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Comment by woeirua | Hacker News Reader

Now that we’re getting a small preview of what ChatGPT would be like with sources cited, I’m ready to say that there is a 100% chance that this style of search will be sued into oblivion. Publishers already almost drove Google News to extinction when it was merely summing up headlines, can you imagine the outrage when those sites see their traffic drop off by 75%? This might be the Achilles heel of this entire approach to search. If you’re too successful you kill off the sites that you need to scrape for data.

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I'm very curious about the legal implications of all of this. With NeevaAI they appear to be citing content such as abcnews or businessinsider that is unlikely to have licensing that allows them to use it this way - but please correct me if I'm wrong. openAI and chatGPT refuses to provide sources even when asked saying its "sourced from general knowledge".. which might obfuscate it until someone can find clear terminology from their content being reused.

And if we hackers build on top of tools such as openai how do we cover ourselves from any potential license abuse? Is it enough to have a YouTube style take down policy?

OpenAI will end up forced into a royalty licensing agreement with the underlying sites that they’re scraping. Every time they serve up a snippet from a site that site will get a fraction of a penny. As a result, OpenAI is going to have to find a way to monetize their search quickly. I’m just not sure how they would do that.

I wouldn’t build my app directly on ChatGPT. They’re going to charge for it soon enough, and if the pricing is onerous your company will go belly up.

Not convinced this is actually an issue from a business perspective. If you are so successful you kill off the rest of the internet you end up with a monopoly. Sure, your results get worse in absolute terms but where else will your customers go?

That’s my point, you’ll never be allowed to get there. There’s too much money wound up in the current advertising pay for clicks business model to ever let this go unchecked.

Wasn’t google news able to get away with it? Good point though

Yes, but they nerfed it by getting rid of article snippets entirely. There are just headlines now.

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