Bluesky threads are already full of people laughing at this "pivot to video" moment. I'm pretty sure they didn't even bother to read the article. It's a typical social media site. Everybody is like-insane. Minutes - even seconds - count. Post first - read later if at all.

I think this is awful. Aggressive plagiarism by Google could ~~(will?)~~ make it a big success.

Google calls its AI answers “overviews” but they often just paraphrase directly from websites.

[...]

Jake Boly, a strength coach based in Austin, has spent three years building up his website of workout shoe reviews. But last year, his traffic from Google dropped 96 percent. Google still seems to find value in his work, citing his page on AI-generated answers about shoes. The problem is, people read Google’s summary and don’t visit his site anymore, Boly said.

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Edit

To be clear - my main point is that I think Google is going to plagiarize as much as they want to try to get the shit to work. They won't be stopped by congress and they won't be stopped by the courts. Will plagiarizing work well enough to generate aiShittyText that Joe Schmo who shops at Walmart, isn't tech savvy will happily consume? It might be a ginormous flop. But my gut says Google's plan might work.

Rant: Holy mother of fuck. I haven't had pointed online convo outside of Hexbear in a very long time. I totally forgot how annoying the net can be. Reddit is bad enough but Bluesky can be like trying yell an argument through a keyhole due to the 300 character limit.

[–] Shinji_Ikari@hexbear.net 7 points 5 months ago

New angle: force a courts hand to create a precedent for disregarding copyright to break copyright law

[–] Kereru@hexbear.net 7 points 5 months ago

I agree, I think this could work. Google already has featured snippets, this just feels like an extension to that. I'm pretty sure those snippets often screwed over the sites they were taken from too, because people read them but don't click through. But the AI summary ensures they get even less credit/ad revenue.

Any high-value search terms and Google hides the summary. So you either get ads or AI slop for every search.

[–] blobjim@hexbear.net 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

It seems like it's going to force people to make their websites less accessible or something, to prevent Google from getting the full answer. Like they'll have some leading information indexable by Google and the rest of the answer will be in a video. Or maybe websites already do this in some way?

It seems like trying to monetize publicly available content on the internet is a crapshoot anyways. Hence why websites have paywalls, or additional stuff that you pay for to go along with the content, like merchandise.

[–] InevitableSwing@hexbear.net 1 points 5 months ago

It seems like it's going to force people to make their websites less accessible or something, to prevent Google from getting the full answer.

AI projects are laughable in many ways and google has a long track record of failure in most of its projects. But this to me feels different. Google is the monster in the room when it comes to search. I think google will give small web publishers a horrible choice.

Block us? We will fuck you over by never showing your sites in search results. Of course - we'll lie and say everything was aboveboard. The algos made the choices all by themselves!
Allow us to suck up your data is better and the intelligent choice. We'll give you some crumbs, peasants. Something is better than starving, right?