The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

This would be a very impressive technical feat

"Stolen" is kind of a loaded word. It implies the content was for sale and was taken without payment. I don't think anyone would accuse a person of stealing if they purchased GRRM's books, studied the prose and then used the knowledge they gained from studying to write a fanfic in the style of GRRM (or better yet, the final 2 books). What was stolen? "the prose style"? Seems too abstract. (yes, I know the counter argument is "but LLMs can do more quickly and at a much greater scale", and so forth)

I generally want less copyright, not more. I'm imagining a dystopian future where every article on the internet has an implicit huge legal contract you enter into like "you are allowed to read this article with your eyeballs only, possibly you are also allowed to copy/paste snippets with attribution, and I suppose you are allowed to parody it, but you aren't allowed to parody it with certain kinds of computer assistance such as feeding text into an LLM and asking it to mimic my style, and..."

— https://andymasley.substack.com/p/individual-ai-use-is-not-b...

> What’s the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT?

— https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/carbon-footprint-c...

The goal isn't to have an ad->purchase, the goal is to make sure the purchase is more likely in the long term.

I'd guess we're only 6-12 months out from a full advertisement takeover.

Too late!

This is spot on. I think we'll be able to capitalize on other talents of "AI" once we recognize the big shift is done happening. It's like five years after the Louisiana Purchase: we have a bunch of new resources but we've barely catalogued them, let alone begun to exploit them.

> how long until all the LLM corporate initiatives die?

Sooner than I personally thought, and I place a lot of that with Apple's. They've led the way in hardware that supports LLMs, and I believe (hope?) they'll eventually wipe out most hosted chat-based products, leaving the corporate players to build APIs and embedded products for search, tech support, images, etc. The massive amounts of capital going into OpenAI, Anthropic, etc., will ebb as consumer demand falls.

I hope for this because the question I keep asking is, how can our energy infrastructure sustain the huge demand AI companies have without pushing us even further into a climate catastrophe?

  > I don't think ads will be built into the main replies, 
  > because people will quickly lose trust in the results. 

So, can they? yes. Will they? yes.

This is honestly why I struggle to get excited for anything in our industry anymore. Whatever it is it just becomes yet another fucking vector for ad people to shove yet more disposable shit in front of me and jingle it like car keys to see if I'll pull out a credit card.

The exception being the Steam Deck, though one could argue it's just a massive loss-leader for Steam itself and thus game sales (though I don't think that would hold up to scrutiny, it's pretty costly and it's not like Valve was hurting for business but anyway) but yeah. LLMs will absolutely do the exact same, and Google's now fully given up on making search even decent, replacing it with shit AI nobody asked for that will do product placements any day now, I would bet a LOT of money on it.

They don't need a winner, they want the race to continue as long as possible.

But to be honest, optimizing monstrously slow processes that cost weeks of human labour by automating them, that saves a ton of energy as well. It’s not zero sum, as the humans spend that energy elsewhere, but ideally they spend it on more productive things.

This calculus can very quickly offset whatever energy is wasted generating cartoon images of vuvuzelas.

Once the pressure to turn a profit is high enough the big players surely won't just leave that money on the table.

The scary part is that even if we end up paying for "ad-free" LLM services how do we really know if it is ad-free? Traditional services are (usually) pretty clear on what is an ad and what isn't. I wouldn't necessarily know if raid shadow legends really is the greatest game of all time or if the model had been tuned to say that it is.

Once enough people become like this, they will gladly pay to keep it, they'll consider it a basic necessity.

They are also trying to reduce workers in search, etc, somewhat through the trained LLMs so the other idea is that they have lower costs per user.

I don't think many people will pay monthly fees or will want to pay them for each platform they use which is why they all tend to do so many questionable integration attempts to try to get users to not want to use a separate LLM of their choice in a browser instead.

I think with the last sub-clause (that I emphasized), you answered your question: because the conversation is more intimate, Google learns more about your "true interests", be it to make advertising to you more targeted, or for more sinister purposes.

People didn’t stop using Google Search, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and a myriad other services and products (and things like TV before those) because they got ads.

But what if you don't see distinct ads? LLM advertising can just be paid-for bias in the generated content.

Now if AI turns out to be the next big thing, they can steer differently next time, sell subscriptions, and avoid all that entanglement with multi-sided markets and layered revenue strategies. At least that’s my take.

You mean like how the instant we see ads on YouTube we will stop using it?

I wish we wouldn't mindlessly repeat these platitudes. Try and falsify your statements before posting.

OTOH, there are far too many people who desperately want to believe in cool new stuff really being free, without any "gotcha" down the line.

By labeling the salaries as R&D assets and amortizing that over 5 years (instead of taking it completely in the first year), they're more likely to make "accounting" profit and pay taxes in the early years.

Those legislative changes will likely move forward the taxes being paid.

But to your point: not paying taxes because a company is investing doesn't mean taxpayers are footing the bill. It does mean the company isn't contributing to paying taxes while it is in "growth investing" mode.

This is pretty much the best arrangement we have come up with so far in human civilization. You seem to be suggesting a tragedy of the commons is instead the ideal we should strive for.

I'm really looking forward to something like a GNU GPT that tries to be as factual, unbiased, libre and open-source as possible (possibly built/trained with Guix OS so we can ensure byte-for-byte reproducibility).

This will distress the big players who want an open field to make money from their own adulterated inferior product so home grown LLM will probably end up being outlawed or something.

I'm also not particularly convinced any advertisers would pay for "Hey, we're going to direct people to just drive by your establishment, in a context where they have other goals very front-and-center on their mind. We're not going to tell them about the menu or any specials or let you give any custom messages, just tell them to drive by." Advertisers would want more than just an ambient mentioning of their existence for money.

There's at least two major classes of people, which are, people who take and give directions by road names, and people who take and give directions by landmarks. In cities, landmarks are also going to generally be buildings that have businesses in them. Before the GPS era, when I had to give directions to things like my high school grad party to people who may never have been to the location it was being held in, I would always give directions in both styles, because whichever style may be dominant for you, it doesn't hurt to have the other style available to double-check the directions, especially in an era where they are non-interactive.

(Every one of us Ye Olde Fogeys have memories of trying to navigate by directions given by someone too familiar with how to get to the target location, that left out entire turns, or got street names wrong, or told you to "turn right" on to a 5-way intersection that had two rights, or told you to turn on to a road whose sign was completely obscured by trees, and all sorts of other such fun. With GPS-based directions I still occasionally make wrong turns but it's just not the same when the directions immediately update with a new route.)

"Turn left at McDonalds" is what a normal person would say if you asked for directions in a town you don't know. Or they could say "Turn left at McFritzberger street", but what use would that be for you?

Although I've had Google Maps say "Turn right after the pharmacy", and there's three drug stores in the intersection...

If you're someone like Marlboro or Coca-Cola, on the other hand, it might be worth your while to pollute the training data and wait for subtle allusions to your product to show up all over the place. Maybe they already did, long before LLMs even existed.

This doesn't have to be as blunt as promoting specific libraries or services and it's a bias that could even be introduced "accidentally".

You can probably hack that experience by making use of the "rules" feature. You can have certain search engines or macros launch automatically upon pressing enter based on the content of the query. You if you set a rule to check if your search contains a vowel (which most will), it's effectively a catch all rule.

Hacky, but it will work.

Sure, maybe so. But now with hindsight we can see what happened and we should realize that it's going to happen again unless we do something.

> The jarring conclusion I keep trying to see a way around but no longer can is that the toxic waste is part of humanity. How do we get rid of it, or lock it away? One of the oldest questions our species has ever faced. Hard not to just throw up your hands and duck back into your hidey-hole once you realize this.

I think both bad and good are part of humanity. In a sense this "toxic" part is not that different from the part that leads us to, say, descend into drug addiction, steal when we think no one is looking, leave a mess for other people to clean up, etc. We can do these negative things on various scales, but when we do them on a large scale we can screw one another over quite egregiously. The unique thing about humans is our ability to intentionally leverage the good aspects of our nature to hold the bad aspects in check. We've had various ways of doing this throughout history. We just need to accept that setting rules and expectations and enforcing them to prevent bad outcomes is no less "natural" for humans than giving free rein to our more harmful urges.

I have used Google very little for about 3 years now. Sometimes when DDG fails to find what I'm looking for I'll try Google. It rarely works better.

I tried to switch to DDG because Google was blocking Hurricane Electric IPv6 tunnels. DDG is still my homepage but I usually end up clicking the bookmark I made for ipv4.google.com. I wish I knew why DDG works for all you people but it's horrible for me.

I don't understand why they got rid of these escape hatches. Sometimes I want the "top" pages containing precisely the text I enter -- no stemming, synonyms, etc. Maybe it shouldn't be the default, but why make it impossible?

In my ideal search world, there would also be an option to eliminate any page with a display ad or affiliate link. Sometimes I only want the pages that aren't trying to make money off of me.

The internet is dead and is starting to smell.

If it's not then it will just invent some plausible-souding bullshit that doesn't actually work.

After the fifth time you get burnt by this the whole LLM experience starts to sour.

This was in the top three results, and I can't tell if it's "real", or just a page created to capture those exact search terms!

https://akkaalternatives.com/

If the goal of that site really is just to capture clicks via very specific web searches... and people are creating sites like that at scale... what hope do we have of saving the web? :-(

Sky TV makes 10 times as much from subscription as adverts but spends 30% of the time showing you adverts. London underground revenue is a similar ratio - for every £9 tickets they make £1 in adverts. If I go to the cinema they spend 20 minutes showing adverts to people who spent £50 on tickets and popcorn.

Companies shave very little incentive not to make things shit with adverts. The measurable cost to them is tiny, the cost to the rest of the world is massive. Odeon won’t attribute lost revenue from my reduced visits to their adverts, but will measure the 50p or whatever they get.

They are incredibly good value for money, if you understand the benefits and take a long view. However, politically they are an easy thing to cut.

ook

Because Google runs Google Search, it's instead only bad because profit motivates Google to push its services, increase ad impressions/interactions and incentivize users to not actually leave the search engine result page (e.g. by citing or summarizing content of the related web pages on the result page).

And because competition is good that means Google actively competing with the sites it indexes for the attention of its users is a good thing even if those sites losing out and failing would result in worse search results over time.

Hang on, maybe "content stealing" really already was a problem before LLMs made it their entire MO and those greedy newspaper publishers were onto something when they complained about Google lifting their news feeds even if it provided "exposure" for them.