For Google, they’re at the mercy of whatever the internet has.
You also have to consider the money angle. As using ChatGPT and other chatbots becomes more popular, people will stop producing garbage internet articles because they will be less popular and therefore less profitable. Bloggers who enjoy writing will continue to do so because it was never about the money, they just enjoy writing.
Further, the internet is only one small portion of information available to train on. There’s a lot of other data out there, including real-world conversations.
How would LLM upstarts be able to counter the massive commercial interests? As with google they will also succumb to prefer money over usefulness at latest when they have a wide user base.
There is also an even less proven way of distinguishing spam from signal with LLMs.
And not updating a model means that they will be stuck in COVID-19 era forever.
So now it's got great information about the Model T Ford but knows nothing about our new mars colony?
I don't think "just don't update the model" is a likely option.
"Just don't update the model, only feed it new information" is exactly how to get to the outcome of concern in this thread.
We've already seen exactly this happened with search. There's no reason to believe that LLMs are immune.
The only "if" to all this is if we will destroy the LLMs by feeding them their own diarrhea. I expect a sort of natural selection here to play out, especially in the open source space. Ones that are trained on LLM generated blogspam will probably, I expect, get outperformed by ones that are trained on genuine information, or at the very least ones made using new techniques that adequately filter noise.
How will it learn anything new?
Yes, humans are notorious for only seeking out high quality, accurate data, especially when it conflicts with our priors.
To say nothing of our ability to assess the accuracy or truthiness of information in the first place (look at how many people take, on faith, that Chat GPT isn’t wrong as often as it is right).
Step 2. Humans write SEO copy for machines to rank them higher.
Step 3. LLM writes copy for machines to rank them higher.
Step 4. Human uses LLM to try to distill the LLM generated SEO spam for any remaining signal.
Also to your point:
> SEO listicle garbage filling the internet.
the feeling that the LLM is better than what you described is going to be very temporary, then the mountains of LLM generated bullshit is going to overwhelm even LLM to make meaningful sense of.