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Comment by jacooper | Hacker News Reader

The issue is getting people to click on your website, why would any one do that if the entire content is already extracted by the ai, which directly gave it to the user?

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Are you saying that the motive for posting a bread recipe that starts with 5000 words about the history of bread will evaporate, so we'll be left with websites from enthusiasts who have something interesting to say?

maybe… but will an ai search even tell you those sites exist?

It will tell you the information. Information wants to be free. Right?

Free to be harvested and monopolized by a few giant corporations..

If it is designed and prompted to be able to reference sites rather than just give freestanding “answers” with no context, yes.

You think AI will stop and pause as it comes across your "interesting things"? Hey look, it's enthusiast content, let's send our users directly to their website?

I don't think so. It's going to be vacuumed into the big machine and nobody will visit those websites. In fairness, pretty much nobody does today.

So what? As an enthusiast am I supposed to be motivated by the page counter on my site?

Besides, good writers are good writers. Would you rather read Matt Levine or some AI summary of his latest piece?

I'm just not seeing the problem. IMO the whole obsession with driving clicks was silly from the get-go and destructive now. If AI does away with that, great. And if people whose sole motivation for writing was to get clicks decide to stop writing... well, OK.

In this future there is no Matt Levine because he can't make a living getting viewers and no replacement.

Why are viewers the only way to make a living? It wasn't always that way.

It was always this way. If no one buys your paper you shutdown writers have no jobs and stop writing. If no one buys your book same deal.

What era are you referring to?

Well there were eras before mass publication when some people still wrote, about science or history or whatever, either because they were funded by their religion or by personal money or by a rich benefactor. Of course it was a tiny % of people doing that, but then again it was only a tiny % who could learn to read and write or afford to spend time on hobbies.

If that were true there would be no new writers, because nobody paid them to write their first book. In fact, most first books don't sell at all. And yet... people write.

Not everyone is 100% motivated by money. And those that are do not all need full time employment doing that work. And those that need money and employment can often generate revenue with complementary goods. And those that can't can source subscription and other revenue sources.

The idea that the current model of commercialization of writing is the only one that has ever or could ever work is really narrow thinking. Writing has two main values: 1) the ideas, and 2) the expression. Both of those have put food on the table for good writers forever, and will continue to do so. The AI panic is just from people who can't imagine the world being any different than it is at this very instant.

Those positions become gated for the already rich. Only those who can afford to publish do. It's been this way throughout history. The internet changed this briefly but that may change. People are worried it will go back to what it was or worse.

“As an enthusiast am I supposed to be motivated by the page counter on my site?”

If you bothered to put a counter on your website, wanted to attract like minded individuals, or get enough people to sponsor you to continue work you otherwise couldn’t do, yeah probably. Or we can go with the unrealistic idea that enthusiasts as a whole don’t have egos or motives beyond shouting into the void to express their pure love of <insert thing>.

You have a cynical view of "clicks". I'd argue that others reading the content you write is fairly important.

Because if it isn't, keep it in notepad I'd say.

Traditional search engines aren’t going away for a long time, even if they are hybridized with LLM quick answers. My favorite websites about bike touring or someone’s tech blog will still be findable, and perhaps less buried under junk once content marketing is worthless.

I'm a little worried about the coming flood of AI-generated "recipes" that fit some linguistic model but have never been cooked by any human.

I've been using ChatGPT to generate recipes both for things I already cook, and for things I'm new to cooking and testing the result against what I find online.

So far it's a good cook! There are times when an ingredient appears in different amounts than I'd expect (like 1c of oil for a 4c/flour taralli recipe) but overall it's comparable to the quality of human written recipes, and better than many.

Just don't use it for baking. It often seems to skip steps, even when summarizing existing recipes.

I did that the other day. I cooked a kadai chicken recipe verbatim from ChatGPT. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t amazing either.

Because an article isn't a snippet?

People who just want a basic factual answer to a question won't go to your site, they'll use Google's snippet as they already do now in many cases.

But people who want to read your whole article will continue to go to your site.

This seems entirely reasonable to me. I shouldn't have to visit a webpage to discover when Abraham Lincoln was born, but I should if I want to read a short bio of him.

Why? Lincoln's birth date and his bio are both things that could be figured out by anyone with a few minutes of time.

Well, finally people will just make things for the pleasure of adding to the knowledge in the world rather than trying to "build an audience" or "monetize my content" or whatever. No one is going to click through to your blog, so you have no incentive to shittify it.

We're going back to the original days of the Internet that HN users often beg for. Now only the true creators will create for the sake of creation: ars artia gratis.

The early days of the internet people made content and it was easy to find and get readers.

Under this new world your content is impossible to find by real users. Opposite of the early internet

Maybe we’ll have to create something where like-minded actual people share links to content they found interesting?

Perhaps this thing could be tailored to a specific community? Or be, itself, a community of communities?

I may just be onto something here… damn, this may be a billion dollar idea.

Joking aside, I’m pretty sure this will make communities like HN and Reddit, and closed discords, slack & all, blow up.

Google’s results already are worthless half the time anyway.

Maybe we'll end up in a place where most people ask an LLM and take the first opaque answer they're given and be done with it. But others with more curiosity and skepticism will continue to go to real sources, evaluate their trustworthiness, weigh a few against each other, bypass intentional or unintentional bias/censorship in some tech giant's algorithm.

Isn’t this an issue as is? Theres a lot of content summarized at the top which answers the question I have more often than not.

Somewhat, it's only not really an issue currently because most of the top answers aren't great and you want to look for a better overview. You can't currently get the overview from Bing or Google, only whatever sentence they've decided to highlight.

Exactly, just like info gets ripped off websites onto Wikipedia, with very few references, it’s hell getting them cuz they claim you want the link back, cahtgpt references hardly anything

I think it comes down to user experience.

Is your website more pleasant to use than ChatGPT/Bard/Bing Chat? Some actually are. Websites can load fast, be responsive, beautiful and well thought out. Those websites are a treat to visit.

However, if you need to first dismiss a GDPR waiver, a request to know your location, a request to show notifications, a chatbot that is available right now for a free sales consultation, and a request to subscribe to a newsletter; and once you do that, the page jumps around for 30 seconds as the ad auctions finish and obtrusive video ads flood in, and when you try to exit the page your back-button is hijacked; then the answer is probably "no".

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