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.
azemetre · 4h ago
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.
blackoil · 3h ago
The choices given are to die today or die tomorrow, no wonder most are accepting whatever money they can get.
paul7986 · 3h ago
AI is nothing without them if it becomes a zero sum business I guess AI tech companies are going to have to become publishers. That would be no good at all as democracy needs many varied voices!
csallen · 3h ago
Competition in the free market is not colonialism. The capitalistic marketplace is meant to involve disruption. That's the entire point: new companies come along and out-compete and out-innovate older companies and business models. The consumer wins. This is not the same as invading countries and subjugating the inhabitants, who have a human right to a peaceful life. No business in a capitalistic marketplace has a "right" to continue enjoying profits and resist innovation.
spacemadness · 1h ago
If this is the consumer winning I’d rather be losing. As far as I can tell, free market means let the monopolies control everything.
csallen · 1h ago
Literally the entire narrative right now among online business owners, big and small (influencers, creators, indie hackers, startup founders, etc.) is that this is a golden age for aspirational new entrants and entrepreneurs.
_DeadFred_ · 3h ago
Violating/changing the meaning of copyright law and demanding special carvouts AFTER THE FACT is not 'competition'. (AI)
Breaking hospitality/zoning laws is not 'competition'. (AirBnb)
Breaking taxi/transportations laws and regulation is not 'competition'. (Uber/Lyft)
Misclassifying workers to bypass employment laws is not 'competition'. (All 'gig' companies)
Operating unlicensed financial services is not 'competition'. (fintech)
Being given special content liability carveouts only to your platform is not 'competition'. (social media)
Evading antitrust norms via vertical integration is not 'competition'. (Apple app store and 30% rent)
Flooding the market with illegal or gray-area imports is not 'competition'. (Amazon)
Exploiting data without consent is not 'competition'. (all tech at this point)
Using investor capital to subsidize predatory pricing is not 'competition'. (almost all tech)
Every industry 'new' tech has gone after they have cheated, broken laws and/or had/pushed for (normally after the fact) special carveouts from the law so that they are the only ones in their field that get to operate a different way, used and harvested data in bad faith, used predatory unsustainable pricing practices.
Show me where tech has 'outcompeted' without doing any of the above. Where the product didn't need special protections/carvouts to existing law, didn't exploit data/peoples trust, didn't use investment capital to artificially lower prices, didn't utilize 'grey areas' to skirt barriers that ACTUAL competing companies obeyed, where the product delivered, on it's own, created a unicorn.
Edit: Responding as edit because I've been timed out. Apple is doing rent-seeking enforced through ecosystem control. This is traditionally seen as a monopolistic practice and historically/based on capitalist philosophy companies that did this were seen as a threat to capitalism and broken up/punished for this behavior. Rent seeking is explicitly anti-capitalist in classical economic thought.
csallen · 2h ago
Hilariously, half of the examples you cite are laws created/influenced/strengthened by incumbent businesses of the past with the explicit goal of reducing competition and making it difficult for new entrants to compete.
Let's take copyright law for example. Set aside the fact that the entire basis of copyright law is EXPLICITLY to give businesses a "monopoly," which is the exact opposite of competition. Your issue with AI is that they are violating or trying to change the meaning of copyright law? How do you square that with the past 250 years of history of businesses successfully lobbying to strengthen and change copyright law in order to protect their monopolies and weaken competition?
Or let's look into taxi laws. Where for decades taxi medallion owners and fleet operators in NYC lobbied to prevent the city from issuing new medallions.
You seem to believe that laws increase competition and that resisting/changing/lobbying against the laws is meant to decrease competition, which is plainly untrue. Often the exact opposite is true, which is the very definition of regulatory capture.
Capitalism is a system that seeks to benefit the common man by incentivizing profit-seekers to compete to create new innovations, to deliver goods faster/easier, and to lower prices. It also seeks to disincentivize profit-seeking through non-competitive means that don't benefit consumers, e.g. monopolies, oligarchies, regulatory capture, false advertising, etc.
_DeadFred_ · 51m ago
Please follow HN etiquette and respond to my position not call it hilarious. Also sorry for the wall of text.
You ignored my point on copyright and 'what about'd your own as if that makes copyright law somehow not currently exist. Without copyright you would have market failure. Who will invest in Bob's business if Tom can just undercut him? Who would make a multi-million dollar movie in your world? Write text books? How can Bob start a business doing those things if he can't get investment? This is a BASIC premise of the modern economy. Modern society wouldn't exist, and historically western society (starting when first applied in the "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning" in the early 1700s) has understood and embraced it's benefit. Business can't build their business around ignoring the law and then say 'our business model won't work under the current law' and then benefit from first mover advantage because they started by making illegal moves. Capitalism is not anarchy, it works within frameworks and constraints, including the law. Rewarding lawbreakers with 'first mover advantage' or additionally in AIs case special new legal carvouts creates INCREDIBLY perverse incentives.
For NYC you are arguing that it's OK for businesses to ignore laws that impact them. I disagree, I don't believe capitalism is 'anarchy'. Capitalism MUST exist in a framework with government regulation, as classical capitalist philosophy points out. Again all you are saying is 'tech is above the law because I don't like the law' and 'breaking the law if it means profit is TRUE capitalism'. Business was free to push to change the law NYC. They are not free to just ignore the law. They should definitely not benefit from first mover advantage when they got to be first by breaking the law.
Please don't say what I believe, but instead respond on substance. I believe businesses should not build their business on ignoring the law, using BILLIONs in funding (which combined with business corporate legal protections shields them from consequences of breaking the law), in order to distort the market and force a carveout for themselves and give themselves an unfair first mover advantage. I don't think lawbreaking is competition or capitalism. I believe if a business created their market penetration through breaking the law that even if the law is changed after the fact that specific business should be banned from the carveout as they had an unfair/illegal first mover advantage versus those that followed the law. Your model encourages and rewards law breaking and unfair competition, not healthy competition/capitalist growth.
I seem to believe that we are a nation of laws, that capitalism exists with in constraints, on of which are laws, and that breaking laws that get in the way of billionaire founders wishing to exploit an industry segment isn't competition/capitalism. Breaking laws to get an unfair competitive and/or first mover advantage should be punished not rewarded, as to do otherwise creates horribly perverse incentives.
I notice you didn't point to a single legitimate/untarnished unicorn.
ujkhsjkdhf234 · 3h ago
> Evading antitrust norms via vertical integration is not 'competition'. (Apple app store and 30% rent)
This one is competition though. No one is forced to use Apple or develop for Apple. People purchase Apple because they like their products more than the alternatives.
slg · 3h ago
It really depends on the specifics.
From the Wikipedia entry on vertical integration[1]:
>Vertical integration can be desirable because it secures supplies needed by the firm to produce its product and the market needed to sell the product, but it can become undesirable when a firm's actions become anti-competitive and impede free competition in an open marketplace.
...
>A firm may desire such expansion to secure the supplies needed by the firm to produce its product and the market needed to sell the product. Such expansion can become undesirable from a system-wide perspective when it becomes anti-competitive and impede free competition in an open marketplace.
...
>The result is a more efficient business with lower costs and more profits. On the undesirable side, when vertical expansion leads toward monopolistic control of a product or service then regulative action may be required to rectify anti-competitive behavior.
Apple literally forces you to own an iphone (and a Mac) for you to develop for iPhones. And they also force their users to only be able to install apps through the app store. "If you don't like use an alternative" is not a valid take here.
ujkhsjkdhf234 · 3h ago
Capitalism and colonialism share a lot of similar traits and are not exclusive. In this case, this is the very definition of colonialism, taking over someone's territory and exploiting their resources. AI is trained on all of these publishers' material without consent and without compensation and then big tech turns around and says pay us if you want a slice of the pie we stole from you.
Ecstatify · 3h ago
What new companies? Google is a monopoly, along with most other major tech platforms. When a handful of corporations control entire market sectors and actively acquire or crush potential competitors, that's not free market competition, that's market consolidation that prevents the very disruption you're describing. The "creative destruction" of capitalism requires actual competition to exist, not just the theoretical possibility of it.
AstroBen · 4h ago
Yeah and then what happens in 2026 onwards? No one's going to put in the work to create high quality original content when they can't monetize it..
beej71 · 2h ago
A few of us will. :) I give my stuff away for free with no ads. Maybe the web will get small again.
karaterobot · 4h ago
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.
ceejayoz · 3h ago
> What really killed their revenue was zero barrier to entry, combined with social media monopolizing the attention of users.
Well, and intentional efforts by the major tech companies.
"It turns out that the metrics that Facebook was using to measure engagement with news video were wrong, massively overestimating the amount of time that users spent consuming video ads. In 2019, Facebook settled a lawsuit with those advertisers, paying them $40 million (while admitting no wrongdoing). But it was too late for the publishers who’d already pivoted to Facebook video and then either made big cuts or shut down completely when it turned out people weren’t actually watching."
csallen · 3h ago
I think this had <1% of the effect compared to what the parent stated.
The web has led to 10x more content being published in the past 30 years than was published in all of human kind's history before. And that's not including short-form posts/comments/reviews/chats/etc on social media and forums and communities.
The amount of increased competition and commoditization of content is insane.
ceejayoz · 3h ago
> I think this had <1% of the effect compared to what the parent stated.
I worked at a newspaper for years, during the early days of social media (I made our Twitter account, even... and once dropped an accidental f-bomb on it). I remember the video push; it was a huge change to workflows, hiring patterns, technology needs, etc. It was built on lies and bad data, and media outlets really haven't recovered since.
rybosworld · 4h ago
In some sense I agree.
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.
billllll · 3h ago
At the end of the day, they're subject to the same market forces. If the big publishers lose their shirts, that means small bloggers don't have any chance of making it big. The same market forces that make big publishers worse are going to squeeze smaller outfits and writers.
And I know some people are going to say how writers and news "don't deserve" to make money because they haven't sacrificed enough upon the altar of tech, hustle, and Silicon Valley - I don't really care. I think newspapers and writing in general losing out is a blow to society.
xixixao · 4h ago
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).
ceejayoz · 3h ago
Ah, yes. Trickle-down economics again.
The trickle always turns out to be piss.
brokencode · 3h ago
Could somebody downvoting this explain why? Shouldn’t AI companies pay for the content they train their models on and summarize?
slg · 3h ago
I downvoted because it is naive childlike logic that excuses current bad behavior on the possibility of future good behavior.
OP's original comment called this stealing and this response is that the "obvious solution" is that the thief will pay their victim back after turning their stealing operation into a successful business. That is silly. Do people think that if the Pirate Bay is allowed to exist long enough that they will eventually start paying Hollywood Studios for new movies?
If you want to argue against OP in defense of these AI companies, argue why what they're doing isn't stealing or why what they're doing in the moment is justified. Don't say the stealing can be excused by some hypothetical and implied promise of future reparations.
EDIT: It's funny to respond to a comment asking for explanation of the downvotes only to be downvoted without explanation.
brokencode · 2h ago
I didn’t downvote you, but I do disagree.
Yes, the AI companies are stealing. This is an area where the legal system needs to catch up.
Once it does, AI companies should have to negotiate contracts with publishers in order to legally use their content. Otherwise they should be open to lawsuits for copyright violations.
This is quite different from Pirate Bay, which is not run by a law abiding company with customers. Unless OpenAI wants to go underground and sell their services on the black market, they will have to play by the rules.
slg · 1h ago
What you are saying here is fundamentally very different from the original downvoted comment. You’re saying this behavior is bad and should be corrected by the government. The original comment sidestepped the ethics of the behavior on the insistence that it would be fixed by market forces.
brokencode · 7m ago
I mean, that’s what I’m saying too. I think AI companies will have to pay for content to be competitive in the market. Either that or I guess they could write their own content.
Yes, the government needs to force them to stop stealing first. Similar to how the government stops contractors from going to Home Depot and stealing all the two by fours.
The government doesn’t force contractors to buy wood, it only stops them from stealing it. It’s the profit incentive that leads contractors to buy wood.
ceejayoz · 3h ago
They should!
They won't.
sam_lowry_ · 4h ago
Publishers ≠ authors.
No comments yet
mattmanser · 4h ago
And then governments are mysteriously rolling over and saying of course it's not infringement and even if it is we'll legislate against it.
Just all stinks of corruption.
blibble · 4h ago
> It's like stealing from someone and then making sure they never make money again.
I think the problem is that government/companies don't see that we are eating the seed corn and completely hollowing out society.
csallen · 4h ago
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.
AstroBen · 3h ago
Our society should have a way of protecting people that invest a decade into mastering a field from being made obsolete overnight. They're not business owners banking money the whole time and now needing to pivot, they're regular people being screwed out of their livelihoods. I agree that stifling innovation and disruption isn't the way, but we need something
That initial investment in time/energy is what we need to protect to encourage people to do it. This goes for IP law also in the exact same way - why invest the resources into R&D if the end product will just be ripped off before you've had a chance to recoup anything?
spacemadness · 1h ago
Yes. The cheesy “disruption is always good” is cutthroat SV capitalist kool-aid. It CAN be good, but just assuming it is good because disruption is dogmatic at best. Especially in a country with near to zero safety net. The consumer always wins is a fairy tale.
_DeadFred_ · 24m ago
Wish you would have broken out the reality that disruption plus zero safety net = some people made homeless, some people commiting suicide, lots of people going hungry. The reality that a large amount of people 'disrupted' later in life don't recover to where they were.
georgeecollins · 3h ago
I appreciate you defending an unpopular point of view. I have a hard time accepting that "pure" artists are unaffected. First of all, what the heck is a pure artist anyway? More importantly, all creative people respond to incentives and meet their audience where they are. A lot of the English invasion bands of the '60s went to art school. If painting had been the hip thing to do a lot fewer of them would have been musicians. There would have been a lot fewer cool websites in the '00s if there wasn't an audience and a living to made from them.
I have spent my life making video games and I can assure you market forces shape which video games are created for your enjoyment. There is a reason why a certain type of game appears on iOS and a different type of game appears on your PC. One is very shaped by the pricing rules of the Apple store and the other is very shaped by Steam. A "pure" artist may never be deterred from spending their days playing an accordion, but maybe the fact that no one is listening will cause them to choose a different path?
iwontberude · 4h ago
Counter argument: part of why consumers have received so much value is that IP laws have encouraged inventors and creators to share their creations while maintaining rights. With those rights effectively eroded by training with genai, wouldn’t those group of creators share less and monetize in secrecy?
ToucanLoucan · 3h ago
> 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.
Apples to oranges. No amount of studying Rembrandt paintings would permit a human to paint 9 of them every minute.
Learning in humans and learning in LLMs are fundamentally so different, this analogy doesn't hold up to basic scrutiny.
> 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.
Our legal system will decide that.
> Capitalist markets depend on constant competition and innovation.
Fuck capitalism and fuck the corporations playing it's game. I don't give a fuck if OpenAI makes a billion trillion dollars or not. I give a fuck whether or not people can continue earning money so they can not freeze to death.
If we want to embrace fully automated luxury communism, fine. If you want to automate millions of workers out of a job simply because you can, and pocket a fraction of their salaries each and be rich beyond belief while millions are consigned to starvation, you are everything wrong with our modern world and I hope those workers take vengeance on you.
> Pure artists are unaffected.
[ citation needed ]
> 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.
You know what can? Losing your home.
> 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.
Justify to me how it's fair for a comic illustrator to lose market share to some asshole with a subscription to Midjourney. Justify to me why it's fair for copy writers to lose their jobs to ChatGPT because the results are fine. Is the broad-scale punishment for not learning to code that as software eats the world you just get to go die about it? Is that what our industry is? I thought we were in this to build a better, more efficient world, not to just privatize everyone's way to earn a living so our oligarchs could buy a 14th yacht.
This sucks.
All of #4 is trying to recast people trying desperately to cling to their mode of survival as rent seeking which is not only ethically disgusting, it's also dumb as hell.
You can recast this argument that it's only businesses losing out to AI, but it fucking isn't and you know that. It's workers who trained up for jobs and did exactly what they were told, and now their path to whatever meager way to scrape by is being automated so a handful of people who are already rich beyond fucking belief can be slightly richer.
Fuck this whole thing.
Literally the only people benefitting from AI are the rich assholes who are investing in it, who then get to scrape a tiny amount of money off of everything it writes, draws, and otherwise farts out for people who also transparently do not want to become skilled themselves. It robs workers of their ability to earn a living, it's widely regarded as shit to consume which makes the consumers experience worse and platforms already struggling to filter all the stupid garbage out have to now solve that too. Literally just a tax on everyone and everything on the internet, paid to people already unfathomably rich, because fuck you.
csallen · 2h ago
> Apples to oranges. No amount of studying Rembrandt paintings would permit a human to paint 9 of them every minute.
That's an arbitrary and irrelevant difference. Proof: if a future society upgraded human brains to have the same power as AI, would you then consider it to be immoral and illegal for humans to witness the works and creations of others? No, you would certainly not, as that would be ridiculous. Or take the inverse: it's illegal to use a copy machine to mass copy and distribute somebody else's work, but should it be legal for a human to do this by hand, since humans are massively slower than a copy machine? No, it shouldn't, both should be illegal.
These examples prove the point that ability/capability/skill are non-factors in assessing the morality and legality of copyright infringement.
> Fuck capitalism and fuck the corporations playing it's game. I don't give a fuck if OpenAI makes a billion trillion dollars or not. I give a fuck whether or not people can continue earning money so they can not freeze to death.
Capitalism and the competitive market have created more prosperity and taken more people out of the cold than any other economic system in history. So either you don't actually care about people's well-being, or you're simply ignorant of the effects of capitalism on human prosperity. I suspect it's the latter since you're 100% focused on only a small slice of what's occurring when competition/disruption occur (incumbents lose profits) and 0% focused on everything else (consumers win en masse as things get cheaper and more abundant, new business opportunities are created, new players increase their profits).
Essentially you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. By trying to do do the shorted-sighted "humanitarian" thing to protect the profits/livelihoods of a small number of incumbents, you're sacrificing the massive benefits for everyone else.
blibble · 24m ago
> Capitalism and the competitive market have created more prosperity and taken more people out of the cold than any other economic system in history.
there is no guarantee this will continue to be true forever
I don't see how capitalism survives in a future where nearly all humans are redundant
it will be feudalism, not capitalism
ToucanLoucan · 1h ago
> That's an arbitrary and irrelevant difference. Proof: if a future society upgraded human brains to have the same power as AI, would you then consider it to be immoral and illegal for humans to witness the works and creations of others?
I would hope if we all had brains powered by AI we would recognize how stupid the game we're playing is and end it already, do away with the notion of money as a whole, and just set about living good lives, since that's what AI itself largely suggests we do. However, if this extremely tenuous metaphor is be executed as is presented, if indeed a human could look at a Rembrandt, and subseqently produce 9 copies of it per minute, no, viewing it shouldn't be illegal, but selling the copies absolutely should and would be.
Like if you just want to obsessively generate AI art and... idk, staple it to your wall? That's not illegal, nor even unethical. You don't need to generate it either, you can just print things, and have them.
> Or take the inverse: it's illegal to use a copy machine to mass copy and distribute somebody else's work, but should it be legal for a human to do this by hand, since humans are massively slower than a copy machine? No, it shouldn't, both should be illegal.
No shit.
> Capitalism and the competitive market have created more prosperity and taken more people out of the cold than any other economic system in history.
It also starves 25,000 people to death per day.
tomjen3 · 3h ago
Most of them were so shit in the first place. Click bait and listicle upon listicle.
pier25 · 3h ago
It's not unfair it's content theft at an industrial scale.
Edit:
Those how are downvoting me probably haver never spent a week writing an article or blog post.
renegat0x0 · 2h ago
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.
Google really is braindrained if the best thing they can come up with is to rebrand pop ups.
grugagag · 3h ago
Let’s not forget Google was sleeping on AI and it still is. They were ahead at some point but didnt know what to do with it.
joe_the_user · 3h ago
Yeah,
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).
seydor · 3h ago
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.
everforward · 4h ago
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.
bargainbin · 3h ago
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”
softwaredoug · 4h ago
AI kills search traffic. Yes.
OTOH good search - deep research - is one of the biggest productivity gains using AI.
ceejayoz · 4h ago
Until they kill off the content providers who a) rely on that traffic and b) provide the raw material for the models, of course.
heisenbit · 3h ago
And until now had to pay part of their revenue to Google for search results being ranked accordingly. Diversity of ingress vectors may not be such a bad thing.
GardenLetter27 · 3h ago
And put ads and sponsored results in the LLMs.
candiddevmike · 3h ago
Using AI to do research almost seems worse than citing wikipedia as a reference.
Mars008 · 2h ago
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.
WD-42 · 4h ago
Scare off whatever human visitors you have left with more paywalls, sounds like a great plan.
mrtksn · 4h ago
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.
deadbabe · 3h ago
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.
candiddevmike · 3h ago
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.
righthand · 3h ago
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.
deadbabe · 3h ago
The revenue is clout
hackerbeat · 1h ago
Clout doesn‘t pay the bills.
etchalon · 4h ago
Hopefully everyone's learned not to build their business on top of any Google product. Who knows when they'll cancel it.
blackoil · 3h ago
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)
etchalon · 2h ago
Maybe I should have qualified that with new Google Product.
timewizard · 4h ago
LLMs haven't "killed" search traffic.
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 · 4h ago
"LLMs haven't "killed" search traffic."
"Google has intentionally degraded search as a product to try to force people to use their models."
Both things can be true.
ujkhsjkdhf234 · 3h ago
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.
ChrisArchitect · 3h ago
Related recently:
Few Americans pay for news when they encounter paywalls
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
snowwrestler · 4h ago
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.
johnnyjeans · 3h ago
I know that I've stopped using Google's search primarily because it's been intentionally[1] made a worse tool. The AI overviews sound obnoxious and I'm not surprised if they're driving more people off of the platform.
I don't know what the hell is going on over there, but the systemic issues and awful decisions I see coming out of Alphabet companies in recent years paints a picture of suicidal levels of hubris at the c-suite level. The boards need to pull their heads out of their asses, otherwise incompetence is going to sink that ship before 2040.
Breaking hospitality/zoning laws is not 'competition'. (AirBnb)
Breaking taxi/transportations laws and regulation is not 'competition'. (Uber/Lyft)
Misclassifying workers to bypass employment laws is not 'competition'. (All 'gig' companies)
Operating unlicensed financial services is not 'competition'. (fintech)
Being given special content liability carveouts only to your platform is not 'competition'. (social media)
Evading antitrust norms via vertical integration is not 'competition'. (Apple app store and 30% rent)
Flooding the market with illegal or gray-area imports is not 'competition'. (Amazon)
Exploiting data without consent is not 'competition'. (all tech at this point)
Using investor capital to subsidize predatory pricing is not 'competition'. (almost all tech)
Every industry 'new' tech has gone after they have cheated, broken laws and/or had/pushed for (normally after the fact) special carveouts from the law so that they are the only ones in their field that get to operate a different way, used and harvested data in bad faith, used predatory unsustainable pricing practices.
Show me where tech has 'outcompeted' without doing any of the above. Where the product didn't need special protections/carvouts to existing law, didn't exploit data/peoples trust, didn't use investment capital to artificially lower prices, didn't utilize 'grey areas' to skirt barriers that ACTUAL competing companies obeyed, where the product delivered, on it's own, created a unicorn.
Edit: Responding as edit because I've been timed out. Apple is doing rent-seeking enforced through ecosystem control. This is traditionally seen as a monopolistic practice and historically/based on capitalist philosophy companies that did this were seen as a threat to capitalism and broken up/punished for this behavior. Rent seeking is explicitly anti-capitalist in classical economic thought.
Let's take copyright law for example. Set aside the fact that the entire basis of copyright law is EXPLICITLY to give businesses a "monopoly," which is the exact opposite of competition. Your issue with AI is that they are violating or trying to change the meaning of copyright law? How do you square that with the past 250 years of history of businesses successfully lobbying to strengthen and change copyright law in order to protect their monopolies and weaken competition?
Or let's look into taxi laws. Where for decades taxi medallion owners and fleet operators in NYC lobbied to prevent the city from issuing new medallions.
You seem to believe that laws increase competition and that resisting/changing/lobbying against the laws is meant to decrease competition, which is plainly untrue. Often the exact opposite is true, which is the very definition of regulatory capture.
Capitalism is a system that seeks to benefit the common man by incentivizing profit-seekers to compete to create new innovations, to deliver goods faster/easier, and to lower prices. It also seeks to disincentivize profit-seeking through non-competitive means that don't benefit consumers, e.g. monopolies, oligarchies, regulatory capture, false advertising, etc.
You ignored my point on copyright and 'what about'd your own as if that makes copyright law somehow not currently exist. Without copyright you would have market failure. Who will invest in Bob's business if Tom can just undercut him? Who would make a multi-million dollar movie in your world? Write text books? How can Bob start a business doing those things if he can't get investment? This is a BASIC premise of the modern economy. Modern society wouldn't exist, and historically western society (starting when first applied in the "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning" in the early 1700s) has understood and embraced it's benefit. Business can't build their business around ignoring the law and then say 'our business model won't work under the current law' and then benefit from first mover advantage because they started by making illegal moves. Capitalism is not anarchy, it works within frameworks and constraints, including the law. Rewarding lawbreakers with 'first mover advantage' or additionally in AIs case special new legal carvouts creates INCREDIBLY perverse incentives.
For NYC you are arguing that it's OK for businesses to ignore laws that impact them. I disagree, I don't believe capitalism is 'anarchy'. Capitalism MUST exist in a framework with government regulation, as classical capitalist philosophy points out. Again all you are saying is 'tech is above the law because I don't like the law' and 'breaking the law if it means profit is TRUE capitalism'. Business was free to push to change the law NYC. They are not free to just ignore the law. They should definitely not benefit from first mover advantage when they got to be first by breaking the law.
Please don't say what I believe, but instead respond on substance. I believe businesses should not build their business on ignoring the law, using BILLIONs in funding (which combined with business corporate legal protections shields them from consequences of breaking the law), in order to distort the market and force a carveout for themselves and give themselves an unfair first mover advantage. I don't think lawbreaking is competition or capitalism. I believe if a business created their market penetration through breaking the law that even if the law is changed after the fact that specific business should be banned from the carveout as they had an unfair/illegal first mover advantage versus those that followed the law. Your model encourages and rewards law breaking and unfair competition, not healthy competition/capitalist growth.
I seem to believe that we are a nation of laws, that capitalism exists with in constraints, on of which are laws, and that breaking laws that get in the way of billionaire founders wishing to exploit an industry segment isn't competition/capitalism. Breaking laws to get an unfair competitive and/or first mover advantage should be punished not rewarded, as to do otherwise creates horribly perverse incentives.
I notice you didn't point to a single legitimate/untarnished unicorn.
This one is competition though. No one is forced to use Apple or develop for Apple. People purchase Apple because they like their products more than the alternatives.
From the Wikipedia entry on vertical integration[1]:
>Vertical integration can be desirable because it secures supplies needed by the firm to produce its product and the market needed to sell the product, but it can become undesirable when a firm's actions become anti-competitive and impede free competition in an open marketplace.
...
>A firm may desire such expansion to secure the supplies needed by the firm to produce its product and the market needed to sell the product. Such expansion can become undesirable from a system-wide perspective when it becomes anti-competitive and impede free competition in an open marketplace.
...
>The result is a more efficient business with lower costs and more profits. On the undesirable side, when vertical expansion leads toward monopolistic control of a product or service then regulative action may be required to rectify anti-competitive behavior.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_integration
Well, and intentional efforts by the major tech companies.
Like Facebook lying about video stats to push "pivot to video". https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/well-this-puts-a-nail-in-t...
"It turns out that the metrics that Facebook was using to measure engagement with news video were wrong, massively overestimating the amount of time that users spent consuming video ads. In 2019, Facebook settled a lawsuit with those advertisers, paying them $40 million (while admitting no wrongdoing). But it was too late for the publishers who’d already pivoted to Facebook video and then either made big cuts or shut down completely when it turned out people weren’t actually watching."
The web has led to 10x more content being published in the past 30 years than was published in all of human kind's history before. And that's not including short-form posts/comments/reviews/chats/etc on social media and forums and communities.
The amount of increased competition and commoditization of content is insane.
I worked at a newspaper for years, during the early days of social media (I made our Twitter account, even... and once dropped an accidental f-bomb on it). I remember the video push; it was a huge change to workflows, hiring patterns, technology needs, etc. It was built on lies and bad data, and media outlets really haven't recovered since.
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.
And I know some people are going to say how writers and news "don't deserve" to make money because they haven't sacrificed enough upon the altar of tech, hustle, and Silicon Valley - I don't really care. I think newspapers and writing in general losing out is a blow to society.
The trickle always turns out to be piss.
OP's original comment called this stealing and this response is that the "obvious solution" is that the thief will pay their victim back after turning their stealing operation into a successful business. That is silly. Do people think that if the Pirate Bay is allowed to exist long enough that they will eventually start paying Hollywood Studios for new movies?
If you want to argue against OP in defense of these AI companies, argue why what they're doing isn't stealing or why what they're doing in the moment is justified. Don't say the stealing can be excused by some hypothetical and implied promise of future reparations.
EDIT: It's funny to respond to a comment asking for explanation of the downvotes only to be downvoted without explanation.
Yes, the AI companies are stealing. This is an area where the legal system needs to catch up.
Once it does, AI companies should have to negotiate contracts with publishers in order to legally use their content. Otherwise they should be open to lawsuits for copyright violations.
This is quite different from Pirate Bay, which is not run by a law abiding company with customers. Unless OpenAI wants to go underground and sell their services on the black market, they will have to play by the rules.
Yes, the government needs to force them to stop stealing first. Similar to how the government stops contractors from going to Home Depot and stealing all the two by fours.
The government doesn’t force contractors to buy wood, it only stops them from stealing it. It’s the profit incentive that leads contractors to buy wood.
They won't.
No comments yet
Just all stinks of corruption.
isn't this the entire AI playbook?
artists, software developers, writers, musicians, everyone
total parasitism always kills the host
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.
That initial investment in time/energy is what we need to protect to encourage people to do it. This goes for IP law also in the exact same way - why invest the resources into R&D if the end product will just be ripped off before you've had a chance to recoup anything?
I have spent my life making video games and I can assure you market forces shape which video games are created for your enjoyment. There is a reason why a certain type of game appears on iOS and a different type of game appears on your PC. One is very shaped by the pricing rules of the Apple store and the other is very shaped by Steam. A "pure" artist may never be deterred from spending their days playing an accordion, but maybe the fact that no one is listening will cause them to choose a different path?
Apples to oranges. No amount of studying Rembrandt paintings would permit a human to paint 9 of them every minute.
Learning in humans and learning in LLMs are fundamentally so different, this analogy doesn't hold up to basic scrutiny.
> 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.
Our legal system will decide that.
> Capitalist markets depend on constant competition and innovation.
Fuck capitalism and fuck the corporations playing it's game. I don't give a fuck if OpenAI makes a billion trillion dollars or not. I give a fuck whether or not people can continue earning money so they can not freeze to death.
If we want to embrace fully automated luxury communism, fine. If you want to automate millions of workers out of a job simply because you can, and pocket a fraction of their salaries each and be rich beyond belief while millions are consigned to starvation, you are everything wrong with our modern world and I hope those workers take vengeance on you.
> Pure artists are unaffected.
[ citation needed ]
> 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.
You know what can? Losing your home.
> 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.
Justify to me how it's fair for a comic illustrator to lose market share to some asshole with a subscription to Midjourney. Justify to me why it's fair for copy writers to lose their jobs to ChatGPT because the results are fine. Is the broad-scale punishment for not learning to code that as software eats the world you just get to go die about it? Is that what our industry is? I thought we were in this to build a better, more efficient world, not to just privatize everyone's way to earn a living so our oligarchs could buy a 14th yacht.
This sucks.
All of #4 is trying to recast people trying desperately to cling to their mode of survival as rent seeking which is not only ethically disgusting, it's also dumb as hell.
You can recast this argument that it's only businesses losing out to AI, but it fucking isn't and you know that. It's workers who trained up for jobs and did exactly what they were told, and now their path to whatever meager way to scrape by is being automated so a handful of people who are already rich beyond fucking belief can be slightly richer.
Fuck this whole thing.
Literally the only people benefitting from AI are the rich assholes who are investing in it, who then get to scrape a tiny amount of money off of everything it writes, draws, and otherwise farts out for people who also transparently do not want to become skilled themselves. It robs workers of their ability to earn a living, it's widely regarded as shit to consume which makes the consumers experience worse and platforms already struggling to filter all the stupid garbage out have to now solve that too. Literally just a tax on everyone and everything on the internet, paid to people already unfathomably rich, because fuck you.
That's an arbitrary and irrelevant difference. Proof: if a future society upgraded human brains to have the same power as AI, would you then consider it to be immoral and illegal for humans to witness the works and creations of others? No, you would certainly not, as that would be ridiculous. Or take the inverse: it's illegal to use a copy machine to mass copy and distribute somebody else's work, but should it be legal for a human to do this by hand, since humans are massively slower than a copy machine? No, it shouldn't, both should be illegal.
These examples prove the point that ability/capability/skill are non-factors in assessing the morality and legality of copyright infringement.
> Fuck capitalism and fuck the corporations playing it's game. I don't give a fuck if OpenAI makes a billion trillion dollars or not. I give a fuck whether or not people can continue earning money so they can not freeze to death.
Capitalism and the competitive market have created more prosperity and taken more people out of the cold than any other economic system in history. So either you don't actually care about people's well-being, or you're simply ignorant of the effects of capitalism on human prosperity. I suspect it's the latter since you're 100% focused on only a small slice of what's occurring when competition/disruption occur (incumbents lose profits) and 0% focused on everything else (consumers win en masse as things get cheaper and more abundant, new business opportunities are created, new players increase their profits).
Essentially you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. By trying to do do the shorted-sighted "humanitarian" thing to protect the profits/livelihoods of a small number of incumbents, you're sacrificing the massive benefits for everyone else.
there is no guarantee this will continue to be true forever
I don't see how capitalism survives in a future where nearly all humans are redundant
it will be feudalism, not capitalism
I would hope if we all had brains powered by AI we would recognize how stupid the game we're playing is and end it already, do away with the notion of money as a whole, and just set about living good lives, since that's what AI itself largely suggests we do. However, if this extremely tenuous metaphor is be executed as is presented, if indeed a human could look at a Rembrandt, and subseqently produce 9 copies of it per minute, no, viewing it shouldn't be illegal, but selling the copies absolutely should and would be.
Like if you just want to obsessively generate AI art and... idk, staple it to your wall? That's not illegal, nor even unethical. You don't need to generate it either, you can just print things, and have them.
> Or take the inverse: it's illegal to use a copy machine to mass copy and distribute somebody else's work, but should it be legal for a human to do this by hand, since humans are massively slower than a copy machine? No, it shouldn't, both should be illegal.
No shit.
> Capitalism and the competitive market have created more prosperity and taken more people out of the cold than any other economic system in history.
It also starves 25,000 people to death per day.
Edit:
Those how are downvoting me probably haver never spent a week writing an article or blog post.
I created my own Internet index. That is how I control my discoveries.
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
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).
If google doesn't do that, publishers will respond in a vicious way, like purposely poisoning content to mislead their LLMs.
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.
OTOH good search - deep research - is one of the biggest productivity gains using AI.
Good luck with that, quality publishing died years ago when Google was optimizing for their end.
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.
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.
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.
"Google has intentionally degraded search as a product to try to force people to use their models."
Both things can be true.
Few Americans pay for news when they encounter paywalls
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44373222
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.
I don't know what the hell is going on over there, but the systemic issues and awful decisions I see coming out of Alphabet companies in recent years paints a picture of suicidal levels of hubris at the c-suite level. The boards need to pull their heads out of their asses, otherwise incompetence is going to sink that ship before 2040.
[1] - https://jackyan.com/blog/2023/09/google-search-is-worse-by-d...