People really trust it? Like it’s been so wrong on things for me, I automatically skip to search results past it. Why bother anymore

Which is such a shortsighted move because as soon as all the news portals close shop Google's scraper will have nothing relevant to summarize and is gonna be shit.

Watch his recent interview with Nilay Patel from The Verge. Watching him dance around questions about this was painful.

This man only cares about increasing Alphabet stock prices to ensure as large a golden parachute as possible on the way out.

One of the problems that the major news outlets have is that they repeat each other. It's not merely an issue of AI compiling news stories, but that on top of the fact that all of these newspapers are doing hardly any research. For example, if you live in a town that's not too large, there might only be one local paper, and they might send out reporters to local events. Obviously you would then go to that newspaper if you wanted to learn about local events, because they are adding explicit value.

But if you're trying to read about national politics, a lot of the information is going to be the same in a lot of the newspapers. Which means nobody cares about the newspaper itself. And this is a creation of the newspaper's own decision making over the past few decades.

Wouldn't this kill their ad revenue? Which is like...most of their revenue?

With what passes for news these days at most outlets I can't say I feel too bad for them that someone else beat them at their own game of feeding the masses surface level doom scrolling slop for engagement and ad impressions.

Hell, a large chunk of the junk being put out by these same outlets is trash written by the AI solutions they are paying for. Probably solutions from the likes of Google that is giving it to them at both ends.

Once the snake finishes eating its own tail maybe the good reporters will still have somewhere that pays them for the good work they do.

“Every day, we send billions of clicks to websites, and connecting people to the web continues to be a priority,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “New experiences like AI Overviews and AI Mode enhance Search and expand the types of questions people can ask, which creates new opportunities for content to be discovered.”

They followed up with: “You can totally trust me, and everything I just said. I am absolutely definitely not lying.”

With a link to NYPost lol

No! Pushing AI generated garbage is our job!

Google wants it all this time. No traffic for anyone but them after they steal all your content.

Oh no... Not the major news outlets, how ever will we cope. Let them burn.

Most news sites ask me to consent to google tracking or pay, neither of which am I prepared to do in almost all cases. I am sure I am not alone in this. Their decision to align with google in this way is more than a turn off, it is an indication of their untrustworthiness.

I shouldn't need to explain why I do everything I can to avoid being tracked by the likes of google. The idea that I will pay to be subject to propaganda died with the 20th century. If news outlets want my eyes on their pages they need to come up with a way to make it worth my time.

We need new search. Really we need a new web.

Blockchain's immutability might serve a public record of 'news', even moreso if combined with certificate verified identity on information disseminating 'social' media. The blockchain could actually be useful in this case. You don't have to link your irl identity to your internet identity everywhere, but it might not be a bad idea in the areas of information disseminating social media. These are just idle thoughts.

Edit - I saw a post today purporting to be a twitter screen grab of a James Woods post with a reply. The James Woods post was a screengrab of a video, supposedly of the current LA riots, with a comment along the lines of: Democrats can't talk about peaceful protest and support this. Following this was a reply saying 'this video is from 2020'.

I have no idea if either or both of these tweets happened, if the video was from 2020, or if either person were who they said they were! With the blockchain's immutability you could verify all of this automatically, and algorithmically reduce the reach of repeat offenders' posts.

There is a lot of value in this in terms of public discourse.

Similar processes could happen with both scientific/academic papers and government policy v. outcomes.

It might change the nature of the public debate.