The tl;dr bot that pops up on every link to an article on Lemmy is depriving those websites of clicks, which deprives them of ad revenue.
The only thing that will accomplish is forcing those websites to do the very thing that we rail about; replacing their writers with crappy A.I because they can’t afford to pay for actual content.
We rail against the enshitification of the internet, but when there’s a legitimate way to fight back by giving these websites a page view/read/click etc… so that they can attract advertisers, we would rather have a bot summarize it for us, giving them nothing.
I don’t think think online article writers are providing services of value anymore.
It’s an extension of advertising, and the shitty journalist practices of today’s writers means I don’t fear losing their services.
Realistically, an AI can take a 1 sentence piece of news and generate a full page of fluff just as well as a human already.
This is the only response that I feel obligated to respond to, because yeah … I know it’s an unpopular opinion and that websites suck. We’re talking chicken and egg, do websites have to be that shitty because they need to milk as much as they can from the few people that still click? Or do fewer people click because it’s that shitty.
Which came first…did ad-blocking lead to more aggressive advertisements, or did more aggressive advertisements lead to ad-blockers…
I get that. I don’t take offense to any who disagree with me because I see that point.
What I DO feel the need to respond to is the notion that we don’t need human writers anymore.
A.I. doesn’t “produce” content. It aggregates it from other sources. If A.I. just aggregates from other A.I content, it’s an ourobouros eating it’s own tail; there’s nothing new being added.
So when you say a “1 sentence piece of news”, an A.I. can’t collect that and add it to the internet. It has to already exist from a human writer in order for the A.I to actually have something to scrape.
I appreciate that people have differing opinions on the monetization of websites, but no offense, saying that human writers aren’t providing a service anymore is the dumbest of dumb takes.
Let’s see how much news gets shared when A.I.s are just scraping from other A.I.s…
I think we do need human writers. In my experience, though, the TLDR bot cuts thru the fluff. It’s like those recipe blogs that have to add “jump to recipe” button. That button exists because I don’t need 1,000 words about the author’s childhood. Sure, there are some people who do, but I don’t, and that option is great. Most other kinds of blogs/essays don’t have that. If there was a TLDR section, and then a “would you like to know more” after that, then the TLDR bot wouldn’t need to exist. Too many articles need to get to the damn point.
I know this is rhetorical, but I’m gonna bet that advertisers led to ad blockers. I don’t mind mild ads, but mild ads don’t generate sales. Heck, I’ll watch the right ad if it’s amusing. I watched a 30 minute ad for Surfshark because TomSka made it funny. When it’s noises, popups, security issues all to drive sales, then I’m gonna block it.
They did. In the mid to late 90s, we didn’t have adblockers. Ads were mostly static images around the content, and could easily be ignored if you weren’t interested. In the late 90s to early 2000s, pop up ads started appearing, and adblockers were introduced, or at least became known, to stop them.