Why Google's New ChatGPT-Style Search Could Kill the Websites That Feed It (PC Mag) [View all]

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https://www.pcmag.com/opinions/why-googles-new-chatgpt-style-search-could-kill-the-websites-that-feed
Archive at https://archive.ph/47gOH

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But what if that wealth of content is reduced to grist for a bigger mill? Google's new AI search experience pushes links to articles below the digital fold, summarizing the response to a search query up top as a conversational, ChatGPT-style paragraph. Content in the answer, a mini-article in itself, can theoretically come from PCMag and a host of other publications.

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Writers watching a live demo of the new experience at Google's I/O conference found it chilling. “Did Google receive that e-bike and set it up?" asks Angela Moscaritolo, PCMag's health and fitness expert. She reviewed the Aventon Aventure Ebike, which the demo suggested for commuters as "good for hill climbing."

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With what we've seen from Google thus far, users can't truly know if the information came from a PCMag article, customer reviews, marketing claims on a manufacturer's product page—or some undistinguished mish-mosh of all that. The even more chilling thing for society as a whole? If Google goes down this path, that source material could end up less likely to be from trusted publications and sources, because the revenue hit they take means they may not be around.

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"Google has been juggling between whether it's dependent on journalism, or whether it wants to usurp it, for years," says Segan. "It seems to keep wanting to grow into...the canonical, one-stop source for information. But as it does that, it risks destroying all of the information sources it uses."

I've seen a lot of commentary like this already on Google's asinine plans for their new search.

The little article their bot will present is basically designed to end the search there. It doesn't quote any sites or link directly to them from the article. There will of course be ads designed to sell you something. But you won't know the sources of the article's information.

It's the search equivalent of the text-generating AI ripping off countless writers, and the image-generating AI ripping off visual artists, and the music AI ripping off singers and musicians.

And it will badly hurt the very websites it draws its information from.

Google's Sundar Pichai, like OpenAI's Sam Altman, appears to be so hypnotized by AI that his own brain has stopped working.