The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

AI has been trained on pirated material and that would be very different from someone buying books and reading them and learning from them. Right now it's still up to the courts what counts as infringing but at this point even Disney is accusing AI of violating their copyrights https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/11/business/media/disney-uni...

AI outputs copyrighted material: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/25/business/ai-i... and they can even be ranked by the extent to which they do it: https://aibusiness.com/responsible-ai/openai-s-gpt-4-is-the-...

AI is getting better at data laundering and hiding evidence of infringement, but ultimately it's collecting and regurgitating copyrighted content.

Stolen doesn't imply anything is for sale, does it? Most things that are stolen are not for sale.

I think there is case to be made that AI companies are taking the content - providing people with a modified version of that content and not necessarily providing references to the original material.

Much of the content that is created by people is done so to generate revenue. They are denied that revenue when people don't go to their site. One might interpret that as theft. In the case of GRRM's books - I would assumed they were purchased and the author received the revenue from the sale.

> It implies the content was for sale and was taken without payment

that's literally what happened in innumerable individual cases, though.

Yes, there are ethical differences to an individual doing things by hand, and a corporation funded by billions of investor dollars doing an automated version of that thing at many orders of magnitude in scale.

Also, LLMs don’t just imitate style, they can be made to reproduce certain content near-verbatim in a way that would be a copyright violation if done by a human being.

You can excuse it away if you want with reduction ad absurdum arguments, but the impact is distinctly different, and calls for different parameters.

At a time when solar & batteries were just getting great, nah.

Haha, I would have thought the reckless cuts of DOGE or willingness of the current US administration to rely on AI for decision making would have driven home exactly why governments can't be trusted to manage nuclear.

It's just too dangerous to leave it in the hands of people who don't believe in science, and value money, power, and ideology more than anything else.

Its happening now, and there is nothing to stop it happening again in future.

They’re restarting coal-fired power plants to run AI datacenters. I don’t know what your personal threshold is for “massive” environmental harm, but that meets mine.

Training AI models uses a large amount of energy (according to what I've read / headlines I've seen /etc), and increases water usage. [0] I don't have a lot to offer as proof, merely that this is an idea that I have encountered enough that I was suprised you hadn't heard of it. I did a very cursory bit of googling, so the quality + dodginess distribution is a bit wild, but there appear to be indiustry reports [2, page 20] that support this:

""" [G]lobal data centre electricity use reached 415 TWh in 2024, or 1.5 per cent of global electricity consumption.... While these figures include all types of data centres, the growing subset of data centres focused on AI are particularly energy intensive. AI-focused data centres can consume as much electricity as aluminium smelters but are more geographically concentrated. The rapid expansion of AI is driving a significant surge in global electricity demand, posing new challenges for sustainability. Data centre electricity consumption has been growing at 12 per cent per year since 2017, outpacing total electricity consumption by a factor of four. """

The numbers are about data center power use in total, but AI seems to be one of the bigger driving forces behind that growth, so it seems plausible that there is some harm.

0: https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmen... 1: https://www.itu.int/en/mediacentre/Pages/PR-2025-06-05-green... 2: (cf. page 20) https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Environment/Pages/Publications/...

Anthropic demoed something similar with Golden Gate Claude a year ago:

https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude

I agree they'd love to do that in theory, and it seems technically feasible. What gives me hope on that front is that marketers and advertisers (let alone the companies that pay them) have never shown the slightest capacity for that level of subtlety. The most sophisticated adtech today, produced by networks of massive data collection and analysis, ultimately just tries to shove as many loud, disruptive ads in your face as possible.

I think if you had this incredible technology that could manipulate language to nudge readers in the softest possible way toward thinking a little bit more about buying some product, so that in aggregate you'd increase sales in a measurable way that nobody would ever notice, it would just quickly just devolve into companies demanding the phrase "BUY MORE REYNOLDS GARBAGE BAGS!!!!!!!!" at least 7 times.

I’m pretty sure it would be measurable. How else would advertisers pay for it? And given that advertisers would know about it, it would also be generally known. I wager that enough people and businesses would reject it, if it isn’t outright illegal in the first place.

I think subliminal advertising is banned in quite a few countries - not sure about the US - so it might be a problem internationally. I know that here in Australia there was a big scare about it in the mid 2000s, some station was cutting 100ms ads into shows. Not sure about the efficacy of it though, I’m sure it would be better if you watched a whole ad.

> It's very possible that they never will, that instead the advertising will be so subtle nobody will be able to detect it.

I was going to write a rebuttal to this, about how more subtle forms of advertising are likely not very effective, and then I remembered subliminal advertising.

It's largely been banned (I think), but probably only because it's relatively easy to define and very easy to identify. In the case of LLMs, defining what they shouldn't be allowed to do "subliminally" will be a lot harder, and identifying it could be all but impossible without inside knowledge.

This is credible simply because this is how advertising works. Product placement, free products for celebs, modern life awash in images that make us desire things.

This gave me creeps. Modern tech is good an opening up new dimensions of dystopian hell.

That still sounds like AIs attempting to sell you something, to me.

> It's very possible that they never will

Oh come on.

Genuinely.

Come on.

Look at every single tech innovation of the last 20 years and say that again.

And they were actually praised when they did start doing ads because they weren't as obtrusive as the existing heavy duty in-your-face Flash animations and they were relevant to a user.

It quickly turned Google into the biggest / most valuable internet company of all time ever, and it still wasn't enough for them.

I've had adblockers running for as long as I can remember so I'm blisfully unaware of how bad it is now... mostly, I don't have adblockers on my phone and some pages are unusable.

Google was founded in 1998 and you could buy ads on the search results page in 2000. https://googlepress.blogspot.com/2000/10/google-launches-sel...

That wasn’t out of benevolence, that’s because they hadn’t discovered the ads business model yet. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle now.

I think it’s time folks dust off their library cards :)

Or support an open source AI model.

I stopped using ChatGPT when it started littering my conversation with emojis. It acts like one of those overzealous kids on Barney.

It was a quote, which I failed to format in this app I use.

The simpler explanation is that ChatGPT is trained on webpages that have been SEO'd to death.

So you are just getting SEO'd pages (i.e ads) regurgitated to you.

> This is spot on. I think we'll be able to capitalize on other talents of "AI" once we recognize the big shift is done happening. It's like five years after the Louisiana Purchase: we have a bunch of new resources but we've barely catalogued them, let alone begun to exploit them.

one thing about LLMs used as a replacement for search is they have to be continually retrained or else they become stale. Lets say a hard recession hits and all the AI companies go out of business but we're left with all these models on huggingface that can still be used. Then, a new programming language hits the scene and it's a massive hit, how will LLMs be able to autocomplete and add dependencies for a language they've never seen before? Maybe an analogy could be asking an LLM to translate a written language you make up on the spot to English/other language.

Same as all technology. You missed the deadline to file that complaint by more than a couple hundred thousand years.

I've already seen this.

I'm not convinced. This article focuses on individual use and how inconsequential it is, but it seems like to me it dismisses the training part that it does mention a bit too fast to my taste.

> it’s a one-time cost

No, it's not. AI company constantly train new models and that's where the billions of dollars they get go into. It's only logical: they try to keep improving. What's more, the day you stop training new models, the existing models will "rot": they will keep working, but on old data, they won't be fresh anymore. the training will continue, constantly.

An awful quantity of hardware and resources are being monopolized where they could be allocated to something worthier, or just not allocated at all.

> Individuals using LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini collectively only account for about 3% of AI’s total energy use after amortizing the cost of training.

Yeah, we agree, running queries is comparatively cheap (still 10 times more than a regular search query though, if I'm to believe this article (and I have no reason not to)) after amortizing the cost of training. But there's no after, as we've seen.

As long as these companies are burning billions of dollars, they are burning some correlated amount of CO2.

As an individual, I don't want to signal to these companies, through my use of their LLMs, that they should keep going like this.

And as AI is more and more pervasive, we are going to start relying on it very hard, and we are also going to train models on everything, everywhere (chat messages, (video) calls, etc). The training is far from being a one shot activity and it's only going to keep increasing as long as there are rich believers willing to throw shit-tons of money into this.

Now, assuming these AIs do a good job of providing accurate answers that you don't have to spend more time on proofreading / double checking (which I'm not sure they always do), we are unfortunately not replacing the time we won by nothing. We are still in a growth economy, the time that is freed will be used to produce even more garbage, at an even faster rate.

(I don't like that last argument very much though, I'm not for keeping people busy at inefficient tasks just because, but this unfortunately needs to be taken in account - and that's, as a software developer, a harsh reality that also applies to my day to day job. As a software developer, my job is to essentially automatize tasks for people so they can have more free time because now the computers can do their work a bit more. But as a species, we've not increased our free time. We've just made it more fast-paced and stressful)

The article also mentions that there are other things to look into to improve things related to climate change, but the argument goes both ways: fighting against power hungry LLMs don't prevent you from addressing other causes.

> optimizing monstrously slow processes that cost weeks of human labour by automating them, that saves a ton of energy as well

Yes, I do agree with this. However, that's only good as long as there wasn't a better way of optimizing them. Assuming we'd not be better off getting rid of those costly process altogether.

> ideally they spend it on more productive things

Same gotcha as mentioned in my other comment: "productive" in our growth economy often means "damaging to the environment", because we are collectively spending a lot of our time producing garbage and that's not something we should really optimize. Most of us work a fixed amount of hours so it's not like we are doing ourselves any favor by optimizing time in the end.

In another system, I wouldn't say. I'm generally for freeing up time for us so we can have better lives.

Humans will have the privilege of using that time to take out the trash and be taxi drivers for drug users

I hope the academia of your dreams create code that is not like real-world academia :)

Ads are Google's core product, isn't it?

Their core product is software meant to make sweet ad money.

Google's core product has always been advertisement. They sell advertisements to companies looking to advertise, and they bring in tens of billions in revenue from that business. In effect, their core product is you: they're selling your eyeballs.

If the bait that they used to bring you to them so they could sell your eyeballs has finally started to rot and stink, then why do people continue to be attracted by it? You claim they've ruined their core product, but it still works as intended, never mind that you've confused what their products actually are.

But a drunkard might sit behind the wheel, at which point it becomes detrimental to everyone on the road…

And there are countless books and movies where the hero has drinks, or routinely swigs some whisky-grade stuff from a flask on his belt to calm his nerves, then drives.

> People genuinely do have a good time drinking.

This depends a lot on the person. I, for example, would much more associate "reading scientific textbooks/papers" with having a good time. :-D

It's that way because of successful marketing - just like smoking, or cars, or fast food.

Yes, the future is in making a plethora of hyper-specialized LLM's, not a sci-fi assistant monopoly.

E.g., I'm sure people will pay for an LLM that plays Magic the Gathering well. They don't need it to know about German poetry or Pokemon trivia.

This could probably done as LoRAs on top of existing generalist open-weight models. Envision running this locally and having hundreds of LLM "plugins", a la phone apps.

Landmark based directions rather than street names does seem like a plausible explanation. I still have some childhood friends whose houses I don’t know the street address but I know how to get there

I still prefer street names since those tend to be well signed (in my area anyway) and tend not to change, whereas the business on the corner might be different a few years from now.

oof, I’m not sure if I’m proud or ashamed of having an idea in the “torment nexus”. I believe I heard of the idea in some of the discussion surrounding a patent from an automaker to use microphones in the car for a data source for targeted ads. Combine that with self driving cars and you could have a car that takes a sliiight detour to look at “points of interest”

"Continue driving on Thisandthat Avenue, and admire the happy, handsome people you see on your right, shopping at Vuvuzelas'R'Us, your place for anything airhorn!"

Does you Google actually respect the keywords? For me, most of the times it replaces words with "synonyms" (mostly wrong context or not really replaceable). And results are pretty crap as a result - no what I was looking for, but just much more common/generic stuff.

Isn’t DDG basically Bing with a privacy layer?

It was fast, which almost nothing else was at the time.

And if people on dialup connections think you’re slow, it’s because you are.

When Google came out it was way better than Altavista, people switched instantly. Specifically Altavista looked at how often a search term was in the result, which wasn't always a helpful thing. Google also noticed if search terms were near each other in a page which was really helpful, otherwise you would get forums with one search term in one message, and the other far away in an unrelated message. Google fixed that.

The web has changed these days, it's an adversarial system now, where web results are aggressively bad and constantly trying to trick you. Google is much harder to implement now.

I have a solution: search engine which uses machine learning to score the "commercialness" of a page. By commercialness, I mean: is it a table of products with prices; does it have buy buttons; does it use a lot of tracking and analytics; does it have a cart; is there a lot of product talk (and is it overbiased positively); how are all the pages within a couple link-degrees scoring; ... (and more). Then, give users a slider which right side means no filtering, left side means basically only return universities, Wikipedia, and PBS tier results.

This has to track number of ads and trackers in a page and not just be about product pages. This measure should also fight SEO spam, as the tracking and advertising elements would cause SEO spammers to lose rank on the engine (disincentivising an arms race).

Add in the patently obvious need for the poweruser's 2nd search bar, which takes set notation statements and at least one of a few popular powerful regex languages, and finally add cookie stored, user-suppliable domain blacklists and whitelists (which can be downloaded as a .txt and reuploaded later on a new browser profile if needed). I never ever want to see Experts Exchange for any reason in my results, as an immediately grasped example. Give the users more control, quit automagicking everything behind a conversationally universal idiot-bar!