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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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ChatGPT sucks at being a reference for anything because it makes things up constantly. Ask for a recommendation, get a fake book. If someone could threaten Google with ChatGPT they could threaten them with a basic bitch search engine.

They can't, no one can make a search engine better than google because the internet is too shitfilled to get a good quality signal out of it, the only way to rank query results is to get feedback from search engine users and only google has users.

The real ChatGPT threat to Google is that you can use it to create gigantic mountains of plausible looking spam to run ads on. Think content farms, but fully automated: millions and millions of genuine looking wordpress websites filled with plausible looking nonsense answering every possible question a user can possibly have. Millions of fake reviewes for everything both positive and negative all written by language models.

The quality of google results will crater even further than it already has and users will resort to asking questions to other users directly that they know, through extensive interaction, to be humans.

Think content farms, but fully automated: millions and millions of genuine looking wordpress websites filled with plausible looking nonsense answering every possible question a user can possibly have.

When's the last time you've tried to use Google search to answer a general knowledge question and clicked one of the links that didn't go to Wikipedia, Quora, StackExchange, or Reddit (i.e., some site where humans are moderating the content)? Because that's what's it's looked like for years now. I'm sure you're right that in the future the nonsense will be written by better AI models and therefore take a bit longer to recognize as nonsense. But the existing content farms have poisoned the well enough that I'm not sure I would ever click one those links to notice.