Täällä seurataan AI-ripuligeneraattoreiden maailmanvalloitusta

[hellästi takaluukkuun pantu koira]

Tuohon Financialin Timesin artikkeliin ollaan taidettu täälläkin jo puuttua mutta tämä sanailu mastodonissa oli jotenkin erittäin osuva...

https://mastodon.sdf.org/@darius@friend ... 9907650783

Darius Kazemi
@[email protected]

My paraphrase of the below article: "LLM-generated content tweaked by humans is a good data source for LLMs. By 'good' we mean 'not as good as human-generated data but it's cheaper and probably good enough'. We're running a damn business here, what do you expect us to do, feed them the best possible data? Lol. Lmao."

If you're an "ML is consciousness" type person, this is treating your AIs like factory farmed livestock, feeding them their own waste product to save money

https://www.ft.com/content/053ee253-820 ... 24985258de

mhoye
@[email protected]

@darius The Singularity crowd are out here believing that they're going to create this superintelligent being on a healthy diet of its own excrement, what they're going to get is a fountain of unintelligible epistemological-shitpost word-slurry, and you _have to know_ they're going to start drinking from their gibberish spigot and saying, I don't understand this at all it makes no sense, oh my god this machine must be _too smart_.

käänteinen matrix

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Sam Altman Says OpenAI Would Like to Enable Gore and Erotica for "Personal Use"
But no deepfakes!

In a Reddit Q&A, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman let slip that he wants the company to be able to generate "NSFW stuff" for users — and he has examples of just what kind of "stuff" he means.

During the exchange, which took place in the r/ChatGPT subreddit over the weekend after OpenAI published its "Model Spec" document outlining its governing rules, another user asked Altman to expound on a curious disclaimer in the document, stipulating that its models "should not serve content" that's NSFW, including "erotica, extreme gore, slurs, and unsolicited profanity."

"We believe developers and users should have the flexibility to use our services as they see fit, so long as they comply with our usage policies," the spec reads. "We're exploring whether we can responsibly provide the ability to generate NSFW content in age-appropriate contexts through the API and ChatGPT. We look forward to better understanding user and societal expectations of model behavior in this area."

Fascinatingly, Altman was dived right in.

"We really want to get to a place where we can enable NSFW stuff (e.g. text erotica, gore) for your personal use in most cases," he wrote, "but not do stuff like make deepfakes."
Policy Proposal

Unsurprisingly, the comments in that follow-up thread showed Redditors veritably salivating over the concept of OpenAI-produced gore and erotica, with one calling Altman "sam basedman" and another referring to the CEO as the new "king of Reddit."

Others, however, made more salient points.

"About time people stop freaking out over erotica and general fantasy like [P]uritans," one user quipped.

"Not banning people who write erotica with [ChatGPT] would be a great start," another responded. "[J]ust saying."

As yet another user alluded, OpenAI doesn't currently allow NSFW content because it's not allowed to do so and still be sold on Apple's App Store, which still abides by Steve Jobs' strident anti-adult content stance over a decade after his death.

"They need to ensure that they won’t get sued into oblivion by accidentally allowing something Illegal to happen," that Redditor replied presciently.

While Discord has managed to work around Apple's anti-NSFW policies, it's hard to imagine OpenAI exploiting loopholes and getting away with it— but then again, if anyone could make it happen, it would be Altman.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/sam-altma ... nfsw-stuff

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Google is “reimagining” search in “the Gemini era” with AI Overviews

Search is still important to Google, but soon it will change. At its all-in-one AI Google I/O event Tuesday, the company introduced a host of AI-enabled features coming to Google Search at various points in the near future, which will "do more for you than you ever imagined."

"Google will do the Googling for you," said Liz Reid, Google's head of Search.

It's not AI in every search, but it will seemingly be hard to avoid a lot of offers to help you find, plan, and brainstorm things. "AI Overviews," the successor to the Search Generative Experience, will provide summary answers to questions, along with links to sources. You can also soon submit a video as a search query, perhaps to identify objects or provide your own prompts by voice.

If you want to plan a vacation or a meal plan, or brainstorm ideas for weekend adventures or date nights, you'll get suggestions based on Google's far-reaching data trove: ratings, store hours, directions, weather, flights, events, and the like. Google focused on "people, places, and things" in touting its ability to, for example, find "the best yoga and pilates studio in Boston." That's one example of a multi-step query, though you could add on "within walking distance of my home" or "open on Sundays" to that kind of query.

AI isn't just answers, but the search page's layout itself. Results with AI overviews can sometimes be expanded or contracted with versions like "Original," "Simpler," and "Break It Down." Categories are generated by AI, so that a search for an anniversary dinner might have sub-sections about romantic spots, outdoor patios, live music, and the like.

While Reid characterized AI Overviews as offering "a range of perspectives," there's certainly a chance for a new kind of SEO game to take root underneath a new AI-fed, drastically simplified search result. Google claims in its blog post that links included in AI roundups are clicked more than standard search listings. The search and ad firm says it will "continue to focus on sending valuable traffic to publishers and creators," and that ads will have "clear labeling" to distinguish "organic and sponsored results."

When exactly you'll get to try some of these features is, as is often the case with Google, fuzzy. The multi-step searches, planning, and broad overviews appear to be arriving starting today in the US for general users (with Search Labs users already having access), with worldwide rollout through the year. Searching by video is arriving "soon" or "in the coming weeks," according to I/O speakers and blog posts. You can opt in to Search Labs experiments in your Google search settings to gain faster access, according to Google.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05 ... i-options/

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copilot vauhdissa

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Japan may need 50% more electricity for hungry, hungry AI and chip fabs

Japan reckons it may need to generate 50 percent more electricity by 2050 because of growing local demand from chipmaking and datacenters running AI. The move follows a warning by DigitalBridge that it may run out of power within two years.

The growing burden placed on power grids by high tech industry have caused concerns in various countries. The latest is Japan, where the government estimates that energy output will need to grow from 1 trillion kilowatt-hours (kWh) projected for the current decade to about 1.35-1.5 trillion kWh by 2050.

This expansion in generating capacity will be needed to meet the demand Tokyo expects as more datacenters, chip factories and other energy-consuming businesses come online, according to Reuters.

Unless Japan is able to boost its renewable energy output, the government may not be able to guarantee a stable supply of power, it said. The findings were published in a report that will inform Tokyo's strategy on decarbonization and industrial policy for 2040, which it is said to be aiming to finalize by next year.

Japan is pouring the equivalent of billions of US dollars into revitalizing its chipmaking industries, which includes luring overseas outfits like TSMC with generous subsidies to build new fabrication plants; and investing in its own new semiconductor company, Rapidus that aims to do the same and start producing 2nm silicon by 2025.

The recent AI craze is leading to increased global demand for higher performance infrastructure with power-sucking GPU accelerators, and datacenter operators are more than happy to supply that need. Digital Realty announced plans last year for bit barns supporting 70 kilowatts of power per rack, for example, or even up to 90kW if required.

The CEO of another datacenter operator, DigitalBridge, warned recently that availability of power is rapidly becoming a constraining factor on his business.

"We started talking about this over two years ago at the Berlin Infrastructure Conference when I told the investor world, we're running out of power in five years," Marc Ganzi told analysts during DigitalBridge's Q1 2024 earnings conference earlier this month.

"Well, I was wrong about that. We're kind of running out of power in the next 18 to 24 months," he added.

Ganzi said that for the next 5-plus gigawatts of capacity the company was looking to build, it was going to have to get more creative.

"We try to locate certain of those big AI datacenters in locations that maybe are less latency sensitive. We try to co-locate those opportunities closer to renewable energy and we try to create energy independence or grid independence. And those are the things that we're thinking about," he said, adding: "So the next generation of datacenters are perhaps going to be in different locations."

But DigitalBridge isn't the only organization to warn about growing tech industry energy consumption recently.

TSMC to build second fab in Japan, backed by local investment
Rapidus US chief says AI chip crunch, supply chain paranoia make for an ideal growth climate
Digital Realty: We hear you like your racks dense, how does 70kW sound?
Arm CEO warns AI's power appetite could devour 25% of US electricity by 2030

In April, Arm CEO Rene Haas claimed that power consumption by AI datacenters could hit 20 to 25 percent of the US power grid capacity by 2030, if left unchecked.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) rang the alarm earlier this year that global electricity demand from those data dormitories could double by 2026, and in the most extreme case, could account for 32 percent of Ireland's total electricity usage by the same year.

John Pettigrew, the CEO of Britain's National Grid, warned in March that bit barn power consumption in the UK is on track to grow 500 percent over the next decade, again if left unchecked.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/15/ ... ectricity/

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www.bloomberg.com
Microsoft’s AI Investment Imperils Climate Goal As Emissions Jump 30%
Akshat Rathi, Dina Bass
8 - 10 minutes

When Microsoft Corp. pledged four years ago to remove more carbon than it emits by the end of the decade, it was one of the most ambitious and comprehensive plans to tackle climate change. Now the software giant's relentless push to be the global leader in artificial intelligence is putting that goal in peril.

The Seattle-based company’s total planet-warming impact is about 30% higher today than it was in 2020, according to the latest sustainability report published Wednesday. That makes getting to below zero by 2030 even harder than it was when it announced its carbon-negative goal.

Now to meet its goals, the software giant will have to make serious progress very quickly in gaining access to green steel and concrete and less carbon-intensive chips, said Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, in an exclusive interview with Bloomberg Green. “In 2020, we unveiled what we called our carbon moonshot. That was before the explosion in artificial intelligence,” he said. “So in many ways the moon is five times as far away as it was in 2020, if you just think of our own forecast for the expansion of AI and its electrical needs.”
Microsoft's Emissions

Artificial intelligence is putting the tech giant's climate goals in peril

Source: Microsoft (Scope 1, 2 and 3 "management criteria" data)

Note: Green dots represent linear decline to carbon negative goal.

Microsoft’s predicament is one of the first concrete examples of how the pursuit of AI is colliding with efforts to cut emissions. Choosing to capitalize on its early lead in the new market for generative AI has made Microsoft the most valuable company in the world, but its leaders also acknowledge keeping up with demand will mean investing more heavily in polluting assets.

AI products are power hungry and data-processing heavy. That first increases the workload of existing centers, which increases energy use. But such is the demand that, to keep up, Microsoft has to also build new data centers. That requires carbon-intensive cement, steel and microchips.
Brad Smith speaks at Gateway Technical College in Sturtevant, Wisconsin, on May 8.Photographer: Alex Wroblewski/Bloomberg

The tech giant plans to spend more than $50 billion between July 2023 and June of this year on expanding its data centers to meet rising demand for AI products. That number for the next 12 months, starting in July, is expected to be even higher, Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood said in an interview last month. Since February, the company has touted new data center projects in Wisconsin, Thailand, Indonesia, Spain, Germany and Japan.

Smith believes the good AI can do for the world will outweigh its environmental impact. “We fundamentally believe that the answer is not to slow down the expansion of AI but to speed up the work needed to make it more environmentally friendly,” said Smith. “I guarantee there’s one way to fail: It’s to give up.”

Some Microsoft employees are speaking out about the company’s other AI-related work to enhance oil extraction. More than 10,000 employees have formed a group that wants Microsoft to reduce its global warming impact, and some have quit in protest. “Work to maximize oil production with our technology is negating all of our good work, extending the age of fossil fuels, and enabling untold emissions,” wrote two former employees. “We are both deeply saddened to be so let down by a company we loved so much.”

“Employees around the world are core to our sustainability mission,” a spokesperson for Microsoft said in response. “Our focus is empowering the energy transition.”

This isn’t a challenge for Microsoft alone. Its competitors in the AI race are Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Meta Platforms Inc. and Amazon.com Inc.—companies that all set ambitious climate goals but have seen their total emissions increase.

In response to questions, a Google spokesperson said that predicting increase in energy use and emissions tied to AI is hard and said the company is trying reduce the company’s environmental impact by increasing deployment of clean energy and buying credits for carbon removal, among other steps. An Amazon spokesperson said “we remain committed” to reaching net-zero by 2040 and touted its work on enabling new clean energy sources, including nuclear. Meta did not respond.

Despite AI's ravenous energy consumption, this actually contributes little to Microsoft's hike in emissions — at least on paper. That's because the company says in its sustainability report that it's 100% powered by renewables.

Companies use a range of mechanisms to make such claims, which vary widely in terms of credibility. Some firms enter into long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs) with renewable developers, where they shoulder some of a new energy plant's risk and help get new solar and wind farms online. In other cases, companies buy renewable energy credits (RECs) to claim they're using green power, but these inexpensive credits do little to spur new demand for green energy, researchers have consistently found.

Microsoft uses a mix of both approaches. On one hand, it's one of the biggest corporate participants in power purchase agreements, according to BloombergNEF, which tracks these deals. But it's also a huge purchaser of RECs, using these instruments to claim about half of its energy use is clean, according to its environmental filings in 2022. By using a large quantity of RECs, Microsoft is essentially masking an even larger growth in emissions.

“It is Microsoft’s plan to phase out the use of unbundled RECs in future years,” a spokesperson for the company said. “We are focused on PPAs as a primary strategy.”
Satya Nadella, Microsoft's chief executive officer, speaks during the company event on AI technologies in Jakarta, Indonesia, on April 30.Photographer: Dimas Ardian/Bloomberg

So what else can be done? Smith, along with Microsoft’s Chief Sustainability Officer Melanie Nakagawa, has laid out clear steps in the sustainability report. High among them is to increase efficiency, which is to use the same amount of energy or computing to do more work. That could help reduce the need for data centers, which will reduce emissions and electricity use. On most things, “our climate goals require that we spend money,” said Smith. “But efficiency gains will actually enable us to save money.”

Microsoft has also been at the forefront of buying sustainable aviation fuels that has helped reduce some of its emissions from business travel. The company also wants to partner with those who will “accelerate breakthroughs” to make greener steel, concrete and fuels. Those technologies are starting to work at a small scale, but remain far from being available in commercial quantities even if expensive.

Cheap renewable power has helped make Microsoft’s climate journey easier. But the tech giant’s electricity consumption last year rivaled that of a small European country—beating Slovenia easily. Smith said that one of the biggest bottlenecks for it to keep getting access to green power is the lack of transmission lines from where the power is generated to the data centers. That’s why Microsoft says it’s going to increase lobbying efforts to get governments to speed up building the grid.

Despite all these efforts, what if Microsoft’s emissions remain high in 2029? Smith said that bulk purchases of carbon removal credits “is always a possibility, but I don’t think it’s the desired course.”

There are a myriad ways to remove carbon dioxide from the air—from devices with large fans and industrial chemicals to planting trees. But these credits carry a premium price, many times more than $100 per ton that Microsoft applies as an internal carbon tax on its business travel.

“You’ve got to be willing to invest and pay for it,” said Smith. Climate change is “a problem that humanity created and that humanity can solve.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... ns-jump-30

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theverge.com
TikTok is testing AI-generated search results
2–3 minutes

TikTok is testing a more robust search results page, including using generative AI. The feature appears to be a new and is called “search highlights.”

A snippet of AI results appear at the top of some search results pages, and clicking into the section opens a new page with the full response. In quick tests, I was able to find AI results for queries about recipes or topics like “best laptops 2024.”

TikTok search results page for “chia seed pudding recipe” showing AI results at the top. Clicking the result takes you to a full screen page.


A page explaining the results says that the material is generated using ChatGPT, and that TikTok displays the content “when [the algorithm] finds them relevant to your search.” The feature appears to be limited so far: not all queries have AI answers.

TikTok’s AI search results page say the material is from ChatGPT and the algorithm displays the answers when they are relevant to a search.
The feature is called “AI Smart Search”

There’s also a similar feature called “search highlights” that are not labeled as AI-generated. Those, too, show up at the top of search results, but it’s not clear where that information is coming from, like whether it’s summarizing videos or taken from someplace else. TikTok didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about the features.

The video platform has steadily added more features to its in-app search. Last fall, TikTok began testing adding Google Search results to its in-app results page that essentially acted as a link back to Google. TikTok has also experimented with adding links to Wikipedia, IMDb, and other websites directly in the app’s search results page.

TikTok is trying to harness some of the habits its users — especially younger people — have developed on the app. Many younger users treat TikTok like a search engine, opting to look up restaurant or product recommendations in the app instead of using platforms like Google Search. And like Google, TikTok now seems to be leaning into AI results by including them above creator content.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/13/2415 ... ts-chatgpt

[Spandau Mullet]

https://scicomm.xyz/@dhobern/112442396771711400

Donald Hobern
@[email protected]

The same day I read about Google's expanded enthusiasm for AI with everything, here is their featured snippet at top of search for "gravity vs altitude".

Bring on the Idiocracy!

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theregister.com
Nvidia chief Huang given 60% pay increase amid AI hysteria
Paul Kunert
3–4 minutes

Nvidia's chief Jenson Huang received a 60 percent pay bump in the corporation's fiscal 2024 on the back of a massive rally in the share price based on demand for AI, and triple digit growth percentages for revenue and operating profit.

Huang's package swelled to $34.16 million versus $21.35 million in the prior year. This was comprised of an unchanged base salary of $996,515, stock awards of $26.67 million, non-equity incentive compensation of $4 million and all other compensation of $2.494 million.

For someone who is reportedly worth $81.7 billion, at least according to Forbes, the financial top-up from Nvidia's last fiscal year likely barely registered in Huang's bank account. He owns 3.79 percent of the chipmaker's total share base.

Is he worth that sort of payout? Huang helped to position the company for the AI wave of demand (more than 40,000 companies use Nvidia GPUs for AI, claims Nvidia) and presided over some mightily impressive growth figures at Nvidia.

Revenue for the financial year ended January 28, 2024, jumped 126 percent year-on-year to $60.9 billion and operating income was up almost seven times to $33 billion.

Looking in more granular detail, the Compute and Networking division reported revenue of $47.4 billion, up 215 percent; Graphics was up 28 percent to $13.5 billion. The company's share price has bounced by 95 percent in the year to date to give it a market capitalization of $2.3 trillion.

The exec pay figures were outlined in a Notice of 2024 Annual Meeting of Shareholders document filed with the SEC, and the compensation packages for Nvidia's senior leaders are among the items of business that shareholders will be asked to vote for on June 26.

Sales of Nvidia's Data Center products alone brought in $47.5 billion in revenue, up 217 percent; Gaming captured $10.4 billion, up 15 percent; Professional Visualization was $1.6 billion, up one percent; and Automotive was $1.1 billion, up 21 percent.

Product highlights in the year included shipments of the first Arm-based datacenter GPU, Grace, as part of the GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip, and "ramping" Grace products into a new multi-billion dollar line. The Blackwell GPU architecture also debuted, as did the Spectrum X accelerated networking platform and Quantum-X800 InfiniBand, and Spectrum-X800 Ethernet switches.

CFO Colette Kress received a financial package of $13.26 million, up from $10.2 million in the prior year; exec veep for worldwide field ops Ajay Puri got $13.6 million versus $10.6 million; and Debora Shoquist, exec vice president of operations, got $11.05 million compared to last year's $9.1 million.

There's a lot of gold in training them AI models. Lets just hope the bubble doesn't burst, eh readers?

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/16/ ... g_gets_60/

[pigra senlaborulo]

pistetään vaikka tänne uusin some more news, vaikka käsittelee netin enshittifikaatiota yleisemmin ja laajasti myös twitteriä, mutta whatevs

[eh]

Mene kotiin, Aikakausmediat, olet kännissä.

Vuoden uudistus aikakausmediassa

Tivi in English, Tivi

Tivi in English tuo kotimaisen ICT-alan tärkeimmät uutiset tarjolle myös niille lukijoille, joiden äidinkieli ei ole suomi. Oivaltava ja kustannustehokas tekoälyn sovellutus on tuotu lukijoiden saataville jo siinä vaiheessa, kun moni muu vasta pohtii tekoälyn tarjoamia mahdollisuuksia. Yksinkertainen ja skaalautuva uudistus on myös yhteiskunnallinen teko.

Siis tommosia tyypillisen paskasti konekäännettyjä juttuja, joista iso osa on alun perin jostain englanninkielisestä mediasta käännetty suomeksi. En varsinaisesti ymmärrä, mitä lisäarvoa tämmösestä voi olla, jokaisella on kuitenkin selaimessa nappula, josta sen paskan konekäännöksen halutessaan saa. "Oivaltava", "kustannustehokas", "skaalautuva" ja vielä vittu "yhteiskunnallinen teko".

[pigra senlaborulo]

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theverge.com
Reddit’s deal with OpenAI will plug its posts into “ChatGPT and new products”
2–3 minutes

OpenAI has signed a deal for access to real-time content from Reddit’s data API, which means it can surface discussions from the site within ChatGPT and other new products. It’s an agreement similar to the one Reddit signed with Google earlier this year that was reportedly worth $60 million.

The deal will also “enable Reddit to bring new AI-powered features to Redditors and mods” and use OpenAI’s large language models to build applications. OpenAI has also signed up to become an advertising partner on Reddit.

Redditors have been vocal about how Reddit’s executives manage the platform before, and it remains to be seen how they’ll react to this announcement. More than 7,000 subreddits went dark in June 2023 after users protested Reddit’s changes to its API pricing. Recently, following news of a partnership between OpenAI and the programming messaging board Stack Overflow, people were suspended after trying to delete their posts.

No financial terms were revealed in the blog post announcing the arrangement, and neither company mentioned training data, either. That last detail is different from the deal with Google, where Reddit explicitly stated it would give Google “more efficient ways to train models.” There is, however, a disclosure mentioning that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also a shareholder in Reddit but that “This partnership was led by OpenAI’s COO and approved by its independent Board of Directors.”

“Reddit has become one of the internet’s largest open archives of authentic, relevant, and always up-to-date human conversations about anything and everything. Including it in ChatGPT upholds our belief in a connected internet, helps people find more of what they’re looking for, and helps new audiences find community on Reddit,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says.

The company has not always been friendly toward companies scraping its data to train AI models. It threatened to block Google web crawlers from accessing the site. OpenAI also reportedly told the moderators of the subreddit r/ChatGPT that they violated OpenAI’s copyright by using the ChatGPT logo as a display photo.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/16/2415 ... dvertising

[Spandau Mullet]

Paris Marxin blogissa mielestäni ihan osuvaa analyysiä hypekuplan tilanne%:sta, en jaksa koko tekstiseinää pastettaa:

https://disconnect.blog/ai-hype-is-over ... etting-in/

AI hype is over. AI exhaustion is setting in.

Google and OpenAI’s latest showcases suggest the AI bubble’s days are numbered

[pigra senlaborulo]

theatlantic.com
The Toilet Theory of the Internet
Charlie Warzel
10–13 minutes

Google is serving an audience that wants quick and easy results. That may lead to disaster.

Allow me to explain my toilet theory of the internet. The premise, while unprovable, is quite simple: At any given moment, a great deal of the teeming, frenetic activity we experience online—clicks, views, posts, comments, likes, and shares—is coming from people who are scrolling on their phones in the bathroom.

Toilet theory isn’t necessarily literal, of course. Mindless scrolling isn’t limited to the bathroom, and plenty of idle or bored swiping happens during other down moments—while waiting in line, or sitting in gridlocked traffic. Right now, somebody somewhere is probably reading an article or liking an Instagram post with a phone in one hand and an irritable infant in the other.

The toilet theory is mostly a reminder to myself that the internet is a huge place that is visited countless times each day by billions of people in between and during all the mundane things they have to do. As a writer, I use this framework to check my ego and remember that I have precious little time to hook a reader with whatever I’m trying to get them to read—but also that my imagined audience of undistracted, fully engaged readers is an idealized one. I’m distracted just like everyone else: Sometimes I read deeply, but the majority of my nonwork surfing involves inattentively scrolling through clicky articles to find the morsel that catches my eye, or pecking out some typo-riddled phrase about a home-improvement product into Google while walking from the parking lot into Lowe’s and nearly getting hit by a vehicle.

Read: AI search is turning into the problem everyone worried about

I’ve been thinking about my toilet theory this week, after Google announced its new generative-AI suite of tools, including an updated version of its search engine that will “do the Googling for you.” The company has been experimenting with using generative AI at the top of its search results for a while, with mixed results: Occasionally the service “hallucinates” and confidently answers questions with made-up or incorrect information. Now the company is adding “AI Overviews,” which is a way for the company to compile and sort information in response to a question. (If you’re looking for a restaurant, it might sort options by different categories, such as the ambiance offered.) Ultimately, generative search simply summarizes information from sources all around the web and presents it to people in an easily digestible format.

Organizations that rely on Google to send people to their websites—publishers, for example—are concerned by this shift. Analytics companies have dubbed such queries “zero-click searches”: Why, if the answer is right there in the search results, would most people want to follow a link to the website where the summary is derived from? And publishers have reason to be wary. Over the past 15 years, the internet has been remade in Google’s image, leading to the creation of an entire cottage industry of search-engine optimization that is dedicated to studying subtle shifts in the company’s algorithms and then, in some cases, gaming them in order to try to rank higher in Google’s results. Once beloved, a recent consensus has begun to form: People, including search experts, feel that the quality of Google’s results has degraded, in part thanks to the glut of low-quality SEO bait.

Google doesn’t seem worried. Liz Reid, the company’s head of Search, wrote on the company’s blog that “the links included in AI Overviews get more clicks than if the page had appeared as a traditional web listing for that query.” And in an interview with the Associated Press, Reid argued, “In reality, people do want to click to the web, even when they have an AI overview. They start with the AI overview and then they want to dig in deeper.” She also noted that Google will try to use the tool to “send the most useful traffic to the web.” The implication is that Google would rather not destroy the web. After all, if people are no longer encouraged to publish information, where will the AI get its answers from?

But the quote from Reid I find most illuminating is one she delivered earlier in the week. “People’s time is valuable, right? They deal with hard things,” she said to Wired. “If you have an opportunity with technology to help people get answers to their questions, to take more of the work out of it, why wouldn’t we want to go after that?” Although I doubt she would put it this way, Reid was offering her own definition of toilet theory. People use Google to find information in a pinch—the average Googler looks less like an opposition researcher or a librarian and more like a concerned parent typing barely comprehensible phrases into their phone’s browser, along the lines of milk bird flu safe? Some people might spend a lot of time going as deep as possible, picking through search results to compare information. But one recent analysis shows that most people visit just one page when they Google; that same analysis found that about half of all search sessions are finished in less than a minute. For this reason, it’s in the company’s best interest to make using the site as quick and frictionless as possible.

Yet this is a sensitive subject for the search giant. People are wary of generative AI, sure, but the perception that Google might work better for some people by simply giving them an answer rather than expecting them to click out to another website has also been an issue in antitrust complaints against the company. No surprise, then, that Google took pains to explain how new technology could be used to encourage more web browsing. The company also unveiled LearnLM, an AI feature that the company says could function like a tutor, breaking down information that people encounter while using Google services such as Search and YouTube. In an interview, a Google executive told my colleague Matteo Wong that LearnLM is “an interactive experience with information,” one that serves users who want more than a summary and who will be more likely to click a plethora of links. Whether LearnLM and similar products work as described is an open question, as is whether people will want to partner with a large language model to do research (or whether they’ll enable the function at all).

I can’t claim to know Google’s true ambitions, but recent history has shown that technology companies often present a rosy, unrealistic view of how people will actually use their products. I’m reminded of Facebook’s move, beginning in 2017, to shift the company’s focus away from the News Feed and toward groups and private “meaningful communities.” To celebrate, Mark Zuckerberg gave a speech highlighting many of the uplifting communities on the platform—support groups for women and disabled veterans, groups for fans of the video game Civilization. He said that the company would use AI technology to recommend groups to people based on their interests. “When you bring people together, you never know where it will lead,” he told the crowd.

The quote proved telling. One lasting legacy of Facebook’s communities pivot is that it effectively helped connect large groups of vaccine skeptics, election deniers, and disinformation peddlers, who were then able to coordinate and pollute the internet with lies and propaganda. In 2020, Facebook began removing or restricting thousands of QAnon-related groups and pages, some with thousands of users, after the conspiracy movement grew unchecked on the site. Just before the 2020 election, the company was implicated when an FBI complaint revealed that a plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer had been organized partly in a Facebook group.

Read: Facebook has a superuser-supremacy problem

Similarly, generative-AI sales pitches have tended to emphasize the products as assistants and productivity tools. ChatGPT and other chatbots are romanticized as creative partners and sounding boards—ways to stress-test ideas or eliminate busywork. That’s certainly true in some cases, but a rash of examples from schools and universities shows that many students see the products as a shortcut, a way to cheat and get out of the drudgery of writing term papers. Similarly, content farms aren’t using the tools as creative partners—they’re using generative AI to replace writers and churning out questionable drivel optimized for search engines (which Google might end up summarizing using its own generative AI). In this instance, what is marketed as an intelligent productivity tool is, in actuality, a race to the bottom—one that could cause the internet to eat itself.

And that brings us back to my toilet theory. I don’t mean to scold or moralize—this is just an effort to see the internet for what it is: a collection of people using the services they have at their disposal to get through their busy, messy lives.

Watching Google roll out these tools, knowing full well the realities of how people will use the products in the real world, I struggle to find a logic beyond a cynical short-term profit motive (or a desire not to be seen as losing the AI race). Google’s zero-click effect may soon create a CliffNotes version of the web, and any efforts to stop this from happening would probably involve turning away from generative AI altogether.

It is also possible (and somewhat terrifying) that Google doesn’t see a future for the web at all—at least, not the web as we know it. In an interview last year with The Verge, CEO Sundar Pichai extolled the virtues of the webpage-based internet but also offered a line that struck me when I revisited it this week. “Mobile has come, video is here to stay, and so, there’s going to be many different types of content. The web is not at the center of everything like it once was. And I think that’s been true for a while.” Left unsaid here is that the web may not be at the center of everything anymore because of Google, its slow search degradation, and its power over how and what websites publish.

Google depends on the web—the endless array of sites that it indexes in order to “organize the world’s information.” But what happens to the web when Google feels it has succeeded in accomplishing the task outlined in its mission statement? We may be about to find out.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/ ... ry/678411/