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The new AIs draw from human-generated content, while pushing it away:
With the massive growth of ChatGPT making headlines every day, Google and Microsoft have responded by showing off AI chatbots built into their search engines. It's self-evident that AI is the future. But the future of what?
[...] Built on information from human authors, both companies' [(Microsoft's "New Bing" and Google's Bard)] AI engines are being positioned as alternatives to the articles they learned from. The end result could be a more closed web with less free information and fewer experts to offer you good advice.
[...] A lot of critics will justifiably be concerned about possible factual inaccuracies in chatbot results, but we can likely assume that, as the technology improves, it will get better at weeding out mistakes. The larger issue is that the bots are giving you advice that seems to come from nowhere – though it was obviously compiled by grabbing content from human writers whom Bard is not even crediting.
[...] I'll admit another bias. I'm a professional writer, and chatbots like those shown by Google and Bing are an existential threat to anyone who gets paid for their words. Most websites rely heavily on search as a source of traffic and, without those eyeballs, the business model of many publishers is broken. No traffic means no ads, no ecommerce clicks, no revenue and no jobs.
Eventually, some publishers could be forced out of business. Others could retreat behind paywalls and still others could block Google and Bing from indexing their content. AI bots would run out of quality sources to scrape, making their advice less reliable. And readers would either have to pay more for quality content or settle for fewer voices.
Related: 90% of Online Content Could be 'Generated by AI by 2025,' Expert Says
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Sunday February 12 2023, @04:58AM (1 child)
Teaching the controversy only applies when there are more than one good faith position on the topic. Teaching that some people think the world is flat as a serious position when the subject of the Earth comes up would be stupid, not teaching the controversy. And certainly not when there is a definitive answer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 12 2023, @06:38AM
In fact "Teach the controversy" is a bullshit move by creationists to slip the Bible into science teaching in the US. This is the only context where "Teach the controversy" is used - and it is a fraudulent attempt to present "both sides" to give one side (the fraudulent one) exposure that is unwarranted. Any attempt to criticize the teaching of the controversy is itself an opportunity to teach the controversy. A clever little autoimmune virus that can only survive in the inflamed sensibilities of angry conservatives.