has google, which is primarily an ad company, thought through replacing search links with AI regurgitation?

[thomastc@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@eniko They lose the ad revenue from ads embedded in those external pages, but they gain the ad revenue from ads on google.com itself.

They also gain the ability to have companies pay to produce desirable slop machine outputs. The possibilities are endless.

[gkrnours@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@eniko the plan is probably made by gemini for CEO that are at 80% pro-AI, while the worker are at 80% against.
Thought bubble

[eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@mkj "Each advertiser brings their own LLM, and an auction mechanism decides whose model gets to influence the next word"

ah yes that sounds very accessible. very low barrier to entry. you know, like buying some ad space.

[themipper@mastodon.social]

@eniko I imagine they will keep injecting misinformation in form of ad-approved wordings for keywords. And the advertisers will need to pay for their misinformation to show up first.

Similar to the keywords that currently plague the search results on every major platform.

And with no traffic there will be no websites. Just those platforms like amazon, google, facebook and the like.

[maia@mastodon.art]

@eniko they want to make people dependent on them for everything. then they can do whatever they want. that’s why they’re locking down their phones too

[landelare@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@eniko I'm hoping the plan is one last rodeo before investment dries up.

[mort@floss.social]

@eniko I honestly feel like nobody has a plan anymore other than to contort themselves into pretzels to demonstrate any kind of broad societal value in "AI". It seems like most of the big tech companies have collectively decided that *no* price is too great to sacrifice on the altar of AI. It's not about delivering products people want, it's about convincing society that it wants AI. I would normally say these sorts of things are about impressing shareholders but this is deeper than that

[eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@mort AI induced C-suite psychosis

[thepi@urusai.social]

@eniko Google will become The Internet , then they'll ???, and then they'll PROFIT.

Then they'll shut it down for unclear reasons and we can all touch grass.

[44@defcon.social]

@eniko plan's make money printer go brr,
ambivalent 2 how much the world burns around it

[sinvega@mas.to]

@eniko hold all the infrastructure and "convenience" to ransom probably

[foxyloon@blimps.xyz]

@eniko I think folks are on the right track here, but there's a big part of this that's being overlooked.

It's all about data collection and controlling access to information freely available on the internet.

They realized there's a subset of Internet users who bypass their ads entirely with adblockers, despite their best efforts to stop that from happening in recent years. That's why they'd rather replace their search engine with Gemini to get folk's personal data that way. It also serves the interest of the billionaires to obscure access to info that would "radicalize" folks, by having a chatbot presenting curated and digested "search results" while keeping tabs on who's asking for such things.

This also seems to coincide with their efforts to lock down Android as well. Can't have folks "sideloading" apps to bypass all of this, now.

[kjhank@social.vivaldi.net]

@eniko Of course there is: more AI. Then, if that doesn't help: more AI.

[flamingos_cant@mastodon.social]

@eniko I'd attribute this to three things:

1. They've mostly given up on innovating on computer interface. This LLM craze is in many ways an extension of the previous voice assistant one;
2. LLMs are expensive and they salivate at the idea of you being dependent on them (see cloud storage);
3. They're Google, exceedingly self-conscious and irrational. Managers saw people on Reddit and HN bigging up OpenClaw, Claude, etc and feared they're not 'innovating' enough. So they innovated (copied).

[chemicaleyeguy@mstdn.science]

@eniko #Google is the new New Coke.