The article treats as axiom that organic traffic is a right. It's not.
Most people don't want to read an article on travel advice when AI gives us much better and specific advice, with references, when we want it.
Most people don't want to read an article on travel advice when AI gives us much better and specific advice, with references, when we want it.
Since politicians do not protect us from these criminals, we are fortunate that no one except for CEOs under the influence of cocaine wants "AI".
I get emotions are high because of the impact of AI, but in no meaningful/legal sense is this true. Is there space for nuanced/critical discussion?
Then they unilaterally change the deal to basically, "you create the content, we will take it and without attribution, slice & dice it into our automated output".
It is straight-up bait and switch, and absolutely unethical. Just because it was not planned a decade in advance and was just opportunistic does not make it any more ethical (that'd be like arguing it was more ethical for you to steal a car because the keys were dropped next to it vs planning to hotwire the car).
And yes, I'm 100% in agreement with the caveats that building a business based on someone else's platform is like building a house on sand — a definitely risky idea. But the risk that the big player will change their platform is one thing, the risk they'll actively steal from you is another risk people weren't taking.
When someone does that with a book, a movie or science paper it's called stealing. What would you call it?
If I read a travel site then make a recommendation to a friend did I steal?
Opinion data - from all other SEO sites. These were low signal mostly, and AI seems to have got the general gist of how to structure content for consumption. So rather information reaching our mind through a SEO writer, it's now being AI written, which is atleast more standardized, and can be grounded more easily, and personalized to boot.
Or AI will invent opinions based on the better bid. That would be an extension of the ad business and sponsored contents too.
Saying "I refuse to acknowledge the reality of the situation and will just continue saying that we need to do the 'right' thing" like it's a bad thing is also implying that morals don't matter.
People who don't have morals don't belong in society.
So when you, and other's, stroll up and say "but but if we do this then AI companies won't be able to make money!!1! And also China!" that doesn't mean anything. Because then the response is, "well yeah, illegal actions shouldn't make you money."
The cat is out of the bag in terms of people passing around models that are “illegal” in your scenario, though such models would disappear from places like Huggingface. Running a commercial service that touches one of those models is off the table and will be blocked, at the IP level if need be, in essentially all the countries that matter economically to Chinese “exporters”.
Separate from the morality of the issue (which is clearly that you can't take things you didn't pay for), if such a law is passed, then either the US will actually develop a model that allows AI companies to properly buy training data from people, or China will excel in AI specifically, which doesn't guarantee much of anything at this point. If and when AI turns out to have meaningful geopolitical implications, then the US will revisit that situation, if needed (which is unlikely - companies will push for there to be a way for them to buy data).
It seems like the unstated assumption in that question assumes that the world totally depends on the information from small independent blogs like this thread's article. I.e. all other information sources would be derivatives of the independent blogs.
There are many other sources of organic info to feed AI training. Examples:
- transcripts of Youtube videos. E.g. somebody (maybe a travel agent or a well-traveled vacationer) records a video giving advice and uploads it to Youtube. Google auto-transcribes the audio and feeds the text to the training algorithm.
- AI assistants used by normal people to "analyze/summarize information" can feed that same data to the AI cloud. E.g. a travel agent types out an email giving advice to a customer. That customer then submits that same email content (or the AI autoscans the customer's email inbox) to enable the customer to ask the AI assistant, "Is this travel advice good? Is there anything this travel agent overlooked?"
Of course, the travel advisor would want to limit his "proprietary and valuable travel knowledge" to only his direct clients in that private email but they stop the customer from exposing it to AI assistants.
The common theme is that AI engines can insert themselves in between many types of communication between people. Those are the scenarios where you can think creatively about where all the new training data will come from. If AI assistants are used as mediators in private communication, information (including "travel advice") can "leak out" into the public. Independent blogs are a good source -- but they're not the only source.
Both examples has nothing to do with an open and free internet. Meaning I cannot trust AI at all. All those examples of data source here, also in the other replies, using mainly highly biased sources. Wikipedia (biased by a small group of mods), YouTube filtered by Google itself, pasting customer travel advice email heavily violates GDPR, social forums also funneled.
If we loose organic sites, we loose freedom. Fair enough, organic sites does mean the information there is correct, but still it is open and free, so organic sites can be treated as Gaussian distributed.
Not seeing how pasting text with no personal identity information would violate GDPR.
E.g. someone sends an email saying "For your career prospects, I think you should learn Rust instead of COBOL."
Copy&pasting that into AI or an AI scanning that sentence with no identity information isn't going to violate GDPR. There's no personal data to violate. (If the AI companies deliberately want to ignore privacy laws and want to secretly attach personal data to that "Rust/COBOL" sentence, then yes, that violates GDPR.)
EDIT reply to : >or the AI autoscans the customer's email inbox
That auto-scan scenario still doesn't require the AI to save the personal identifiers attached to text fragments. Many ways to do that without violating GDPR. Consider how today's global spam filters "auto scan" customers' incoming emails to automatically categorize some of them for the customers' "Junk folder" without any intervention or violation of GDPR.
They may not want that now, they might want it back if they get used to the google AI experience for a bit longer.
The amount of false information I got from this thing in the short time it's been forced upon me is staggering. My brain already started to filter out this part of the search results.
Agreed, but traffic has been the substitute for monetary rewards so far. If they aren't sending the traffic then someone is going to start to need to pay for surfacing and verifying information directly.
The big problem with this is it means anything really interesting will no longer be published in the open.
Unfortunately, there's enough slop that the average user will probably just continue using the AI, because it's so much easier that the quality floor they're willing to hit is very low.
A couple of days ago one of the web games in my profile frontpaged here, and while it generated a lot of traffic it was nothing like previous times. I have had much more trouble with large private mailing lists linking to things, which also leads to a more condensed rush when everyone looks at once.
Organic traffic generally appears dead, Google or not.
For stuff like hiking routes, permitting, local cuisine, etc. I don't think it can replace a good blog from an experienced person at this point.
We can make an honest attempt to see what the old vs AI options for it looks like. Both of us will walk away a bit more informed, and share here with others as well.
AI will give good surface level advice and sometimes point to decent sources. If I'm looking for e.g. a good hike in a specific area near me, I know the blogs that will have directions, pics, and GPX data for all the routes. These are found via word of mouth, search, and local forums.
It read things like websites of municipalities of surrounding towns and found local food festivals in towns I never would've found out about otherwise. It's exactly the kind of stuff I'd previously read the experienced person's blog for.
For hiking routes, I ask AI for a list of suggested hiking routes in [area] based on my criteria (e.g. dog friendly, accessible by public transport, whatever) Then I google the specific suggested routes to fact-check the AI and get more detailed/reliable info.
I guess it comes down to knowing where to find valuable information. If you already have known quality sources, AI is currently inferior.
Where I live I'm lucky to have tons of trails that have been meticulously mapped out and the made available (with images, directions, gear recommendations, etc.) on various blogs. I don't see AI being able to totally replace that in its current state, especially due to the semi-dynamic nature of the data.
My intuition (could be completely wrong) is that lesser-known companies have much less density around them that popular brands, except if you are very specific. It would be great if this could be tweaked somehow.
It is a shame because the mutually beneficial relationship between Google and sites has driven a huge amount of the tech economy. Sometimes this has been bad (and advertising is a scourge for many reasons, I can't believe I am defending it) but in general the web would be a lot less useful if people couldn't make money of advertising.
I think long-term sites will stop relying on advertising and go with payments or memberships for information. This will hurt everyone but be disastrous for Google if they cannot spider up-to-date information. It will also hurt the free flow of information that we now enjoy.
What is really galling is that with all the impressive AI summaries, the search results themselves seem to be getting a lot worse[0]. Many times I have used Google and the AI summary is pretty good but the actual page the summary is from is buried well down in the search results. Is this something they are doing deliberately to make the AI summary seem more useful?
[0] An example I blogged about: https://sheep.horse/2025/4/yo_google%2C_thanks_for_the_ai_ov...
Yes, because as we all know Google search's AI has been nothing but a hit. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go eat my designated 3 small rocks for today.
When. At the moment, not.
A bit of a tangential anecdote, on the subject of "human written" stuff pre AI.
Circa 99-2000 I knew a US company that would hire students from CEE to write travel content for their many .com properties. The students were instructed to write "as if they'd travelled there", or "as if you're living there", or "in an official tour-guide style", and so on. Judging by how spread the content of my friend's writing was, and how "stereotypical" the other pieces were on those properties (that we found after searching for known content), it was pretty clear that nothing on those sites was genuine. Everything was fake! Since then I take everything with a bit of cynicism, knowing how much of the "natural, organic content" is in fact faked with low-paid contributors. But hey, during those times the gig was pretty good for my friend doing it.
I don't know of any more clear and obvious example of "AI uses your content, robs you of your income, and gives nothing in return" than this.
Whether AI (currently) gives "better" answers or not is rather besides the point.
We will also disagree if displacement of work due to new technology qualifies as "robbing", as any advancement is then "robbing".
AI has seen mass adoption, but trust is still low and many are aware of how it can make errors. https://kpmg.com/xx/en/our-insights/ai-and-technology/trust-...
Yeah, on the end-user side (so, discounting the chatbots, the dark patterns and the always-on features shoved down our throats), AI hasn't even seen as much mass adoption as crypto has. But even if it had, once the venture capital propping all this has dried out, nobody will be willing to foot the exorbitant costs of running inference.
How can you be so naive as to think that Google has your best interests in mind (and not their pockets')? They will absolutely serve you the content that has you stick on their walled garden for the longest, misdirecting you along the way, and serving you nonsense and fake content if that's what it takes. And you don't have to take my word for it, that's what Google search has been doing for the best part of a decade: deteriorating search results and placing partner's/own links/SEO slop more and more prominently on their first results page. Monopolies encourage that.
Also you seem to be believing that LLMs are somehow a source of truth. Here I've got bad news for you: LLMs are political machines "aligned" (biased by design) by slave labourers who are in no way competent nor neutral. They are opinion producing/repeating pieces that you shouldn't take at face value, with a knowledge cutoff in the past and no ability to adapt to real world events. How do you expect LLMs to fare (and the state of the world to be bettered) once all your travel recommendations are AI generated, subsequently digested and repeated by other AIs? Depressing.
AI frequently cites references based on human generated content. Often it does a terrible job of it in my experience. I searched for a very specific name and the Google AI returned a “profile” and the link to the person’s social media account was displayed the name that I’d searched for but the AI directed me to a completely different person WITH A DIFFERENT NAME as the link destination. Why the hell would I trust it with travel plans if it get such basic, easily validated challenges so very wrong?
So unless you have a citation for your claim, and even then one that meets some basic credentials of rigor, then you’re flat out wrong.
The purpose of a search engine is to direct organic traffic, not function as fucking bait.