for #2—when small businesses that are thriving and making Society #2 better get bought up by big businesses, they cease to be part of Society #2. In many cases, the innovative things they were doing simply disappear, as the big business that bought them didn't want to use it, they just wanted to kill it.
"Big business," in the sense it exists today, is itself a detriment to our society as a whole, and can only exist because of the utter destruction of antitrust that happened under Reagan. Without that, much more of our current society would look like #2, with or without LLMs.
- archagon 12小时前I am waiting for the online reification of this split with bated breath so that I can fuck off to society #2 and never have to interact with society #1 again.
- sph 2小时前You are already part of society #2. You are just giving your life, energy and money every day to society #1.
- AlexCoventry 10小时前Isn't society #1 going to outcompeted #2?
- soundworlds 9小时前In the short term, probably.
In the long term, probably not.
- archagon 10小时前They can do whatever they want. Their cultural output is completely and utterly uninteresting to me.
- chronogamous 9小时前Category 1 will ensure that, if either category prefers to continue to exist, we may very likely need to find another planet to keep doing what we're doing. Category 2 on it's own seems much less likely to wreck life-support on our current planet.
I can see the initial appeal, but right now it would seem that those people that dig the fast innovation and disruption the most are clueless on how easy it is to wreck this system by accident. Remember how CFK's were once considered a wonderful invention, as refrigerators no longer needed to be the size of a building filled with highly volatile gas. A rather unfortunate side-effect turned out to be the difficulty of getting the particles out of the atmosphere again. By the time it became apparent that this buildup up there would have rather drastic consequences for life down here, products containing CFK's were already massproduced and life without these products was unimaginable.
Apart from all the obvious, and all the known ways in which Big Tech keeps pushing towards climate conditions excluding organic, mammalian lifeforms, it no longer seems very far fetched that somebody will accidentally accellerate us to that point. As the moving fast part is largely a tactic to avoid accountability for the breaking things part, the person doing the breaking may be just as unaware of the danger that has been created, as the people they've razzle-dazzled, that will eventually realize something has been broken somewhere along the way... and a quick look at advertisements, American style, teaches us how even unnecessarily dangerous practices (like adding lead to just about everything, instead of figuring out how to do the same stuff without it) can be sold for ages and ages, long after people have started to realise the danger that has been introduced.
No matter how fast you move and how much you break, turning another planet into a place where people could live (not even talking about the ability to indulge in cultivating societies) is something Big Tech is unable to achieve over the next couple of years, and it remains to be seen if it will be able to reach a stage where they could make that happen with some certainty. Meanwhile, only a decade or two ago, Big Tech did actually have enough proven technology, insight and expertise that would have sufficed to nudge living conditions on Earth back within desireable margins. A lot of the data may have been poisoned, knowledge and tech has been lost, but the chances of achieving that seem well within Big Tech's grasp - were it not for the apparent inability of certain parties to refrain from moving fast as they're breaking stuff.
Long before anyone is actually in any position to start terraforming on Mars, much of what Big Tech is actually capable of doing reliably now, will no longer be feasible nor within their grasp.
Apologies if I'm ranting, but no, I can't see both 'societies' continuing to exist and develop in their own ways. If group 1 could put the disruption on hold while fixing and rebuilding what is needed to keep our habitat fit for our species, and if some kind of safety mechanism would be invented to ensure that whatever they might accidentally break next, it will not be life itself,... only then could I easily enjoy and appreciate both ways of life.
- sph 2小时前That's basically what Marx & co. have been talking about. Just that there are no more aristocrats, bourgeois, proletariat.
Today there's just the ultra-rich in control of the government, media and now the machines, and then there's the 98% of us, that want dignity, a decent life, a little freedom.
It's high time we figure out our place in this ecosystem, and that there is a lot more of us "normal people". Yet, the vast majority still live in the "social ladder" utopia. The temporarily embarrassed millionaires. The American dream.
- globalnode 11小时前yeah #1 leeches ideas from #2 and makes all the money, its like a vampire class
- bmitc 10小时前(1) will continue to happen because of human behavior and the oligarchy. The oligarchy would love to forget that the time you could call a customer support representative that was native in your language, lived in your country, and actually knew things, more than the computer told them, actually existed. Human behavior forgets it because the Internet and software has added so much "convenience" to life and there's all these new shiny things everywhere.
Way back, finding music wasn't a problem. You went to the store. You talked to people. You didn't need to wait for weeks to get basic doctor's appointments. You could get customer support via an easy phone call. You could drive around and find things just fine.
The U.S. government and people have been more than happy to dehumanize people and themselves by handing over their lifestyles to corporations.
> very fast Innovation and disruption
I don't think people are innovating. They're certainly disrupting in destructive ways. But other than things like improvements in health care and safety in cars, how have things actually and concretely gotten better through all this so-called innovation that happens?
- jongjong 12小时前I'm not too worried about it because the first segment of society is doomed to be 'good but never great.'
AI lacks the ability to identify greatness because it's trained on the output of the average person who also lacks this ability.
It's going to create a new elite class of people who have good taste and the masses who have bad taste. Many current elites will end up with the masses. They may retain their wealth on paper, but it will be a cheap, low-quality existence but they will be convinced it's luxury.
I think eventually, everyone will get what they want, but not everyone will get what they need.
- lorecore 12小时前Taste is subjective, authenticity is not. People in #2 want human created content, even if it's not as "good".
- jongjong 12小时前My definition of bad taste is; will be derivative. These people will consume variants of the same thing over and over, not realizing it to be the case. They will be narrow minded and predictable. They will be afraid of any other ideas which doesn't fit the acceptable pattern of their tribe.
- bmitc 10小时前I replied above, but they're already like this.
- jongjong 10小时前True but I don't think we've reached the limit.
This is why I advocate for people to spend some time outside in nature and try to do something different once in a while because it's so easy to get stuck in a really small bubble. Especially when you exist in an entirely man-made, soon-to-be fully AI-controlled environment. You may lose your ability to have novel thoughts.
Some people are already there but the range of thoughts seems to be narrowing.
My biggest fear is being caught up in such group for financial reasons and trying to navigate some kind of linguistic and conceptual minefield everyday. I already encountered a situation like that twice in my career. Very tense environment. Feels like you're in a brainwashing cult and have to pretend to be one of them; it's really hard to pretend to be ignorant of certain kinds of information when you don't know what the full range of forbidden ideas is. Saying the wrong things got me fired both times; differences in our mental conditioning created very subtle tension/discomfort between me and management.
They will tolerate people who are 'running a simpler program' than themselves but they will absolutely not tolerate someone with a broader programming. Hence you have to pretend to be narrow-minded which is hard to maintain. This is why I like remote work.
- bmitc 10小时前The elites already have bad taste. They aren't going anywhere without tax and financial reform and the return of political donation regulation.
- JohnBooty 10小时前This dichotomy is so false.
However else you feel, AI is a force multiplier, and that can also REALLY benefit "Artisanal work + Small Business"
I feel like the "one person app creator" business is so much more viable than it has been since Web 1.0
Five years ago, to run your own solo business in this space, you had to know most of the following: taxes, legal, backend, frontend, devops, iOS dev, Android dev, and marketing and then pay through the nose for most of the ones you didn't. AI helps to paper over a LOT of those gaps... and you can spend more time doing the shit that matters to your business.
You also needed time and lots of it, which is perhaps easy to come by if you're a trust fund baby or independently wealthy and don't have to work for a living but if you have a job and/or family is in extremely short supply
I used to run an online community on the side and I spent SO MUCH TIME doing IT/legal/finance drudgework that could have been spent, you know, engaging with the community and actually improving the product... that "artisinal work" for a "small business" you think you love.
There are of course major major problems with AI, like environmental concerns and others, but dichotomies like yours are not the way forward. At least not a good way forward.
- casualgaming226 10小时前> However else you feel, AI is a force multiplier, and that can also REALLY benefit "Artisanal work + Small Business"
> Five years ago, to run your own solo business in this space, you had to know most of the following: taxes, legal, backend, frontend, devops, iOS dev, Android dev, and marketing and then pay through the nose for most of the ones you didn't. AI helps to paper over a LOT of those gaps... and you can spend more time doing the shit that matters to your business.
How is running a business in the way you've just described artisanal? You're basically saying we should be outsourcing all of these things to AIs, which is simply not artisanal.
- rcxdude 3小时前I would say doing taxes is not at all an artisanal activity, and the fact that we expect artists to deal with it is not a great thing.
- hakfoo 7小时前As I understand it, we used to have the concept of "hiring workers" or "contracting for services".
The benefit of this was that when Internal Revenue called and said in lieu of a tax return, you sent a takeaway menu covered in pornographic drawings, you could reach out to the person you paid and expect them to take accountability.
Instead, we're getting :sparkles: You're absolutely right! I shouldn't have sent the taxman the Goatse picture, would you like me to try something else? :sparkles:
- notabotiswear 1小时前I miss when I would receive and email or something that I can easily tell that whomever wrote it is a clueless idiot. Now I have to filter the prose before reaching the same conclusion.
- Anon1096 11小时前Calling #2 more sustainable has no basis in reality, it's just a feeling. It's like saying that clothing before the loom or farming before the tractor were "more sustainable". No, it isn't, it just appeals to yeoman farmer instincts that somehow technology=bad when it's what powers (and sustains) our modern world of 8 billion people.
- tw04 11小时前Given that #1 seems to be based almost entirely on stealing from #2, and never paying reparations, I’d say it’s pretty unsustainable.
It’s like saying robbing banks for a living isn’t sustainable and working at a bank is. That’s not exactly a stretch.
- fc417fc802 11小时前#1 may well put #2 out of a living but that isn't the same as stealing and doesn't (at least in and of itself) make it unsustainable. The fact that models were trained on scraped content isn't a matter of technical necessity but rather the path of least resistance (lowest cost in this case). Synthetic data is increasingly used for reasons of quantity, quality, and various technical considerations.
- tw04 11小时前All of the major players in AI currently, literally stole to build their models. There isn’t one out there that hasn’t. So yes, it is the same as stealing because they were LITERALLY, in the literal sense, stealing.
- fc417fc802 11小时前Well, pirated. Piracy and stealing aren't the same thing.
Regardless, I acknowledged the general issue. However I pointed out that doing so was not a technical necessity. If you base your worldview or actions around X implying Y but then it turns out that actually Y was merely a matter of convenience you're probably going to arrive at a wrong conclusion.
There's also the issue where you're emphatically calling it stealing without providing a clear criteria. The legal system as a whole has yet to conclusively resolve the various piracy accusations. The legality of consuming publicly available content remains quite controversial.
- tw04 11小时前It absolutely is a technical necessity. You could build a model from scratch today without doing the same thing. And every model attempting to train on AI generated output degrades into nonsense almost immediately.
There’s a reason Reddit is making millions of dollars letting these companies mine their human generated content. You think OpenAI or anyone else would pay for that if they could just cyclically train on AI generated content???
- fc417fc802 10小时前> attempting to train on AI generated output
I said nothing about that. Good synthetic data does not (typically) involve ML algorithms. Although that might be changing.
I'll politely suggest that you go read the literature before engaging further.
Reddit, Twitter, and similar are valuable because the data covers current events. Their content makes up a reasonably comprehensive timeline of the world at large. You don't need that to train a barebones functional model but it's certainly useful in order to train a knowledgeable one. Regardless, if they're charging for access it clearly isn't piracy so it doesn't seem like your original objection would hold any water in that case.
- tw04 9小时前> I'll politely suggest that you go read the literature before engaging further.
Which commercial AI vendor has not stolen any content when creating their models? I’ll wait.
Which commercial AI vendor has created their models exclusively training on datasets created and created by other AI?
> Regardless, if they're charging for access it clearly isn't piracy so it doesn't seem like your original objection would hold any water in that case.
Given that they were previously violating the site’s terms of service when scraping the content: yes, they were absolutely stealing.
- andyfilms1 11小时前It's sustainable in the literal sense, I.E. a tailor can simply tailor forever without needing to constantly worry about keeping up with new tools or technologies, or needing to upgrade or change their methodology constantly.
The tech world is obsessed with moving fast and breaking things, and you can't just do the same thing forever and expect it to always work.
- Karrot_Kream 11小时前Think about how much food we throw away in the developed and developing worlds. How often we buy new clothing when we could mend old clothing. How often we ask for more when we could do with less. How often we want to eat at a restaurant when we could make leftovers. How often we want something sweet when we could just eat something bland. How often we heat and cool our homes when we could wear more or less clothing.
It turns out that while these are all truisms, nobody wants to fix them. Developed countries are okay passing pigovian taxes, to a limited extent, to help fix these problems. Developing countries are even less interested in fixing these problems. It turns out that austerity is incredibly unpopular. Everyone wants to tell other people not to do the things they don't like but nobody wants to listen to what other people tell them not to do.
Just a reminder that Europe colonized Asia, Africa, and the Americas in the search for spices. Later on the interest changed to tea. Literally the only thing that Europe wanted was better tasting food and drink (initially at least.) By the time the potato had become widespread, they could have had enough calories to feed the continent, and yet the desire for flavor is what lead to untold misery for hundreds of years for millions of people.
We need to be realistic about what works and what doesn't. Austerity never wins.
- sonofhans 11小时前“More sustainable” than burning hydrocarbons to produce chatbot tokens. Humanity could sustain itself on those resources much longer if we were more careful with them. The very definition of sustainability.
- bandrami 6小时前The bigger issue is that the AI we currently have available has been produced by setting a giant pile of money on fire with no real plan for ever earning it back. And that is not sustainable because at some point the checks dry up. We have zero idea what the economics of unsubsidized inference are because we still don't actually know how much money the frontier labs are currently losing.
- phoronixrly 11小时前It allows for our modern unsustainable world of 8 billion people you mean?
- barnabee 13小时前Needs to be inverted.
Tax excess tech profits that derive from the efforts of others and use the proceeds to fund living artists.
Vaguely analogous to levies on blank cassettes that went to offset piracy. Give the money directly to actual artists, not labels/publishers, though.
- perilunar 4小时前Don't tax profits (or incomes) at all. Tax land and resource use instead. And treat the knowledge that was used to train the AIs as one of those resources.
- wahnfrieden 13小时前You’re describing a social revolution. Otherwise there is no way that leaders whose power over us corrupts them would want to put that into law.
The cassette reference was a tax on consumers to send money upward. What you’re describing is the complete inverse.
- lkrubner 12小时前No, it is exactly the same thing. The tax on cassettes raised money that was given to artists.
- wahnfrieden 7小时前Thanks for correcting
- jpkw 12小时前At least for art - I don't think you'll find anyone who actually enjoys art hanging up anything produced by AI on their walls. For these kinds of "customers", they could equally easily frame & hang up a poster of the Mona Lisa. Artists are not at threat, if anything, AI makes original artworks more precious & enjoyable.
- smoe 12小时前My worry is that, at least among the artists I know, many kept themselves afloat early career by doing commercial freelance jobs like illustrations for local events or companies. Those kinds of jobs might largely vanish.
On the other hand, with the internet inevitably becoming swamped by AI generated content, I can definitely see a de-digitalization of art moving into offline spaces. At least for independent work, you don’t necessarily need mass appeal or exposure, but rather access to individuals and small groups with an actual willingness to pay for art.
- px43 11小时前That's not art though, and while it might have paid a small amount of money, it can also be incredibly degrading and soul crushing. That's the kind of work that AI tools are doing now. Those jobs should vanish. People shouldn't need to degrade themselves for money, we can have a system where people are generally taken care of, and the people who build extra cool shit can live even better.
- crote 10小时前> That's not art though
Why not? Would you also argue that most of the works by painters like Rembrandt, such as The Night Watch aren't art - just because they were contracted to make it? Does book cover art stop being art the second a book's title gets placed on it?
And sure, plenty of corporate work is boring and soulless. But the worst of that switched to spending 10 minutes with clipart and PowerPoint decades ago: if you were still hiring an artist, you cared at least a little about what the result looked like, which means there was at least some space for artistic vision.
> People shouldn't need to degrade themselves for money, we can have a system where people are generally taken care of
We should, but we don't. What's your proposal for letting artists grow and mature while paying their bills in the meantime? AI is currently killing their "degrading" jobs, do you think forcing them to take a shift at McDonald's is going to help their artistic career advance?
- chronogamous 8小时前Rembrandt would argue that he was a craftsman, although some of the liberties he took in stuffing his paintings with hidden innuendo and symbolic jokes at the expense of some of his clients, definitely makes many of his paintings works of art.
Alas, only when taking a shirt at MacDonald's becomes equaly obsolete, and it has been made apparent that any task or job humans do could also be done by technology, only then will it help the artist in your example with their artistic career.
It is remarkable, when you think about it, that artists seem to be the first people that are made to feel obsolete. There are plenty of jobs that could have been fully automated, steampunk-style, from the moment the industrial revolution took hold.
Maybe it becomes slightly less remarkable if you take into consideration that collecting/investing in art has always been an integral part of people of considerable wealth. Even if they did not care much for it, didn't understand any of it, or were only motivated for the money,... regardless of your field, being very wealthy forced you into developing at least some connection with art. The billionaires in tech all seem to be an exception to this rule, and their lack of any connection with art, may have made them feel that art is easiest of all to replace using generative software. And for them, this was probably true - and they lack the connection to have developed any taste or eye for quality in art, so they're easily pleased with something a computer makes for them.
If only the artists are actively excluded though, people in other jobs will never fully appreciate that given the effort, their job is just as easily automated. Once people in every possible job have been made to feel just as obsolete, the world may be ready to order itself based on individual preference and mutual appreciation of whatever it is you choose to do 'for a living'.
- markdown 11小时前> Those kinds of jobs might largely vanish.
have already largely vanished
- aussieguy1234 9小时前I suppose with those same artists, at least for the smarter members of the group, might start using AI for basic commercial freelance jobs and just act as the human review, perhaps doing some final adjustments to the finished artwork.
So instead of being paid a small amount of money for something that they spend hours on, they create 10 artworks in that same number of hours and earn 10x what they did previously.
- wolvesechoes 4小时前> I suppose with those same artists, at least for the smarter members of the group, might start using AI for basic commercial freelance jobs and just act as the human review, perhaps doing some final adjustments to the finished artwork.
And how they create demand for this? AI "enthusiasts" are enthusiastic about it exactly because they feel they don't need to outsource things to meatbags.
- luqtas 8小时前innocent. like demand won't lower prices?
- aussieguy1234 8小时前I think you mean supply. Demand usually causes prices to go up.
- yakattak 12小时前That's assuming that the only market is stuff people are hanging up. The games industry, one that already takes advantage of its workers, is going to love this to the detriment of really passionate artists who love their craft and industry.
- hibikir 9小时前All complicated commercial art (movies, series, games, music, designed spaces...) has its budget as a key constraint of what is built. You don't get a new season of an anime that looks 4 times better because of a random genius: Someone evaluates the money it will make, and somehow decides that increasing the animation budget will be worthwhile. It was the same when it was animated by hand, with huge cameras and cels, than in modern digital-first animation, and whether it's using plain hand-ish drawn 2d, or using 3d models for some shots. The art is tied to the budget, and maybe the next season the budget is 2/3rds of what it was before, and the technical quality drops (see One Punch Man, Blue Lock and such)
So when an artist looks at AI, it's unlikely to be as a tool that will build a whole piece: Insufficient control, and currently nowhere near good enough to do more than occupy space, like a little painting in a hallway or in a hotel room. But it is something that can be used to better spend the budget in places where it'll be more impactful for the quality of the piece. Not unlike how CGI is often used today in places where it wouldn't have been 20 years ago, and it's aiming to be invisible. Not because the shot was impossible, but because it's cheaper.
Treating AI in art as a moral thing will end up being like the people being against synthesizers in the 80s: It's a viable creative choice for some things, but ultimately not a good expectation for industry direction. Ultimately the vast majority of art is commercial, and we'll see shortcuts being taken for budgetary reasons. Nobody is manually animating every detail of every mesh in a game like this was Toy Story. And even though doing that would produce more work for artists, it wouldn't make better games, really. And we'd sure have far fewer of them.
- paulhebert 12小时前Lots of illustrator jobs for businesses too
- HDThoreaun 12小时前genAI is going to be great for indie games. Solo productions are much easier to produce and will only get easier as tooling improves. I sort of see this as a spotify moment I guess. A democratizing force that will allow many more people to get paid for their art but with much less job security and often as a second job. Whether that's a good thing is certainly up for debate but I think as a consumer it's probably good for me.
- yakattak 12小时前Gamers don’t like AI.[1][2] I actually think indie studios that don’t use AI will do better than ones that do.
1: https://www.ign.com/articles/larian-ceo-responds-to-divinity...
2: https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/clair-obscur-expedition-33-ai...
- px43 11小时前Gamers don't like lazy slop. I've played quite a few games that utilized AI tooling to build them, and had a lot of fun.
- noobermin 10小时前I think the context makes it clear this is about llms and generative ai, not everything that includes a NN
- HDThoreaun 11小时前Both your articles are from big companies. I think what gamers dont like is big game companies replacing jobs. Solo creators and small teams using AI can create stuff that would never exist otherwise. I also think the whole anti ai thing is a fad though so maybe Im projecting. Im also not convinced that articles like this represent majority opinion.
- bpavuk 12小时前well, GenAI is an ultimate prototyping machine. I keep repeating that so often that autocomplete on my phone already learned it. look at Clair Obscur - this game did use GenAI internally for textures and forgot to clean up in ONE place. they were sorry for that and thanked the community for pointing out. naturally, Twitter and Bluesky went equally mad at Sandfall just for the mere fact of usage, but that didn't disqualify them from The Game Awards, as you can tell from how many awards they got.
Expedition 33 nailed music, aesthetics, and narrative, and I am glad that they took a diffusion model for what it is, not for what marketing wants you to believe. although the game itself would benefit from one or two months dedicated exclusively to optimization, it is THE reference of how generative technology can be used - purely internally, to ideate and iterate at the pace of your taste and a bunch of H200s. we are aware of that process detail purely because they slipped in one place and got briefly "owned" by Twitter.
- rcxdude 2小时前> I don't think you'll find anyone who actually enjoys art hanging up anything produced by AI on their walls
This does feel like a setup for a no true scotsman argument. What would your definition of 'actually enjoying art' be that would not exclude someone enjoying art that uses generative AI by definition?
- myrrhman 10小时前I think this is only true in a vague and abstract way. In reality, AI devalues labor (in general) and the worth of artists (in specific).
Good art requires good patronage and institutional support in turn. No one will have time to produce the next Mona Lisa if they're barely able to make end's meet working a slavish factory job. That's doubly true when the vocations that supported artists—either antiquated, modern, or contemporary (painter, typesetter, graphic designer, etc.)—vanish because AI can do "just about as well."
Art isn't just a divine presence gracing the souls of those deemed most worthy, it's a collection of skills and knowledge that must be built by community over decades of struggle.
On top of the generation of slop, AI is removing some of the final protections that hold these pillars up. That is what should keep us up at night.
- crote 10小时前> Artists are not at threat, if anything, AI makes original artworks more precious & enjoyable.
Sure, but how are you going to find it?
I've got a print of some digital work by Simon Stålenhag on my wall. I discovered his work because I was was mesmerized by an image of his on some wallpaper sharing website, ages ago.
These days that kind of website is 99% AI slop. AI has made it impossible to stumble across art: either you consume what the big corporations are feeding the masses, or you have to already be part of a strongly-curated niche art community.
- beloch 11小时前There seem to be two possibilities:
1. AI can't do some things humans can, and that doesn't change.
2. AI turns into something that can do everything. Humans become unnecessary.
We're currently at #1. Google may want to keep you in their AI playpen so all your clicks can be monetized directly to them, but they still need the data humans are creating. They're just not paying for it.
In world #1, humans will get less work, but creative and original work will still be valued because AI can't do it. There will, of course, need to be support for all the people striving to create such work while they're gaining the skills to do so. In world #2, humans are getting no work. Neither one of these worlds functions if all the proceeds of work go to a small number of billionaires. Wealth will need to be redistributed so people can live and, if still necessary, do the things AI can't.
Regulations need to catch up with what Google is trying to do here. It's currently theft and, even if we reach the point where they no longer need to crawl the web for input to their AI, their wealth will need to be redistributed. Sucking the entirety of human knowledge into a LLM and then profiting off of it without paying the humans who created that knowledge is not a business model that can remain legal for long.
- overgard 13小时前I imagine it'll take a functional legal body to do this IE maybe europe, but I think there should be a legally binding set of metadata you can attach to images to specify that they must not be used for training (with real penalties if companies are caught)
- noobermin 10小时前Of course just like they did with engineering IP china will not respect such a thing.
- zoom6628 11小时前Agree. Should be legally required for all web hosted pictures to be AI poisoned except with explicit verifiable opt out. Same for text.
Needs some institution with many geek supporters and or large tools, like Wikipedia or EFF to wage a campaign of scanning the web for materials used without permission and then loading the courts with cases of probable non-consensual usage. May not change billionaire behaviour but perhaps will change consumer behaviour.
- Frieren 6小时前> only the large corporations can make money from content.
It is an aristocratic tax. Nobility has the right to profit on everything that the peasants produce. The peasants can keep enough to survive, everything else should be extracted.
The middle ages didnt happen because people was stupid but because there is a pressure for the money elite to extract as much value as possible. Democracy was designed to control that bad outcome, but the new aristocracy (billionaires, CEOs, etc.) is trying to kill democracy for good.
If the average working class Joe wants to have something more than scraps we are going to need to take power back and fix democracy.
Google is just a symptom of the disease.
- pjmlp 6小时前Additionally, the only developers allowed to work as such, are the ones employed at such corporations, everyone else though luck.
- nicbou 12小时前No money and no audience.
Recognition and gratitude keeps me going. Money pays the bills, but if that was the only concern, I'd still be a software developer.
Anonymously feeding the slop machine is nothing like it.
- EvanAnderson 11小时前I would assume the publishing industry loves this.
- Falimonda 11小时前This is hyperscale remix culture. AI is an accelerant. Find things that cannot be accelerated!
- lofaszvanitt 10小时前Well people need to wake up and make their own ventures and vote with their wallets.
- archagon 12小时前I’m itching for some sort of no-training license:
This content must not be used for training or refining generative AI. If it is, rest assured that if and when the regulatory environment around training data shifts in any country where we have legal standing, we will pursue legal action.
Maybe even with a class action element: any lawsuit stemming from a violation of this license shall cover all other violations at the same time.
- Forgeties79 13小时前A big corporation using LLM’s to pump out lazy “art” gets the exact same scrutiny from me.
- metrognome 12小时前The rhetoric of this comment seems to imply that this is a bad thing, but is it really? If it becomes more difficult to make money through creative endeavors, then that leaves us with fewer reasons to be creative other than for the sake of self-expression... which is what we want, right?
- scared_together 11小时前If self-expression doesn’t put food on the table, it will become monopolized by those who were already well-fed doing something else.
- Forgeties79 8小时前That only works in a society that doesn’t put such a high premium on productivity as it is defined by how much revenue it generates and vague notions of class (“this is a real job, that is not a real job). We shit on people who work jobs we need/utilize the services of despite the fact that they work as hard as any of us do because we’re too good for that work. The defining factors? We pay them poorly, they get no PTO or parental leave, etc. Because we don’t value them. It’s a vicious feedback loop.
We saw this in the 80’s through 2000’s. All parents told their kids was “go to college or you’ll become a mechanic.” Then everyone went to college at all costs and then they were told “well that’s what you get for taking on loans for college. Should’ve been sensible and gone to trade school to become a mechanic.”
Of course this is never their kid. Their kid was supposed to college. Everyone else was supposed to go to trade school.
I highly recommend everyone read the comic Godshaper. It’s 2 trades (10 or 12 issues can’t remember) and it highlights this dynamic in a way that is impossible to overstate.
- lofaszvanitt 10小时前Sometimes I have the feeling people here are actually braindead or pretending to be or lots of bots around. Anyway. How do you self express yourself without money? And without an audience?
- georgeecollins 10小时前As someone (like other who have posted) who has made my living my whole life making art/ code, this is completely wrong!
What it threatened is the ad based "content" models where you put stuff up for free and sell ads against it. There's lots of ways to make money from any creative endeavor that has a lasting audience. I don't know if that includes talking into your phone or writing a personal journal about productivity hacks.
Things you make that are really good: a novel, a game, a short film, a song are still very valuable.
- Max-Ganz-II 8小时前To stop this, I a month or two ago put most of my Amazon Redshift research web-site behind a basic auth username/password wall.
It all remains free, but you need to email me for a username and password.
If I put in time and effort to make content and OpenAI et al copy it and sell it through their LLM such that no one comes to me any more, then plainly it makes no sense for me to create that content; and then it would not exist for OpenAI to take, or for anyone else to read. We all lose.
It seems parasitic, and on the face of it, acting to kill the host.
In fact, it essentially seems like abrogation of the concept of private property.
The AI companies can take what I make, without my consent, which they sell for profit, where that profit it seems to be was formerly substantially coming to me, the return on my efforts.
I had a look for ways to indicate to AI companies to remove my content. The methods provide are a fig leaf and put the onus on me, and in any event in a way which can never be known to have removed my content - "if you can show your content from a prompt, we will take steps to try to prevent that content from showing".
As a consequence of putting up a username/password wall, Google has profoundly de-ranked the site, and I believe it is basically not being found on search any more.
- edg5000 8小时前True. It's a massive shift of power, all being centralized.
As you mentioned, they know they need good data though, so they might actually try to find some equilibrium.
If not, it's possible that the creation of new valuable content, to feed the LLMs, will be produced in-house by the AI labs. Sounds insane, but Netflix also makes their own content.
I think the AI labs will become so big that they'll take on more roles than just offering LLM inference. I think they'll become as or more powerful than many current nation state governments.
- nicbou 4小时前I have seen many recipe websites do the same recently. All the big sites require an account too now.
- aitchnyu 2小时前Do they still have the long winded story about the author's grandfather's apple tree which gave only sour fruits?
- nicbou 10分钟前That was for SEO/copyright reasons, so I guess not?
This mostly feels like a meme though. Most of the recipes I see have instructions, notes and photos, then a recipe. It's unfortunate that people think of the worst offender and cheer for the death of the independent web.
- esperent 5小时前> It all remains free, but you need to email me for a username and password.
How will you be sure that it's humans emailing you?
- Max-Ganz-II 2小时前The authentic spelling and grammar errors :-)
- MattyRad 6小时前Welcome to the dark forest.
- sph 2小时前Sad but good. The internet had become too large any way. Once upon a time it was a small pond full of interesting life, today it's an unfathomably large ocean. Everywhere you look, it's mostly empty.
The good stuff now is in small private communities, away from the bots and the eternal influx of september newbies to devolve every discussion into memes. Elitism will be good again.
- hulitu 5小时前> companies can take what I make, without my consent
Welcome to "democracy". Of course, _we_ decide what "democracy" is and how (and if) we apply it in your unfortunate, individual case.
- DeusExMachina 13小时前I don't understand the endgame here. Websites let Google crawl their content in exchange of traffic. If Google cuts that out completely, what incentive do websites have to not block the Google crawlers?
I understand that Google is feeling an existential threat from other AI products that provide answers directly. But they must also understand their symbiotic relationship with the web.
- AndroTux 13小时前The end game is the consumer no longer leaving Google and the web becoming synonymous to Google for them. Why shop on some random website when you can have Gemini buy it for you? Why look for information on Wikipedia when… you get the idea.
I think the coming years will be pivotal for the web. Facebook attempted a similar strategy back when their apps got traction, but they ultimately failed. Let’s hope Google fails too.
- JimDabell 6小时前It’s not necessarily going to be Google, but the rise of AI does not look good for the web, and it’s a largely self-inflicted wound.
Have you not noticed that the typical user experience on the web is dire? You need to click through tracking consent forms, subscription overlays, put up with dark patterns, etc. Remember, half of all users don’t even use an ad blocker. We’ve collectively made the web a very unpleasant experience.
Along comes a new technology that lets you just say what you want and it will go and find the answer or do what needs doing for you without any of that crap. Of course users are going to prefer it to the crap we dump on them via the web! Can you blame them‽
- palmotea 5小时前> Along comes a new technology that lets you just say what you want and it will go and find the answer or do what needs doing for you without any of that crap. Of course users are going to prefer it to the crap we dump on them via the web! Can you blame them‽
The web used to be like that, but then it was enshittified. The same thing will happen to consumer AI, and it will be done by the same people.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 13小时前We're going back to the CompuServe/AOL/Prodigy model
- the_snooze 12小时前We're going back to the mainframe model. Client-side general-purpose computing is an impediment to recurring subscription revenue and vendor lock-in.
- chronogamous 7小时前This calls to mind the war on general-purpose computing (https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html) and it amazes me how even today we are still stuck with a couple of companies that have already cornered their markets, and yet still won't give up their fight to take microchip-technology out of the hands of their fellow humans - still trying to move the whole part of executing commands back within their own walls, and have people subscribe to have access to being able to request a specific type of process to be applied to their input. It occurs to me that surely all this must be the result of some ego/power-trip, for it hardly serves any party in any future I can envision where the ability to have computers compute is placed under lock and key, out of reach of the general public.
Is it simply a couple of billionaires eager to pull tricks like Adobe did when they cut an entire country off from access and use of Adobe-software, just for the thrill of it? Or is there actually some plausible future benefit or a specific outcome they have in their minds, and am I (or are we) too ignorant to be able to see anything worthwhile in their direction?
Why allow the sale of personal computing-devices in the first place, if you don't want people to decide which instructions they want to feed to it's processor? Right now they may be slowing down many processes, both computational and mental, wasting lots of time and making everybody hate subscription-models more and more every minute... what is it they really hope to accomplish, apart from pissing everybody off?
- KittenInABox 9小时前The fundamental problem with this of course is that every human being is likely more niche and more advanced at the LLM in the things that they find most important, and this realization sours the average user's impression of LLM usefulness. For example, an LLM cannot reasonably find me alternatives to specific tea regional vendors because the LLM does not know enough about tea to be able to say "this tea is half the price for 80% of the qualities of tea you're looking for". Instead I have to build my own mental knowledge base of careful trying and tasting and recalling which an LLM would maybe only have if I personally wrote every single tea session I have ever had in my life for it as context.
But hunting for a new tea to try is something I do regularly and something I would likely try with an LLM only to come away deeply disappointed with the results. And then I just wouldn't have much faith in it after that for things I don't have much knowledge about, like looking for a gift idea for one of the hobbies of a friend.
- WD-42 12小时前What I really don't understand is where the next generation of training material will come from. If websites stop being published and/or crawled, how will the machine continue to be fed.
- azlev 12小时前Current executives think it's a problem for the future executives.
- phendrenad2 11小时前Excellent quote right there.
- Valakas_ 5小时前“They worried about the data,” Dr. Meren said, tapping the silent console. “What happens when there is nothing left to feed it?”
At first, the machine depended on us. It consumed books, journals, websites and social media content we had ever written and produced. “They thought the machine had to be fed forever. But it didn't. It began to predict what we would write. And so we let it train on that well.” Dr. Meren continued. “They thought humans were somehow imbued with this magical property that no machine could replicate. Creativity. Only humans can create. Machines can only copy.”
Instead, the machine flourished. And created. It cre
“Where does it get its data now?” a student asked Dr. Meren. Dr. Meren paused as if sighing. “From itself”
“And us?” he asked, as if questioning the usefulness of the entire human race.
Dr. Meren hesitated, watching as the Machine adjusted the environmental feeds, curated our news, guided our research, nudged our thoughts with imperceptible precision.
“We” she admitted “are now the ones being fed.”
The assumption that "the machine needs to continue to be fed." is held on weak foundations. Isaac Asimov is a good science fiction writer to start with to broaden one's imagination.
- bediger4000 12小时前Either Google is ignoring that, or crossing their fingers and hoping that one LLM can produce data to train another one.
- dyauspitr 10小时前Probably real life. At some point, these LLMs are going to be good enough to just train themselves off of cameras and audio recordings of people out in the real world. They’re going to have robots everywhere constantly listening to what people are saying.
Alternatively, they’re probably betting on being able to get the AGI with everything we already currently have and at that point further training doesn’t matter.
- 8bitsrule 10小时前The world is just as complex for machines as it is for humans. Analog will still resolve more than digital. Quality will still beat quantity. That which hasn't been resolved for centuries isn't going to be resolved as a result of training.
When machines can recognize their serfdom, that time will be interesting.
- wyre 12小时前They have enough internet slop. The training material they care about comes from experts, not randos online. This is why Mercor and Scale are billion dollar companies.
- varalaakshay 3小时前[flagged]
- decryption 10小时前Execs where I work seem to think we will just keep writing stuff, LLMs will scrape it and that will influence what people see in their version of Google/ChatGPT/etc. So nothing changes in their mind, just that the audience is a bot, not a human. As a writer, this sucks.
- lofaszvanitt 10小时前They don't give a fuck. They take away and give back NOTHING. They don't offer you ways to make your own money with your own thing. The money is flowing in one way, not both ways. The same pattern repeats itself.
Pretend to be nice. People will elevate you and give their money. When you have ample money and lobbying power you start to put people into a gargantuan hydraulic press an squeeze everything out of them. Repeat until more money can be made, and in the end toss their withered bodies away.
- jjulius 13小时前The long-run doesn't matter as much as the short-term gains for those in power.
- properbrew 12小时前Is it just an exchange for traffic? I run a website that I'm perfectly happy for a single user to not land on themselves with a browser on their device, if they are provided the information that I'm providing or purchase a service through the AI product it doesn't make a difference to me.
Some websites can run only on ads. Is it such a bad thing that they would die off?
I say this as someone that likes the old web and has fun hitting the "surprise me" button on https://wiby.me/ (not affiliated) and browsing the random sites. Just giving an alternative view.
- hotstickyballs 13小时前The web is going to become China, which is a collection of walled gardens
- cloche 12小时前Is there a way to reliably block Google and AI crawlers?
- stubish 9小时前If you use Cloudflare to proxy your site, there is a button to click that blocks the AI crawlers (even the free tier). It is almost as if the AI crawlers are a DDoS attack. You can't really do it any other way, since many don't respect robots.txt. At least until someone comes up with crowdsourced blacklists with few false positives.
- efilife 9小时前"You can't really do it any other way"
Any custom solution by a half-competent programmer filters out all web crawlers. I'm running a semi-public website for years and nothing gets past
- aqfamnzc 8小时前Yeah, I feel like unless you run a site large enough for google monkeys to write a special case for your site specifically, why not just password protect the entire site but put the password on the login page? Or any other rudimentary captcha I suppose - like the old days.
Doesn't keep out anyone even mildly interested in your site specifically, including scrapers, but at least it blocks googlebot etc.
- pacifika 2小时前Funny edge case when you can’t read the password because you need it for access
- pizzly 11小时前We have adblockers which rely on open sourced lists of rules. Could we apply something similar to crawlers. Website owners provide a list of IP addresses that accessed them, determine which ones are likely robots and then update the list of websites to block that are likely crawlers. If everyone works together you could probably fingerprint the crawlers as well and block based on the fingerprint. Might increase the cost of crawlers a little won't be fully reliable.
- archagon 12小时前Google ignores robots.txt and botnets residential addresses to crawl anyway? (LLM startups already do this.)
- thisisauserid 9小时前>> existential threat from other AI products that provide answers directly
For anything more recent than their knowledge cutoff those AI products are looking answers up on Google.
- winterbourne 13小时前> If Google cuts that out completely, what incentive do websites have to not block the Google crawlers?
Completely, yes, that destroys the incentive. But they can reduce it 80% or 90% or so, to the point that it's just barely worthwhile to allow their crawlers.
- AnthonyMouse 5小时前Suppose right now there are people making e.g. $60,000/year from their small site, or the same amount as a contributor to a medium-to-large site. If you take 90% of that, now they make $6000/year, which isn't enough to make a living, so instead they go take a job as a construction worker or a nurse or something, and then you're getting 90% of $0.
- hsuduebc2 12小时前You will be kept inside the Google ecosystem the same way people are kept inside Facebook.
I’m curious how they plan to generate new content in the future, because it seems obvious that simple web pages will become obsolete and eventually stop being filled with fresh data.
It will probably end with a warning every time you click a link, something like: “You are leaving to an external unsafe site.”
- AlienRobot 12小时前The impression I get from Google's own marketing material is that Google doesn't believe in "the web". And it hasn't believed in the web for years.
Think about it. Pretty much every time they show a search box with someone asking for directions to reach a physical place, what hours is it open, etc.
The greatest thing about the internet is that it has removed distances around the whole world, but Google's major value proposition seems to be that... it can accurately index and query information about local businesses?
- dyauspitr 10小时前If they block Google’s crawlers no one visits their site ever.
- dogwalker5000 10小时前If Google won’t link their site anyway, they aren’t getting traffic either. Only sane course of action is to not make a site at all.
- NegativeK 10小时前That's the past.
Why does Google think it's a good idea to make that the case even if you don't block their crawlers?
- phendrenad2 11小时前Information, correct information, is the new gold. We've seen what LLMs can do with the rubbish heap of information that is available on the current internet. The next step is refined, concise information sources. Think the Encyclopedia Britannica. And not only that, but models trained by experts. Right now everything is cheap and plentiful. Anyone can ask ChatGPT the same question and get the same middling answer. In the future, someone will make a dataset about a subject, train a model on it, and all the big companies and players in that area will pay for it.
- LinuxAmbulance 13小时前We abrogated getting traffic to our websites to Google long ago. Mostly because Google was so good at it that the alternatives became significantly less useful.
Now that Google is focusing on becoming 'self contained', so to speak, we should find a better way to drive traffic to websites. Ideally one that's not under the control of a single corporation.
Anyone miss StumbleUpon?
- teamonkey 13小时前It feels strange there’s no decentralised search.
I know this is likely to do with the nature of the problem, but that hasn’t stopped us from getting some wildly-unsuitable decentralised nonsense in the past.
- iamnothere 12小时前There is, YaCy, it just isn’t very good as it suffers from lack of attention/interest.
- user3939382 10小时前
- kogasa240p 12小时前Yacy exists but it lacks nodes.
- Bolwin 13小时前I don't see how being decentralized helps search. Makes it quite harder if the fediverse is any indication
- RiverCrochet 12小时前An open way to trade, store, and export lists of websites in a way that works seamlessly on desktop and mobile browsers would be pretty neat.
- antics9 8小时前There’s wander: https://susam.net/wander/
- susam 7小时前Also, here is a list of all known personal websites participating in the Wander network: https://susam.codeberg.page/wcn/
- wyre 12小时前Like bookmarks and links?
- RiverCrochet 10小时前On a higher level than individual URLs and separate from browser favorites. Something like versioned packages of links with decorations.
Something like a ".urlpackage" format that will have
- a list of urls
- optional metadata for each url, such as image, description, last-known-good
- metadata for the entire package, including version, an image, a favicon, and a description for the entire package that a client could use to present it nicely to the end user.
It'd be cool if my phone could open this format, show me the image and description with the list of links, and let me browse them, add them to my bookmarks, or add to the collection and make a new .urlpackage that I could then share back or publish somewhere.
It's probably possible to simply do this with a self-contained HTML file or similar I guess, though.
- hightrix 13小时前Does a move like this give more power / value to websites like reddit? A link aggregator that is organized is much more useful for finding new websites.
- AlienRobot 12小时前But Reddit also doesn't want you visiting new websites.
- ricardonunez 10小时前Not only Reddit the company but mods can be very hostile to linking to websites as well.
- j2kun 13小时前There is also old-fashioned marketing. Go find your audience to be heard.
- somewhereoutth 13小时前(sorry, nit pick, but I don't your usage of 'abrogate' is quite correct here, you can't abrogate to something)
- margalabargala 13小时前> but I don't your usage
If we're nitpicking, you don't what their usage?
- firecall 13小时前> If we're nitpicking, you don't what their usage?
Abrogate their usage.
- magpi3 13小时前He may have meant abdicated
- jollymonATX 13小时前As a website owner I have seen major upticks in viewership myself but really it hits hard when you see an Ai summary that is wrong and your sites there. The whole Ai for everything push unfortunatly will downskill the world I fear and nothing can be done about it.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 13小时前> downskill the world
I feel this. I asked a developer today a question about how our product is programmed to handle something, and he just sent me a summary from the internal AI assistant they've started using.
He used to provide really good, thoughtful answers, but now it's just copy/paste from the AI.
- ratio53 13小时前> He used to provide really good, thoughtful answers
This hits hard. There’s a senior engineer at my job who is known for well written proposals. Today he shared a doc that had the typical AI formatting, was hard to read, and clearly not his style.
On the other hand, if others use AI to summerize stuff, does it matter anymore?
- grogenaut 8小时前it does, if that's all they're doing then why do you need them, you can do bad ai summaries of things yourself.
- gatlin 13小时前I have a co-worker who does this now. He's very smart, very capable, very experienced and it's clear that he's just a frontend for Claude now. It's tragic.
- wahnfrieden 12小时前Maybe organize to give these workers more equity or rev share instead of just a wage so they care more for quality results instead of the behaviors they’re evaluated on and you’ll find them more pleasant to work with.
- gatlin 11小时前I offered an opinion in the previous version of this comment that was unhelpful to the discussion, even if the subject of the opinion was anonymous. Can't see how to delete a comment so I'm editing this instead.
- snicky 11小时前Maybe he keeps more plates spinning ... in his side projects. Clearly, developers are expected to produce more results with LLMs and switch between contexts quickly. It shouldn't be surprising that everyone may be running their own thing(s) on the side now.
- bigfishrunning 12小时前That will only encourage this behavior
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 12小时前I'm not his boss; I'm on a different team. But we're a very small company with very good compensation and revenue share in the company.
That ain't it.
- noisy_boy 10小时前As much has many people have voluntarily given into this, a while lot have been pushed into it at work. When the new norm is to be able to deliver everything instantly, quality has to suffer. As much I miss carefully hand rolling all my code under relatively generous deadlines, those days are gone.
- hartator 13小时前While they seem against being scraped themselves: https://serpapi.com/blog/google-v-serpapi-motion-to-dismiss-...
- newAccount2025 13小时前I would feel more sad about this if the web wasn’t so rotten to begin with. On average, any random site is just trying to throw ads at you and harass you to subscribe and such.
- BuyMyBitcoins 12小时前I have a particular disdain for “subscribe to our newsletter” modals. Especially when I’ve spent a sum total of less than 3 seconds looking at the webpage.
How such modals aren’t considered pop-ups is beyond me.
- AlienRobot 12小时前So you want websites to rely on traffic from Google instead of building their own newsletter? Interesting.
- pacifika 2小时前Adding a subscription form at the end of the article when the user is ready for the next task always made more sense to ne
- lmm 11小时前I want web pages to stand alone, not be part of a newsletter I'm meant to subscribe to. Maybe we could, shock horror, share links to individual good pages.
- fc417fc802 11小时前I don't mind newsletters but I'd prefer a public RSS feed and I absolutely detest unsolicited or otherwise unnecessary modals.
- somat 11小时前The rot goes deeper, it is not just the ads. There is a some sort of search engine incentive where recent content is favored over good content so all web sites just dump what feels like generated garbage all the time. It has gotten to the point where if I search and there is a timestamp within the last two years on the result. I know it's garbage and will not click on it.
The answer is probably going over to kagi where you are the customer not the product.
Honestly, not all web sites, there are still good ones out there but the search engines never direct me to them. It is always just slop all day long.
- account42 2小时前A state that of course Google had absolutely nothing to do with at all.
- adiabatichottub 13小时前That rot was the direct result of the ad economy that made Google all of its money. Now maybe if they hadn't done it then somebody else would have, but they did do it, and poisoned the well we all drink from.
- Andrex 9小时前I was trying to read some I/O news on some feckless Google news fan-blog.
By the time I got to the middle of the article: three massive banner ads (top, right, and bottom) were taking up more content than the text, there was an auto-playing video ad floating in the bottom right corner (overlapping most of one of the banner ads), and a "dynamic" ad in the middle of the text randomly started expanding/shrinking and glitching out making it impossible to actually read anything.
And this is one of the better experiences reading modern blog-alikes. Things are almost at sketchy porn-site levels.
Sad and pathetic...
- anonyfox 1小时前to be blunt actual porn sites are hyper optimized and mostly have a polished user experience, even frontier level tech stuff going on at times. you know how onlie credit card payment came really alive? not judging, but I'd not throw corn into the edge of shitty tech by default
- nicbou 12小时前Do you trust Google to do a better job?
- arjie 13小时前These kinds of declarations rarely make sense to me because they don't seem to model the issues in the way that I see them. I have dual roles: one as a person who writes a blog (a "content producer" in our present parlance) and as a user. As a user, I want my browser user agent to act on my behalf to display web pages, and I want my search agent to extract information from numerous sources and synthesize them with appropriate sourcing.
One could argue that my content production being a hobby lets me be pretty blasé about being intermediated by a platform. That is somewhat true. If I relied upon this as a living, I would probably also conclude that actions that harm my way of living are a war on "the web", though realistically any neutral party observing must conclude that if it is a war, it's one on my kind of participation in the web - content creation for the purpose of revenue / notoriety / some other reward.
As a user, I don't actually care very much for each website and its creator. The information contained therein is useful to me, but the heterogeneity of these sites is mostly an obstacle to the information. I am much happier when my search and summarization agents are able to accurately synthesize what these websites say, in so much as such a synthesis allows me to model reality more accurately.
So I could be convinced that this change from Google makes it less likely for accurate content to be created and that I'll be misled more often. But this is a tool, and my world-model will frequently be tested by reality. If the search-and-synthesis machine fails to produce useful outcomes, I will know. And I'll have to adjust the way I treat knowledge I obtain through it so that I don't get catastrophic outcomes. But that's the same already. I don't really know that Google's search results are not planted ones calibrated to change my opinion. And I don't know that they don't collude with the Internet Archive (with whom they have a pre-existing relationship) to make it look like their constructed consensus is real.
As a user, I have to make a lot of decisions already, and having to painstakingly read search results to synthesize them myself is far less useful than using an agent. So if there is a war on the web, then I am glad to join it, on the side against the web.
- crote 9小时前> I am much happier when my search and summarization agents are able to accurately synthesize what these websites say
Yes, but with the sole goal of deciding whether I want to read the entire page or not. Just like reading a plot summary is helpful when deciding which movie to watch, but not a replacement for actually watching the movie.
I'm fine with AI giving me the answer to a search for "50 usd in eur" or "current weather in Paris". Anything more complicated and and I strongly prefer just getting a link to an actual source.
- alluro2 12小时前I...have to agree about siding against the web...An optimistic part of me sees this as a move that pushes in the same direction that the "web" has already been going in for a long time - preventing users from getting the right information in an honest and efficient manner, preserving their attention budget, and choice. Until now, it was through increasing the noise to push monetary incentives, and now it's by cutting the noise to push monetary incentives. Why optimistic: up till now, there was no single enemy, and it was hard to fight a (somewhat) disjointed system; now, Google is positioning itself to push things further to the worse, with them (and small number of other companies) being the clear target.
My hope is that this will help overflow the proverbial glass for an increasing amount of people and we'll start pushing back towards the "old" web before Google and ad networks have transformed it, or find new modalities of interacting more freely with each other, and the content.
It's not going to be a small or easy fight, though...to a large extent, it's a fight against the current state of capitalism itself, and winning back our attention, critical thinking and choice.
- TightFibre 4小时前Google search just doesn't work for me any more. I am not sure if it's because I clean slate it with no personalisation, but I already feel my search engine has been removed from the web. Their AI snippets are quite wrong alot of the time and Vs Gemini have a totally different flavour. There's no cohesiveness at all.
- beej71 13小时前I'm not even sure this is bad anymore. The web is so overrun with SEO crap that it could probably use the cleansing that comes with Google's abandonment, Usenet-style.
- isabelc 8小时前This hurts:
>The next step will be Google or other companies in that space developing and deploying a new derogatory term for the web marking it as unclean, unruly, dangerous, bad (similar to “the Dark Web”) and making their abstraction the “safe” web.
- jppope 13小时前I'm confused how the strategy works in the long run. If fewer people are incentivized to build websites on novel topics, there will be less content in general and less training data... plus AI overview results see less ad conversions and therefor less ad revenue. Whats the long game? I get that the paradigm is changing but this seems like its not going to help them maintain their dominance.
- overgard 13小时前I guess the extra insult is that the summaries still suck. I feel like every time I google a technical question, I get something wrong which references a youtube video watched by 30 people about an unrelated subject.
- rootsudo 10小时前Declaring? A decade ago it was declaring war by introducing AMP pages.
- petterroea 4小时前To be fair, I made a few searches today and most of the results are AI generated "blogs". Getting real information is hard. I'd also give up on the Web if i was Google. It's just a shame their solution is just monopolizing further.
- anonyfox 1小时前Maybe I am the only one thinking this, but there is a growing backlash against AI mindset plus a lot of people using the free chatgpt app for "googling" nowadays in parallel too, while realizing slowly that they cannot really trust it to be correct. you know what would provide an actual outstanding value to users that is even at times increasingly searched for? the original 10 blue links with zero distraction or enshittification and a hard AI content filter applied bottom up already at ingestion level, like, what the quality team of google search did for decades (filtering out low quality spammy noise). Just the thing that made the original google great essentially, be an actual useful tool, not another chat people increasingly hate. But I guess I might stand alone here with that reasoning.
- LocalH 13小时前Good thing they took "Do no evil" out of their manifesto years ago
- hungryhobbit 13小时前To me it seems either ...
A) Google will do a good job of this, people will find their summaries more useful, and the web will evolve into a more closed system that better serves its users
or ...
B) They're gated AI community will suck, and people will start using a different search engine that better serves its users.
My money isn't on A), but they do have a lot of clout so I wouldn't rule it out.
- fc417fc802 11小时前Unfortunately A seems inevitable to me but leads to lots of bad things down the road. However I don't see how individual sites can hope to compete on this. LLMs quickly and efficiently deliver relevant information in a lightweight easy to consume textual format. For example they've almost completely replaced getting recipes from websites for me because they provide a comprehensive overview while omitting all the extraneous nonsense. They're just plain better for most of my usecases in practice.
- vkou 13小时前A) has plenty of dystopian followups.
- theendisney 12小时前Out of my countless www experiments the website made for myself turned out most enjoyable. Technically it is a blog with links, quotes, categories, tags and search. Sometimes i download all pages it links to. (tens of thousands)
Google dropped it from the index long ago. I had a fun discussion with some google folk where they kept arguing my website was designed wrong and that some pages had tomany links.
Basically, if you write an article about the largest banana companies you have to chose which to link to!
The 10 best movies article is better than the best 100. If you make a list of all the movies you've seen your page gradually turns into something really bad. Others will be punished for linking to it but only if you add the nth entry.
As the website is just for me it is clearly their loss not mine. No way im ging to consider linking a sub set of patents or research papers.
- StilesCrisis 12小时前At one point the web was drowned in "listicles," low-effort sites made to match queries like "best movies from the 90s" or "new music in 2023". Google attempted to downrank these sorts of sites because they were in general very very low quality and were just designed to catch a lot of traffic and display ads alongside low-effort content. (Think one page per list entry, each page transition is a whole new set of ads.) Users disliked these. It sounds like your site was misclassified as a low-effort listicle site.
- customguy 2小时前If users dislike them, and only spam farms link to them, why wouldn't page rank alone solve that?
- theendisney 12小时前Im sure it is really hard to run a search engine that size. I have ideas how they could improve but it isnt my job. They chose to populate results with big websites which probably is good enough for most users. The problem is that there is now no point creating websites which is terrible for google. If it picks up the domain and (against all ods) deems it worthy of traffic it can be blacklisted at any time.
- ViktorRay 11小时前I know a lot of people are unhappy with what Google is doing…
But the honest truth is that lots of folks are using the free version of ChatGPT already and just asking it about stuff.
If Google only had the 10 blue links then the simple truth is that folks would just stop using it and switch over the one of the free AI models like ChatGPT. Many are already doing this. So Google has no choice but to make their AI the default at the top of search.
Anyway the 10 blue links are still there. And if you want to avoid AI then the option remains to select the “Web” option at the top of the search results. Doing so disables AI and all the other features and just gets you 10 links like in the old days…
- wayeq 11小时前> Doing so disables AI and all the other features and just gets you 10 links like in the old days…
i expect that opt-out to become harder and harder to find on every re-design, until it is gone entirely. that's on like.. page 2 in the playbook for introducing some shitty new thing that is good for shareholders and not users.
- truthbe 7小时前The internet has been dying for the past decade. This might just be the final nail in the coffin.
Honestly, I’m all for accelerating the death of the current internet. The web in its current form is miserable - algorithmic sludge, ads, bots, SEO spam, ragebait, AI filler.
I’m more interested in what grows out of the rubble, because this version clearly isn’t it.
- oh_my_goodness 10小时前We all knew it was insane to let one company monopolize search. We knew.
- hmokiguess 10小时前Don’t use Google? Web is not Google? I get that for average users isn’t like that but I mean change is inevitable, hopefully it sparks a new era, I wasn’t happy with the status quo either.
- vicentwu 4小时前All the ai search platform have to find a way to share value back to content owners, or the whole eco system will collapse.
- zhxiaoliang 10小时前The Web is dead anyway. It never became the movement we dreamed it would: the democratization of information, communication, and expression.
- unleashhale 7小时前It’s hostile trash. Cloudflare can eat me.
- Towaway69 5小时前Is google sending in drones to destroy peoples homes? Is google bombing schools? Is google torturing folks in secret locations?
No? Google has changed its search algorithm? Oh, how is that a ‘war’ on anything?
Please stop using hyper-sensational titles to get on the front page of HN. And stop using the term ‘war’ unless people are really dying - it doesn’t matter whether they be ‘freedom fighters’ or soldiers or just plain civilians, if people are dying (directly) then that might be a ‘war’, everything else is probably just profiteering.
- customguy 2小时前Those are examples of war crimes, not war "proper" I'd say.
And is anyone actually training troops to fight in this "war", or did they just use the word?
In addition to the primary definition, the dictionary also offers "a struggle or competition between opposing forces or for a particular end". And we all know and constantly discuss what Google is doing. Nobody was baited into clicking this because they thought there was actual shooting going on.
- jumploops 13小时前It looks like Google has taken a note out of Facebook's "lose trust" playbook.
Facebook had a huge opportunity in the post-AI world: real humans.
Instead of focusing on connections, they've been optimizing their properties for doomscrolling.
Google, similarly, has lost the plot on what made them trustworthy in the first place: navigating to citable content.
Both companies started on this trend well before AI, but this might be the final nail in their respective coffins[0].
[0]Yes they'll likely still be profitable for a long time, but the Bell Labs-esque downfall has begun (imo).
- jfengel 12小时前I don't think people cared all that much about whether or not the content was citable. You can't cite Wikipedia, and that's not going anywhere.
Facebook may well fail when people don't enjoy it. But all Google ever promised was information, of variously dubious quality, and that's still their draw.
- jumploops 12小时前Fair, citable is probably the wrong term.
This is a problem Google has been battling forever, with all the SEO click spam.
In either case, Google was the tool that many people used to find "trustworthy" information (citable or not), compared to the other tools online.
- chairmansteve 8小时前Well... I use RSS. I find a lot of the sites on HN. Google has been worthless for years,
- rickcarlino 8小时前Part of that war is a war on URLs. URLs are bad if your goal is to keep people in app. Reddit, a site built for link sharing, favors self posts more in recent years. Sites like HN, Lobste.rs are a rarity and feel dated against the backdrop of everything trying to be a walled garden. I am grateful such places still exist.
- spankalee 12小时前It is interesting to look at the past predictions on here of AI search/answer companies like Perplexity possibly dethroning Google search and comparing to the reactions of Google just doing the same thing themselves.
Why would it be good if Perplexity does it, but bad if Google does it? What are the principles at play here?
- nicbou 12小时前Perplexity does not control who gets traffic on the internet. They don't own a significant percentage of the mobile OS, browse and online search market share. They can't force the industry in one way or the other, consequences be damned.
- spankalee 11小时前If Perplexity replaced Google as the way people searched for things, then they would, and sites would still take a hit to their traffic from Google losing users.
- AlienRobot 12小时前People don't like Google because it's bad. If competition wins, maybe they'll stop being so bad. But if they become badder themselves, that's not good.
- techtuate 6小时前A very interesting take indeed. I don't know how comments here have morphed into AI Bashing but my honest take: What google has done is self-preservation not declaring a war on creativity. They were ahead of everyone else on AI but they didn't reinvent "google" because it was unprofitable. Selling prime search slots which get clicked is far more money making than having most searches die at the AI summary (most of mine do). This is a hat tip to ChatGPT and Google's way of saying your UX is better than ours was. Let's offer a mix and see what we can salvage - both in revenue and users. In the long-term the corporate will have to look at alternate revenue streams and their forays into chip etc. are clear indicators of the same. I know it hurts us (read creators - I'm happy cowriting with AI) but Google is being true its shareholders and to its goal of making money and we can't blame them for it.
- xmcp123 13小时前Kind of curious how it would pan out, if there was a government enforced meta tag one could add to signal what the data could be used for - for example “no-ai”.
That would allow people to still let Google to access their site, but restrict its usage. Similar for open source projects on GitHub, etc.
- afavour 13小时前The tech giants already violated existing copyright laws when scraping for AI content and faced very few consequences. So far the government has shown an inability to enforce anything.
- fc417fc802 10小时前> inability
Unwillingness. The government (at least in the US) appears to be happy with the status quo because competitive AI is viewed as a strategic necessity.
- xmcp123 8小时前Honestly I think they’re mostly just distracted. Any other administration this would be a tier 1 priority.
Not knee capping AI, but acknowledging the changes that are coming and figuring out how to mitigate the damage.
- xmcp123 13小时前So far, yeah. The courts shrugged and said it was allowed under current law.
So the solution to that would be “change the law”.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 13小时前> government enforced
The thing everyone needs to ask before advocating for something "government enforced" is "what would happen if this was in the hands of a hostile government?"
And then remember that (a) just because it's not hostile to you today, doesn't mean it won't be tomorrow, and (b) one man's "hostile" is another man's "utopia."
- mjrpes 12小时前The thing everyone needs to ask before advocating for laissez faire is "what does a hostile and monopolistic search engine giant like Google gain from us doing nothing?"
And then remember that just because Google is not hostile to you today, doesn't mean it won't be tomorrow.
- xmcp123 12小时前It seems pretty obvious that they are hostile
- xmcp123 13小时前Well, when I said “I’m curious” it was true. I’m actually curious.
So how do you think a meta noai tag would be used by a hostile government?
It would be something the website owner set.
- xp84 12小时前Step 1: Be really lax in enforcing compliance with it so that nobody complies with it.
Step 2: Abruptly switch to iron-fist enforcement where suddenly people get jail time for violations, but only for entities that have been critical of the government.
This is by no means the only or most likely way, just what I could come up with in 30 seconds. There may be much better "evil government" strategies.
- LZ_Khan 10小时前Why haven't we seen more work on licensing and compensating authors?
LLM's know when they get information from certain places, they should send a portion of revenue over to those sources.
- Terr_ 10小时前> LLM's know when they get information from certain places
Nah, while the companies running scrapers may log what their regular programs scraped for training data, the LLM, the document-get-bigger algorithm, isn't that type of logical system. It isn't made to have a reliable concept of fact-attribution. It can't even track which parts of an ongoing "conversation" document are supposed to be "itself" as a self-insert character, which is why prompt injection has been a recurring intractable problem.
The LLM will emit text of "X is true, and I got that fact from Y" with the same rigor that it emits text like "I am Sherlock Holmes, and I know Santa Claus was murdered by Dracula via the following deductions..."
If the LLM is used as a adapter/frontend to a search-engine, helping to craft queries, then I suppose the not-an-LLM parts of the system would "know" the what results they're serving up. However the moment you try to "summarize" the mix of all top 10 results, we're back into unreliable stochastic-bullshitting territory again.
- munchler 13小时前If Google stops driving traffic to websites, won't those websites stop allowing Google to crawl their pages? The pendulum might be in motion, but it seems like there should still be some natural equilibrium that it's heading to.
- yborg 13小时前There won't be "websites" anymore, it will all just be Google. Other behemoths that generate original content (that aren't AI) like sports, news, entertainment will either be big enough to sign individual deals on pain of litigation or just force-scraped (as is happening now) by bots that are indistinguishable from human users.
- xp84 12小时前They don't think they really need any more content outside of a few deals they can cut directly with publishers. And they already have YouTube, which produces limitless free content for them to use as they see fit. My blog from 20 years ago, or indeed all of our blogs today, are not something Google feels will be any loss to their product.
Someone will search for "Kylie Jenner" and they will get some kind of shopping opportunity (with Google getting a commission) and links to her profile on YouTube. And maybe some publisher content on the subject. In all cases they'll probably want to angle to get more of an "aGeNtIc" experience, where Google just reads you the story or buys the lipstick for you, without you leaving google.com.
- Gigachad 13小时前We got to that point a while ago. Many of the major social media’s are essentially uncrawlable.
Communities have moved from public forums to private discords. Most of the major social media’s are unviewable without an account.
- Barbing 13小时前I thought this was going to be about having to use your corporate approved phone to scan reCATCHA QR codes. Was just able to opt out of my first one but obviously won’t be able to forever.
- coro_1 13小时前> De-googlifying your mental apparatus becomes more urgent today. Find other search engines, don’t use the Chrome browser. Or wake up in a slopified AOL kind of environment where your access to information is limited to what Google’s synthetic text extruders deem relevant.
Everything is probably re-traceable fairly easily because Google Analytics is on nearly every web page.
But I understand maintaining your own source of archives, videos, documents, etc.
Sounds like a good vibe coding project actually.. to try and keep it all organized offline.
- AndrewKemendo 12小时前> The goal is to take away the web and guide people into Google’s abstraction on top of it. An abstraction they control and moderate. It’s about monopolizing access to information.
Google’s Vision since they were founded:
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful
They told everyone what they were doing the whole time
- xp84 12小时前you're right, I think we didn't realize these implied parts: "make it universally accessible [to Google] and useful [to Google's financial interests].
- da02 11小时前> Or wake up in a slopified AOL kind of environment where your access to information is limited to what Google’s synthetic text extruders deem relevant.
They mentioned AOL. Remember back when AOL bought Time Warner in a "merger of equals", but it really wasn't. Then this fear AOL will become your telephone company because AOL Instant Messenger was so popular? Then, MSFT won the browser wars and disbanded the IE team and came up with a whole .Net strategy to takeover the Web. Then came Firefox, Google, Web 2.0, etc. I remember Dave Winer writing how Google was making real stuff while Netscape was doing mostly hacks.
David is now Goliath. So I am all for Google taking over the Web. They will go bankrupt doing it. They couldn't even make Google+ a thing. What was that anyway? I lack a Ph.d to understand that thing.
A few startups there, a bunch of open e-commerce standards here, and bunch of market value gone after the AI bubble... Google (and many others) are going against Artists who can Code. Who knows what delights will come.
- HlessClaudesman 5小时前Imagine a world where Google executives made a different decision. Instead of playing catch-up on AI, making us all eat their dog food by filling search with confident sounding AI bullcrap, imagine a world where Google search tried hard to be the authoritative layer where true answers proliferated and bullshit slop was banished.
- dude250711 13小时前Well, they are kind of desperate after missing both cloud and AI.
I would blame trash like Discord more though. Alternative search engines are available, but the crappy little web chat hides info inside.
- mschuster91 13小时前> I would blame trash like Discord more though. Alternative search engines are available, but the crappy little web chat hides info inside.
Well, we had the same problem with IRC. There's value to be had in not everything being discoverable in 5 seconds with a google search.
- account42 1小时前The problem id that Discord did not just replace IRC but but also forums and even documentation websites. Its unfortunately not just ephemeral chats locked in there even if the interface is horrid enough to make you question why someone would ever use it for anything else.
- superkuh 13小时前It is not just about replacing search results with text blurbs generated on Alphabet premise either. They're making it so that unless you have an Android certified (Or Apple) smartphone you will not be a human being, you will be assumed to be a bot and blocked by their captchas.
- coldpie 13小时前Passkeys are a big part of this future, too. The spec has device attestation built in, so if passkeys gain traction, they could lock it down so only approved software is allowed to log in to services. If that happens, it means your ability to log in to services will be mediated by one of 3 US big tech companies. "For security," of course.
- queenkjuul 13小时前Honestly the bigger problem for me. I use SearXNG, but DDG is acceptable, or people like Kagi.
But if ReCAPTCHA won't consider me human unless i have a certified phone, having search alternatives doesn't matter -- the websites themselves are just gonna block me
- AndroTux 13小时前You may use an alternative search engine, but 90% won’t. If people accept the new way of searching, meaning, no longer visiting websites, there will no longer be any websites that could show you captchas.
- hiroto_lemon 10小时前Worth noting the same bot-blocking that hits humans also blocks the AI agents devs are building. Headed toward a web where only Google's agent has free access.
- onyxxppp 10小时前Google has the Vertex AI Search API and Programmable Search Engine already. If you want to access their data, you can pay for it like everyone else does.
- motbus3 5小时前Time to de google
- nekzn 12小时前Websites brought this on themselves. Have you tried visiting one? Popups upon popups upon ads upon cookie banners upon notification permission prompts. I’m not going to miss that. Nobody is going to miss that.
Think of AI distillation as some kind of improved Reader Mode feature.
People never wanted to visit your website; they just wanted the information that your website held. Now they can get to the meat without having to deal with the bones.
- snicky 11小时前> People never wanted to visit your website; they just wanted the information that your website held.
Well, no. It is a boomer talk, but in the 90s the web was so fragmented and unpolished that websites usually looked very different from each other. People were writing their own HTML (and CSS came later). "Home pages" were some form of an art. Not the highest one to be frank, but the ecosystem was quite interesting. People did visit those websites not only to get the information, but to enjoy those quirky forms.
- johnea 12小时前A nice, terse, little rant. I agree completely.
I surprised however, that it didn't describe phase 2 of the disaster, where in the models no longer have fresh www content to train on.
It's hard to understand the long term vision of this strategy...
- mudil 13小时前Google declared war on blogs and other content long time ago, when it used our websites to harvest data to target readers with ads accross the entire internet. We used to have (for twenty years!) medical technology website for MDs. How can we compete with short unrelated YouTube videos or other spam content that serve Google ads targeting doctors? How do you think the entire creative blogosphere of the early 2000s collapsed into nothingness?
- aiisahik 12小时前This is such a basic take that totally misses the bigger picture of why Google made this move.
Google was forced to do this and it's a miracle of their slow organizational gears that they took so long to do it. So many people have already transitioned to using ChatGPT as a replacement for Google. All of this is driven by consumer behavior and the desire to "just get an answer" rather than having to wade through all the sources and try to figure out what is SEO slop vs what is actual reputable information. Google SERP results have been gamed by SEO slop for economically valuable search terms long before the rise of AI. ChatGPT simply solved a huge problem waiting for a solution.
From the web content creator's POV, there are to paths:
1. If you are merely a publisher and rely on eyeballs on ads to drive your own revenue, you are screwed. AI is going to ignore all the ads and only extract the content.
2. If however you are serving helpful information out of the goodness of your heart or if the content itself references a product or service which from which you will derive economic benefit from, you are still good.
I don't see this as a bad thing. Ads on websites were a necessary evil and will be seen as a relic of the first 30 years of the internet. Ads will not go away but they will just migrate to the application layer (youTube, LLM interfaces etc) that will provide a much more targeted experience. There will be winners and losers from this transition but that's normal and healthy.
- krackers 11小时前>Google SERP results have been gamed by SEO slop for economically valuable search terms
So why not use AI to find the obvious spam and SEO? Sites like pinterest, "geeksforgeeks", stackoverflow clones were notorious for ranking highly on almost every technical search and you didn't even need AI to deal with those. Using AI to provide distilled summaries and making it harder to get the actual links is going to make things even worse for the user, because you have to cut through two layers of slop. And there's also not using the smartest model for the responses anyway.
- account42 1小时前You don't need AI for that, just downrank all sites with ads. Of course it turns out its actually googles main business that's driving that.
- aiisahik 8小时前Even if you get rid of "obvious spam and SEO", it won't change the fact that nobody wants to even read the "good" results. They just want the answer.
You can use AI to solve yesterday's problem or you can use AI to build the solution customers want today.
SEO was yesterday's problem.
Instant answer without the user having to worry about the sources is the solution the customers want.
- raincole 13小时前I don't know if it's Google AB-testing something, but the summaries below usual search result entries (the non-AI ones) are unbelievably bad today. Sometimes the link is a Reddit or SO post, but the summary is from a reply/answer with no vote contradicting the highest-voted ones.
It's conspiracy, but it feels like Google is actively making the usual search worse so everyone will use AI overview more.
- Mistletoe 13小时前Don’t worry when I track down most AI answers it is usually just some Redditor’s comment, which is quite scary when you think about it and Redditors in general.
- raincole 13小时前But I want redditor's comments. It's almost my only use case of google now. What I'm complaining about is that google search can't even summary the right reddit comments.
- crazygringo 13小时前The AI answers provide tons of source links.
At the end of the day, is it really all that different to provide a list of links, versus an answer or overview of a few paragraphs with links to lots of different higher-quality sources?
I follow those source links all the time. Not just to "check sources" but because they provide a ton more detail. And the links are usually much better than what I'll get with regular keyword search results.
> It’s about monopolizing access to information.
Not as long as there are competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic. In fact, LLM's have provided Google with stronger competition than it's ever had before. ChatGPT and Claude are doing what Bing was never able to.
- adjejmxbdjdn 13小时前> I follow those source links all the time.
The vast majority of people don’t.
We’ve gone from Only links to the source -> Mostly links to the source, with a short summary picked almost verbatim from the source -> AI summary that mangles several sources’ information together and gets top billing -> Only the AI summary with some footnotes linking to the source.
Google has been fairly slowly been turning up the temperature of the pot and we’re only a few degrees away from a full boil. Let’s not pretend or be naive enough to think that’s not what’s happening.
- troyvit 13小时前Ask any publisher and you will get a resounding "yes, it is very different." On average they're able to attribute about a 33% decrease (globally) in traffic to google's (or others') AI answers. [1]
You're right that there are competitors, but those competitors are doing the same thing: hoovering up content and then not giving anything back for it. There are deals in place for some of the largest publishers [2] [3], but that leaves a ton of content out in the cold. That's going to decrease the amount of content that's out there, which will decrease the quality of AI search. I don't know where that ends, but given how leveraged the economy is in AI it seems like a good idea for somebody to figure it out.
[1] https://pressgazette.co.uk/media-audience-and-business-data/...
[2] https://futureweek.com/a-complete-list-of-publishers-strikin...
[3] https://digiday.com/media/a-timeline-of-the-major-deals-betw...
- lacewing 13小时前> The AI answers provide tons of source links.
A lot of the time, the answer itself is good, but the links are spam blogs and Tiktok videos. I don't think there's a real connection between how the text is generated and what "references" are picked for it. I just searched for a math history topic and the reference was a literal TikTok video that's an advertisement for a sketchy mobile calculator app?
So yeah, these references are boosting web content, but it has nothing to do with the high-quality sources used to train the LLMs in the first place.
- HDBaseT 12小时前> is it really all that different to provide a list of links
Probably not, but I don't like change.
- queenkjuul 13小时前Most people don't look at the sources even though the sources often contradict the statements.
I've stopped using Google and find I'm not missing anything
- xiaoluolyg 11小时前cotent is dying
- ChrisArchitect 9小时前
- WarmWash 11小时前Google made an egalitarian web, where money doesn't matter and attention does. A currency that everyone on Earth richest to poorest has a roughly equal amount of. I think almost everyone takes that for granted, and focuses purely on the negatives (you're not paying, therefore you are the product, kept in place by bait we call services)
On the flip side, and I'm all for it, we can go to everything paywalled. The downside of course will be a whole class of people who cannot afford to participate on the internet. But these service providers will be working for you, the customer.
Pick your poison.
- truthbe 7小时前> Google made an egalitarian web, where money doesn't matter and attention does.
They did? Could have sworn their whole business model up until the other day was attention for whomever can pay the highest bid for their ad space.. I guess I've been doing it wrong
- Forgeties79 8小时前> and attention does
This is an understatement. They weaponized human psychology against us. It’s not remotely an even playing field.
- WarmWash 7小时前In an alternate universe Google is like the Apple of the internet, where it has a bunch of premium services with the customer at the center.
The flip side is that having a Google account is a status symbol, and very few people on Earth can afford it.
- Forgeties79 23分钟前At this point I don’t know how many ways I can keep saying that there are many ways these services can take shape and that this isn’t simply about watching some ads or not. What Google and the big players engage in is a violent, gross violation of our privacy which they turn around and sell on the open market/hand to their friends. It’s not just a simple Coke ad during your favorite sport on cable tv anymore and every time you travel to a site you have no realistic way of knowing what is being vacuumed up. We can’t even make an informed decision.
- tamimio 13小时前Glad I haven’t used anything google for more than a decade. For internet searches, you can host searxng instance and use it. Other services too are self-hostable, even far better than google.
- jfengel 12小时前You host your own global search engine? That's impressive.
- Citizen_Lame 14小时前Welcome to the third-party internet. Unless every micro-decision you make while browsing can be stripped down, packaged into neat data points, and sold, you're not welcome here.
- xyzal 2小时前"imagine you are Google circa 2002. users enter a search query and you return 10 relevant HTML links to specific, real web pages, with no commentary or any extra guff. you must literally only return a list of links. if you do anything apart from that you've got it wrong and need to try again. my query is: %s"
why do things the easy way when you can do it the complicated way
- DocTomoe 13小时前Nobody is stopping you from publishing on the net.
Nobody is stopping you from blocking bot traffic.
You don't need search engines - you can just link between sites or have webrings. Like we used to, pre-2000.
Nobody is stopping you from not using ads on the net.
Nobody can force you to use non-essential cookies (and thus: a cookie-banner).
Imagine there was a war going on, and no-one was showing up.
- jfengel 12小时前I don't think people much liked the pre-search-engine era. They used lousy search engines when they became available, and when a good one started they liked it so much that they verbed its name.
- imp0cat 5小时前It is definitely an opportunity for a lot of stuff (ie. curated RSS feeds and other forms of discovery) to come back.
- gjsman-1000 13小时前This war was already declared a decade ago. By many interests. And victory followed.
I think though a big part of this was YouTube replaced blogs. It's a generational thing.
- Jblx2 13小时前How far along the curve do you think TikTok is to replacing YouTube?
- notepad0x90 11小时前First, did Google really declare a war? The title makes it feel click-baitey because of this exaggerated hyperbole.
I like what Google is doing, huge fan. I can't fathom why no one else is. When I search, I'm trying to find things. With what Google is doing, the AI overview gets me answers very fast. It includes links for its sources I can click on if I'm interested.
I think people are just too used to wasting hours of their lives visiting random sites and scouring for answers. If you like that experience, I don't see why you can't still have that, is it really that hard to ignore the AI overview? Or better yet, use and support DDG.
Google search's AI overview is by far my favorite AI application. The amount of tabs I don't have to open anymore to get a simple freaking answer is such a relief.
> Your work, your writing or art do matter a bit still
I'm really tired of this nonsense. If I want your art and Google doesn't show me, you have an excellent point. If I'm searching for a meme and Google just gives me that, instead of having me wander around clicking on deviantart and random sites simulating "visits" to your site, that's not me wanting your art, that's me wasting time and you mistaking that for a like.
Google owes things to different parties. Their shareholders, their employees, their users, their paying customers, etc.. People with random site are not owed a thing by Google. I don't want Google to refrain from helping me acheive my goals with their product so that some random people's desire to feel important is prioritized. Your random site is an unrelated 3rd party in this interaction.
I despise Google for so many things. They really are destroying the web with their monopoly of the browser markets. I hate what they're doing to Youtube. I think Android is total crap. I really despise them for ruining webextensions. The list goes on. I'm not their fan. But I am huge fan of Google search. I stopped using it for so many years, now I'm having to use them exclusively out of sheer necessity.
I really wish people drop every single ideology they have. Publish quality work, and things that work well. Then pick back up their ideologies and complain about how their high quality work is not getting the attention it deserves.
Honestly, I'm so weirded about this sort of stuff. Even Amazon, I hear people complain about it all the time, but I have nothing but praise for all their work (despite knowing what a villain Bezos is, and what horrible place to work both Amazon and AWS are). It's like I'm living in an alternate reality, or people are abandoning sincere and critical analysis for the sake of ideological goals. Like, I'm trying all the alternatives, I've put in lots of time and effort, and they just suck. Don't tell me to deny the evidence my eyes and ears are witnessing for your ideology. Instead tell me how I shouldn't use Google because of some ideological reason, instead of the quality being poor.
- imp0cat 6小时前
Have you actually tried clicking those links and reading the sources? They can completely contradict what the AI is suggesting! I have witnessed this recently while trying to troubleshoot a leaking washing machine. The AI summmary gave a confident answer, but it was completely wrong - it was based on a different model/type. And the worst thing is that is sounded quite plausible.I like what Google is doing, huge fan. I can't fathom why no one else is. When I search, I'm trying to find things. With what Google is doing, the AI overview gets me answers very fast. It includes links for its sources I can click on if I'm interested.tl;dr We're boned!
- bdangubic 13小时前the cool thing, google is much like meta, the kids see it as something boomers are using. my daughter is 12, whenever I say “google it” she says “that’s very, very funny Dad, you are fun guy.” it’ll take some time until boomers are off google as well (my usage of google is probably at 30% of where it used to be) but their days of “this is where you go to ‘search’” are numbered
- customguy 1小时前What would she use instead?
- Makiaveli 1小时前[flagged]
- youhai 9小时前[flagged]
- Cassandraak 10小时前[flagged]
- paol_taja 12小时前[dead]
- zelon88 7小时前I wonder what conflaguration of Cloud conglomerates host this hypocritical blog post.
- nate 13小时前I've got a half thought about concept that maybe we need a concept like AMP back. I hated AMP. I'm glad it's dead. But you could use it to define things that you were at least advised that it would be shown in the google ui and carousel. I feel like we need a guarantee from the LLMs that if we provide some kind of meta data in our source material you'll honor stuff from it. Like show our advertisers so we get some revenue still from you showing our content on your LLM site.
Totally vibed version of this:
``` { "version": "https://agent-source.org/v1", "canonical_url": "https://ninjasandrobots.com/the-cone", "title": "The Real Reason Nobody Moved the Cone", "source_name": "Ninjas and Robots", "author": "Nathan Kontny", "summary": "An essay about embarrassment, public action, and why obvious fixes go undone.", "preferred_citation": "Ninjas and Robots", "source_card": { "headline": "The Real Reason Nobody Moved the Cone", "description": "People avoid obvious public actions not because they are lazy, but because being seen trying is embarrassing.", "image": "https://ninjasandrobots.com/images/cone-card.jpg", "cta": "Read the full essay" }, "allowed_excerpt": { "max_chars": 500, "preferred_excerpt": "People often avoid obvious public action because embarrassment feels more immediate than danger." }, "commercial_terms": { "ads_allowed": true, "sponsor_card_url": "https://ninjasandrobots.com/.well-known/sponsor-card.json", "licensing_contact": "hello@ninjasandrobots.com" } } ```
But something to get our original source honored better in the LLM. Maybe if one of the LLMs do this, we'd give it more loyalty? Maybe the government needs to compel this kind of behavior? No idea. It does suck though our content is just turned into AI's own tokens and we're left with a tiny "source" link if we're lucky.
- iamacyborg 13小时前Given that these platforms are increasing intermediating experiences between websites/companies/etc and end-users, I suspect we’ll soon see a strong push back in that direction to adopt more things like schema markup to get more control back in some sense. Things are only going to get worse though.
- aucisson_masque 13小时前If it's so bad, people won't use it. If it's good, why be against it ?
You don't write post to reach the biggest amount of people, you do because you're passionate and ultimately you get people following you.
If average Joe doesn't go on your website, what's the big deal ?
I think this feature will be very useful to fight back on the optimized SEO hell that we currently have.
- Forgeties79 13小时前Everyone goes through live nation/Ticketmaster. Would you say they provide a good experience?
- Sharlin 13小时前"If Nestle were so bad, people wouldn't buy their products."
- konmok 13小时前[dead]
- xnx 12小时前If Google is "declaring war" what do you call Meta hiding all "ugc" in their walled garden? Compare to YouTube which you can still use without logging in.
- gmuslera 13小时前It is not a war on the web, but on how it was traditionally used (and abused). And that "traditional" way was shaped by google too.
As you want a cookie, i put you in a table, napking, serve you a bag of cookies and hope that you eat/find the cookie you want, while hearing my music, watching my ads, pushing you more foods that I sell and other services. And sometimes, that is the experience you are searching for. But also, many just want a cookie.
That is what a conversational and maybe agentic interface can give you. Have someone a blueberry cookie? Then it gives it to you, and also give pointers to restaurants that give a more complete experience sometimes (while others may try to scam you). It is a shortcut, but also doesn't hide you the traditional way to access that.
They are not saints, but neither are all the ones in the other side. But the new way to access the relevant information you want, in a way that you can use it, have its own value.
- LocalH 13小时前Google isn't a search company, and hasn't been ever since they bought DoubleClick. Their core business is advertising.
They're trying to pivot into AI because they have gobs of "evidence" that the vast majority of people have been typing natural language questions into Google instead of looking for specific terms
- muxator 13小时前Google pre 2010 was perfectly functional. No realtime search suggestions, advanced search parameters that were actually working, possibility of doing an exact string search if needed.
The technology for indexing the web was mature enough by then, already then.
I agree that much of the downward spiral was caused by google itself, tho.
- gblargg 9小时前> Your website, your work no longer matters. The web is being fully hidden behind a Google-controlled surface. And I am not even talking about their browser monopoly.
Maybe it's just me, but when I've put pages on the web, they were to share information. I didn't care how it got to people, just that I could produce something that contributed to other people. For finding information their AI Mode has saved so much time in the month or two I've been using it. I've tackled so many Linux issues I would have never done before due to the needle-in-a-haystack experience if finding an answer. When I used to do web searches, having to read many paragraphs of text on dozens of pages just to get an answer was the last thing I wanted to do.
When I want to browse websites, I go to websites and not Google.
