Is it only me who feels its incredibly unfair for publishers, that not only did big tech trained their LLMs on free content authored by these publishers, but it's also killing their future revenue. It's like stealing from someone and then making sure they never make money again.
Yes it's unfair. It's digital colonialism. What's sad is that other companies keep falling for the false narrative that big tech monopolies act as partners and not the blood sucking leeches they've become to represent.
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!
It’s colonial, but mostly Offerwall just seems like a big company decision. It has a name somehow worse than “paywall”, and I don’t plan to pay anyone for their content, especially if some of it is going to a big company. The reasons are that I don’t need to, it’s not important enough, and I don’t want to think about it.
A better idea would be a non-profit federated subscription similar to music services. You just use it, you don’t have to think about how much you pay for each page you read, and the federation keeps your identity private. You could even upvote or downvote a page if you wanted more of your percentage to go to someone or none of it. You could decide how much you could afford to pay so it could be affordable and free to the poor. You could vote even if you didn’t contribute and your vote would be considered equal.
But, the odds of that becoming a thing are incredibly low. It would require some sort of identity, which could be misused. And the web is meant to be like the outdoors- you go outside and move around in it mostly freely. It’s not a zoo where you pay admission.
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.
Google can link to whomever they want but stealing content and then saying it is not theft because they mix it up with content from other sites they've stolen from is not fair competition. It's more like the logic of car thieves who say that they took apart the porsche they stole and it's parts are now used with the parts from all the other cars they stole - therefore did they really take the now unrecognizable porsche? The court still deems it theft. If Google left creators and site owners content alone and created their own content to use in A.I. overviews - ie: becoming publishers - it would be annoying and spark innovation as sites de-googled but this is not that.
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.
It's really not the reality. AI spam is diluting the voice of 'new entrants' and removing any traffic based revenue they may get.
All I can see AI doing is entrenching those large enough to integrate it into their offerings in a meaningful way, and sustain a significantly lower cost base.
I use copilot at $10/mo. Gpt4.1 costs $2/m in and $8/m out. I'd do that in a single day, easily. There is no way any product I try and make can compete with that while consuming any meaningful number of tokens.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I think you are misunderstanding a fundamental part of capitalism and markets, which is leading you to incorrect conclusions.
You seem to be assuming that there are a limited number of business models out there, and that they need to be very specifically (and legally) identified and protected in order for the economy to thrive. Or how else could you come to the conclusion that the market would fail without copyright?
Not only is this not true, but it is exactly backwards. The precise opposite is true. There's an unlimited number of business models that are possible, and for the vast majority, government involvement and specific "protection" only serves to limit competition and thus innovation and to hurt the economy.
"Who will invest in Bob's business if Tom can just undercut him?" With this question, you neglect the obvious possibility that Bob simply will choose a business model that can't be easily undercut. The vast majority of business models do not rely on copyright law.
"Who would make a multi-million dollar movie in your world? Write text books?" This particular quote requires multiple responses:
(1) First of all, who cares? These are arbitrary business models, and it should not be up to you or me or the government to legislate them into existence. There are a billion trillion quadrillion business models that could theoretically exist that do not exist today, and the world is just fine. For example, imagine a world where you could copyright recipes, and the first person to make a pizza could make Pizza Inc., and they'd sell all the world's pizzas or license them out, and it would be illegal for anyone else to copy. And then I came along and said, "Hey, let's get rid of recipe copyrights." You would be sitting there saying the exact same thing, "@csallen, who is going to make Lasagna LLC or Salad Inc.? Who is going to invest in a huge recipe conglomerate if any tiny restaurant could just undercut them?" And I would give you the exact same response: who cares? We do not need some particular subset of business models to exist for the world to be okay, it is a failure of imagination to assume that particular business models that thrive in the current timeline are necessary or even ideal relative to what could be.
(2) It's arrogant for any of us to think we know so much about market dynamics that we can confidently predict that BusinessModelX cannot survive without CopyrightLawY. The entirety of the world's information exists online for free, and yet textbook companies still make money. You can get free online courses from MIT, yet colleges still make money. These things are easy to explain with the benefit of hindsight. But I bet you before the existence of the web in 1992, few experts would have predicted this to be the case. It's incredibly difficult to predict how market dynamics will play out because of the limitless ingenuity and creativity of the human mind multiplied by tens of millions of profit-seeking individuals trying to seek out an edge in the market. Even barring my "who cares, other alternative business models will pop up" argument, the idea that you or I know enough to have a top-down decree about what will happen to the economy if a particular business model disappears is incredibly unrealistic. The economy is formed in a bottom-up way, from trillions of individual actions made daily by consumers and businesses.
"Capitalism MUST exist in a framework with government regulation, as classical capitalist philosophy points out." This is one of the few points you made that I absolutely agree with, and that I think is fundamentally ignored by many supporters of capitalism, especially the libertarian types. Capitalism is essentially created by laws, and made possible by laws. I 100% agree. However, this brings me to the second part of my response to you.
2. Laws
I think you possess a fundamental misunderstanding of laws here as well, or at the very least, a severe difference in our attitudes and how we view the law.
Per my view, laws are imperfect. They are self-evidently imperfect. I can find any number of laws on the books right now that you yourself would agree should probably be broken because they are so ridiculous and in need of update, revision, or repeal that it would be unconscionable to actually follow or enforce them. Once you admit that even one such law exists, and yet remains on the books (and trust me, that number is much greater than 1), then it follows when and whether it is best to follow the law is a matter of subjective judgment. It is not a black-and-white issue.
Even our courts and legal systems believe this, and are organized around this principle. Laws can and have been thrown out as unjust or unconstitutional by the judicial branch, despite the fact that they were clearly violated. Laws can and have been ignored and unenforced by the executive branch and the forces it controls, despite situations where the law is clearly being violated.
Now, I am not an anarchist. I believe in the rule of law, and I believe that it makes life better. But again, it is completely subjective which subset of the law actually does so. And I don't think it's possible for any human to live without their actions agreeing with this, even if they ideologically pronounce a black-and-white stance.
Personally, when it comes to capitalism at least, the laws that matter to me are the laws that increase competition and that protect consumers. The entire goal is to incentivize people/companies to profit by competing, innovating, improving products/services/delivery, and lowering prices. And to outlaw every other form of profit seeking that doesn't benefit consumers (monopoly, collusion, bribery, sabotage, false advertising, regulatory capture, etc), in order to disincentivize companies from taking that path. In addition, there are regulations that exist to protect consumers and keep them safe. I'm a huge fan of this kind of law.
However, there are lots of unjust and poor laws that get put on the books, as I have already mentioned. Regulatory capture is a tremendous problem in a capitalist society: using the law to reduce competition for one's own benefit, at the expense of consumers, the market, the economy, and the country. This is not some rare, exceptional thing. It's a persistent problem that must be fought against. And the primary means by which unjust laws are fought and challenged is by breaking them (peacefully), and then taking things to court.
This is not anarchy. This is how the system was intentionally designed, and how it's been upheld.
So no, I don't subscribe to any sort of oversimplified black-and-white thinking about whether or not it is okay to break the law. Every case must be assessed and adjudicated on its own.
Personally, I don't care that much when Uber and Lyft deliver a product that people want, and it flies in the face of laws that were essentially written by the taxi lobbies. While there are exceptions (as I said, these things must be looked at on a case-by-case basis), I largely see those as unjust and anti-competitive laws, created in order to serve other corporate interests with millions or billions of dollars in backing.
While I agree with you that I don't particularly love the idea of companies using billions in funding to flaunt the law for their own benefit, I find it hard to understand why you are simultaneously so happy with companies using billions of dollars to write the law in a self-serving way. When these two forces go head-to-head, I will almost 100% side with whatever promotes competition and aligns with what consumers are demanding to pay for.
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.
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.
It IS incredibly unfair and it's also unethical, given that they're already scraping publisher content to feed their own A.I. Unless I missed it, this article didn't have details on how the revenue - if any - would be handled but I presume there would also be some 'ticket-clipping' on the part of Google there as well.
Ie: sorry about acquiring your content and then no longer linking to you but in case anyone does ever find your pathetic indie site, we're now offering an array of solutions so that you can ditch your long-standing but now no longer needed e-commerce solutions. You have made...$177 in micro payments this week minus the transaction fees of $17.77 but cannot claim it yet as you have not met our your ad revenue threshold. Need help? Go around in circles with our chat bots until you die - we'll keep your money regardless.
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.
"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."
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.
> 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.
It's hard to not see this as unintentional by big tech because now these same media outlets are completely subservient to their platforms. Very few media outlets can be the New York Times most are confined to Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Spotify, Apple Music.
It most be nice to have a 40-50% blood extraction machine when these same media companies would have owned their advertising networks if this were 30 years ago.
I can't think of a single company that wouldn't want a 40% boost in revenue.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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?
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
The vast majority of people who are starving to death every day live in high conflict countries and/or places without functioning capitalist market economies. Percentage wise, it's almost certain that fewer people are starving to death than at any other time in human history. It boggles my mind that people can see and hear these stats and still rage against capitalism.
Also, leaving aside my previous two points on this and speaking as a person who consumes the internet, I don't want the apparently outmoded 'list of blue links' to be replaced by one A.I. overview.
As is well documented, the overviews can 'hallucinate' and less well-documented, they're bland. I'd rather have my search query met with an array of links, offering a variety of takes that I can then sift through.
This is especially vital for research which is why I now use Kagi and also Perplexity, as in the latter provides quality links. I may be wrong but I believe it was started by former Google execs and uses some of the natural language processing mechanisms that made legacy Google so good.
Often it is hard for me to discover new places on internet using search. How monetization could take place if I cannot easily find for example Warhammer related blogs, resources.
I created my own Internet index. That is how I control my discoveries.
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.
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.
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”
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.
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.
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).
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.
The exciting thing about search engines becoming useless as a traffic source, is that small publishers and blogs will eventually learn to adopt old technologies to gain traffic: web rings and links sections.
This means if you like a blog, there could now be a way to organically discover other blogs similar to it, by following links across multiple sites.
No one knows what a web ring is, and there's no incentive for folks to leave their preferred "attention theme parks" that have been meticulously curated by big tech.
There will not be a second decentralized web renaissance. We are all too busy, lazy, and enthralled by low effort content, like posting on HN.
Why would I publish if no one is ever looking for my content? To feed the LLMs? A lot of blogging is done to make money. If no one is searching anymore what is the revenue model? What you’re describing to me seems like passion blogging which already exists and I don’t think the financially interested are going that way if there’s no revenue model.
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!
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.
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)
The "killing" started way before AI summary was launched, and the killing was done by the sites themselves, by turning themselves into garbage factories churning out slop (human slop!) that nobody wants to read. Look at this graph and tell me when Google AI Summary launched: https://x.com/YujieChen/status/1932566121846354228/photo/1
While many sites did shovel slop out the door in the name of SEO, the decline in Google search traffic is happening to all sites.
It’s a real phenomenon where search impressions and clicks, which moved roughly in tandem for many years, have started diverging rather abruptly and dramatically. It is an obvious qualitative change in Google search traffic.
Everyone is blaming the AI overviews, and they seem like the most obvious culprit. But regardless, the change in pattern is real and not correlated with site content quality.
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.
Is it only me who feels its incredibly unfair for publishers, that not only did big tech trained their LLMs on free content authored by these publishers, but it's also killing their future revenue. It's like stealing from someone and then making sure they never make money again.
Yes it's unfair. It's digital colonialism. What's sad is that other companies keep falling for the false narrative that big tech monopolies act as partners and not the blood sucking leeches they've become to represent.
The choices given are to die today or die tomorrow, no wonder most are accepting whatever money they can get.
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!
It’s colonial, but mostly Offerwall just seems like a big company decision. It has a name somehow worse than “paywall”, and I don’t plan to pay anyone for their content, especially if some of it is going to a big company. The reasons are that I don’t need to, it’s not important enough, and I don’t want to think about it.
A better idea would be a non-profit federated subscription similar to music services. You just use it, you don’t have to think about how much you pay for each page you read, and the federation keeps your identity private. You could even upvote or downvote a page if you wanted more of your percentage to go to someone or none of it. You could decide how much you could afford to pay so it could be affordable and free to the poor. You could vote even if you didn’t contribute and your vote would be considered equal.
But, the odds of that becoming a thing are incredibly low. It would require some sort of identity, which could be misused. And the web is meant to be like the outdoors- you go outside and move around in it mostly freely. It’s not a zoo where you pay admission.
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.
Google can link to whomever they want but stealing content and then saying it is not theft because they mix it up with content from other sites they've stolen from is not fair competition. It's more like the logic of car thieves who say that they took apart the porsche they stole and it's parts are now used with the parts from all the other cars they stole - therefore did they really take the now unrecognizable porsche? The court still deems it theft. If Google left creators and site owners content alone and created their own content to use in A.I. overviews - ie: becoming publishers - it would be annoying and spark innovation as sites de-googled but this is not that.
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.
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.
It's really not the reality. AI spam is diluting the voice of 'new entrants' and removing any traffic based revenue they may get.
All I can see AI doing is entrenching those large enough to integrate it into their offerings in a meaningful way, and sustain a significantly lower cost base.
I use copilot at $10/mo. Gpt4.1 costs $2/m in and $8/m out. I'd do that in a single day, easily. There is no way any product I try and make can compete with that while consuming any meaningful number of tokens.
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.
> 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.
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.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_integration
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.
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.
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.
1. Capitalism
I think you are misunderstanding a fundamental part of capitalism and markets, which is leading you to incorrect conclusions.
You seem to be assuming that there are a limited number of business models out there, and that they need to be very specifically (and legally) identified and protected in order for the economy to thrive. Or how else could you come to the conclusion that the market would fail without copyright?
Not only is this not true, but it is exactly backwards. The precise opposite is true. There's an unlimited number of business models that are possible, and for the vast majority, government involvement and specific "protection" only serves to limit competition and thus innovation and to hurt the economy.
"Who will invest in Bob's business if Tom can just undercut him?" With this question, you neglect the obvious possibility that Bob simply will choose a business model that can't be easily undercut. The vast majority of business models do not rely on copyright law.
"Who would make a multi-million dollar movie in your world? Write text books?" This particular quote requires multiple responses:
(1) First of all, who cares? These are arbitrary business models, and it should not be up to you or me or the government to legislate them into existence. There are a billion trillion quadrillion business models that could theoretically exist that do not exist today, and the world is just fine. For example, imagine a world where you could copyright recipes, and the first person to make a pizza could make Pizza Inc., and they'd sell all the world's pizzas or license them out, and it would be illegal for anyone else to copy. And then I came along and said, "Hey, let's get rid of recipe copyrights." You would be sitting there saying the exact same thing, "@csallen, who is going to make Lasagna LLC or Salad Inc.? Who is going to invest in a huge recipe conglomerate if any tiny restaurant could just undercut them?" And I would give you the exact same response: who cares? We do not need some particular subset of business models to exist for the world to be okay, it is a failure of imagination to assume that particular business models that thrive in the current timeline are necessary or even ideal relative to what could be.
(2) It's arrogant for any of us to think we know so much about market dynamics that we can confidently predict that BusinessModelX cannot survive without CopyrightLawY. The entirety of the world's information exists online for free, and yet textbook companies still make money. You can get free online courses from MIT, yet colleges still make money. These things are easy to explain with the benefit of hindsight. But I bet you before the existence of the web in 1992, few experts would have predicted this to be the case. It's incredibly difficult to predict how market dynamics will play out because of the limitless ingenuity and creativity of the human mind multiplied by tens of millions of profit-seeking individuals trying to seek out an edge in the market. Even barring my "who cares, other alternative business models will pop up" argument, the idea that you or I know enough to have a top-down decree about what will happen to the economy if a particular business model disappears is incredibly unrealistic. The economy is formed in a bottom-up way, from trillions of individual actions made daily by consumers and businesses.
"Capitalism MUST exist in a framework with government regulation, as classical capitalist philosophy points out." This is one of the few points you made that I absolutely agree with, and that I think is fundamentally ignored by many supporters of capitalism, especially the libertarian types. Capitalism is essentially created by laws, and made possible by laws. I 100% agree. However, this brings me to the second part of my response to you.
2. Laws
I think you possess a fundamental misunderstanding of laws here as well, or at the very least, a severe difference in our attitudes and how we view the law.
Per my view, laws are imperfect. They are self-evidently imperfect. I can find any number of laws on the books right now that you yourself would agree should probably be broken because they are so ridiculous and in need of update, revision, or repeal that it would be unconscionable to actually follow or enforce them. Once you admit that even one such law exists, and yet remains on the books (and trust me, that number is much greater than 1), then it follows when and whether it is best to follow the law is a matter of subjective judgment. It is not a black-and-white issue.
Even our courts and legal systems believe this, and are organized around this principle. Laws can and have been thrown out as unjust or unconstitutional by the judicial branch, despite the fact that they were clearly violated. Laws can and have been ignored and unenforced by the executive branch and the forces it controls, despite situations where the law is clearly being violated.
Now, I am not an anarchist. I believe in the rule of law, and I believe that it makes life better. But again, it is completely subjective which subset of the law actually does so. And I don't think it's possible for any human to live without their actions agreeing with this, even if they ideologically pronounce a black-and-white stance.
Personally, when it comes to capitalism at least, the laws that matter to me are the laws that increase competition and that protect consumers. The entire goal is to incentivize people/companies to profit by competing, innovating, improving products/services/delivery, and lowering prices. And to outlaw every other form of profit seeking that doesn't benefit consumers (monopoly, collusion, bribery, sabotage, false advertising, regulatory capture, etc), in order to disincentivize companies from taking that path. In addition, there are regulations that exist to protect consumers and keep them safe. I'm a huge fan of this kind of law.
However, there are lots of unjust and poor laws that get put on the books, as I have already mentioned. Regulatory capture is a tremendous problem in a capitalist society: using the law to reduce competition for one's own benefit, at the expense of consumers, the market, the economy, and the country. This is not some rare, exceptional thing. It's a persistent problem that must be fought against. And the primary means by which unjust laws are fought and challenged is by breaking them (peacefully), and then taking things to court.
This is not anarchy. This is how the system was intentionally designed, and how it's been upheld.
So no, I don't subscribe to any sort of oversimplified black-and-white thinking about whether or not it is okay to break the law. Every case must be assessed and adjudicated on its own.
Personally, I don't care that much when Uber and Lyft deliver a product that people want, and it flies in the face of laws that were essentially written by the taxi lobbies. While there are exceptions (as I said, these things must be looked at on a case-by-case basis), I largely see those as unjust and anti-competitive laws, created in order to serve other corporate interests with millions or billions of dollars in backing.
While I agree with you that I don't particularly love the idea of companies using billions in funding to flaunt the law for their own benefit, I find it hard to understand why you are simultaneously so happy with companies using billions of dollars to write the law in a self-serving way. When these two forces go head-to-head, I will almost 100% side with whatever promotes competition and aligns with what consumers are demanding to pay for.
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.
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.
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..
A few of us will. :) I give my stuff away for free with no ads. Maybe the web will get small again.
It will be small again. Less high quality content in the future is the current path.
It IS incredibly unfair and it's also unethical, given that they're already scraping publisher content to feed their own A.I. Unless I missed it, this article didn't have details on how the revenue - if any - would be handled but I presume there would also be some 'ticket-clipping' on the part of Google there as well.
Ie: sorry about acquiring your content and then no longer linking to you but in case anyone does ever find your pathetic indie site, we're now offering an array of solutions so that you can ditch your long-standing but now no longer needed e-commerce solutions. You have made...$177 in micro payments this week minus the transaction fees of $17.77 but cannot claim it yet as you have not met our your ad revenue threshold. Need help? Go around in circles with our chat bots until you die - we'll keep your money regardless.
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.
> 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.
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."
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.
> 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.
It's hard to not see this as unintentional by big tech because now these same media outlets are completely subservient to their platforms. Very few media outlets can be the New York Times most are confined to Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Spotify, Apple Music.
It most be nice to have a 40-50% blood extraction machine when these same media companies would have owned their advertising networks if this were 30 years ago.
I can't think of a single company that wouldn't want a 40% boost in revenue.
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.
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.
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).
Ah, yes. Trickle-down economics again.
The trickle always turns out to be piss.
Could somebody downvoting this explain why? Shouldn’t AI companies pay for the content they train their models on and summarize?
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.
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.
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.
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.
They should!
They won't.
Publishers ≠ authors.
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.
> It's like stealing from someone and then making sure they never make money again.
isn't this the entire AI playbook?
artists, software developers, writers, musicians, everyone
total parasitism always kills the host
I think the problem is that government/companies don't see that we are eating the seed corn and completely hollowing out society.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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?
> 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.
> 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.
> 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
I'm just as curious as you about what the future holds. But while we're living in the present, we shouldn't be throwing out what's working.
> 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.
The vast majority of people who are starving to death every day live in high conflict countries and/or places without functioning capitalist market economies. Percentage wise, it's almost certain that fewer people are starving to death than at any other time in human history. It boggles my mind that people can see and hear these stats and still rage against capitalism.
Most of them were so shit in the first place. Click bait and listicle upon listicle.
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.
Also, leaving aside my previous two points on this and speaking as a person who consumes the internet, I don't want the apparently outmoded 'list of blue links' to be replaced by one A.I. overview.
As is well documented, the overviews can 'hallucinate' and less well-documented, they're bland. I'd rather have my search query met with an array of links, offering a variety of takes that I can then sift through.
This is especially vital for research which is why I now use Kagi and also Perplexity, as in the latter provides quality links. I may be wrong but I believe it was started by former Google execs and uses some of the natural language processing mechanisms that made legacy Google so good.
Often it is hard for me to discover new places on internet using search. How monetization could take place if I cannot easily find for example Warhammer related blogs, resources.
I created my own Internet index. That is how I control my discoveries.
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
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.
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.
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”
AI kills search traffic. Yes.
OTOH good search - deep research - is one of the biggest productivity gains using AI.
Until they kill off the content providers who a) rely on that traffic and b) provide the raw material for the models, of course.
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.
And put ads and sponsored results in the LLMs.
Using AI to do research almost seems worse than citing wikipedia as a reference.
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.
Google really is braindrained if the best thing they can come up with is to rebrand pop ups.
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.
> sleeping on AI and it still is
How is Google still sleeping on AI? Don't they have the best available models at every size?
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).
Scare off whatever human visitors you have left with more paywalls, sounds like a great plan.
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.
The exciting thing about search engines becoming useless as a traffic source, is that small publishers and blogs will eventually learn to adopt old technologies to gain traffic: web rings and links sections.
This means if you like a blog, there could now be a way to organically discover other blogs similar to it, by following links across multiple sites.
No one knows what a web ring is, and there's no incentive for folks to leave their preferred "attention theme parks" that have been meticulously curated by big tech.
There will not be a second decentralized web renaissance. We are all too busy, lazy, and enthralled by low effort content, like posting on HN.
Why would I publish if no one is ever looking for my content? To feed the LLMs? A lot of blogging is done to make money. If no one is searching anymore what is the revenue model? What you’re describing to me seems like passion blogging which already exists and I don’t think the financially interested are going that way if there’s no revenue model.
The revenue is clout
Clout doesn‘t pay the bills.
But it pays
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.
"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.
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.
Hopefully everyone's learned not to build their business on top of any Google product. Who knows when they'll cancel it.
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)
Maybe I should have qualified that with new Google Product.
Related recently:
Few Americans pay for news when they encounter paywalls
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44373222
The "killing" started way before AI summary was launched, and the killing was done by the sites themselves, by turning themselves into garbage factories churning out slop (human slop!) that nobody wants to read. Look at this graph and tell me when Google AI Summary launched: https://x.com/YujieChen/status/1932566121846354228/photo/1
While many sites did shovel slop out the door in the name of SEO, the decline in Google search traffic is happening to all sites.
It’s a real phenomenon where search impressions and clicks, which moved roughly in tandem for many years, have started diverging rather abruptly and dramatically. It is an obvious qualitative change in Google search traffic.
Everyone is blaming the AI overviews, and they seem like the most obvious culprit. But regardless, the change in pattern is real and not correlated with site content quality.
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.
[1] - https://jackyan.com/blog/2023/09/google-search-is-worse-by-d...
The AI overviews are not obnoxious to me. I quite like them. It is the sites that are obnoxious!