Wow! Amazing post! You really nailed the complexities of AI browsers in ways that most people don't think about. I think there's also a doom paradox where if more people search with AI, this disincentives people from posting on their own blog and websites where incentives are usually ads could help support them. If AI is crawling and then spitting back information from your blog (you get no revenue), is there a point to post at all?
One possibility I like to imagine is a future where knowledge sources are used kind of like tools, i.e. the model never uses any preexisting knowledge from its training data (beyond what’s necessary to be fluent in English, coherent, logical, etc.), a “blank” intelligent being, tabula rasa. And for answering questions it uses various sources dynamically, like an agent would use tools.
I think this will let models be much smaller (and cheaper), but it would also enable a mechanism for monetizing knowledge. This would make knowledge sharing profitable.
For example, a user asks a question, the model asks knowledge sources if they have relevant information and how much it costs (maybe some other metadata like perceived relevance or quality or whatever), and then it decides (dynamically) which source(s) to use in order to compile an answer (decision could be based on past user feedback, similarly to PageRank).
One issue is that this incentivizes content users want to hear versus content they don’t want to hear but is true. But this is a problem we already have, long before AI or even the internet.
> If you post for ad revenue, I truly feel sorry for you.
I think this is a bit dismissive towards people who create content because they enjoy doing it but also could not do it to this level without the revenue, like many indie Youtubers.
If I could press a button and remove money from the internet, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
I absolutely do enjoy content that is financed through ads. I really, REALLY do like some of the stuff, honest. But it is also the case that the internet has been turning into a marketing hellscape for the last couple decades, we've gotten to a point in which engagement is optimized to such a degree that society itself is hurting from it. Politically and psychologically. The damage is hard to quantify, yet I can't fathom the opportunity cost not being well into the billions.
