This could be the weirdest kind of moat yet. If you crawled all the things and built a model before everything became bot-generated, you can get clean post-2024 human data from the human inputs to your tool. If you haven't, then maybe you're stuck with the 2023-and-earlier crawls, limiting your models' relevance. We've already seen that the feedback loops of training models on model outputs isn't nearly as valuable, and can get wacky fast. It'll be weird to see how that plays out.
I'm wondering now, does the same effect apply to regular HN readers? In the sense that, we're contaminated (for lack of a better word), and are unable to see things out there without having equivalent connections pop into our heads! :)
The analogy I've been using is an ouroboros of bullshit, consuming ai generated bullshit to generate ai bullshit to consume to generate ai bullshit ad infinitum
The shadow libraries are the largest collection of human knowledge to date, and completely untainted by AI. Any search engine that crawls and indexes them will have a tenfold increase in quality and be as revolutionary as the invention of the internet. No LLM model needed.
On top of that, there is no incentive for AI generated content to enter the shadow libraries at all.
> On top of that, there is no incentive for AI generated content to enter the shadow libraries at all.
I think you underestimate just how many people/entities/forces that exist that would love to see further decline, division, and discord in the Anglosphere...
Except that human generated doesn't really seem to matter, all that seems to matter is some basic guard rails on the data you choose. Meta has models generating training data then grading it and select the best examples to reincorporate into the training set, and it's improving benchmarks.
The problem with model collapse is reinforcing means at the costs of the edges of your distribution curve, particularly on repeat.
One of the things that is being overlooked is that offsetting the job loss from AI replacing mean work is that there's going to be new markets for edge case creation and curation.
Jackson Pollock and Hunter S Thompson for the AI generation with a primary audience of AI vs humans, sponsored by large tech and data companies like the new Renaissance Vatican.
Another way they can use this is to log the generated text, and when crawling pages if they find text that Chrome didn’t generate, there’s a chance it was a human, or another tool. But I doubt if people have access to this on Chrome they will really use another tool, so Google can probably differentiate between sources.
I can already see the wonderful cyberpunk future, where people writing e-mails use Gmail's AI assistant to add all the polite boilerplate, while the recipients trying to get through their overflowing inbox use the Gmail-integrated AI summarizer to pare it all back down.
Assuming that, like ChatGPT, the model runs on Google's servers doesn't this vastly increase the cost to Google of offering Chrome for free? Now you have to provide AI compute time to every 4chan poster and forum warrior.
The economics of AI still seems nuts to me. Feels like another bait and switch in the making when all these "free" services need to start showing some revenue.
It's a direct evolution of the search paradigm. You go from entering a few keywords roughly related to what you want and then clicking on ads to continue the search, to having a short conversation with the AI honing in precisely what you need and then having the AI complete the transaction or even generate the content for you, optionally with a transaction attached.
The direct interactions with AI increase the fidelity of the customer model of you that Google has and uses to optimize sales to you for it's customers.
Even further, the most common source of inspiration for purchases is the behavior of other people. If the AI can sufficiently emulate humans and ingratiate itself enough to you then it can directly influence your behavior just by suggesting that it would make certain decisions in your place or that others have already.
This is actually not far removed from the existing situation, just the next level of technological capability.
By actually generating responses for you, it starts training you to allow it to make decisions on your behalf. This may readily extend into purchase decisions.
I find it interesting that the edge browser already has this feature. I wonder if chrome feels pressured to have feature parity specifically with AI or if they believe this change will actually improve their usage metrics?
Little keeping up with the joneses moves like these are always great for a bump in the stock price, its not always to shoot for some metric or business profit
In the example screenshot, the assistant takes this input:
> im interested in this place - do you allow dogs?
and writes this output:
> I'm interested in your property. Its exactly what I've been looking for. To make it perfect for me, I just need to know if the unit is pet-friendly. Thank you for your time and consideration. I look forward to your response.
The input is concise and to the point, the latter is infuriatingly verbose and formulaic. But I guess it'll be easy to filter out humans I would actually be willing to communicate with.
She writes like the latter example. I find myself continuously frustrated by people. She loves them. I find that I'm constantly rejected when suggesting things, she isn't.
I was talking to somebody who worked HR at a multi-disciplinary shop, and she said you could always identify the emails coming from programmers
It was a complaint, definitely not a compliment. She said programmers listed things out in bullet points and bluntly to-the-point. She complained they were dry, intimidating, and she hated dealing with them
I still write concisely and with bullet points, when writing to other programmers. But I now expand things when talking to everybody else. And I've found I get better responses
It shouldn't be terribly surprising that humans incorporate signals beyond pure denotational content of message? Text is a pretty low-bandwidth channel, so we infer as much meaning as possible from the bits of information we receive. All the stylistic choices encode additional information about the sender; part of one's job as an effective communicator is evaluating the effect of all those choices and adapting the entire message (not just its content) to convey the intended impression (not just the meaning).
Incidentally, this is why AI-writing isn't necessarily better communication. The robot can help translate intentions into prose, but it can't decide what one should actually intend to say.
This reminds me of Craigslist. When I get a response that’s written in a terse and grammatically incorrect style, I ignore it. Experience tells me these transactions don’t tend to go well.
There's a middle ground which is what a normal person would write:
I'm interested in your property, but I have a dog. Will that be a issue? Thank you!
or
I'm interested in your property, it looks like just what I need. But I need to know if you allow dogs. Thanks!
People are busy. The kind of filler in the AI example shows that you don't value their time more than you value trying to sound sophisticated when making a simple inquiry. But people also don't have time to decipher possibly cryptic text-message-shorthand. Think about your audience, and write accordingly.
We are still working with yes/no questions. While perhaps a landlord may reply with more information, I would phrase them as open-ended: "What can you tell me regarding dog ownership in your community?" That is an invitation to describe pet deposit, size/breed limitations, places to walk them, etc.
It's not only pointlessly verbose, it ruins the intention behind the input! The user wants to know if they allow dogs, not pets. They can get a "yes we allow some pets" response and now they have to start all over to figure out which pets those are, whether dogs are included, etc.
This is a shitload of computational expenditure to make things objectively worse by introducing an entirely new class of problem to the original message. It's literally "I had a problem, so I used AI, and now I have two problems"
When I take the output apart: The first sentence is to the point and short. The second is potentially redundant but might increase the likelihood of a reply. The third one is perhaps a bit over the top and could be merged shorter with the second (e.g., "... looking for, but I was wondering if ..."). Next one is just basic politeness. Last one feels optional but might at the margin increase likelihood/speed of reply.
Not perfect but not bad either (assuming a human reader on the receiving side).
You can fine-tune LLMs in new styles, without even considering all the styles they are already trained on. The formulaic style response is not needed at all.
The formulaic response in the style of Coding Horror:
"Hey there! Your property has piqued my interest—it's what I've been looking for. Just a tiny detail left to seal the deal: Is the unit cool with pets? Thanks a bunch for your time and consideration. Anticipating your swift response!"
Are younger generations, at least in the US, interested that much in negotiating?
I'm kind of in that age gap where the world started converting to barcodes and computer driven prices and at least to me it seems a lot less haggling occurs now. Again, a lot more of our purchases occur with corporate entities where this haggling doesn't occur. Transactions now are more based on smoothness and speed of transaction. You have X for $Y. Here is $Y. Good day.
Huh, maybe this is why big-G hasn't been too concerned about the rise of ChatGPT. As long as they have Chrome, they still have direct access to a huge portion of web users - even if said users have shifted from using their search engine.
Readit News
I'm wondering now, does the same effect apply to regular HN readers? In the sense that, we're contaminated (for lack of a better word), and are unable to see things out there without having equivalent connections pop into our heads! :)
On top of that, there is no incentive for AI generated content to enter the shadow libraries at all.
I think you underestimate just how many people/entities/forces that exist that would love to see further decline, division, and discord in the Anglosphere...
One of the things that is being overlooked is that offsetting the job loss from AI replacing mean work is that there's going to be new markets for edge case creation and curation.
Jackson Pollock and Hunter S Thompson for the AI generation with a primary audience of AI vs humans, sponsored by large tech and data companies like the new Renaissance Vatican.
IIRC this is less true with the very largest SOTA models, and that OpenAI is now using synthetic data with success.
The economics of AI still seems nuts to me. Feels like another bait and switch in the making when all these "free" services need to start showing some revenue.
The direct interactions with AI increase the fidelity of the customer model of you that Google has and uses to optimize sales to you for it's customers.
Even further, the most common source of inspiration for purchases is the behavior of other people. If the AI can sufficiently emulate humans and ingratiate itself enough to you then it can directly influence your behavior just by suggesting that it would make certain decisions in your place or that others have already.
This is actually not far removed from the existing situation, just the next level of technological capability.
By actually generating responses for you, it starts training you to allow it to make decisions on your behalf. This may readily extend into purchase decisions.
GPT: “You can buy {x} product. Would you like me to put it on your card? It will arrive in two days.”
Human: “Sure!”
This is what Google wants to control.
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> im interested in this place - do you allow dogs?
and writes this output:
> I'm interested in your property. Its exactly what I've been looking for. To make it perfect for me, I just need to know if the unit is pet-friendly. Thank you for your time and consideration. I look forward to your response.
The input is concise and to the point, the latter is infuriatingly verbose and formulaic. But I guess it'll be easy to filter out humans I would actually be willing to communicate with.
She writes like the latter example. I find myself continuously frustrated by people. She loves them. I find that I'm constantly rejected when suggesting things, she isn't.
I'm with you, but I think we're wrong.
It was a complaint, definitely not a compliment. She said programmers listed things out in bullet points and bluntly to-the-point. She complained they were dry, intimidating, and she hated dealing with them
I still write concisely and with bullet points, when writing to other programmers. But I now expand things when talking to everybody else. And I've found I get better responses
Incidentally, this is why AI-writing isn't necessarily better communication. The robot can help translate intentions into prose, but it can't decide what one should actually intend to say.
I'm interested in your property, but I have a dog. Will that be a issue? Thank you!
or
I'm interested in your property, it looks like just what I need. But I need to know if you allow dogs. Thanks!
People are busy. The kind of filler in the AI example shows that you don't value their time more than you value trying to sound sophisticated when making a simple inquiry. But people also don't have time to decipher possibly cryptic text-message-shorthand. Think about your audience, and write accordingly.
This is a shitload of computational expenditure to make things objectively worse by introducing an entirely new class of problem to the original message. It's literally "I had a problem, so I used AI, and now I have two problems"
If there's an HN policy violation in this post, I'm legit curious what it is
Not perfect but not bad either (assuming a human reader on the receiving side).
The formulaic response in the style of Coding Horror:
"Hey there! Your property has piqued my interest—it's what I've been looking for. Just a tiny detail left to seal the deal: Is the unit cool with pets? Thanks a bunch for your time and consideration. Anticipating your swift response!"
The AI may be giving up some of the users negotiating leverage there
I'm kind of in that age gap where the world started converting to barcodes and computer driven prices and at least to me it seems a lot less haggling occurs now. Again, a lot more of our purchases occur with corporate entities where this haggling doesn't occur. Transactions now are more based on smoothness and speed of transaction. You have X for $Y. Here is $Y. Good day.
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