Instead of displaying links, Arc Search's “Browse for Me” feature reads the first handful of pages and summarizes them into a single, custom-built, Arc-formatted web page using large language models from OpenAI and others. Critics say that's a problem.
  • aheadofthekrauts@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    4·
    9 months ago

    Web creators are trying to share their knowledge and get supported while doing so”, tweeted Ben Goodger, a software engineer who helped create both Firefox and Chrome. “I get how this helps users. How does it help creators? Without them there is no web…” After all, if a web browser sucked out all information from web pages without users needing to actually visit them, why would anyone bother making websites in the first place?

    Do you remember rss feed aggregators and how they killed the web?

    For decades, websites have served ads and pushed people visiting them towards paying for subscriptions. Monetizing traffic is one of the primary ways most creators on the web continue to make a living.

    The AI won’t summarize subscribers only articles. In the end content creators have to focus on subscriptions and less on advertisement revenue. Will this mean less content on the web? Yes of course. However, is this really a bad thing? Less clickbait nonenews articles, less copy&paste repetitions etc.

    • ricecake@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      8·
      9 months ago

      For a long time, people put things on the Internet because they thought it was interesting or fun to do so. Ad based stuff has been around longer, but there’s no reason we can’t just accept that maybe the Internet doesn’t make as much money for content creators as we all thought.

      • dustycups@aussie.zoneEnglish
        3·
        9 months ago

        The ad based stuff seem happy to go with click-baity & AI generated content anyway. The people with the purse strings do tend to be stingy. So much genuinely original content gets ripped of, reacted to etc and diluted away. The loss of professional journalism has been a loss to humanity but it’s one that we might just have to accept.

        Now I’m sad.