Curated Resource ( ? )
Pluralistic: Even if you think AI search could be good, it won’t be good (15 May 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Curated:
16/05/2024 from
pluralistic.net/2024/05/15/they-trust-me-dumb-fucks/
my notes ( ? )
Doctorow, pointing out that Google's move to AI search "is a tacit admission that Google is no longer a convenient or reliable way to retrieve information, drowning as it is in AI-generated spam, poorly labeled ads, and SEO garbage". Instead, "you'll ask Google a question and an AI will compose an answer based on things it finds on the web".
So why not just make search better instead of "serving up garbage?", after all others do using Google's own back-end.
More problematically: "why would anyone write the web if the only purpose for doing so is to feed a bot that will summarize what you've written without sending anyone to your webpage?... why wouldn't every publisher just block Google's crawler?"
And, of course, AI's still not very good - Cory provides plenty of examples. But even assuming these problems are overcome, "even excellent AI search – makes it far too easy for Google to cheat us, and Google can't stop cheating us".
Google will "charge publishers for preferential placement in ... [its AI-created] summaries", and has "a readymade excuse for any apparent self-dealing ... AI hallucinations creates a zone of plausible deniability for even more enshittification of Google search".
Read the Full Post
The above notes were curated from the full post pluralistic.net/2024/05/15/they-trust-me-dumb-fucks/.Related reading
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