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ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector

764 points · 395 comments · lmbbuchodi

  1. ck2 · · focus · HN ↗
    imagine stealing tons of content from every source on earth and then running ads on it

    if a single person did that they'd be sent to prison (rip Aaron) but when a too-big-to-fail industry does it with political campaign contributions, no problem?

    well firefox+ublock is still an option for those wise enough not to let unknown javascript with new daily zero-days run on their PC

    1. jsrozner · · focus · HN ↗
      This is basically what Google did when they pioneered the model of surveillance capitalism (see, e.g., The Age of Surveillance Capitalism).

      Google simply provided an index on top of an existing library. Of course, a librarian has no value if he has no books to index over! But it's also worth noting that the Google "librarian" also leveraged the existing "social" structure of the internet: their core contribution (page rank) was a clever, efficient mechanism to extract the latent value in the pre-existing link structure of the internet. This structure (much like the pages themselves) had been curated by actual humans. Undoubtedly page rank was clever, but it was worthless without the existing websites (books) and the existing indexing information (the pre-existing, crowdsourced librarian work). Nonetheless, they successfully monetized it.

      AI companies are even worse in the sense that initially Google was still sending traffic to the original webpages. (Until they didn&#x27;t - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eater.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;9&#x2F;12&#x2F;16294380&#x2F;yelp-google-scraping-feud" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eater.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;9&#x2F;12&#x2F;16294380&#x2F;yelp-google-scrapin...). So yes, the AI companies have even more thoroughly stolen the collective work of humanity than Google did.

      1. ck2 · · focus · HN ↗
        remember the cache: search of google

        so they basically have copies already of every webpage until they turned it off a few years ago (well they may still have it updated but not provide it as a service)

        so it occurs to me they most definitely trained their &quot;AI&quot; on all that user cache

        they may have even just turned it off as a service when they realized other &quot;AI&quot; could do the same thing

      2. jsrozner · · focus · HN ↗
        It is hilarious that this got downvoted, even when it&#x27;s entirely factually accurate. I encourage the downvoters to respond to the content.
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