-- William S Burroughs
A chatbot like chatGPT actually has a great potential to be useful for accomplishing real tasks.
We've been reading three custom made children adventure stories to our kids every night.
My wife made custom black history month trivia, quizzes and posters
I learned more about basic financial terms, music theory, caught up on concussion treatment and myriad other things
We created quick rhymes for school
And I feel there are astonishing things I haven't even touched on! Like ten million things.
I'm exceedingly polite to the chat AI because I cannot believe I'm lucky and privileged enough to use something this awesome in my lifetime.
I feel like a kid in candy store :). I cannot imagine that somebody can find NO USE for it!
You're basically just saying your too damn lazy to do any of this stuff unless the amount of effort you need to put in is as minimal as possible.
While I get being tired and stressed (I'm a parent too) I feel like what you're doing is not much better than just zoning out.
I used chatgpt to craft stories based on events of the day, then I reviewed and modifies, printed them out, and read them out with my kids. In a given time, it multiplied what I can achieve. I could do it without chat gpt. I could do it without computer and printer. I could do it without pen and paper. Heck I could do it the normal way and just get a generic children book. But this was fun! And it was the opposite of zoning out for all involved! :)
Same for black history month quizzes and posters. It allowed my wife, in the limited time available to her (time is always limited to humans in this universe) , to do a far better job celebrating the event than ever before. I don't think she or her colleagues felt like any "zoning out" was involved, or that minimal effort was put in!
We found our initial explorations exciting and involved and rich and educating. I believe there are strong limits, and there can be accuracy issues and AI hallucinating and so on. But just the basic dozen use cases are such strong effort multipliers. I have learned more and have done more with given unit of time invested. For all the extremely legitimate moral, socio economic, legal and other issues, which are extremely valid, I stand by my awe at people who say "I can find no use for this".
I 1000% acknowledged and am terrified of social, economic, power implications. I think they should be discussed and debated.
They are not the same thing though as "is this useful?".
We can and should have discussion on dangers of nuclear and AI and ubi and myriad other things. I will still unabashedly repeat my only point in this thread - it's shocking to me that some people find "chatgpt has no use", to the point I find it disingenuous.
I'm not arguing that ChatGPT has no use. My argument is that I strongly suspect the long term negative externalities of large language models will vastly exceed any positive impact they will have on society. And humanity has a pretty clearly established track record in terms of widespread deployment of things that bring some immediate utility but whose longterm consequences we don't understand upfront. CFC's, artificial sweeteners, cigarettes, lead paint, social media, React Hooks, so on and so on and so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
I guess I'm just surprised how easily people are able to put aside their terror (as you put it) in exchange for some of that sweet, sweet, short-term utility. They're two sides of the same coin. You're ushering in tomorrow's consequences, unseen.
I'm not so sure. Imagine having a human assistant that's smart enough to pass the bar, get an MBA, pass medical exams, and knows how to work on your car, and is good at brainstorming, and and and...
And having that person do searches for you. Are you sure that working with this assistant wouldn't be a better user interface to the internet than the search we have today? And what if that assistant was willing to work for pennies per hour...
Make a marketplace for targeted discounts to incentivize changed behavior.
Many companies that sell consumables are happy to give a first sample free in hopes of repeat purchasing.
If I ask AI for a good lavender scented hand soap refill, it should have a fiduciary duty to give me the best economic choice for me. HOWEVER, AI could solicit discounts from this marketplace platform at the point the AI is making the decision: a new layer above and around Amazon and Walmart and every other established player. Hand soap manufacturers can compete with deals like "people who order hand soap at least twice a year can get 60% off their first purchase" and pay a commission to the AI platform for facilitating the discount. Users can trust the AI with their data because of the fiduciary responsibility and so become willing participants in keeping it accurate because it increases the ability of the AI to serve them.
This generally means you get what the provider can prove seems like the most sensible choice to a regulator, which would mean not being an AI because you can't show how that algorithm works.
Automated mapping sends drivers down railroad tracks and impassible abandoned roads.
We'll eventually figure that AI chatbots similarly degrade the social and intellectual commons. Enjoy your AI advisor, the bar and professional boards exist to protect the public, however imperfectly, from exactly the unpredictable charlatanism embodied by your jack-of-all-trades AI assistant.
As far as computational costs. These chat bots are not remotely maximally optimized. Sure it costs more to run but it is still on the order of pennies per user per day.
This is a competitor market with zero switching costs. You can’t just hamstring your product and expect users to stick around when another company they know and trust has a much better product.
I typically don’t frequent businesses that continue to try to upsell me once I’m already inside.
That being said there are definitely other people out that that do want this and aren’t resistant to paid messaging but if you want answers an AdBot will probably not be your first stop.
In case you don't because you prefer to do the research yourself, I'm sure that holds for the large majority of HN users, including me. But why do we prefer to do the research ourselves? Because we don't trust the salesman's incentives, objectivity and breadth of knowledge. If we had a utopian salesman who only cared about getting the right product for us and has intimate knowledge of every relevant product, it'd be a fools errand to do the research ourselves other than as a genuine hobby.
I think the parent comment is hoping for the creation of AI Chatbots who at least get close enough to such a salesman. And while for-profit companies will surely attempt to instill perverse incentives, unlike with humans we only really need one AI salesman without them and we can all use that one. This might sound idealistic ("if everyone just used Linux..") but the barrier of usage is low enough that I see Google and MS having a much harder time competing with agents without perverse incentives than they've had competing with e.g. Linux or Firefox - especially if Google (the search engine) loses its moat.
So OP is right that this model is going to be financially harmful to Google.
I guess this is something that Google/search engines and other media like podcasts have had to navigate.
While it's not obvious how to best do it in this interface, I dunno, you still have a whole browser window to work with and the search engine solution (show the ads separately and labeled at the top) and the podcast solution (read the ads separately and clearly labeled) weren't super imaginative and seem to be working okay. Gmail ads on the right margin is maybe another example to point to.
I imagine there are probably plenty of UI things to experiment with that don't involve masking the advertisement as expert advice.
But yeah while this is all being sorted out I imagine it shrinks the monetizable surface of search a good bit.
Search results themselves are not influenced by how much money you pay them.
If someone is going to do it - even though it might be a worse business model - it might as well be you.
But yeah, some of the chat responses will have to be ads. How they handle it will be key.
They didn't do anything with it because chatbots are unequivocally a worse business model than the current search paradigm. They cost exponentially more to run and are much harder to organically advertise with without scaring away users by making the chat responses themselves ads. If the future of search is chatbots Google is facing existential problems, even if they maintain complete control over the market, because the market size will be drastically smaller.