Is it only me who feels its incredibly unfair for publishers, that not only did big tech trained their LLMs on free content authored by these publishers, but it's also killing their future revenue. It's like stealing from someone and then making sure they never make money again.
Yes it's unfair. It's digital colonialism. What's sad is that other companies keep falling for the false narrative that big tech monopolies act as partners and not the blood sucking leeches they've become to represent.
Let's not forget that online publishing was dead on its feet before ChatGPT ever showed up. What really killed their revenue was zero barrier to entry, combined with social media monopolizing the attention of users. Every publisher fighting for smaller and smaller shares of attention with more and more outlets, leading to a race to the bottom.
Not really. They created their own business by creating an artificial monopoly called copyright. The government enforced and defended their monopoly enabling them to profit. It was never sustainable, and now the forces of reality are crushing the scheme. Information wants to be free, much as gravity makes the apple fall to the ground, and RNA has created the entire ecosystem on this planet simply to sustain and replicate itself.
The publishers are really no different than, say, printers with their DRM ink. Is it unfair that their business can no longer benefit from an enforced monopoly? Let me get out the world's smallest violin for this one.
It IS incredibly unfair and it's also unethical, given that they're already scraping publisher content to feed their own A.I. Unless I missed it, this article didn't have details on how the revenue - if any - would be handled but I presume there would also be some 'ticket-clipping' on the part of Google there as well.
Ie: sorry about acquiring your content and then no longer linking to you but in case anyone does ever find your pathetic indie site, we're now offering an array of solutions so that you can ditch your long-standing but now no longer needed e-commerce solutions. You have made...$177 in micro payments this week minus the transaction fees of $17.77 but cannot claim it yet as you have not met our your ad revenue threshold. Need help? Go around in circles with our chat bots until you die - we'll keep your money regardless.
I'll be the voice of dissent. I don't think it's unfair.
1. I don't believe that training LLMs on publicly-available content is morally bad. Nor do I believe that it should be prosecutable as copyright infringement, any more than I believe that we should prosecute humans for studying books/art/essays/movies/etc and "downloading" that information into their brains. I'm not a big fan of IP law in general (I think it's largely a crime against the people's freedom to share and riff on ideas and expression), but to the extent that we need to bring IP law into this, I only think it should be prosecutable to publish a near-exact copy of an existing work. Creating a tool/AI capable of reproducing a Lady Gaga song is not the same thing as actually reproducing and selling a Lady Gaga song.
2. Capitalist markets depend on constant competition and innovation. This is a good thing for consumers, as things generally tend to get better and better over time (look at cars, clothing, medicine, food choices, etc). The cost comes to business owners, who are endlessly forced to compete on cost/speed/availability/value at the risk of being disrupted. As a business owner myself, I am okay with this cost and do not find it morally wrong, unfair, or reprehensible. It's for the greater good, and business owners imo are the societal group least in need of charity or prioritization. And, again, the rules help consumers. When a business is being outcompeted, that's because consumers are voting with their feet for what they think is the better option.
3. Pure artists are unaffected. If you're a craftsperson, artist, writer, chef, programmer, etc who is creating for the love of creating, that's amazing. You are unaffected. Nothing under the sun can stop you from doing what you love. If you make a great burger for yourself or your friends and family, it does not matter that McDonald's has sold a billion burgers. However, once you start trying to sell your creations to others, you are no longer purely an artist, you are a business, and you will be subject to the aforementioned rules of the market. Which, once again, I think are fair.
4. Trying to skirt the rules of the market to avoid competition or disruption, imo, is not cool. It generally amounts to rent-seeking "I got here first" behavior, which benefits no one in society except for business owners who don't want to innovate. "My profession/industry was here first, and this is how it's always been since I got into it, and I like making money this way, and it's unfair for anything to happen in the market that disrupts my flow of money or causes me to change, and I'm going to use my incumbency/popularity/authority to try to change the law to stop newcomers from out-competing me or to force them to give me a cut, consumers be damned."
It is not a tragedy for a business model that used to thrive to decline. It's a natural process that has happened many tens of thousands of times, and it's the flip side of the coin called progress.
It's not only you. "Big Tech" does not create anything. Even when it clearly has the budget to do so. Instead, it copies and intermediates (plays the middleman).
It's kinda an obvious solution: If people do get used to paying for ChatGPT like AIs (big "if"), then AI providers will start paying from their revenue for fresh new quality content. This would be great (if you don't like ads).
Also, leaving aside my previous two points on this and speaking as a person who consumes the internet, I don't want the apparently outmoded 'list of blue links' to be replaced by one A.I. overview.
As is well documented, the overviews can 'hallucinate' and less well-documented, they're bland. I'd rather have my search query met with an array of links, offering a variety of takes that I can then sift through.
This is especially vital for research which is why I now use Kagi and also Perplexity, as in the latter provides quality links. I may be wrong but I believe it was started by former Google execs and uses some of the natural language processing mechanisms that made legacy Google so good.
Often it is hard for me to discover new places on internet using search. How monetization could take place if I cannot easily find for example Warhammer related blogs, resources.
I created my own Internet index. That is how I control my discoveries.
This doesn't feel like it will work to me, for a few reasons:
1. A video or survey will take longer than just finding the content elsewhere. The survey is also probably more effort.
2. This breaks the "flow". The odds that I get distracted or just lose interest before the ad/survey is done is pretty high.
3. A lot of the stuff I want to read is more "passing curiosity" than "thing I have a dedicated interest in". The effort and time I'm willing to put into access is low.
The real question for me is whether Offerwall is going to make it harder to get around the paywall than previously. There are a few sites that actually send the full article, they just cover it up with an HTML element. You can still see the full text if you open the request for the content in DevTools.
They re going to have to do more than this. They can surely make an AI that determines which % of the LLM answer is owed to which website / source. Then either pay them ad revenue or demand the user to pay to see the rest of the answer. I don't often click on AI answers, and i assume most people don't. I find myself clicking beyond it only when the answer is bad.
If google doesn't do that, publishers will respond in a vicious way, like purposely poisoning content to mislead their LLMs.
Google has intentionally degraded search as a product to try to force people to use their models.
As they've now realized this kills off any incentive to feed their LLMs with new content they're stuck actually having to pay lip service to publishers by offering them, yep, a new way to prevent users from seeing their content!
The exciting thing about search engines becoming useless as a traffic source, is that small publishers and blogs will eventually learn to adopt old technologies to gain traffic: web rings and links sections.
This means if you like a blog, there could now be a way to organically discover other blogs similar to it, by following links across multiple sites.
No one knows what a web ring is, and there's no incentive for folks to leave their preferred "attention theme parks" that have been meticulously curated by big tech.
There will not be a second decentralized web renaissance. We are all too busy, lazy, and enthralled by low effort content, like posting on HN.
Why would I publish if no one is ever looking for my content? To feed the LLMs? A lot of blogging is done to make money. If no one is searching anymore what is the revenue model? What you’re describing to me seems like passion blogging which already exists and I don’t think the financially interested are going that way if there’s no revenue model.
I can already see how this plays out, it falls flat, the increasing decline in search coincides with industry wide realisation LLMs still can’t achieve AGI, this sets alarm bells ringing, they offer a new system for advertisers to promote content via the AI responses since now “it’s just glorified search”
The question, did all traffic really go to AI companies? May be just there are so many jumping and blinking adds that users simply don't like it. Like youtube is unwatchable without add blockers or other add skipping tricks.
I don't really know how publishers fight back in this situation. Big tech took all of their content and art, trained AI, and are now trying to sell it back to them. It's incredibly fucked.
At this point, Google has become a shitty ChatGPT.
In the last few weeks, using both Google and ChatGPT for search, I get a far broader range of links from ChatGPT.
Basically, Google-today is the product of a long history of having and using its search the monopoly for profits and political agendas (include lots of other entities legally and otherwise forcing this use btw). All it's search results were as "opinionated" as an AI even before the appearance of ChatGPT. It's logical that any "green fields" search engine would be better.
Of course, the problem will be that OpenAI and company will face the
Example: The original Phil Specter version of Let It Be (the album) exists on Youtube but it's not possible to easily find it with either Google or Youtube searches (I've a number of times). But easily ChatGPT found a link to the song and album for me (Ole 'Chat gave strings use for google but these didn't work either btw).
The "killing" started way before AI summary was launched, and the killing was done by the sites themselves, by turning themselves into garbage factories churning out slop (human slop!) that nobody wants to read. Look at this graph and tell me when Google AI Summary launched: https://x.com/YujieChen/status/1932566121846354228/photo/1
While many sites did shovel slop out the door in the name of SEO, the decline in Google search traffic is happening to all sites.
It’s a real phenomenon where search impressions and clicks, which moved roughly in tandem for many years, have started diverging rather abruptly and dramatically. It is an obvious qualitative change in Google search traffic.
Everyone is blaming the AI overviews, and they seem like the most obvious culprit. But regardless, the change in pattern is real and not correlated with site content quality.
Readers can unlock more content(which is often just some AI slop or SEO optimized word salad) by watching an ad or can get their content on some AI chatbot on the VC's dime.
Good luck with that, quality publishing died years ago when Google was optimizing for their end.
Given the monopolies, what are the alternatives? For video content, Youtube is near monopoly with alternatives no better than Google. Same goes for mobile app, website (traffic via Google SE), offline store (search/reviews on maps)
dpacmittal|8 months ago
azemetre|8 months ago
AstroBen|8 months ago
karaterobot|8 months ago
rybosworld|8 months ago
But I also think publishers have been complicit in providing a gradually worse experience, usually through SEO, for 10+ years.
This has drowned out what most people would call "good/original content" - think small, independent bloggers.
That big publishers might lose their shirts sounds like a good thing to me.
mattmanser|8 months ago
Just all stinks of corruption.
unknown|8 months ago
[deleted]
Ferret7446|8 months ago
The publishers are really no different than, say, printers with their DRM ink. Is it unfair that their business can no longer benefit from an enforced monopoly? Let me get out the world's smallest violin for this one.
sam_lowry_|8 months ago
notsydonia|8 months ago
Ie: sorry about acquiring your content and then no longer linking to you but in case anyone does ever find your pathetic indie site, we're now offering an array of solutions so that you can ditch your long-standing but now no longer needed e-commerce solutions. You have made...$177 in micro payments this week minus the transaction fees of $17.77 but cannot claim it yet as you have not met our your ad revenue threshold. Need help? Go around in circles with our chat bots until you die - we'll keep your money regardless.
blibble|8 months ago
isn't this the entire AI playbook?
artists, software developers, writers, musicians, everyone
total parasitism always kills the host
tomjen3|8 months ago
csallen|8 months ago
1. I don't believe that training LLMs on publicly-available content is morally bad. Nor do I believe that it should be prosecutable as copyright infringement, any more than I believe that we should prosecute humans for studying books/art/essays/movies/etc and "downloading" that information into their brains. I'm not a big fan of IP law in general (I think it's largely a crime against the people's freedom to share and riff on ideas and expression), but to the extent that we need to bring IP law into this, I only think it should be prosecutable to publish a near-exact copy of an existing work. Creating a tool/AI capable of reproducing a Lady Gaga song is not the same thing as actually reproducing and selling a Lady Gaga song.
2. Capitalist markets depend on constant competition and innovation. This is a good thing for consumers, as things generally tend to get better and better over time (look at cars, clothing, medicine, food choices, etc). The cost comes to business owners, who are endlessly forced to compete on cost/speed/availability/value at the risk of being disrupted. As a business owner myself, I am okay with this cost and do not find it morally wrong, unfair, or reprehensible. It's for the greater good, and business owners imo are the societal group least in need of charity or prioritization. And, again, the rules help consumers. When a business is being outcompeted, that's because consumers are voting with their feet for what they think is the better option.
3. Pure artists are unaffected. If you're a craftsperson, artist, writer, chef, programmer, etc who is creating for the love of creating, that's amazing. You are unaffected. Nothing under the sun can stop you from doing what you love. If you make a great burger for yourself or your friends and family, it does not matter that McDonald's has sold a billion burgers. However, once you start trying to sell your creations to others, you are no longer purely an artist, you are a business, and you will be subject to the aforementioned rules of the market. Which, once again, I think are fair.
4. Trying to skirt the rules of the market to avoid competition or disruption, imo, is not cool. It generally amounts to rent-seeking "I got here first" behavior, which benefits no one in society except for business owners who don't want to innovate. "My profession/industry was here first, and this is how it's always been since I got into it, and I like making money this way, and it's unfair for anything to happen in the market that disrupts my flow of money or causes me to change, and I'm going to use my incumbency/popularity/authority to try to change the law to stop newcomers from out-competing me or to force them to give me a cut, consumers be damned."
It is not a tragedy for a business model that used to thrive to decline. It's a natural process that has happened many tens of thousands of times, and it's the flip side of the coin called progress.
pier25|8 months ago
Edit:
Those how are downvoting me probably haver never spent a week writing an article or blog post.
1vuio0pswjnm7|8 months ago
xixixao|8 months ago
notsydonia|8 months ago
As is well documented, the overviews can 'hallucinate' and less well-documented, they're bland. I'd rather have my search query met with an array of links, offering a variety of takes that I can then sift through.
This is especially vital for research which is why I now use Kagi and also Perplexity, as in the latter provides quality links. I may be wrong but I believe it was started by former Google execs and uses some of the natural language processing mechanisms that made legacy Google so good.
renegat0x0|8 months ago
I created my own Internet index. That is how I control my discoveries.
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
everforward|8 months ago
1. A video or survey will take longer than just finding the content elsewhere. The survey is also probably more effort.
2. This breaks the "flow". The odds that I get distracted or just lose interest before the ad/survey is done is pretty high.
3. A lot of the stuff I want to read is more "passing curiosity" than "thing I have a dedicated interest in". The effort and time I'm willing to put into access is low.
The real question for me is whether Offerwall is going to make it harder to get around the paywall than previously. There are a few sites that actually send the full article, they just cover it up with an HTML element. You can still see the full text if you open the request for the content in DevTools.
seydor|8 months ago
If google doesn't do that, publishers will respond in a vicious way, like purposely poisoning content to mislead their LLMs.
timewizard|8 months ago
Google has intentionally degraded search as a product to try to force people to use their models.
As they've now realized this kills off any incentive to feed their LLMs with new content they're stuck actually having to pay lip service to publishers by offering them, yep, a new way to prevent users from seeing their content!
What a bummer of a decade this has become.
SirFatty|8 months ago
"Google has intentionally degraded search as a product to try to force people to use their models."
Both things can be true.
deadbabe|8 months ago
This means if you like a blog, there could now be a way to organically discover other blogs similar to it, by following links across multiple sites.
candiddevmike|8 months ago
There will not be a second decentralized web renaissance. We are all too busy, lazy, and enthralled by low effort content, like posting on HN.
righthand|8 months ago
bargainbin|8 months ago
softwaredoug|8 months ago
OTOH good search - deep research - is one of the biggest productivity gains using AI.
ceejayoz|8 months ago
candiddevmike|8 months ago
Mars008|8 months ago
ujkhsjkdhf234|8 months ago
citizenpaul|8 months ago
joe_the_user|8 months ago
At this point, Google has become a shitty ChatGPT.
In the last few weeks, using both Google and ChatGPT for search, I get a far broader range of links from ChatGPT.
Basically, Google-today is the product of a long history of having and using its search the monopoly for profits and political agendas (include lots of other entities legally and otherwise forcing this use btw). All it's search results were as "opinionated" as an AI even before the appearance of ChatGPT. It's logical that any "green fields" search engine would be better.
Of course, the problem will be that OpenAI and company will face the
Example: The original Phil Specter version of Let It Be (the album) exists on Youtube but it's not possible to easily find it with either Google or Youtube searches (I've a number of times). But easily ChatGPT found a link to the song and album for me (Ole 'Chat gave strings use for google but these didn't work either btw).
grugagag|8 months ago
jeffbee|8 months ago
snowwrestler|8 months ago
It’s a real phenomenon where search impressions and clicks, which moved roughly in tandem for many years, have started diverging rather abruptly and dramatically. It is an obvious qualitative change in Google search traffic.
Everyone is blaming the AI overviews, and they seem like the most obvious culprit. But regardless, the change in pattern is real and not correlated with site content quality.
WD-42|8 months ago
mrtksn|8 months ago
Good luck with that, quality publishing died years ago when Google was optimizing for their end.
ChrisArchitect|8 months ago
Few Americans pay for news when they encounter paywalls
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44373222
etchalon|8 months ago
blackoil|8 months ago
unknown|8 months ago
[deleted]
unknown|8 months ago
[deleted]