In a joint op-ed published earlier this month by Maya Schenwar, board president for Truthout and director of the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism; Negin Owliaei, Truthout’s editor-in-chief; and Ziggy West Jeffery, Truthout’s executive director, the trio noted that Google’s AI model, Gemini, is now prioritizing summaries of news articles at the top of its searches, leading to dramatic drop-offs in viewership for independent media websites.
“We lost 15 percent of our readership overnight,” the op-ed writers said. “This was a readership we painstakingly built over decades, and it vanished because Google chose corporate greed over a healthy democracy.”
Independent media like Truthout largely rely on donations from readers, who are asked to consider donating when they visit these sites. However, when Gemini summarizes these articles (or prioritizes corporate media instead in its summaries), the loss in revenue is noticeable.
“At Truthout, we anticipate a loss of roughly $500,000 in online revenue as a result of this massive traffic plunge in the next year alone,” the op-ed said.
Keep saying it.
“We lost 15 percent of our readership overnight,” the op-ed writers said. “This was a readership we painstakingly built over decades, and it vanished because Google chose corporate greed over a healthy democracy.”
Google and all megacorps always chose greed over everything else. Always.
If a corporation can simply “choose” to undermine your “healthy democracy” it means you never had any democracy to start off with.
The summaries aren’t even accurate. I can’t find the link in my own past comments but the BBC did a study that showed 51% of summaries are seriously inaccurate.
And I read an article today where the website had their own summary which was wrong, so I’m assuming that was generated too. We’re so screwed.
Half the time the ‘sources’ provided are irrelevant to the claims the AI makes. They’re worthless for anything more important than gaming tips.
Yes, I remember an LLM making a claim and the sources it linked to had no relation to the subject at all. Bizarre.
If pirating is stealing for consumers, how is this legal?
Because you are poor and they are rich.
If a rich person does something illegal it might just be innovation so we must treat their noble visions and sacrifices with legal shelter and acceptance we cannot afford to extend to ourselves.
shrugs I didn’t make the rules sorry, my only part in this is to continually lobotomize my capacity to envision a world that ran on different rules and condescend those who can still imagine it.
Bit of a tangent, but has anyone noticed AI is getting worse?
I use it for cvs and the like, because most companies also use AI to filter, but I’ve noticed it makes more mistakes than it did not even that long ago.
This was inevitable, the value of AI is derived from quality open and accessible training data of genuine expert human conversations that are constantly added to and kept up to date and yet the fundamental business model of AI companies is founded on disguising the value of that with a purposefully obscure woodchipper that brutalizes all of that information into a less useful, more manipulatable product of lossy compression algorithms.
The only way these AI companies can succeed is by definition completely devaluing the datasets they existentially rely on to maintain and create the AI, the only way this could ever go was to have a brief honeymoon period of AI companies stripmining the collective human wealth of the internet and then drowning and killing it with worthless bot crap that is always somehow fed back into the mouths of the very same algorithms creating the crap and thus everything degrades.
The only play these companies really have is to enshittify all other alternatives faster than their AI goes to shit… which is exactly what these companies are trying to do.
In the end all AI companies have really proved is that intelligence begins somewhere in the process of a librarian creating a library, and that we can gesture at that crudely by mutilating libraries created from the labor and love of countless people into untrustable bots that serve to privatize the wreckage of that knowledge… but none of that actually proves what the AI comapanies are doing is the valuable part it just proves that a well curated dataset contains a latent capacity for intelligence already.
Indeed, the filing shows that OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman admitted he was “deeply motivated by the gazillions” he hoped to gain.
I hope this is a sign that these people are not making a fraction of what they hoped. Even better, I hope they’re making a net loss. I bet some are making a fortune, but I’m not sure who besides Nvidia.
We need some kind of large asteroid.
Don’t look up tackles that, even the billionaire tech bros.
