I really worry about the meta effects that Search is having on the internet. Google has slowly degraded as the internet has morphed into being almost entirely an SEO driven contraption. It's now very difficult to find good original information because it's overwhelmed with spam. Whether that be websites that copy that original information but pushes you through a maze of adverts, serving you what looks like original information but is actually just manufactured content, or straight up astroturf. All of these effects work to make real original work less economical and less valuable - it has no value if no one can find it. If you do something worthwhile on the internet it'll be stolen and no one will care anyway, because no one will beleive it.
Now ChatGPT is 1 further step of intermediation. No longer are you competing with everyone else to get noticed by Google search, hoping Google actually has an incentive to bring people to your valuable page. No, now ChatGPT will just serve your stuff to the customer, having stolen your stuff wholesale with no chance of ever actually referencing you. Given that new situation why would anyone ever produce any text of value for the internet? Why? To pump MSFT share price? Well you won't. So what will be produced? Massive amounts (even more) of trash information will be pumped out, raising the noise floor and in turn bringing down the quality of ChatGPT, and who's to say what's right! The whole point of Google was to figure out what was right from the organic structure of the internet, but if you replace the organic structure with Google and ChatGPT there's no one left providing the original information that these services will use.
Now ChatGPT is 1 further step of intermediation. No longer are you competing with everyone else to get noticed by Google search, hoping Google actually has an incentive to bring people to your valuable page. No, now ChatGPT will just serve your stuff to the customer, having stolen your stuff wholesale with no chance of ever actually referencing you. Given that new situation why would anyone ever produce any text of value for the internet? Why? To pump MSFT share price? Well you won't. So what will be produced? Massive amounts (even more) of trash information will be pumped out, raising the noise floor and in turn bringing down the quality of ChatGPT, and who's to say what's right! The whole point of Google was to figure out what was right from the organic structure of the internet, but if you replace the organic structure with Google and ChatGPT there's no one left providing the original information that these services will use.