# They're Looting the Internet ![rw-book-cover](https://www.wheresyoured.at/content/images/2024/01/wyea--1.jpeg) ## Metadata - Author: [[Edward Zitron]] - Full Title: They're Looting the Internet - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: Last week, Meta revealed (in a motion trying to dismiss an FTC anti-monopoly lawsuit) that Instagram made an astonishing $32.4 billion in advertising revenue in 2021. That figure becomes even more shocking when you consider Google's YouTube made $28.8 billion in the same period. Bloomberg reports - URL: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-great-looting-of-the-internet/ ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > Despite the billions of investment and media headlines, it is surprisingly difficult to describe what ChatGPT *does.* Generative AI allows you to generate lots of stuff from a prompt, allowing you to pretend to do the research much like LLMs pretend to know stuff. [It's good for cheating at papers](https://www.wired.com/story/chatgpt-college-university-plagiarism/?ref=wheresyoured.at), or [generating lots of mediocre stuff](https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-spam-google-ruin-internet-search-scams-chatgpt-2024-1?ref=wheresyoured.at), which makes it, if we're honest, kind of like a very advanced calculator that can create words as well as numbers. Every time I write something like this I get sent emails telling me what "generative AI can do," and the answer is always some sort of contrived excuse to use tech rather than a useful integration with a specific purpose. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hvhx0c0j8t4qwzkft7yn9zfe)) > As these generative AI companies become *more* desperate, they'll (intentionally or otherwise) ingest AI-generated content, which causes a degenerative training effect called "model collapse" (also known as Habsburg AI) that destroys the model's ability to deliver useful answers ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hvhx3pt7v9jwzxtscgnggftj)) > Yet I believe that they're all disconnected from any actual value creation. Google, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI don't create anything — they're built off of supporting other people doing things, and have spent decades abstracting themselves away from any kind of labor. These aren't the companies that made Google Search, or Facebook, or Word. They're data brokers by different names that happen to sometimes sell software. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hvhxaw28za9n2dfqspakct0t))