I'm surprised nobody thought at this before. It was the fairly obvious outcome, inevitably this will lead to the collapse of the information environment we rely on, if nobody puts a stop to this. Ai doesn't seem to care, neither improvements seem to target this. Small websites were already struggling, now they're dying.

On one hand, I don't generate ad revenue for anyone in the first place and would love to see the ad-supported web model collapse. On the other hand, I don't like that AI is destroying things. I'm conflicted.

People have been talking about it since Google debuted their instant answers years ago.

Nobody listened or cared.

Literally everyone has been saying this the entire time.

Are you stupid?

It seems they've been deprioritised entirely, years ago i was able to find actual blogs and forums. But this is going to hit them even harder.

I switched to Kagi for this and they have “small web” and fediverse search.

They are a US based paid search engine and so far have not enshittified.

They’re one of the few US services I kept (low switching costs, low lock in, and a company I like) despite otherwise boycotting most other US products.

All that ad revenue won't be surrendered without a fight. Just wait, there will be ads you have to click through to read all of the AI summary.

Google will probably just start playing video ads as soon as you hit. Enter on the search bar.

You had one job.

Given how wrong/ridiculously oversimplified those AI summaries usually are, it scares me that so many people would stop there like, "Ehh, good enough".

I think Alk is referencing, the concept of perverse incentives. Without explicitly saying it. It's a concept, or a way of refering to an incentive structure that gives un-desirable results, in economics.

Example: When clicks give you ad revenue. And hurt kittens nurtured back to health gives the most clicks. People start hurting kittens, so they have more to nurture back to health for clicks.

Edit: my example is unfortunately a very real thing. Multiple channels on YT have been found to do it. Someone else will have to find the articles about it. I don't want to ruin my day reading about it again.

A lot of my queries only call for oversimplified summaries. Either I'm simple like that or I google stupid shoot no one else would bother. A recent example:

Are there butterflies or moths that don't have mouths? (No but some have vestigial mouths connected to non-functioning digestive systems.) Good enough!

That said, I'm very skeptical about answers if it's anything I care about or need to act on.

Are you Google's official bootlicker?

Less depressing example. A country (I think it was India but my memory is hazy and I'm too lazy to go google it right now) had a problem with a certain venomous snake. They decided to offer a bounty for every snake corpse brought to them. The goal was to incentivise people to hunt snakes. What actually happened was people started breeding the snakes to turn in for the bounties. They realized the program wasn't working and cancelled it at which point the breeders dumped their snakes into the wild making the whole situation even worse.

So I had this joke idea of "they'll just start showing the ads to the AIs", but the more I thought about it the more it started to sound less like a joke. Imagine if someone figured out how to cram ads into the AI training models and it skewed the outputs. Why astroturf when you can train the AIs to astroturf for you. This is some black mirror shit and now I've made myself a bit depressed.

There is an exploit used by scammers to change the official support number from summaries to theirs.
I dont know exactly how it works but its bad when you call the indian it support instead of your airline supportdesk

Youre right, it was in British India, where the British government came up with this scheme of rewarding the locals with money for captured / killed snakes in hopes of controlling the local snake population.

The AI answer mostly just parrots whatever the site that has won the referencement war is spewing. If it's easy enough, it can luck out and find an easy ready answer on wikipedia or something. Beyond that, most of those high referenced sites are the shitty aggregators that already pollute the search results.

I often search for the correct way to do do something. For example, there's a lot of baseless bullshit in gardening. If there wasn't an AI answer, I would not trust the first result and stop there, I would look for a few, check what sources they have. I would not even take the wikipedia answer at face value without at least confirming where they got their info.

We know AI doesn't do that. We have examples of it not even recognizing obvious parody, it can't be trusted with recognizing unsourced shit.