I don’t understand why any journalism site will advertise that they are using AI. It just says they don’t care about facts, research or quality in writing. Journalism is not simply spewing out a handful of paragraphs of text about a random subject. It is research that can take weeks or months, double checking facts, verifying sources and putting it all together into a well written article. AI texts have none of that. Quite the opposite.
I have been using https://getvau.lt for years. It is really just a very small JS lib. No need for paying for complicated services in my opinion.
I have been experimenting with this week and while I like it, I am still not sure I like it enough to find it worth paying. It is still mostly using Google and Bing as a search provider, so I haven’t so far found drastically different results than what I get from DuckDuckGo. Having a limit on searches also makes me a bit anxious when you are used to just searching for all kinds of stuff simply because I am lazy and don’t want to type in full URLs or go to my bookmarks. Lots of muscle memory that needs to be revamped. I do see the potential in how it can be customized with personalized lenses and lowering/raising specific domains. And the people behind it seem really nice on Discord, so I expect to see a lot of innovation in search that we haven’t seen from Google in years.
Totally agree on the news and journalism part. I subscribe to three different publications, which gets expensive, but it is worth it. Many newssites have also started to hide their articles behind paywalls, which is understandable, but also make sharing and discussing news with others on social media harder. And since most people can’t afford to subscribe to several news outlets, they will be limited in their exposure to different viewpoints - unless that particular newspaper is really good at challenging its readers and not just giving them what they think they want.
I am often getting interesting stuff from the personal discover playlists on Spotify. Often it is very obscure vands with like a thousand listeners on last.fm, so I feel like I am being exposed new and upcoming bands and not just established names.
I think that will turn out to be really important in the long run. The gamification aspect of karma score let to posts and comments leaning more to the quick and funny, and less to long and thoughtful. Especially in bigger subreddits. And then bots started to just repost and reuse previous highly upvoted stuff to boost their numbers even further.
Well, there is also this news https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/netflix-subscribers-up-q2-earnings-1235673960/ showing that apparently many people just pay up to keep their access.