1. People get on the web and make real content with care because they're just excited to share stuff with each other.
2. Advertisers talk them into putting some ads on their pages so they can get some compensation for their work.
3. Shitty people figure out you can just make content where the main incentive is to get people to go to the page and see the ads.
4. Those people then outsource writing the content to the lowest bidder.
5. The lowest bidder becomes an LLM.
6. Search engines cut out the middle-man entirely and just send your search query to an LLM, stuff some ads in, and show the result to the user without ever hitting the web (except to periodically scrape it for model training).
7. Because of 6, people stop putting new content on the web at all. The models get shittier and stupider with regards to current events.
8. To counter that, LLM companies make deals with news organizations and other primary source information provides and pay them to have direct access to content to train their models.
9. Those organizations get such a large fraction of their income from those deals that eventually they get out of the business of giving human readers direct access to it because it's not worth the effort. Newspapers become B2B companies.
10. The only way to get information is via a handful of giant tech companies sitting on top of huge LLMs saying who-knows-what trained on a slurry of actual information and giant piles of ads.
I hope that somewhere in the process people start to get tired of talking to machines all day and hop off the ride entirely and starting calling up their friends and getting information the old fashioned way.
The only consolation I have is the belief that people have a deep seated desire to connect to actual humans and know the real truth about the world.
IMHO a major part of the problem is that the Internet never had a mechanism for paying for good content. Everything is “free” therefore ads emerge as the only monetization strategy and you did a good job outlining the rest.
I’ve started trying to pay for good journalism, especially good indie journalism. I also Patreon a bunch of podcasts, buy high quality software if the price is reasonable, buy albums of my favorite music, buy films, and so on, while actively avoiding both gratuitous subscription models and the ad web.
Pay for it or it either doesn’t get made or it pays for you. Free is a lie and piracy undermines quality.
Edit:
All the paying for good stuff I outlined above averages out to around $100-$150/month. It’s less than I usually spend on restaurants and coffee shops and far less than groceries for our family. Restaurants in particular feel like a far more frivolous expense.
1. People get on the web and make real content with care because they're just excited to share stuff with each other.
2. Advertisers talk them into putting some ads on their pages so they can get some compensation for their work.
3. Shitty people figure out you can just make content where the main incentive is to get people to go to the page and see the ads.
4. Those people then outsource writing the content to the lowest bidder.
5. The lowest bidder becomes an LLM.
6. Search engines cut out the middle-man entirely and just send your search query to an LLM, stuff some ads in, and show the result to the user without ever hitting the web (except to periodically scrape it for model training).
7. Because of 6, people stop putting new content on the web at all. The models get shittier and stupider with regards to current events.
8. To counter that, LLM companies make deals with news organizations and other primary source information provides and pay them to have direct access to content to train their models.
9. Those organizations get such a large fraction of their income from those deals that eventually they get out of the business of giving human readers direct access to it because it's not worth the effort. Newspapers become B2B companies.
10. The only way to get information is via a handful of giant tech companies sitting on top of huge LLMs saying who-knows-what trained on a slurry of actual information and giant piles of ads.
I hope that somewhere in the process people start to get tired of talking to machines all day and hop off the ride entirely and starting calling up their friends and getting information the old fashioned way.
The only consolation I have is the belief that people have a deep seated desire to connect to actual humans and know the real truth about the world.