At some point (maybe we’ve reached it), I fully expect that many of the top-ranked websites by Google will be AI-generated themselves. There’s a cottage industry (and has been a very long time) of websites engineered in such a way to game the algorithm. They target specific queries and load up the pages with ads and links to product pages on amazon which generate a kickback for the website. Google used to turn up pages written by passionate people, using the web of hyperlinks people created out of good will as a proxy for relevancy to a query. But when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Google Search was so good that everyone started to use it for everything and then we got the cottage industry wanting to generate money from people just seeking information. Vague queries like “best dog food” or “how often to water plants” or “tortilla recipe” are not likely to turn up anything except crap and that’s pretty much a self-fulfilling prophesy. A top-ranked website for a popular query will bring so much traffic so as to overwhelm any site except the ones generating some money per page view. A site which doesn’t do that goes offline and then is deranked by google. And the sorts of people who stoop to the level of putting ads and trackers on their site and aggressively SEO’ing their way to the top are not likely to care about providing you with the highest quality information. It goes the other way too; a passionate hobbyist does not want their website to be top-ranked as the traffic would bring the server or its costs to its knees. Neither do those old-school web forums who don’t want hundreds of noobs coming in and ruining their fun time. I’d consider the possibility that google is ranking pages partly based on whether the site can tolerate and would welcome the load. A metric like that is almost certain to rank up the bad, ad-riddled sites. Google may have no choice in the matter. When a random person wants to know why their refrigerator smells bad, the only other person willing to spend their own resources answering their dumb question will be evil as fuck.
It was poor English literature grads writing those pages only because those were the only people who could write well. Now a computer can do that job. Take a guess where it’s going to go. The people running these sites and prompting the AI will be the poorest people in the world with internet access, where the money from the kickbacks goes a lot further than it does in the West. The internet has no borders. You’ll be getting information from an AI prompted by Raj in India, claiming to be Dave from NYC.
I think they are planning to go even further than that. There wont be a an internet made up of discrete websites full of facts, or web search as we understand it today. They want to make their AI the first and last stop for any question a person might have, and have the AI act as agent to perform any tasks that require interactions with the broader web.
It was poor English literature grads writing those pages only because those were the only people who could write well.
A lot of that work was outsourced overseas a long time ago. You don’t need to write original content, you just need to reword the content from other sites. It’s an industry in the Philippines and other place with low wages and people that know English.
I guess AI will replace that though. So it’ll be AI summaries of AI content.
At some point (maybe we’ve reached it), I fully expect that many of the top-ranked websites by Google will be AI-generated themselves. There’s a cottage industry (and has been a very long time) of websites engineered in such a way to game the algorithm. They target specific queries and load up the pages with ads and links to product pages on amazon which generate a kickback for the website. Google used to turn up pages written by passionate people, using the web of hyperlinks people created out of good will as a proxy for relevancy to a query. But when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Google Search was so good that everyone started to use it for everything and then we got the cottage industry wanting to generate money from people just seeking information. Vague queries like “best dog food” or “how often to water plants” or “tortilla recipe” are not likely to turn up anything except crap and that’s pretty much a self-fulfilling prophesy. A top-ranked website for a popular query will bring so much traffic so as to overwhelm any site except the ones generating some money per page view. A site which doesn’t do that goes offline and then is deranked by google. And the sorts of people who stoop to the level of putting ads and trackers on their site and aggressively SEO’ing their way to the top are not likely to care about providing you with the highest quality information. It goes the other way too; a passionate hobbyist does not want their website to be top-ranked as the traffic would bring the server or its costs to its knees. Neither do those old-school web forums who don’t want hundreds of noobs coming in and ruining their fun time. I’d consider the possibility that google is ranking pages partly based on whether the site can tolerate and would welcome the load. A metric like that is almost certain to rank up the bad, ad-riddled sites. Google may have no choice in the matter. When a random person wants to know why their refrigerator smells bad, the only other person willing to spend their own resources answering their dumb question will be evil as fuck.
It was poor English literature grads writing those pages only because those were the only people who could write well. Now a computer can do that job. Take a guess where it’s going to go. The people running these sites and prompting the AI will be the poorest people in the world with internet access, where the money from the kickbacks goes a lot further than it does in the West. The internet has no borders. You’ll be getting information from an AI prompted by Raj in India, claiming to be Dave from NYC.
I think they are planning to go even further than that. There wont be a an internet made up of discrete websites full of facts, or web search as we understand it today. They want to make their AI the first and last stop for any question a person might have, and have the AI act as agent to perform any tasks that require interactions with the broader web.
A lot of that work was outsourced overseas a long time ago. You don’t need to write original content, you just need to reword the content from other sites. It’s an industry in the Philippines and other place with low wages and people that know English.
I guess AI will replace that though. So it’ll be AI summaries of AI content.