I'm just skeptical on how OpenAI fixes the blog spam issue you mentioned. Im sure someone has already started doing the math on how to game these systems and ensure that when you ask ChatGPT for recipe recs, it's going to spout the same spam (maybe worded a bit differently) and we'll soon all get tired of it again.
Everything's changing, but everything's also getting more complicated. Humans still need apply.
OpenAI fixes this issue by not giving you two pages of the history of this recipe and the grandmother that originated it and what the author's thoughts are about the weather. It's just the recipe. No ads. No referral links. No slideshows. You don't have to click through three useless websites to find one with meaningful information, you don't have to close a thousand modals for newsletters and cookie consent and log-in prompts.
If you've always wondered about and scoffed at how people fall for things like Nigerian Prince scams and cryptocurrency HELOC bets, this is it, what you're experiencing right now, this intense FOMO, it's the same thing that fools cool wine aunts into giving their savings to Nigerian princes.
Tread lightly. Stay frosty.
From my perspective this isn't about anyone trying to convince me of anything and I'm falling for it. My beliefs on the future of software are based on a series of logical steps that lead me to believe most software development, and frankly any software with user interfaces, will mostly cease to exist in my lifetime.
On Monday, I would have agreed with you. Today, I am thinking not so much.
Unless you are heavily invested in whatever you are working on, I would definitely consider jumping ship for an AI play.
The main reason I am sticking around my current role is that I was able to convince leadership that we must consider incorporation of AI technology in-house to remain competitive with our peers. I was even able to get buy-in for sending one of our other developers to AI/ML night classes at university so we have more coverage on the topic.
At the moment. Although, this does seem like a chance to reset the economics of the "web". I can see enough people be willing to pay a monthly fee for an AI personal assistant that is genuinely helpful and saves time (so not the current Alexa/smart speaker nonsense), that advertising won't be the main monetization path anymore.
But, once all the eyeballs are on a chatbot rather than Google.com what for-profit company won't start selling advertising against that?
There is also the question what happens to the original content these LLMs need to actually make their statistical guess at the next word. If no one looks at the source anymore and its all filtered through an LLM is there any reason to publish to the web? Even hobbyists with no interest in making any money might balk knowing that they are just feeding an AI text.
The LLMs get granted the capacity to explore their environment physically and gather data on their own. The recent PaLM-E demo shows a possible direction.
The big issue is moving free with ads ---> paid with no ads + extra features; people froth at the mouth.
Hell, just Youtube premium gets enough people angry, being self-entitled and furious that YT dare charge for a service w/o ads, or complaining that it's the creators that generate all the content anyway. Meanwhile my brah YT over here having to host/serve hundreds of thousands or even millions of "24 hours of black screen" or "100 hour timer countdown" or "1 week 168 hour timer countdown", like what the actual fuck.
Not that the way the internet operates has to continue -- in fact I'm pretty sure it can't -- but a lot of stuff exists only because someone figured out a way to pay for it to exist. If you imaging removing those ways then you're also imaging getting rid of a lot of that stuff unless some new ways to pay for it all are found. Hopefully less obnoxious ways, but they could easily be more obnoxious.
But the converse is a huge and ever-growing ocean of bullshit exists to siphon the ad dollars off while doing nothing to actually earn it.
Something has to break, and I guess we'll see what really soon.
