My proposed solution: People sign their articles with a key, and I specify for which topics I trust certain people.
I trust Paul Graham on the topic 'startups', so anything that he writes on the topic is considered a high pagerank for me. Paul can also trust other people on the 'startup' topic, and so they will automatically be ranked high on my pagerank (for that topic!). When I do a search, it takes into account the people that I trust on certain topics.
Please steal my idea and make millions!!!
The idea that someone reputeable is always right and and expert in his domain could not be further fetched from the truth.
Just read the following sentence and tell me what you think about it: "oh yeah i get all my information about my religion directly from the pope in the vatican, because we decided EONS ago that he is the source for this kind of stuff".
Weren't Galileo and Copernicus famously persecuted because of exactly that reason?
Only on the internet, where history can be distilled into a single-sentence quip.
In real life the truth is more complicated, but doesn't fit into a tweet.
It only changed over a hundred years later due to the opposition from the Protestants that his books became banned.
I assure you that all major search engines use the author name of articles and blog posts and even posts of forums like HN for all kinds of purposes that end up influencing ranking. It's primarily for anti-spam (a user account with good content on one page probably has good content on another page), but is used to rank quality/expertise too.
The mixing of random and "trusted" content is already what is being done with pagerank.
Truth is an agreement and trust is superficial. I know, I know there is truth in code, but that does not mean that the bigger concept aligns.
I mean damn, we went as far as defining math as the "universal truth" because its replicateable. I dont think anybody wanted to convert reality to numbers but here we are represeting them this way. But hey, if you can develop a mathematical formular why blogspost A about "how to setup your linux computer" is much more true that blogpost B im really all ears.
There’s no need, with this idea, for you to have to get your info directly from the Vatican. You can decide you trust someone different.
Because its really going to be different from the one your neighbour has.
How do you select turstworthy people on a new topic? Does every search start with "hmmm i found 6521 people blogging about this, please click on the trustworthy avatars you like"?
The concept you are trying to apply here, will just lead to your own bubble. Im not even going to go into detail of "orange men knows best" but this example alone should shock you.
This isn't about getting quick answers.
Now you’re arguing about implementation, which is different.
So how to vet people? Well, Paul Graham started a VC company and has seen a lot of startups, so my guess is that he knows a lot about the topic. More so than anyone who hasn't come close to any startup.
On (game) development, I would go for Carmack and the likes.
And of course just like PageRank, if they have vetted for certain people, those also get scored.
Does it lead to your own bubble? Of course! But if you're going to get a religious person to dump his own religion in favor for another, good luck to you. But that's not the kind of problem that I want or need to solve.
I just want reliable information. And I get to decide what "reliable" is. If you're a flat-earther, you can vet any crazy person you wish. I don't care, because it won't affect me at all.
I had a similar idea (also, please take it) for online comment systems. Seed of people and who they invite is who they vouch for. The new invitees get to invite more etc. Now, and keep OPs suggestion in mind as well, that's the easy part - here's where it needs to go... If someone messes up, account gets banned and upchain (two levels let's say) gets a notice. Upchain gets one more notice and the whole chain's banned. One notice clears out in half a year or so. Two never. Yellow/red cards for the teams on the internet. One's always at fault, but whole team suffers and is responsible.
You might say that would make you think thrice about inviting people, and yes it would - what incentivises anyone to invite anyone, ever? What makes your system different from a small group of friends making a private invite-only Discord/IRC channel/etc. and keeping it exclusive right now?
I trust PG for knowledge about startups. That's it.
I’ve come to realize that the people that “wrote the book” on a particular subject aren’t necessarily experts, they’re just the person who happened to be motivated to write a book on the subject.
Learning about a subject or an event comes from hearing many voices, across a broad spectrum of perspectives and opinions.
Then you can form your own conclusions out of all the possible truths.
Truth is not a democratic process and very hard to verify just by using data.
Not asking to rewrite the whole internet here, just an alternative search engine.
> The idea that someone reputeable is always right and and expert in his domain could not be further fetched from the truth.
The expert probably knows more than the non-expert. If you like to get your info from low-waged SEO writers, fine by me.
> Just read the following sentence and tell me what you think about it: "oh yeah i get all my information about my religion directly from the pope in the vatican, because we decided EONS ago that he is the source for this kind of stuff".
The pope, and everyone that he trusts, seems like credible sources for Catholics, no? Maybe you can throw in some theologist you like (and therefore also this persons trusted connections), and you can have a pretty good catalogue of trusted searchable information.
For me, personally, it’s been a long time since Google pointed me to new platforms or new writers. It is dominated by big outlets and seo articles now, and good mostly for finding basic factual info - not for finding individual writers or nlogs any more
E.g., suppose I tell the network that I'm 80% interested in William Gibson, and I set my "see posts by" threshold to 60%. I would then see all posts from William Gibson, as well as any posts from people he's at least 75% interested in. And of course I'd also see posts from more distant connections, if the chain multiplies out to more than my view threshold.
Have any networks ever done something like this before? Or with "interest" swapped for "trust" or some other stat?
They make money by tweaking those thresholds so that you'll be interested in what their paying customers (advertisers) actually want you to be interested in. Giving you back the power to change that, would be the end of their business model.
That's how they all worked in principle.
The "problem" for FB, Twitter, YouTube (and others) is that some people trust Alex Jones and since the 2016 election we've been in a moral panic around misinformation (Russian or otherwise). Our big idea right now is making sure that tech conglomerates choose for us the people we should trust.
Also that's not very far from sharing RSS feeds with friends. "I like this blog, so I add it to my feeds" is a way of "trusting" someone. But the reality is that people can't be bothered to use RSS, generally.
Besides, do not think about the problem as a techie with a long list of trusted internet personalities. Think about it as a normal user that barely gets technology. The most common outcome would be that they setup once these search sources with some random familiar sounding names (probably news outlet they trust) and never touch them again. It feels it could be a highly exploitable system.
I’m also not sure that i agree with your idea that the core principal of the internet should be in any way related to what information one might discover. The internet and the web provide means to disseminate and access information (amongst much else) but I don’t see how it should have anything to do with what you discover.
Current system is too easily gamed. If it means we need to sign everything with real name/ID let's be it. There is a place for anonymous Internet but life is too short to go through piles of trash every day to try to find a nugget. At least allow others who already found it to sign on "I found out and it's interesting" promise.
Reddit.
http://getoutfoxed.com/node/46
We raised several million dollars and ran for several years before we had to pivot. At least then, people weren’t too interested in having to select trusted experts. However, this was the golden era of Google so it was hard to see the need.
It began as a Firefox plugin and had a lot of buzz for a time in those early Web 2.0 days.
It's not like you have to do this with every article you read, but for those where you do care about the integrity of the information, you'd have this extra support.
Outsourcing the credibility assessment to the link graph was the whole point of PageRank, because most people wouldn't know where to start with whitelisting sources for their query (and if they did, a general web search engine wouldn't be where they started).
If I want pg's opinion on startups, I go to his blog. If I want to find a venue near me, or the web presence for a company somebody has mentioned, or a description of a particular phenomenon I'm not familiar with, or whether a particular error message has been seen by other people, or where to buy something, or some information on a place in a foreign country or what Foo means, I don't want to start off by specifying who I trust to provide this information. And even if I did, I suspect I'd be disappointed by how little information Paul Graham, my favourite YouTubers and the Pope had to offer on any of these subjects.
I look forward to seeing this on /r/agedlikemilk in 2 years when KonsoloSearch buys Google.
Expensive at the moment but is one way to solve source payment problem and as an end outcome seems preferrable to being being beholden to Trump, Biden, Pope, BBC, Fox, Musk, Xi, Putin or whatever flavoured bots for our "truth".
It'd be trivial for them to remove/derank 99% of spam by manually reviewing search results (still at negligible cost) possibly letting users flag results for them for guidance.
Example: Is a page copying lots of text from stack overflow? Then it's probably spam! Don't show it on the first page of the search results!
I discovered the ecobee thermostat in the comment section of a post about home automation yesterday. It’s nice to know (based on my assumed wisdom of HNers on these subjects) that it’s a solid product. That kind of thing has gotten to be next to impossible to produce organically with Google.
Regarding the ecobee, I’ll provide another assumption that I’m working with. On the post yesterday, it was mentioned in multiple places by multiple accounts, and all mentions were received positively by the community. Here I’m assuming that the community at large is savvy when it comes to detecting blatant malicious scheming.
I guess I’m relying very heavily on the community in a way that could be manipulated, but I’ll give you some of my logic. I enjoy some of Joey Diaz’s comedy. He’s got a joke about how he likes being lied to. The context of the joke is that the lie (fake posts/comments here) actually end up getting him what he wants (even if it wasn’t exactly what was said in the lie).
I’ve had a bad experience with the Nest thermostat and don’t want to go back. Now that I’ve started looking at the ecobee, it looks like a safe product to try instead. Even if it was lies that got me to start investigating further, it now looks to me like a reasonable decision to make.
What scares me a little is that the venture capital behind both ChatGPT and similar products is going to want a return on their investment, and morally questionable "content" is the obvious low hanging fruit here. Any betterment of mankind type of outcome is much further in the future. A coming recession would make this inevitable as early capital dries up first.
The real twist of this story would be if GPT-style automatons are used on both sides of the consumer divide. It's easy to imagine building more sophisticated ad watchers, thereby creating a closed loop of advertisements slowly sucking the economic value out of the system.
You should assume that HN is popular enough to have astroturf in it, by now. Maybe not as much as reddit, but still.
I also wonder if this will in-fact "split" the web into two: users who care whether the content is authentic and original and users who don't and every website will now have to cater to both sets depending on their customer demographic.
I doubt it's possible to feed both from the same well, for the same reasons that news sites are split and social media is balkanising; people get upset if you they think you're lying to them.
Now, you can keep them from realizing this to a certain extent, but once you mix fraudulent and non-fraudulent information the people who care about that trust none of it .. and the people who came because they're cult members for the false information will also distrust it.
The problem is that Google is not incentivised to provide you with good results for multiple reasons:
* good results means not only you spend less time on the search results page, but you are less likely to click on an ad. Spam results make the ads more attractive in comparison and may solicit more clicks.
* spam sites often contain Google Ads and/or Analytics, so spam results also indirectly contribute to Google's revenue.
Spam results are trivial to detect should there be an incentive to do so: use the presence of ads, analytics or affiliate links as a negative ranking signal. Spam sites can't easily conceal those either because the same techniques they'd use are also used for ad fraud and would be forbidden by their advertisers/affiliates/etc.
It's not tamed at all, at best it's hidden for a part of the users but in reality there is far more spam than actual emails.
But that's still better than the current situation with regards to SEO and web spam?
Weird, my experience is the exact opposite. Maybe once a week I click on a promising looking web search result to find that it's essentially "spam". But every single day I get multiple emails that are obviously so, and worse, if I don't check my junk folder frequently I miss important emails.
Both my wife and I have Office 365 at our respective places of work. I get maybe one spam mail a month into my inbox, my wife gets several a day and we both only use our work email strictly for work. So there is some factor beyond just email provider that makes a huge difference.
Maybe political action (ideally itself incentivized by the need to get votes) could change that but I don't think things will improve
What could cause a major problem for search engines is the balkanization of the internet from Web 1.0 personal sites to Web 2.0 shared (but still indexable) platforms to mostly unindexable private groups. Discord, and Whatsapp are models for how this might happen.
What might cause an acceleration in that direction? Bots. ChatGPT can create content that is authentic-looking, and if open forums become Markets for Lemons [1] then people will move to trusted groups like smaller chat groups. (The other alternative is verifying identities which will happen but has privacy issues.)
[1] https://www.fortressofdoors.com/ai-markets-for-lemons-and-th...
>I really worry about the meta effects that Search is having on the internet. Google has slowly degraded as the internet has morphed into being almost entirely an SEO driven contraption.
Do people at Google know and acknowledge this? I mean that in a non-Upton Sinclair kind of way. "Search" for me doesn't really take place on google anymore, but myself and anyone else here who is in the same boat is an outlier. So has the idea at Google become that "search" has just evolved to giving "the masses" (i.e. the non-technical people) SEO garbage?
Sergey Brin and Larry Page on how advertising-supported business models negatively impact the quality of search results in commercial search engines, presented while students at Stanford University in conjunction with their Google prototype of a large-scale search engine:
> Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media, we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
> Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.
From: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine - Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page - Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives - http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
Almost certainly, though I don't know what you mean by "non-Upton Sinclair kind of way". SEO (and editing wikipedia to your advantage) has been a back-and-fourth struggle even before I finished university in 2006.
I think the current problem the eyeball-as-a-service sites (Facebook, Youtube, Google, Twitter etc.) have is their models of their audiences; certainly when I see how they classify me, they're way off — sports I don't care for, languages I can't speak, the politics of countries I don't live in.
If consumer experiences were broken up like that there would be less incentive to inadvertently hurt the precious AI models.
Ultimately, human progress happens when they save time.(e.g invention of wheels, cars, airplane, telephone, messaging, internet and now AI)
Eventually no one can prevent AI progress. And any wise person shouldn’t. It is the progress of human specie. And If no one can prevent it, let’s embrace it with open arms and make it happen as quick as possible and advance the world further to solve even bigger problems using these advancements in tech.
Would I stop visiting hacker news once most of the articles and comments come from ChatGPT-driven bots? Yes.
And how are we to avoid that happening?
Two hundred years ago it would be hard to imagine that everyone would be registered in a central database and will need an ID to do many things.
I think eventually the internet will have to give up on the idea of anonymity and places like HN will require it's users to be proven humans.
Hour do you handle with humans using gpt to post? The same way you would handle botters in online chess.
I prefer closed communities with invite chains, where user have a limited number of invites.
I fully expect GPT and similar to ruin the internet in many of the ways mentioned in this thread. What's really confusing to me though is why we are going down this path at all when it is so clearly a bad idea. Where does the net positive come from that outweighs the massive risk of such massive AI systems?
Even the leaders at MS know this is a bad idea but fell into the trap of "we're the good guys, if we don't do this a bad actor will"
Once AI are capable of writing comments that pass as human, why even worry?
If it's presented as the first search result, if the information presented by ChatGPT is good enough and if there are no links to the where ChatGPT got the results from, people would not visit the source for the information.
Remember what happened to email replies when popular email clients started defaulting placing the cursor before the quoted text instead of how it used to be?
It’s going to be very difficult for anyone to retain ‘control’ of AI when they’re fighting a running battle against Moore’s Law & The Bitter Lesson.
On the flip side, these new generative AI search engines will have to innovate on their business model as well. Google basically pays content creators in organic traffic. We don’t know what Bings new interface will look like. But I think it’s fair to assume that there will be fewer click-throughs to websites.
To keep feeding the AI with quality content, there will have to be new ways to incentivise the creators. Especially those creators that do not have access to other sources of funding - think journalists. Unless of course, the AI disrupts one of journalism’s key purposes: to explain facts to us.
Let's take an extreme example - say Exxon decides they want to spend $1 billion on influencing society in favor of the petroleum industry. They hire 10,000 freelance content writers to write 1000 articles each at $100 a pop and flood the internet over the course of several years with (everything from subtle to blatant) pro-petroleum content (nuclear's dangerous, solar will never scale, fusion's a pipe dream, wind is ugly, great new ways of recycling plastic, microplastics are actually beneficial to the human biome, a brand new low emission engine, ...). How is the scraper that ingests knowledge for the AI supposed to weed those out? It's still SEO, just at a higher level than the current mom and pop efforts.
On the other hand, if people complained that Google was a black box, or that as the old marketing adage goes, "advertising spend works, I just don't know which half", this might be a whole other level.
So agents will try but I have no clue whether it will be economical or effective.
I'm already seeing it's AI Q&A feature displaying text of "authoritative" answers to questions relevant to original queries above the main results which are sourced to obviously GPT-generated spamblogs consisting of long lists of similar SEO-optimised questions with contradictory and in some cases clearly incorrect autogenerated answers.
Google really has it coming. They bred the SEO industry that has essentially turned websites into SPAM. There isn’t a single website that doesn’t have you scroll through lengthy SEO-optimized bullish.. content.
As for ChatGPT “stealing” content: I’d rather take the view of aggregating human knowledge as a positive. Imagine ChatGPT aggregating, summarising, weighing and dumbing down academic content. And if as a result all that knowledge became accessible by a broad audience. What could this do for the average person’s scientific literacy? Or fake news for that matter?
I guess not much better than when the media say "A study proves that X": it doesn't mean anything, it doesn't mean the study has any value, it doesn't mean that there is a scientific consensus. Yet people routinely consider X to be proven (see what happened in the early days of the pandemic).
Add ChatGPT to the mix, and you don't even have the links to the original studies. I can totally imagine it being even worse.
It may be positive for humanity in general but that wasn't really the point that was made. It's a bad incentive for the individual knowledge creators. I suppose we could argue that it's high time that knowledge is less artificially guarded behind indiviual humans and that it gets a standardized format and available for instant query. That "format" is therefore the knowledge graph/db of the chatgpt trained model.
Maybe the answer here is that the AI programmers need to figure out a way to link to the original creators so that you can at least look at the source of the knowledge. Surely that should be doable. Because I may trust the ChatGPT3 bot a lot but maybe I also want to check out the forum link where it thinks it accumulated the trained data piece that resulted in its answer. And if that list of links is extremely long then so be it, show me ranked source links of 500 websites. It will be no different than looking at a google search.
It's the general Web that didn't keep up and provide better solutions for quality and precise content, solving problems like "This blog is not about avocados" or links in a sidebar about avocados that lead search results for avocados to that page. Microformats and other approaches were suggested, but they were basically too complicated and tools didn't support them.
Where Google has fallen down is not providing more tools to allow individuals to tune sites and keywords. There are many obvious opportunities in Google search, news, etc that would make the experience amazing compared to the picking-through-the-repetitive-garbage we see today. I suspect there is a battle between their tech and marketing about this, and I also think Google's ML team are using our garbage-picking to tune their algorithms rather than letting people just choose what they want to see. That is disgraceful, and they won't change it until there is competition which makes me lose a lot of respect for Google, but I don't blame SEO directly for this and since SEO is based on standards anyone could use their own "Web reader" to add a layer of filtering without special agreements, unlike content by companies that try to create walled gardens.
edit: comment about "web reader."
One is for something to have quality you need to support people making it. And the AI doesn't make stuff, it just repackages it. If there was no one on the internet writing about 'x' topic the AI couldn't give you an answer. And by pretending AI does actually write it we are lowering the support for the real creators which makes them less likely to write. They need to eat, and it's great if they can get their bread by writting because they do their job and get their bread. If they no longer can do that, they will put hours into something else which gives us less writing.
Second one is that AI will probably in my eyes be the leading subject of making sure there's more fake news and less scientific literacy. This would be too big to sum up in short text form. But how I see it the important stuff happens because of perspective/context changes. But the web and AI programs have next to no context. If I go on the web I get a small glimpse of someone's view, before it gets mushed together with someoene elses short view, and then an ad, and some completely unrelated paragraph about some event happening on the other side of the globe, and so on and so on. It's like studying something in a circus. There's no context in a circus outside of chaos and I think the same applies to technologies we build and are building. There's lot of data, but very little communication or meaning happening. Now imagine how the world looks if majority of what is written is made by machines we've build to spin around existing (already crazy with no context) written word and produce more of it?
Reduce it, by providing concise, well-written and authoritative sounding but often inaccurate answers to their question (increasingly likely to be based on 'fake news' as the corpus expands) without source or context instead of requiring people to read up on the background or basic principles to figure it out for themselves.
I'd expect these models to start being run against each other, adversarially, to try to generate optimally "noticeable" information. And not just in commerce - but also in politics and organised disinformation efforts.
It's really hard to see anything good coming of this, and my hope is that the reputational risk consideration (mentioned in the article) ultimately stops it.
Before Google the web was a lot less searchable. You had to go to Yahoo, Altavista, or similar websites and wade through pages and pages of nonsense before accidentally stumbling on a good link. Very hard to find stuff back then. The effect search has had on the internet is that we can now actually find stuff pretty easily.
Of course the new thing here is that we are now mixing search and content generation. Before you had to manually create content, put it somewhere and then hope people could find their way to that content. Now people ask a question and the AI generates the content that contains the answer. AI generated content has the potential to vastly outnumber any human generated content.
Trash content, is what we have already. E.g. reddit is full of it. Lots of people are addicted to spreading their nonsense there and trying to be as offensive as they can possibly be. There's also some good content there of course. With AI there will just be more of it.
This is an issue both for training and for users. A model trained on nonsense will produce nonsensical content. Not good. So there's an incentive for separating the low value garbage from the high value content. Another issue is that you get feedback loops once we start training models on AI generated content.
In other words, there's a need to tell what is what for effective training of models as well. A good strategy is to simply figure out reputability and nature of sources of content. You could use an AI for that. Digital signatures would help too. Trusting certain websites more than others is helpful. Some websites helpfully score and moderate their content or have people liking things to indicate it is important. So, plenty of signals to work with here. That's why Google is still pretty effective. And that's why chatgpt is mostly pretty impressive and not rehashing a lot of alternate reality nonsense from some substack/reddit. But it's definitely an arms race.
The next level in this is going to be people getting more protective of their content. IMHO it's a problem that most content on the web is not signed by their authors. We have no way of doing that in a sane way currently. We have SSL certificates for domains but there's no such thing that guarantees a blob of text comes from a specific person or entity (an AI model could be signing it's generated content as well). As soon as you have this, you can start figuring out reputability and relevance to a particular question much more effectively.
Amazon now is in a good position to grow their books catalogue a lot. They do protect the copyright of their authors religiously. You can't publish books on Amazon with text that is already on the Internet. Neither can you publish text that is already available in another book on Amazon.
The financial incentive is what started the spam problem in the first place. Remove it and you have a system in which content is produced by people who gain something other than money for it - like on the early internet. I would welcome that.
Of course the lack of attribution remains an issue and will probably cause a bit of conflict going forward. The new type of spam will likely mostly be for the purpose of disseminating false information.
But for most of the world? Our contributions are minuscule compared to what we will take from the bucket.
I think we all underestimate, that in reality, there are many abstract motivators that will continue to fill that bucket (status, reputation, for example).
I gave up.
I actually started informing myself about Magisk via ChatGPT and that was very helpful. But if ChatGPT is going to start learning off of these blogs, as if it were using Google to teach itself, then we'll have an even harder time in the future, as ChatGPT will wrap that possibly wrong or even dangerous content in trustworthy sentences.
That's still quite the problem, but it seems to generate good data for exploring the topic. Maybe MS could just use it as an intermediary step to create tags that then get passed to the actual engine...
AFAIK you generate the boot.img via Magisk Manager and then you flash it with TWRP or similar. Reddit will definitely have some good step-by-step guides, the hardest part is finding a compatible TWRP version.
Thanks for the tip, I'll try my luck with Reddit.
This is the world before ChatGPT. Eventually they will have to update it. How do you separate pristine Information from ChatGPT Information during training? If not addressed properly this will raise the noise level even further.
Language model on top of search is an opportunity to filter out the same junk and spam you complain about.
Approximate attribution is possible, just find the most similar training examples to the generated content.
I think in a few years the quality of generated content will surpass most of what humans create today.
So here is how I think this will go:
- somebody (MSTF or some startup) will make a good chatGTP/AI search. The search will be good and will address issues you pointed.
- they will not make money but they will disrupt Google Search causing crisis in Google. Google will shrink and become irrelevant.
- eventually that somebody from step 1 will want to make money and AI search will become crap again
- and cycle will start again
How does a deteriorating product that people are complaining about lead to "great quarterly numbers"? Google does not benefit, in any sense beyond the immediate short-term, by providing lousy search results to customers.
I think part of the problem is that the average person is unable to distinguish good from crap, and the bar for "quality" content is really low.
Why would shareholders value high amounts of spam in the search index?
Maybe, just maybe, the world will slow down a bit, then.
In fact, one of Google's advantages of altavista and such was that pagerank diluted the effects of keyword stuffing, the primitive SEO that had degraded primitive websearch. Search, media and advertising is dynamic, cat and mouse stuff... always. I wouldn't be surprised if "Language Model Optimization (TM)" is currently being invented by a drop shipper living under his basement.
Measure something, act on it, and you change the thing. You have to remember that these things have symmetry. The seo is trying to help users get to his site. From their perspective, Google's anti-spam is hostile to that goal. Google is trying to serve search results. To them, SEO is a hostile attempt to prevent that.
Now ChatGPT is 1 further step of intermediation. No longer are you competing with everyone else to get noticed by Google search, hoping Google actually has an incentive to bring people to your valuable page. No, now ChatGPT will just serve your stuff to the customer, having stolen your stuff wholesale with no chance of ever actually referencing you. Given that new situation why would anyone ever produce any text of value for the internet? Why? To pump MSFT share price? Well you won't. So what will be produced? Massive amounts (even more) of trash information will be pumped out, raising the noise floor and in turn bringing down the quality of ChatGPT, and who's to say what's right! The whole point of Google was to figure out what was right from the organic structure of the internet, but if you replace the organic structure with Google and ChatGPT there's no one left providing the original information that these services will use.