[Workaccount2]

Never link outside your domain has been rule #1 of the ad-driven business for years now.

Once users leave your page, they become exponentially less likely to load more ad-ridden pages from your website.

Ironically this is also why there is so much existential fear about AI in the media. LLMs will do to them what they do to primary sources (and more likely just cut them out of the loop). This Google story will get a lot of clicks. But it is easy to see a near future where an AI agent just retrieves and summarizes the case for you. And does a much better job too.

[bc569a80a344f9c]

> But it is easy to see a near future where an AI agent just retrieves and summarizes the case for you. And does a much better job too.

I am significantly less confident that an LLM is going to be any good at putting a raw source like a court ruling PDF into context and adequately explain to readers why - and what details - of the decision matter, and what impact they will have. They can probably do an OK job summarizing the document, but not much more.

I do agree that given current trends there is going to be significant impact to journalism, and I don’t like that future at all. Particularly because we won’t just have less good reporting, but we won’t have any investigative journalism, which is funded by the ads from relatively cheap “reporting only” stories. There’s a reason we call the press the fourth estate, and we will be much poorer without them.

There’s an argument to be made that the press has recently put themselves into this position and hasn’t done a great job, but I still think it’s going to be a rather great loss.

[nerpderp82]

> significantly less confident that an LLM is going to be any good at putting a raw source like a court ruling PDF into context and adequately explain to readers why

You should play with LLMs this week.

[lazide]

It’ll just link to some random unrelated court ruling.

[Bratmon]

If you think that's the case, you should really give current LLMs another shot. The version of ChatGPT from 3 years ago has more in common with the average chatbot from 50 years ago than it does the ChatGPT from today.

[lazide]

I literally work in the space dude.

[nomoreofthat]

[flagged]

[mike_hearn]

There's a simpler explanation: they are comparing LLM performance to that of regular humans, not perfection.

Where do you think LLMs learned this behavior from? Go spend time in the academic literature outside of computer science and you will find an endless sea of material with BS citations that don't substantiate the claim being made, entirely made up claims with no evidence, citations of retracted papers, nonsensical numbers etc. And that's when papers take months to write and have numerous coauthors, peer reviewers and editors involved (theoretically).

Now read some newspapers or magazines and it's the same except the citations are gone.

If an LLM can meet that same level of performance in a few seconds, it's objectively impressive unless you compare to a theoretical ideal.

[halJordan]

Llms are already incredibly able to be great at contextualizing and explaining things. HNs is so allergic to AI, it's incredible. And leaving you behind

[bc569a80a344f9c]

They are. I use LLMs. They need to be given context. Which is easy for things that are already on the Internet for them to pull from. When people stop writing news articles that connect events to one another then LLMs have nothing to pull into their context. They are not capable of connecting two random sources.

Edit: also, the primary point is that if everyone uses LLMs for reporting, the loss of revenue will cause the disappearance of the investigative journalism that funds, which LLMs sure as fuck aren’t going to do.

[ragequittah]

Is this article investigative? Summary of the court case pdf is trivial for an LLM and most will probably do a better job than the linked article. Main difference being you won't be bombarded with ads and other nonsense (at least for now). Hell I wouldn't be surprised if the reporter had an LLM summarize the case before they wrote the article.

Content that can't be easily made by an LLM will still be worth something. But go to most news sites and their content is mostly summarization of someone else's content. LLMs may make that a hard sell.

[bongodongobob]

I think it's a mix of shortsightedness and straight up denial. A lot of people on here were the smart nerdy kid. They are good at programming or electronics or whatever. It became their identity and they are fuckin scared that the one thing they can do well will be taken away rather than putting the new tool in their toolbox.

[grues-dinner]

The problem I may have with using an LLM for this is that I am not already familiar with the subject in detail and won't know when the thing has:

* Strayed from reality

* Strayed from the document and is freely admixing with other information from its training data without saying so. Done properly, this is a powerful tool for synthesis, and LLMs theoretically are great at it, but done improperly it just muddles things

* Has some kind of bias baked in-ironic mdash-"in summary, this ruling is an example of judicial overreach by activist judges against a tech company which should morally be allowed to do what they want". Not such a problem now, but I think we may see more of this once AI is firmly embedded into every information flow. Currently the AI company game is training people to trust the machine. Once they do, what a resource those people become!

Now, none of those points are unique to LLMs: inaccuracy, misunderstanding, wrong or confused synthesis and especially bias are all common in human journalism. Gell-Mann amnesia and institutional bias and all that.

Perhaps the problem is that I'm not sufficiently mistrustful of the status quo, even though I am already quite suspicious of journalistic analysis. Or maybe it's because AI, though my brain screams "don't trust it, check everything, find the source", remains in the toolbox even when I find problems, whereas for a journalist I'd roll my eyes, call them a hack and leave the website.

Not that it's directly relevant to the immediate utility of AI today, but once AI is everything, or almost everything, then my next worry is what happens when you functionally only have published primary material and AI output to train on. Even without model collapse, what happens when AI journobots inherently don't "pick up the phone", so to speak, to dig up details? For the first year, the media runs almost for free. For the second year, there's no higher level synthesis for the past year to lean on and it all regresses to summarising press releases. Again, there are already many human publications that just repackage PRs, but when that's all there is? This problem isn't limited to journalism, but it's a good example.

[Workaccount2]

"Based on the court's memorandum opinion in the case of United States v. Google LLC, Google is required to adhere to a series of remedies aimed at curbing its monopolistic practices in the search and search advertising markets. These remedies address Google's distribution agreements, data sharing, and advertising practices.

Distribution Agreements

A central component of the remedies focuses on Google's distribution agreements to ensure they are not shutting out competitors:

No Exclusive Contracts Google is barred from entering into or maintaining exclusive contracts for the distribution of Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, and the Gemini app.

No Tying Arrangements Google cannot condition the licensing of the Play Store or any other Google application on the preloading or placement of its other products like Search or Chrome.

Revenue Sharing Conditions The company is prohibited from conditioning revenue-sharing payments on the exclusive placement of its applications.

Partner Freedom Distribution partners are now free to simultaneously distribute competing general search engines (GSEs), browsers, or generative AI products.

Contract Duration Agreements with browser developers, OEMs, and wireless carriers for default placement of Google products are limited to a one-year term.

Data Sharing and Syndication

To address the competitive advantages Google gained through its exclusionary conduct, the court has ordered the following:

Search Data Access Google must provide "Qualified Competitors" with access to certain search index and user-interaction data to help them improve their services. This does not, however, include advertising data.

Syndication Services Google is required to offer search and search text ad syndication services to qualified competitors on ordinary commercial terms. This will enable smaller firms to provide high-quality search results and ads while they build out their own capabilities.

Advertising Transparency

To promote greater transparency in the search advertising market, the court has mandated that:

Public Disclosure Google must publicly disclose significant changes to its ad auction processes. This is intended to prevent Google from secretly adjusting its ad auctions to increase prices.

What Google is NOT Required to Do

The court also specified several remedies it would not impose:

No Divestiture Google is not required to sell off its Chrome browser or the Android operating system.

No Payment Ban Google can continue to make payments to distribution partners for the preloading or placement of its products. The court reasoned that a ban could harm these partners and consumers.

No Choice Screens The court will not force Google to present users with choice screens on its products or on Android devices, citing a desire to avoid dictating product design.

No Sharing of Granular Ad Data Google is not required to share detailed, query-level advertising data with advertisers.

A "Technical Committee" will be established to assist in implementing and enforcing the final judgment, which will be in effect for six years."

Frankly I don't think that's bad at all. This is from Gemini 2.5 pro

[supernova87a]

I guess they are unable to value the function that I am more likely to read and trust stories from their website if they give me the honest info about where their stories come from that I can further read (and rely on them to always point me to as a guide).

[permo-w]

they likely, and probably correctly, do not want you as a customer. people who are discerning and conscious like this generally use an adblocker, and even if you don't, are generally less easily influenced by adverts in the first place. most people like this tend towards wealthy, so it's a valuable demographic if they can get past those two issues, but they're not easy to get past

[supernova87a]

You made me snort with laughter with how right you were. I in fact have 2 adblockers on, and I actively ignore and sanitize some of my history (like Youtube) to not get directed towards advertising or other rabbit holes I don't want to see, even though I never click a single ad.

But I do pay for quality journalism / news websites!

[madaxe_again]

Most consumers cannot identify which website they are currently looking at. Google, Facebook, giveuscardinfozzzz.com, all the same. No distinguishing or discernible features or difference.

[idle_zealot]

People like you are factored in. There just aren't enough of you for your preferences to impact editorial policy.

[upcoming-sesame]

This is one of the practices I hate the most on the internet.

Sometimes it's so ridiculous that a news site will report about some company and will not have a single link to the company page or will have a link that just points to another previous article about that company.

How fuxking insecure are you ??

[ehsankia]

It has gotten absolutely out of control. I will be reading an article about a new game, and the article won't even have a link to the store page to buy the game...

[iamacyborg]

Which store page should they be linking to? Inevitably what you’re asking for is how we’ve ended up with sites spinning off thousands of articles stuffed full of affiliate links.

[ehsankia]

Just link to a few? There's a finite set of stores a game is usually on

On PC, it'll be Steam, GOG, maybe Humble. Then on consoles you have Xbox, Playstation and Nintendo. If you wanna put affiliate link, go for it. It's better than no link at all.

These articles already bait my click for ads by never putting the name of the game in the title anyways. At least let me get to the game and buy it.

[madaxe_again]

It’s not about insecurity - it’s more like a user will accidentally click on the link, end up on the company’s site, not realise they’ve left the news site, be confused as to why the news site is trying so hard to sell them a dishwasher, not remember they were just reading an article about them, and will be scared and alienated.

[63stack]

Oh my god, the horror! The user will be confused, not remember, and they will be gasp scared? Alienated?? After accidentally clicking a link??? Jesus Christ the internet is such a scary place.

[nradov]

Most of that stuff like court decisions and patents isn't copyrighted anyway. They can host a copy on their own site and display ads around it if they want to.

[justinclift]

Sure, but if they're hosting it on their own site then who's to know it hasn't been modified by them for some reason?

ie it's no longer a "source of truth"

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

Post the checksum J/K. Court should maybe GPG sign it though.. something like that. So we can verify the creator of any particular document.

[madaxe_again]

Who is this for though? Your average user would not be able to use it or understand the purpose of it. A big image of a padlock with a tick saying “SECURE AND VERIFIED” would be just as effective.

[hdjrudni]

Have to start somewhere. Especially in this age of AI where everything can be faked. Put a "learn more" link that says how they can verify the authenticity. If people aren't interested in learning, that's on them. A padlock doesn't tell you anything. The padlock next the URL just says the connection is encrypted. You used to be able to pay $200 and the cert authority would make you send documents proving you are who you say you are, and it'd show your company name next to the address bar. I went through the process once. It was a good idea IMO, not sure why we got rid of it. Maybe shiesty authorities that weren't doing their due diligence.

[justinrubek]

The average user doesn't understand TLS but they use it. The average user doesn't understand TCP but they still use it. That doesn't sound like a problem to me. Having signed documents isn't a bad thing.

[vkou]

> And does a much better job too.

A much better job for who? For you, or the firm running it?

A future where humans turn over all their thinking to machines, and, by proxy, to the people who own those machines is not one to celebrate.

[coro_1]

> Ironically this is also why there is so much existential fear about AI in the media. LLMs will do to them what they do to primary sources (and more likely just cut them out of the loop).

Maybe.. not. LLMs may just flow where the money goes. Open AI has a deal with the FT, etc.

The AI platforms haven't touched any UI devolution at all because they're a hot commodity.

[camillomiller]

And you think that’s better? The Llm will be unbiased how, exactly?

[szszrk]

That is my primitive way of distinguishing actual journalism and honest blogging from ad-crap and paywall traps.

If they actually link to other websites and their sources - it's worth my time. If they don't - it's a honeypot.