> The concern I have with LLMs replacing search is that once it starts being monetized with ads or propaganda, it's going to be very dangerous.
Not to mention that users consuming most content through a middle-man completely breaks most publishers business models. Traditional search is a mutually beneficial arrangement, but LLM search is parasitic.
Expect to see a lot more technical countermeasures and/or lawsuits against LLM search engines which regurgitate so much material that they effectively replace the need to visit the original publisher.
> Traditional search is a mutually beneficial arrangement, but LLM search is parasitic.
Traditional search is mutually beneficial... to search providers and publishers. At expense of the users. LLM search is becoming popular because it lets users, for however short time this will last, escape the fruits of the "mutually beneficial arrangement".
If anything, that arrangement of publishers and providers became an actual parasite on society at large these days. Publishers, in particular, will keep whining about being cut off; I have zero sympathy - people reach for LLMs precisely because publishers have been publishing trash and poison, entirely intentionally, optimizing for the parasitic business model, and it got so bad that the major use of LLMs is wading through that sea of bullshit, so that we don't have to.
The ad-driven business model of publishing has been a disaster for a society, and deserves to be burned down completely.
(Unfortunately, LLMs will work only for a short while, they're very much vulnerable to capture by advertisers - which means also by those publishers who now theatrically whine.)
OK, but someone still has to publish the subset of good content that the LLMs slurp up and republish. LLMs still need fresh quality content from somewhere.
I don't think I'd publish on a blog if I knew it would be consumed entirely from an LLM. Even if I don't want money, I kind of want people to know that I wrote it, they're my ideas, and I don't want them taken out of context.
From the look of the examples they use at least sites like TripAdvisor, which I'd assume would like to have people go to their site.
For services like rail companies, restaurants and so on, I can see them not being bothered, because they make their money offline. Blogs, and pure content sites might not be to happy about their content being used to prop up OpenAIs business, while getting nothing in return. If anything it seems like OpenAI is actively trying to get sued.
The whole interface and functionality seems really nice and a clear improvement for the users, for certain types of queries at least. It assumes that OpenAI has made their LLM stop lying, and that they can get the required data legally, but it doesn't seem like anyone cares about those details.
Which is the main issue I see with them, if no one publishes anything new, all you will get is whatever was there before, which may be incorrect or obsolete. If you want something new, an LLM can't discover it if no data source exists. So over time the LLM becomes useless for current information.
We're talking about LLM-driven search engines here, the assumption is that they will always need up-to-date information. A "strong LLM" can't give you to latest on the presidential election if its knowledge cut-off is in 2023, so these companies "solution" is to scrape today's New York Times and get the LLM to write a summary.
For all the hate it gets, Brave solved this half a decade ago already.
- Publishers no longer show you ads, they just get paid out of BAT.
- Brave shows you ads, but Brave does not depend on that to survive. Because of that there is no weird conflict of interest like with Google/Facebook, where the party that surfaces your content is also the party providing you with ads.
- Users can just browse the web without ads as a threat vector, but as long as you have BAT (either via opt-in Brave ads or by purchasing it directly) you are not a freeloader either.
1. With ads, I don't pay people writing articles, creating content or doing research.
2. "How else would you achieve X than by manipulating people visiting your website into paying for things they probably don't need, and be misinformed and tracked by powerful commercial and political entities?" - I can but shrug at this question.
3. The vast majority of written content is never rewarded or compensated monetarily, ads or no ads.
> With ads, I don't pay people writing articles, creating content or doing research.
You do. The ad broker sells access to your eyeballs to a company, and then gives part of that money to whichever parties have a monetization agreement in the content.
> "How else would you achieve X than by manipulating people visiting your website into paying for things they probably don't need, and be misinformed and tracked by powerful commercial and political entities?" - I can but shrug at this question.
Always fun to see people with strong opinions be critically misinformed.
Brave’s ads don’t have tracking, by design.
> The vast majority of written content is never rewarded or compensated monetarily, ads or no ads.
You opt-in to the ads, you get them in your notifications, and every time you tap on one of them you get a few BAT. You browse, the BAT get paid out to whichever sites you visit (or linger on, depending on your configuration). You can opt out of the ads at any time. Brave didn't pre-mine their own coins. And you can buy BAT if you want to support sites without watching ads.
This in absolute spades, and I wish there was a way to elevate comments to top-level posts sanely.
But yes: the original Web served its (non-profit-motivated) creators and readers. The past two decades of advertising-based web has served publishers and advertisers, precisely as you note. LLM is mixing that up for the moment but I sincerely doubt that it will last.
That said, I welcome the coming ad/pub pain with unbridled glee.
> Traditional search is mutually beneficial... to search providers and publishers. At expense of the users. LLM search is becoming popular because it lets users, for however short time this will last, escape the fruits of the "mutually beneficial arrangement".
Bullshit. Users have shown time and time and time again that they prefer (generally, at large) free content, which has to be supported by ads, over actually paying directly for the labor of others.
> The ad-driven business model of publishing has been a disaster for a society, and deserves to be burned down completely.
I tend to agree, but people can't expect content, which needs sizable amounts of time and money to produce, for free - it needs some sort of workable funding model. LLMs are only viable now because they were able to slurp up all that ad-supported content before they broke the funding model. That window is closing, and fast.
But that breaks OpenAI’s (et al) entire business model. Those AI companies can barely afford to operate as it is, while they scrape the entire web for free. I don’t see how they could keep above water once every website starts paywalling their stuff.
Is it the training or running costs that are putting them in debt? Presumably we'll eventually get to a point where the models are good and they can train less and charge enough to turn a profit. Maybe then they can do a revshare with content creators. Maybe something like YouTube
The whole thing needs a reframe. Ad driven business only works because its a race to the bottom. Now we are approaching the bottom, and its not gonna be as competitive. Throwback to the 90s when you paid for a search engine?
If you can charge the user (the customer- NOT the product) and then pay bespoke data providers (of which publishers fall under) then the model makes more sense, and LLM providers are normal middlemen, not parasites.
The shift is already underway imo - my age cohort (28 y/o) does not consume traditional publications directly. Its all through summarization like podcast interviews, youtube essays, social media (reddit) etc
I think something as important as accurate and quick search should be definitely something that people are willing to spend on. $20 / month for something like that seems absolutely a no brainer, and it should for everyone in my view.
People already spent upwards of $50 a month for the internet itself, plus they probably pay monthly for one or more streaming services. They likely pay separately for mobile data too.
Separate monthly fees for separate services is absolutely unsustainable already. The economic model to make the internet work has not yet been discovered, but $20 a month for a search engine is not it.
For me the ideal would be some form of single subscription - I'm fine with $100 / month, where whatever I use is proportionally tracked and the services I use are ad-free, orientated to bring me the content I absolutely want and nothing else. Depending on usage of all of those is how the $100 would be spread among them.
That’s a nice idea, but the entire world is used to getting their internet content for free by now. People who are willing to pay anything for websites are a tiny minority.
How do you get these high amounts for the internet?
In my country (EU) 600Mbps costs below $15 and I know that's not the most popular fee level. $100 or even $50 on the internet only (not counting video subscriptions) sounds like something too high for the vast majority around me.
I totally agree this payment pattern would work. I think the technical implementation is pretty straightforward but getting enough writers and artists to join would be difficult.
Not really. Everyone is paying monthly anyways it can just be a part of that or a surcharge on top. And I don't envision this being a mastodon thing but a "serious writing/news/art" kind of thing. Alteady there is a lot more asking of direct support online than twenty years ago. KoFi, medium subscriptions etc. I think people are open to the idea of direct sponsorship of creative people they like. The product space is there we just need good infra.
I pay for Kagi, and apparently so do many others here on HN. This, however, solves only half of the problem - publishers are not on board with the scheme, so they still output impression-optimized "content". But at least the search engine isn't working against my interests.
Not to mention that users consuming most content through a middle-man completely breaks most publishers business models. Traditional search is a mutually beneficial arrangement, but LLM search is parasitic.
Expect to see a lot more technical countermeasures and/or lawsuits against LLM search engines which regurgitate so much material that they effectively replace the need to visit the original publisher.