@parismarx Yes, and nothing stops Microsoft from copying that and also taking over the web. Plus Facebook. Possibly even China, in its own way. Remember simpler times when people worried about whether or not caching CDNs violated copyright?

@parismarx If people demand a one-stop, best answer solution, Google really has no choice. I agree that search-driven site traffic across the web is certainly in jeopardy as a result.

@parismarx you made me use #duckduckgo again after some years of relaying on Google to do all my searches.

@parismarx Whike I agree with the premise I think that many of us on the free web seem to forget that this is what the average consumer seems to want. People love going to these LLMs as one stop shops for their answers. They don't care about independent content or even other big corporations. I think this is often missed when this is discussed in tech circles.

@parismarx definitely some useful food for thought. What do you think needs to happen? All the corporates want to own the internet. Can they really be stopped?

@parismarx

Echoing a couple of other people here, I can’t imagine a different way to get end users the experience they probably want and value.

So to build up, what are the alternative ways of doing this, if not big-data-centralized? Is there a way to get around the efficiencies of having it all in one place for processing?

@bigbee @markstahl

@parismarx
Google has operated a "walled garden" for most of a decade now.

They've been scraping answers and serving them directly in search results.

AI will inject steroids into the process. Ads and answers and no organic links.

#AI #Google #DigitalMarketing #SEO #DoNoEvilMyAss

@parismarx I think that's become the MO for sites since they started prioritizing time spent on the site instead of page visits. Isn't this also exactly why news sites are always at war with fb and Twitter? Because their articles can be read on those sites, they don't get ad money for page visits because people aren't being redirected to them anymore.

@parismarx Great read, thanks! What is the best way forward from here?

@parismarx I don't like near monopolies like Google and Amazon as these "brands" are just that - brands that produce nothing of value except the provision of a market place in which to trade whilst taking their cut and avoiding national taxes . I use Amazon to find what I want and then buy it from the manufacturer direct or a local supplier. This is not always possible and often a bit more expensive, but keeps the dream of a free market alive.

@parismarx But on a practical side people like generative ai more then the current search, it can give better answers (not always) and offer a more friendly and human-like interface. It will be used. So pushback on the functionality itself is a futile excercise , we should focus on responsible design, transparency etc

@parismarx From a practical viewpoint, I don’t want to visit a dozen websites myself to research information. If an AI bot gives me a good answer from a thousand sources instead, I’m all for it. Elicit is already saving me hours of research today and I just discovered ResearchRabbit. These wouldn’t exist without GPT and GPT wouldn’t exist without all the data on the net.
And I am still paying for three newspapers, there is still a profitable market for good journalism.

@parismarx @donmelton just don’t use google …

@parismarx what I wonder about is what your call to action is here.

Are you engaging people into changing laws and regulations, or for people to abstain from using google?

Personally I agree that we needs to bolster intellectual property in relation to patternmachines as it seems unfair to be able to do this with content that is not with a open license. But it's only natural for google to want to do well as a company.

But this feels more like google hate to me, which to me is kind of useless

@parismarx Google already started this mission years ago. When a few years ago someone demonstarted that you don't need to leave google to search and book a flight, it became evident.

@parismarx With which independent search machine doing the best research would you push back?
The EU once wanted to develop one but they had no chance against the monocultural giant, the investment would have been gigantic.
BTW, I'm searching professionally and questions to Google give better results than the search for words, at least for finding a point to do a different search. So people will use it, they like it. And Google makes what the masses want (and not me).

@parismarx I think AI is in this case just another tool for big monopolistic tech companies. AI itself is not the problem. As long as it is profitable and legal for a company to close of their ecosystem and have a monopol, this process will continue.

@parismarx No one wants to try to use slow ad/tracker filled websites, or sift through spam. There's no going back from AI, we can only hope open source AI catches up (like Open Assistant).

@parismarx Interesting take, and I guess I agree, but it feels like you’re preaching to the pews in this forum and that it was long ago already too late to push back and stop this. 99.999% of internet uses don’t give a shit and just want their daily lolz served over easy.

@parismarx It presents a real conundrum. If you want people to read your stuff, you put it on the open web for consumption, but then Google scrapes it and it just becomes part of their bot, and no one is going to your site to read your stuff. There's a real possibility this could encourage a fragmented Internet, even pushing the "open" web behind authentications to keep bots away. Of course, since a large percentage of people use Google's browser, that probably won't work long term either.

@parismarx @tommyyum I’m fairly sure we are about 20 years too late to push back on corporate power in the U.S.

@parismarx We need an automatic royalties system. If my web page is included in training the model, then I should get $0.001 for that. Might not matter much to me. But Wikipedia, with 6.5 million articles, would get $6500 every time Google trained a model using those articles.

@parismarx Everything google does is about ads. Gross.