Survey Shows 55% People Are Using Generative AI Instead of Traditional Search Engines for their Queries

According to a survey by The Information, 77% of the respondents out of 1088 said that they are not using traditional search engines like Google for their queries, they are generative AI apps instead. This made Barry Schwartz run a poll on X to find out how many people are using generative AI tools for searching instead of traditional search engines. The results of the poll on X showed that 55% of the respondents are using generative AI or ChatGPT for their queries instead of Google.

it's happening

77% of 1,088 subscribers surveyed by @theinformation said they are using ChatGPT / conversational AI instead of Google for some queries.https://t.co/DEBOzFDJGI pic.twitter.com/a86kQcfc85

— Amir Efrati (@amir) September 19, 2024

The poll on X received 917 votes, out of which 55% votes were inclined using ChatGPT or generative AI tools for their queries. The reason why this percentage is less than the percentage from the survey by The Information is because most of Barry Schwartz’s followers on X are SEO and search marketers. So, they must use Google and traditional search engines a lot instead of generative AI.

The 77% result by The Information can also be because of their audience which is extremely niche and they could be using AI search engines for different purposes like coding or questions that Google do not care about much.

Read next: Google has Completely Disabled Cache Feature, Users Won’t be Able to Access it in Search Results
by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

Visa Slapped With Mega Antitrust Lawsuit For Illegal Monopoly Over Debit Network Markets

Financial services giant Visa has again entered the spotlight after receiving an antitrust lawsuit from the Department of Justice.

The company was accused of unlawful monopoly behavior that was designed to crush competition in the debit network market. This includes attempts to hinder archrivals from flourishing such as PayPal and Square.

The case comes after several years of long investigations after bombshell disclosures were made in 2021.

A new statement was rolled out on this front by the DOJ who has the company tried long and hard to amass a huge amount of power to get money from clients that was more than necessary in a competitive market.

Hence, it’s not just the company that raised pricing but also forced merchants and banks to do the same while compromising on quality. It’s certainly a big deal because the company makes billions every year in the form of payment processing fees. And this does not include the array of other services rendered.

On average, the fees for processing payments go up to $7B and 60% of these debit transactions in America alone run on the firm’s network. Hence, the dominance taking place must be stopped to enable other competitors to flourish.

A lot of the reasons outlined for Visa’s behavior include an array of exclusion agreements that are put on banks and companies. Similarly, it has made attempts to remove competition, including those working on smaller scales and those who are startups in the fintech sector.

So many of the company’s executives feel threatened by iPhone maker Apple which it claimed is their biggest competition and threat in the market.

More details revealed how the company entered into paid agreements with competitors as a part of its efforts to hinder competition from newbies in the payment industry. As a result of these actions, it has become a monopoly.

This is why regulators have had eyes on the company for quite some time now. As per the DOJ, another similar legal case was generated in 2020 that prevented its acquisition of fintech company Plaid. The complaint argued that such behavior would wipe out a leading challenger of Visa that could hinder its monopoly practices.

As a result, both Visa and Plaid opted to scrap the plans for attempts to merge together, thanks to this lawsuit.

Image: CardMapr.nl/Unsplaash

Read next: Meta Will Not Sign EU’s AI Pact For Sharing Detailed Summaries Of Data Used To Train AI
by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

Meta Will Not Sign EU’s AI Pact For Sharing Detailed Summaries Of Data Used To Train AI

Tech giant Meta seems to have had enough of the stringent regulations of the EU. The company just took a bold decision by refusing to accept the AI Pact, at least for the time being.

This was first discussed in May when lawmakers spoke about a new pact that governed the use and creation of AI. The goal was to ensure AI was in check with tech giants providing detailed summaries of all the data used to train AI models.

Now, Meta has decided to opt out of the law, giving rise to a new debate in the region.

In the past month, the EC mentioned how most of the rules regarding this law will be applicable starting in August of 2026. But until that happens, a temporary pact was launched that tech giants could sign.

This would outline the important obligations of the rules enlisted.

As per Meta’s representative, the company is open to discussions and working in harmony with the EU but joining the pact right now is not on the cards. With that being said, a possible signing in the future was also possible.

We can confirm that this AI pact is actually the fifth pillar of EU legislation on this front. It is aligned with the Digital Markets Act Digital Services Acts, and even the Data Act in that part of the world.

Image: DIW-Aigen

Read next: The Story of Alexander Wang Who Became One of the Youngest Billionaires in the World from His AI Labeling Startup, Scale AI
by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

Google has Completely Disabled Cache Feature, Users Won’t be Able to Access it in Search Results

Google had previously announced that it will remove Google Cache completely from search results. At first, Google removed the cache link and then added the links to the Wayback Machine. Now Google has completely disabled Google Cache by disabling its direct link. If the users go directly to the Google cache by searching for it on the search bar, Google won't show anything in the results, such as this one.

Google Cache has completely stopped working in the past 12 hours. This has made people discuss it on different social media apps and forums. They are discussing how even though Google has completely disabled cache, new pages can still see it temporarily.

Google Liason, Danny Sullivan, said that it's a sad thing that Google cache isn't available but it is something that needed to be done. It was one of the oldest features of Google and people back then relied on Cache when they couldn't open a page because of page loading. Now things have improved a lot so there was no need for Google Cache. Sullivan added that he thinks that Google should add cache links to internet archives within About This Result. This would allow people to see how a page changed overtime.

If someone has a Search Console, they can see what the crawler saw looking at their own page by using URL inspector. The alternatives for Google Cache are Wayback machine, URL Inspection Tool and Google’s rich result testing tool.

Read next:

• Google Introduces Sharper Satellite Imagery For Its Maps and Earth Feature

• Rising Voice Cloning Scams Underscore Urgency for Stronger Public Safeguards and Fraud Prevention

• The Story of Alexander Wang Who Became One of the Youngest Billionaires in the World from His AI Labeling Startup, Scale AI
by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

The Story of Alexander Wang Who Became One of the Youngest Billionaires in the World from His AI Labeling Startup, Scale AI

Alexander Wang, at age 27, has become one of the world’s youngest billionaires. He succeeded in doing so by having more than 100,000 employees on contracts who help him power the modern AI. His startup named Scale AI has hired workers from all over the world and these workers wrote and summarized texts as well as label images for AI to better understand human patterns. This is known as data labeling and the employees summarize news articles or write stories in Hindi to Mandarin.

This data labeling business has become so in demand by Gen AI companies that Scale AI’s revenue jumped to triple last year and now has a value of $14 billion. Wang says that his company’s importance is all due to the computing chip they are using which is developed by Nvidia. Scale AI’s office is located in San Francisco and the company hires individuals through advertising on LinkedIn and Reddit. The work is remote and most of the workers do not know that they are working for Scale AI in their initial days. The employees do their tasks on two websites known as Outlier and Remotasks on which no affiliation with Scale AI is mentioned. Projects are also given code names so the employees do not know what clients they are working for.

Many remote employees get frustrated with their jobs and quit. Sometimes they get delayed payments or hourly wages as low as $8. Some also do not produce quality content and some cheat to increase their productivity. Wang also doesn't like the way his company is working right now. He calls this work mundane and boring and has said that his company is trying to develop new software and AI products.

Scale AI has also worked for Meta and has given the company code word “Flamingo”. Last year, Meta had asked the company to create 27,000 questions and answers so they can train their AI models. When Meta received the data, it turned out that contractors had used ChatGPT to write all the responses. Upon contact with the company, Wang tried to save the project and asked its employees to rewrite everything and send it to Meta. Wang also discovered that many of the badly written data had come from Kenyans so Wang restricted all their projects to the USA and English speaking countries. But it wasn't very useful because many USA accounts were being sold to people from other countries on Facebook and WhatsApp.

Alexander Wang grew up in New Mexico and has Chinese immigrant scientist parents. He started to think of a new business start up as soon as he got in the ninth grade. In 2015, he went to MIT and chose five graduate computer science courses but he soon dropped out. He soon accepted a job offered by Eric Wu, CEO of Opendoor. Soon after, he enrolled in an AI training program by Sam Altman, now CEO of OpenAI. After a while, he started his own startup known as Scale AI.

Since Scale AI also labeled images, many car companies needed an AI company who could help them with labeling images for their car’s automated systems. They turned to Scale AI. Soon, Scale AI signed up Cruise and Tesla. Scale AI then chooses the contractors and gives them projects. The hiring process at Scale AI is simple. You get hired by applying for the job advertised by the company. The worker is then given written assignments that the model can use to learn how humans think. The writing samples are then given to clients so they can train their AI models. The worker is soon paid for his work.

Image: alexanddeer/Insta

Read next: New Survey Shows What Companies Think of AI Adoption and the Challenges They Are Facing
by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

Cloudflare Rolls Out New Set of AI Tools That Stops Unauthorized Scraping By AI Crawlers

Cloudflare just rolled out a new array of AI tools that provides websites the chance to prevent unauthorized scraping via AI crawlers. Another option is to force these crawlers to pay a fee to get access to data.

The issues of crawling have wreaked havoc on website owners to such an extent that they were forced to pay out of their pocket for the damages done. The issue has been on the rise since the uprising of Generative AI.

The websites will finally get a chance to get the desired value for their content instead of bots stealing material without paying any form of compensation and without taking any consent.

The company confirmed today how it will be launching new tools that make it super easy for website owners, publishers, and creators to take control back over how content is generated by these bots. Similarly, it enables these platforms to block the crawling activity and get compensation wherever they agree to pay for more access. This way, revenue on these platforms is set to increase instead of the age-old tactic of feasting for free on material.

Such AI audit tools also provide users with the chance to witness how content is accessed by others. Remember, it’s a great way to gain insights into how malicious bots used to crash land pages to get access for free. Meanwhile, AI crawlers don’t usually mean harm. They just want a lot of content for free so they can be used to train AI models in bulk quantities.

Cloudflare is a huge name in the industry. It gives rise to more security and better performance regarding optimization for pages. It confirmed that there is no single platform that is dominating in terms of website scraping activities.

It all varies by the kind of content getting scraped at any moment in time.

Meanwhile, generative AI models need huge amounts of data to work and to provide quick and accurate replies to produce images, videos, and music. Today, this AI crawling industry is huge, and big names are involved in terms of giving AI developers what they want and whenever they want. This could be in the form of voice, text, or images.

As per one research company, the web scraping industry is said to hit the 2.45 billion mark by the year 2036.

So many tech giants are making billions by training AI models using work that does not belong to them. This can be used to generate more material in cases where they compete with original material.

In a world like that, this is unacceptable and has gone on for far too long. This is why creators are expressing outrage over the matter. Hence, Cloudflare going one step further to help others in this regard is certainly a positive step welcomed for obvious reasons.

Image: DIW-Aigen

Read next: TikTok Redesigns Subscription Monetization To Eligible Creators In Selected Regions
by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

TikTok Redesigns Subscription Monetization To Eligible Creators In Selected Regions

TikTok just confirmed the launch of its new and improved subscription monetization feature for creators. The company says only those creators who come under its eligibility criteria can benefit.

However, only a selected number of regions were outlined including Brazil, Spain, the UK, Indonesia, Germany, South Korea, the US, and then Japan. The company spoke about how it hopes to expand this to several markets in the next few weeks.

The official launch comes after the company spoke about the renaming of LIVE Subscription monetization instead of the old monetization feature. The great part is that it will include non-live creators.

The subscription is the company’s reply to Patreon that allows sharing exclusive content to those paying users. The platform is also competing with other arch-rivals in the industry giving creators more benefits. This includes Instagram and YouTube. Both apps are favorites among the creator ecosystem as they provide growth in earnings through more access and perks.

The expansion will provide more paying users with exclusive benefits that entail better content and perks. What’s interesting is how three separate tiers are up for grabs at different pricing plans. Every single one of them will give exclusive perks for a fee charged every month.

Subscribers can attain exclusive content in the form of more live streaming, videos, and notes that regular users cannot access. They will also get communication channels such as the popular Sub-Space. The latter is the name reserved for a location where creators interact with subscribers.

Subscribers will similarly get special stickers that they can use for LIVE sessions and amongst those include badges. Such things pop up against their names on profiles and inside the comments section.

Creators will also be giving out custom perks that are designed for the community space. One spokesperson for the platform says in an email that customized benefits will be up for grabs and creators can choose what they want from a long list. Common examples provided are Discord roles, BTS videos, shoutouts, and requests for performance.

To access this new Subscription offering, the eligibility criteria must be met. Creators need to be 18 in age and have 10k followers with 100k views on videos. Meanwhile, their creator accounts should have a good standing tag to benefit.

Image: TikTok

Read next: New Survey Shows What Companies Think of AI Adoption and the Challenges They Are Facing
by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World