News outlets in crisis mode as Google-led AI search push crushes website traffic (nypost.com)
from mesamunefire@piefed.social to technology@lemmy.world on 10 Jun 20:17
https://piefed.social/post/896580

#technology

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ckmnstr@lemmy.world on 10 Jun 20:45 next collapse

Which is such a shortsighted move because as soon as all the news portals close shop Google’s scraper will have nothing relevant to summarize and is gonna be shit.

limer@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 10 Jun 20:56 next collapse

Nothing is stopping the AI summaries from using social media as the primary source

ckmnstr@lemmy.world on 10 Jun 21:02 next collapse

Can’t wait for Google to AI-summarize AI-generated social media posts for artificial Google users created to hike ad prices. It’s gonna be wild

limer@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 10 Jun 21:03 next collapse

It’s going to get wild

Zier@fedia.io on 10 Jun 21:16 collapse

The robots only want to hang out with the robots.

ckmnstr@lemmy.world on 10 Jun 21:17 collapse

Beep boop

atrielienz@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 01:34 collapse

So social media are news outlets now. Good. Glad we cleared that up.

Star@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 11 Jun 01:36 collapse

Seems inevitable 😮‍💨

atrielienz@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 01:45 collapse

In the context of my original comment, social media companies like Meta and Reddit have fought tooth and nail to not be considered news networks or news outlets specifically because they don’t want to be beholden to the laws that regulate news outlets/networks. Jeopardizing their ineligibility to be sued for what users post (in the US) by going all in on AI LLM’s scrapers when those scrapers rely pretty heavily on news networks and other media to stay useful means they’ll starve themselves of AI scraped content, and that they’ll potentially forfeit what protections against lawsuits they have. It’s a no win situation for them to continue to bet on AI which has already largely reached the limit of what it’s capable of in current iterations because of the lack of clean organic training data.

Star@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 11 Jun 02:33 next collapse

I do respect your optimism, but realistically, I doubt they’re forfeiting anything. Fox News broadcasts blatant lies daily. All they had to do was a behind the scenes rebranding.

atrielienz@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 02:38 collapse

Fox news isn’t legally considered a news outlet. In fact we have literally seen them admit to not being one in court proceedings.

Star@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 11 Jun 20:17 collapse

Yes, correct, that is what I just said.

smayonak@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 04:04 collapse

It’s a huge disaster in the making. There’s probably a game theory model that explains what’s happening but damned if i know it. AI is a trap.

At the beginning of LLMs as a consumer tech phase, the big tech companies believed that they would soon generate synthetic data without human labor costs. But synthetic data caused model collapse when used as training data. So they still need humans.

But now their competitors are using scrapers and summarizers and those are expensive so they have to extract more value from search traffic and that means fewer referrals to sites. Fewer referrals to sites reduces original content and leadabto less traffic and training data for their models.

The only two ways out are to create an international regulatory body ornto break up facebook, microspft, and google.

atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works on 11 Jun 01:45 next collapse

That’s when Google will buy what ever is left of Condé Nast or Buzzfeed at bottom dollar and start using more AI to shit out “news”.

[deleted] on 11 Jun 07:17 collapse

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Reverendender@sh.itjust.works on 10 Jun 20:46 next collapse

“Every day, we send billions of clicks to websites, and connecting people to the web continues to be a priority,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “New experiences like AI Overviews and AI Mode enhance Search and expand the types of questions people can ask, which creates new opportunities for content to be discovered.”

They followed up with: “You can totally trust me, and everything I just said. I am absolutely definitely not lying.”

homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world on 10 Jun 20:50 next collapse

With a link to NYPost lol

aaron@infosec.pub on 10 Jun 21:03 next collapse

asdf

FourWaveforms@lemm.ee on 10 Jun 21:20 next collapse

they seem to be walking that back somewhat, moving it to its own tab.

shiroininja@lemmy.world on 10 Jun 21:25 next collapse

People really trust it? Like it’s been so wrong on things for me, I automatically skip to search results past it. Why bother anymore

teamevil@lemmy.world on 10 Jun 23:54 next collapse

I use extensions to block AI results… having to skip past them is annoying

SpicyColdFartChamber@lemm.ee on 11 Jun 00:47 next collapse

Yup, I’ve been seeing more and more people straight use AI results to support their arguments.

WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works on 11 Jun 01:59 next collapse

I know several people in my community who confidently trust it for search. they are not stupid people… but sometimes I question their choices

shadowfax13@lemmy.ml on 11 Jun 02:42 next collapse

google search has been trash even before llms, i believe its one of the reasons chatgpt got so much traction. first 2 pages are just generic slop with paywalled or ad-infested content.

i switched to kagi 2 years ago and its has relevant results on page 1 that i won’t get in google even after 10s of pages. plus i don’t bombed with ads for that term for weeks.

sprite0@sh.itjust.works on 11 Jun 03:51 collapse

they purposefully fucked up the search so people would have to click more pages to find their answer, giving google a chance to display more ads.

Pirate@feddit.org on 15 Jun 08:37 collapse

I have a different theory. Google started scrapping Reddit since its gone public, so I think this is a strategy to get people to use [search query] + reddit in order to find answers, so that Google can scrape that data to train their AI

sprite0@sh.itjust.works on 15 Jun 08:41 collapse

this isn’t a theory of mine, it came out in leaked testimony. totally intentional enshittification for profit

BigTrout75@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 04:39 next collapse

Depends on what it is. As a reference lookup for a simple programming function and with an example, it’s been a game changer.

flop_leash_973@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 22:58 collapse

Yeah, asking an LLM simple stuff that Google used to just give you at the top of the search before the AI Overview was a thing, like how old is X celebrity or for a high level example of code, or as a stupidly complex spell checker it is pretty good.

BigTrout75@lemmy.world on 12 Jun 06:12 collapse

Usually I would be digging through some old forums for examples from 10 years ago. Or searching stack exchange. Personally, my usage is scripting and programming sites has totally deminish.

Tillman@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 04:47 next collapse

I still find it weird that people don’t use Kagi for search. At least start page or ddg. Google hasn’t been useful for five ish years and admitted in court that they damaged results to prop up ads.

realitista@lemm.ee on 11 Jun 09:24 collapse

I used Kagi for a few months when other engines failed. It did come through a few times. But paying $5 a month to get one extra good search result per month was a hard sell for me. If they offered a much much smaller package of lime 20-50 searches per month or just pay as you go, I’d definitely be in.

baggachipz@sh.itjust.works on 11 Jun 23:18 collapse

Good news for you, Kagi just made the first 50 searches free for anybody without creating an account.

realitista@lemm.ee on 11 Jun 23:34 collapse

Yeah that’s what I used for the first 6 months to try it out.

lepinkainen@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 05:24 collapse

People on Twitter regularly go “@grok is this true” to everything and trust the AI to be correct.

The same AI that said the fresh photo of National Guard members sleeping on the floor was from 2021…

Jhex@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 12:03 collapse

people still on twitter are complete, brain washed idiots… so this behaviour tracks

MyOpinion@lemmy.today on 10 Jun 22:06 next collapse

Google wants it all this time. No traffic for anyone but them after they steal all your content.

A7thStone@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 00:16 collapse

They saw what AOL tried to do and decided they can make it work.

Kolanaki@pawb.social on 11 Jun 04:40 collapse

AOL? Like the company that was always giving away those free coasters and frisbees?

[deleted] on 10 Jun 22:13 next collapse

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boughtmysoul@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 03:21 next collapse

Watch his recent interview with Nilay Patel from The Verge. Watching him dance around questions about this was painful.

This man only cares about increasing Alphabet stock prices to ensure as large a golden parachute as possible on the way out.

rottingleaf@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 07:12 next collapse

AI stands for Ambitious Indian

(Just plagiarizing the joke about that company that went bankrupt)

Zetta@mander.xyz on 11 Jun 07:22 next collapse

This man only cares about increasing Alphabet stock prices to ensure as large a golden parachute as possible on the way out.

This Is literally his legal obligation, welcome to capitalism

shalafi@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 19:13 next collapse

No, making money is not a legal obligation. CEO at my last job told the board, two years in a row, that intended to lose money so we could invest in our people and tech. They cheered him.

pupbiru@aussie.zone on 12 Jun 07:16 collapse

there are many ways to fulfil this “obligation”… i’d argue that he’s increasing alphabet stock price in the short term but long term what the fuck is going to happen when the sources all go out of business?

… oh right they’re going to become a news monopoly… cool cool cool

regardless, i think there’s an argument to be made with all this “we are evil because it’s our legal duty to shareholders” that evil is a bad long-term choice. i think boeing is the prime example: if they weren’t “too big to fail” they’d be fucked because of their short term thinking

CosmoNova@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 10:58 next collapse

The sad part is this is actually his job description and Alphabet could get sued by shareholders if he didn‘t do exactly that. The stock market needs to be criminalized, not glorified as the one truth like it‘s treated right now.

callouscomic@lemm.ee on 12 Jun 08:12 collapse

You described all executives everywhere.

AlecSadler@sh.itjust.works on 11 Jun 07:04 next collapse

Wouldn’t this kill their ad revenue? Which is like…most of their revenue?

3abas@lemm.ee on 11 Jun 07:26 collapse

Ad supported articles is a dead industry, Google realizes this better than anyone. People don’t go to the source anymore to answer curiosities, why would you read a whole article to answer a simple question when AI gives you the answer directly?

Jhex@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 12:00 next collapse

why would you read a whole article to answer a simple question when AI gives you the answer directly?

context?, nuance?, verifying the AI slop?

3abas@lemm.ee on 14 Jun 10:29 collapse

The last thing I googled is how to measure dress shirt size. Do you need context and nuance for everything you Google?

Do you prefer to click on the seo optimized first page results that are full of ads and read through a nonsense article about elegance in formal wear just to get to the instructions on where to place the measuring tape on your shoulder? I MUCH prefer the AI summarized response.

Most of the Internet is NOT intellectual writing, it’s blog spam to answer your daily curiosities and practical needs. A sufficienty trained model is a really good (and environmentally friendly) alternative.

Jhex@lemmy.world on 14 Jun 14:46 collapse

The last thing I googled is how to measure dress shirt size. Do you need context and nuance for everything you Google?

if AI is answering, yes.

Do you prefer to click on the seo optimized first page results that are full of ads and read through a nonsense article…

No, but that’s not what i claimed so you can have your strawman back

Most of the Internet is NOT intellectual writing, it’s blog spam to answer your daily curiosities and practical needs. A sufficienty trained model is a really good (and environmentally friendly) alternative.

Let me know when we get one. In the meantime, enjoy your thick, glue riddled, pizza sauce

3abas@lemm.ee on 15 Jun 00:31 collapse

Let me know when we get one. In the meantime, enjoy your thick, glue riddled, pizza sauce

What? That’s just stupid, like I’m not remotely claiming they are intelligent, but to dismiss their utility completely is just idiotic. How long do you think the plug your ears strategy will work for?

Pick any model that has come out this year and ask if my example query or any similar daily curiosity you would Google, and show me how it gives you “thick, glue riddled, pizza sauce”. Show me a single gpt 3.5 comparable model that can’t answer that query with sufficient accuracy.

if AI is answering, yes.

You’re being obtuse. You don’t need nuance in trying to figure out what size collar you should buy.

Jhex@lemmy.world on 15 Jun 02:06 collapse

but to dismiss their utility completely is just idiotic.

not what I said at all. I simply stated AI answers cannot be trusted without verifying them which makes them a lot less useful

3abas@lemm.ee on 16 Jun 10:06 collapse

You’re moving the goalposts. You said you need nuance in how to measure a shirt size, you’re arguing just to argue.

If a model ever starts answering these curiosities inaccurately, it would be an insufficient model for that task and wouldn’t be used for it. You would immediately notice this is a bad model when it tells you to measure your neck to get a sleeve length.

Am I making sense? If the model starts giving people bad answers, people will notice when reality hits them in the face.

So I’m making the assertion that many models today are already sufficient for accurately answering daily curiosities about modern life.

Jhex@lemmy.world on 16 Jun 13:49 collapse

You’re moving the goalposts. You said you need nuance in how to measure a shirt size, you’re arguing just to argue.

I said I needed context to verify AI was not giving me slop. If you want to trust AI blindly, go ahead, I’m not sure why you need me to validate your point

If a model ever starts answering these curiosities inaccurately, it would be an insufficient model for that task and wouldn’t be used for it.

And how would you notice unless: you either already know the correct answer (at least a ballpark) or verify what AI is telling you?

You would immediately notice this is a bad model when it tells you to measure your neck to get a sleeve length

What if it gives you and answer that does not sound so obviously wrong? like measuring the neck width instead of circumference? or measure shoulder to wrists?

So I’m making the assertion that many models today are already sufficient for accurately answering daily curiosities about modern life.

And once again I tell you that you can trust it blindly while I would not and I will add that I do not need another catalyst for the destruction of our planet so I can get some trivia questions answered. Given the environmental cost of AI, I would expect a significant return, not just a trivia machine that may wrong 25% of the time

AlecSadler@sh.itjust.works on 11 Jun 15:43 collapse

I meant why would people advertise on Google if it won’t convert to clicks anymore?

3abas@lemm.ee on 14 Jun 10:16 collapse

They won’t, and I’m saying Google knows that their Advertising cash cow is running out of milk.

Korhaka@sopuli.xyz on 11 Jun 07:38 next collapse

Oh no… Not the major news outlets, how ever will we cope. Let them burn.

coolmojo@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 08:03 next collapse

Then how would I know the 10 surprising things I can do to be healthier? /s

Korhaka@sopuli.xyz on 11 Jun 09:44 collapse

I am sure ChatGPT can make something up for you each day

Empricorn@feddit.nl on 11 Jun 11:36 collapse

I’m about as anti-corporation a person as you’ll find, but I don’t think we should be cheering the death of the Free Press. I know it’s edgy to say “it’s already here”, but that’s just not accurate. When true journalists are gone, the only thing left will be propaganda.

Korhaka@sopuli.xyz on 11 Jun 11:44 collapse

You think the billionaire owned press is free? Some smaller independents may deserve support but that isn’t major companies.

Empricorn@feddit.nl on 11 Jun 12:00 collapse

Did I say I support billionaire owned press? “Free press”, or the 4th pillar of democracy is a concept. When done correctly, it keeps authorities in check by openly and honestly reporting what is happening with real facts and information.

Blackmist@feddit.uk on 11 Jun 08:19 next collapse

No! Pushing AI generated garbage is our job!

fodor@lemmy.zip on 11 Jun 09:07 next collapse

One of the problems that the major news outlets have is that they repeat each other. It’s not merely an issue of AI compiling news stories, but that on top of the fact that all of these newspapers are doing hardly any research. For example, if you live in a town that’s not too large, there might only be one local paper, and they might send out reporters to local events. Obviously you would then go to that newspaper if you wanted to learn about local events, because they are adding explicit value.

But if you’re trying to read about national politics, a lot of the information is going to be the same in a lot of the newspapers. Which means nobody cares about the newspaper itself. And this is a creation of the newspaper’s own decision making over the past few decades.

realitista@lemm.ee on 11 Jun 09:22 collapse

I’d say their decision making was mostly forced by their drop in ad revenue and subscriptions forced by the internet.

Though I do wish that someone would make a Spotify for news so that I could pay once and get access to all of them and at least give them 10 cents per article or something, because I will never pay the subscription cost any are asking.

As much as I’d like to support them, the price to utility ratio is way the fuck off at the prices they ask now.

insomniac20k@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 23:17 next collapse

That’s kinda what Apple News+ is but stuck in their walled garden.

realitista@lemm.ee on 11 Jun 23:35 collapse

I’m okay except for the walled garden part. I get referred to articles in many ways, none of them in Apple News. If I can ever log into the actual publications sites with my Apple ID and get the article, then I’m on.

pupbiru@aussie.zone on 12 Jun 07:14 collapse

it’s a little annoying but i find searching for the article title generally produces the right result in the news app

realitista@lemm.ee on 12 Jun 08:14 collapse

That’s not an experience I’m willing to pay for in its current form. But I could definitely see a path for it to become one, thanks for putting it on my radar.

pupbiru@aussie.zone on 12 Jun 08:25 collapse

yeah for sure… i get it with apple one because i actively use music, drive, and tv+… certainly wouldn’t subscribe to it on its own, because you’re absolutely right: it’s too much of a hassle

Hugin@lemmy.world on 12 Jun 06:43 collapse

It’s also the speed of news now. When you had a edition a day in print there was time to do research.

Now with instant publishing on the web it’s more important to get the basic story out fast. With the hope it’s the one that sites like reddit pickup.

Therobohour@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 09:33 next collapse

Good. Ai was a terrble idea for searches and Google needs to be broken up

deaf_fish@midwest.social on 11 Jun 12:27 collapse

I hate to tell you this but I don’t think the AI is going down. I think Google could body all news organizations if it needed to.

Therobohour@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 21:34 collapse

They said the same thing about standard oil

deaf_fish@midwest.social on 11 Jun 22:48 collapse

The government broke up standard oil right? The current government has no beef with AI, in fact, it seems to be poring money into it. I am talking about Google vs the news sites.

SplashJackson@lemmy.ca on 11 Jun 12:38 next collapse

Lol maybe they shouldn’t have covered up the genocide in Gaza

flop_leash_973@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 22:52 next collapse

With what passes for news these days at most outlets I can’t say I feel too bad for them that someone else beat them at their own game of feeding the masses surface level doom scrolling slop for engagement and ad impressions.

Hell, a large chunk of the junk being put out by these same outlets is trash written by the AI solutions they are paying for. Probably solutions from the likes of Google that is giving it to them at both ends.

Once the snake finishes eating its own tail maybe the good reporters will still have somewhere that pays them for the good work they do.

explodicle@sh.itjust.works on 11 Jun 23:17 next collapse

Where does one pay for quality news?

ernest314@lemmy.zip on 11 Jun 23:37 next collapse
f4f4f4f4f4f4f4f4@sopuli.xyz on 12 Jun 06:36 next collapse
SpaceCheeseWizard@lemmy.zip on 12 Jun 06:59 next collapse

PBS is a good option too.

CandleTiger@programming.dev on 12 Jun 07:00 collapse
YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today on 12 Jun 07:32 collapse

Yeah, they did it to themselves buying into the rage bait bullshit they’ve been doing for years.

jjlinux@lemmy.ml on 11 Jun 23:31 next collapse

Glad this is happening. These are the same news outlets that provide Google with your information and pay Google for ads.

They can all bust for all I care.

wampus@lemmy.ca on 14 Jun 14:40 collapse

I think it became inevitable that traditional ‘sites’ were going to be in trouble once AI bots gained ground. The user interface is much more organic / user friendly, given that it can be conversational.

It’s why big corps were so quick to start building walls/moats around the technology. If end users had control over what sites their AI bots used to pull information from, that’d be a win for the consumer/end-user, and potentially legitimate news sites depending on how the payment structure is sorted out. Eg. Get a personalized bot that references news articles from a curated list of trusted / decent journalist sites across a broad political spectrum, and you’d likely have a really great “AI assistant” to keep you up to date on various current events. This sort of thing would also represent an existential threat to things like Googles core marketing business, as end users could replace many of their ‘searches’ with a curated personalized AI assistant trained on just reputable sources.

Big tech wants to control that, so that they can advertise via those bots / prioritize their own agenda / paid content. So they want to control the AI sources, and restrict end users’ ability to filter garbage. If users end up primarily interacting with an AI avatar, and you can control the products / information that avatar presents, you have a huge amount of control over the individuals and their spending habits. Not much of a surprise.

It’d be cool to see a user friendly local LLM that allowed users to point it at reference sites of their choosing. Pair that with a news-site data standard that streamlines the ability to pull pertinent data, and let news agencies charge a small fee for access to those APIs to fund it a bit. Shifting towards LLM based data delivery, they could even potentially save a bit in terms of print / online publications – don’t need a fancy expensive user-facing web app, if they’re all just talking to their LLM-based model-hot AI assistant anyway.