With what passes for news these days at most outlets I can’t say I feel too bad for them that someone else beat them at their own game of feeding the masses surface level doom scrolling slop for engagement and ad impressions.
Hell, a large chunk of the junk being put out by these same outlets is trash written by the AI solutions they are paying for. Probably solutions from the likes of Google that is giving it to them at both ends.
Once the snake finishes eating its own tail maybe the good reporters will still have somewhere that pays them for the good work they do.
Yeah, they did it to themselves buying into the rage bait bullshit they’ve been doing for years.
Where does one pay for quality news?
PBS is a good option too.
Glad this is happening. These are the same news outlets that provide Google with your information and pay Google for ads.
They can all bust for all I care.
One of the problems that the major news outlets have is that they repeat each other. It’s not merely an issue of AI compiling news stories, but that on top of the fact that all of these newspapers are doing hardly any research. For example, if you live in a town that’s not too large, there might only be one local paper, and they might send out reporters to local events. Obviously you would then go to that newspaper if you wanted to learn about local events, because they are adding explicit value.
But if you’re trying to read about national politics, a lot of the information is going to be the same in a lot of the newspapers. Which means nobody cares about the newspaper itself. And this is a creation of the newspaper’s own decision making over the past few decades.
I’d say their decision making was mostly forced by their drop in ad revenue and subscriptions forced by the internet.
Though I do wish that someone would make a Spotify for news so that I could pay once and get access to all of them and at least give them 10 cents per article or something, because I will never pay the subscription cost any are asking.
As much as I’d like to support them, the price to utility ratio is way the fuck off at the prices they ask now.
It’s also the speed of news now. When you had a edition a day in print there was time to do research.
Now with instant publishing on the web it’s more important to get the basic story out fast. With the hope it’s the one that sites like reddit pickup.
That’s kinda what Apple News+ is but stuck in their walled garden.
I’m okay except for the walled garden part. I get referred to articles in many ways, none of them in Apple News. If I can ever log into the actual publications sites with my Apple ID and get the article, then I’m on.
it’s a little annoying but i find searching for the article title generally produces the right result in the news app
That’s not an experience I’m willing to pay for in its current form. But I could definitely see a path for it to become one, thanks for putting it on my radar.
yeah for sure… i get it with apple one because i actively use music, drive, and tv+… certainly wouldn’t subscribe to it on its own, because you’re absolutely right: it’s too much of a hassle
Watch his recent interview with Nilay Patel from The Verge. Watching him dance around questions about this was painful.
This man only cares about increasing Alphabet stock prices to ensure as large a golden parachute as possible on the way out.
You described all executives everywhere.
The sad part is this is actually his job description and Alphabet could get sued by shareholders if he didn‘t do exactly that. The stock market needs to be criminalized, not glorified as the one truth like it‘s treated right now.
This man only cares about increasing Alphabet stock prices to ensure as large a golden parachute as possible on the way out.
This Is literally his legal obligation, welcome to capitalism
there are many ways to fulfil this “obligation”… i’d argue that he’s increasing alphabet stock price in the short term but long term what the fuck is going to happen when the sources all go out of business?
… oh right they’re going to become a news monopoly… cool cool cool
regardless, i think there’s an argument to be made with all this “we are evil because it’s our legal duty to shareholders” that evil is a bad long-term choice. i think boeing is the prime example: if they weren’t “too big to fail” they’d be fucked because of their short term thinking
No, making money is not a legal obligation. CEO at my last job told the board, two years in a row, that intended to lose money so we could invest in our people and tech. They cheered him.
AI stands for Ambitious Indian
(Just plagiarizing the joke about that company that went bankrupt)
Wouldn’t this kill their ad revenue? Which is like…most of their revenue?
Ad supported articles is a dead industry, Google realizes this better than anyone. People don’t go to the source anymore to answer curiosities, why would you read a whole article to answer a simple question when AI gives you the answer directly?
I meant why would people advertise on Google if it won’t convert to clicks anymore?
why would you read a whole article to answer a simple question when AI gives you the answer directly?
context?, nuance?, verifying the AI slop?
People really trust it? Like it’s been so wrong on things for me, I automatically skip to search results past it. Why bother anymore
People on Twitter regularly go “@grok is this true” to everything and trust the AI to be correct.
The same AI that said the fresh photo of National Guard members sleeping on the floor was from 2021…
people still on twitter are complete, brain washed idiots… so this behaviour tracks
google search has been trash even before llms, i believe its one of the reasons chatgpt got so much traction. first 2 pages are just generic slop with paywalled or ad-infested content.
i switched to kagi 2 years ago and its has relevant results on page 1 that i won’t get in google even after 10s of pages. plus i don’t bombed with ads for that term for weeks.
they purposefully fucked up the search so people would have to click more pages to find their answer, giving google a chance to display more ads.
I use extensions to block AI results… having to skip past them is annoying
I still find it weird that people don’t use Kagi for search. At least start page or ddg. Google hasn’t been useful for five ish years and admitted in court that they damaged results to prop up ads.
I used Kagi for a few months when other engines failed. It did come through a few times. But paying $5 a month to get one extra good search result per month was a hard sell for me. If they offered a much much smaller package of lime 20-50 searches per month or just pay as you go, I’d definitely be in.
Good news for you, Kagi just made the first 50 searches free for anybody without creating an account.
Yeah that’s what I used for the first 6 months to try it out.
Yup, I’ve been seeing more and more people straight use AI results to support their arguments.
Depends on what it is. As a reference lookup for a simple programming function and with an example, it’s been a game changer.
Yeah, asking an LLM simple stuff that Google used to just give you at the top of the search before the AI Overview was a thing, like how old is X celebrity or for a high level example of code, or as a stupidly complex spell checker it is pretty good.
Usually I would be digging through some old forums for examples from 10 years ago. Or searching stack exchange. Personally, my usage is scripting and programming sites has totally deminish.
I know several people in my community who confidently trust it for search. they are not stupid people… but sometimes I question their choices
Which is such a shortsighted move because as soon as all the news portals close shop Google’s scraper will have nothing relevant to summarize and is gonna be shit.
Nothing is stopping the AI summaries from using social media as the primary source
Can’t wait for Google to AI-summarize AI-generated social media posts for artificial Google users created to hike ad prices. It’s gonna be wild
The robots only want to hang out with the robots.
Beep boop
It’s going to get wild
So social media are news outlets now. Good. Glad we cleared that up.
Seems inevitable 😮💨
In the context of my original comment, social media companies like Meta and Reddit have fought tooth and nail to not be considered news networks or news outlets specifically because they don’t want to be beholden to the laws that regulate news outlets/networks. Jeopardizing their ineligibility to be sued for what users post (in the US) by going all in on AI LLM’s scrapers when those scrapers rely pretty heavily on news networks and other media to stay useful means they’ll starve themselves of AI scraped content, and that they’ll potentially forfeit what protections against lawsuits they have. It’s a no win situation for them to continue to bet on AI which has already largely reached the limit of what it’s capable of in current iterations because of the lack of clean organic training data.
It’s a huge disaster in the making. There’s probably a game theory model that explains what’s happening but damned if i know it. AI is a trap.
At the beginning of LLMs as a consumer tech phase, the big tech companies believed that they would soon generate synthetic data without human labor costs. But synthetic data caused model collapse when used as training data. So they still need humans.
But now their competitors are using scrapers and summarizers and those are expensive so they have to extract more value from search traffic and that means fewer referrals to sites. Fewer referrals to sites reduces original content and leadabto less traffic and training data for their models.
The only two ways out are to create an international regulatory body ornto break up facebook, microspft, and google.
I do respect your optimism, but realistically, I doubt they’re forfeiting anything. Fox News broadcasts blatant lies daily. All they had to do was a behind the scenes rebranding.
Fox news isn’t legally considered a news outlet. In fact we have literally seen them admit to not being one in court proceedings.
Yes, correct, that is what I just said.
That’s when Google will buy what ever is left of Condé Nast or Buzzfeed at bottom dollar and start using more AI to shit out “news”.
they will be using that opportunity to make up the truth they want.
No! Pushing AI generated garbage is our job!
Lol maybe they shouldn’t have covered up the genocide in Gaza
“Every day, we send billions of clicks to websites, and connecting people to the web continues to be a priority,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “New experiences like AI Overviews and AI Mode enhance Search and expand the types of questions people can ask, which creates new opportunities for content to be discovered.”
They followed up with: “You can totally trust me, and everything I just said. I am absolutely definitely not lying.”
With a link to NYPost lol
Google wants it all this time. No traffic for anyone but them after they steal all your content.
They saw what AOL tried to do and decided they can make it work.
AOL? Like the company that was always giving away those free coasters and frisbees?
Oh no… Not the major news outlets, how ever will we cope. Let them burn.
I’m about as anti-corporation a person as you’ll find, but I don’t think we should be cheering the death of the Free Press. I know it’s edgy to say “it’s already here”, but that’s just not accurate. When true journalists are gone, the only thing left will be propaganda.
You think the billionaire owned press is free? Some smaller independents may deserve support but that isn’t major companies.
Did I say I support billionaire owned press? “Free press”, or the 4th pillar of democracy is a concept. When done correctly, it keeps authorities in check by openly and honestly reporting what is happening with real facts and information.
Then how would I know the 10 surprising things I can do to be healthier? /s
I am sure ChatGPT can make something up for you each day
Good. Ai was a terrble idea for searches and Google needs to be broken up
I hate to tell you this but I don’t think the AI is going down. I think Google could body all news organizations if it needed to.
They said the same thing about standard oil
The government broke up standard oil right? The current government has no beef with AI, in fact, it seems to be poring money into it. I am talking about Google vs the news sites.
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