Into It: The Conversation We’re NOT Having About AI

0:00How does F1 turn data into insights at 200 miles per hour? aws is how fans get inside the strategy aws powers next level innovation for millions of businesses how does f1 turn data into insights at 200 miles per hour aws is how fans get inside the strategy aws powers next level innovation for millions of businesses

0:32Hey, everybody. It's your friend, Eli. We've got a little surprise in the Vergecast feed today. My friend Sam Sanders hosts the Intuit podcast over at Fulcher. It's all about culture and entertainment. It is great listening. And he and I got to talking about the internet and how much entertainment writing on the internet is built around people Googling for TV show recaps and Marvel explainers and how that entire ecosystem might change as AI changes search. If you've been listening to the Vergecast, you know I'm obsessed with how AI might change search and how that might change the future of the web.

1:04And it was really fun to talk to Sam about all that from his very different perspective. This conversation is almost like a mirror image of the Vergecast. I think you're really going to like it. Okay, here I am on Intuit with Sam Sanders. Hey, you are listening to Intuit from Vulture in New York Magazine. I'm Sam Sanders. And today we're going to talk AI. Usually when it comes to entertainment and pop culture, the AI conversation is all about the content AI can make. The fake Drake songs, the crappy AI images, all the worry over TV and movie scripts written by ChatGPT or whatever. And all of that is important.

1:44But when it comes to entertainment, there's another AI conversation we should be having that we are not having yet. And it's all about how the rise of AI is going to change the way all of us consume pop culture and share it and obsess over it together. My friend, Nilay Patel over at The Verge, he has been talking with me about this for a while. In this episode, he will talk to you about this as well. It's a really simple idea. Basically, at some point in the near future, AI will end Google's current dominance of the web. Right now, most of us Google search to navigate the internet and most websites build themselves knowing that you will probably get to them through Google.

2:28But what happens once we all stop Googling and start using AI to just like give us the answers without us having to go to a website to find those answers? How does that change our relationship to TV and music and movies and books and video games and how we find out about that stuff and how we obsess over that stuff and how we share our ideas about all of that stuff. Neelai says it changes all of that. A lot. So, this episode, he will explain. All right, let's get into it. So, you and I talked at a little conference called South by Southwest all about how the internet as we know it is about to change in a big, big way.

3:13For the last decade or two or even more, the internet was built in the shape that Google formed. You know, we have an internet that is search-based. And so the conversation now is like, if AI is ascendant, what happens to Google, what happens to search, and what happens to internet as we know it? There's another chat that the entertainment field isn't having that is just as important. And this is a conversation about the shape of the internet when Google is no longer dominant and what that means for the creation and consumption of pop culture. Yeah, not even dominant. What happens when Google changes?

3:57Yeah. Right? And like maybe that change will be less dominant, maybe it'll be more dominant. But the thing that we're used to is a world where most of the web is designed to Google's specifications so Google search can find it. and if Google search changes, what Google wants changes and the web will change. And what's parallel to that, you have all of these places in the culture that Google can't see. Like Google can't search TikTok. That's pretty wild. Google can't search Instagram. Google really doesn't show you a lot of like sub stacks. So there's all these pockets of culture that are sort of developing outside of the gaze of Google.

4:39And then there's the pockets of culture, like the architecture of information on the web that is kind of more readable by the Google search robot than it is by human beings. And that thing, when it changes, it'll go from being invisible to most people to being the most visible thing ever, right? This thing you take for granted. I can type a question into Google and I'll get a list of links to websites that will answer the questions. When that changes, just think about all the people you know who do that 100 times a day without thinking about it. Think about how many times you do that without thinking about it.

5:14It me. I can't live my life without Google search. And if Google search starts answering the questions itself, if AI starts answering the questions and doesn't send you to a website, all the sort of like SEO consequences that we see out in the world will change. Also, just really quick, we should point out SEO stands for search engine optimization. If you aren't in a newsroom or dealing with websites for a living, you don't know what it means. But basically it means gaming your website and your URLs for prominent play in Google search. Yeah. So if you are the lucky person who convinces Google that when people search for chocolate chip cookie recipe, that you should be the first result.

5:55You have a business, right? You can put ads in that business. You can sell chocolate chips. You can do whatever. You're going to get a lot of traffic from people searching for chocolate chip cookie recipes. If you're at the bottom of that list, or heaven forbid, on the second page, you don't have a business. So there's a huge fight to be at the top of those results. And it means when you actually go click on what's at the top of the result for chocolate chip cookie recipe, that page looks bonkers. Because it's designed to game Google and not necessarily be useful to people. And that is 100 % why recipe blogs have like 2 ,000 words of text before the actual recipe.

6:31Explain to our listeners who may not realize it, how much the internet that we know right now is kind of run by Google. When you told this to me, I was like, I had never thought of that, but huh, makes sense. In a nutshell, can you tell us how much of the internet as we know it is shaped by Google and has bent its will towards Google's whims? Yeah, so just think about the experience of using the web. You are opening a browser, which is probably Chrome, which is owned and developed by Google, you are often starting your journey on the web on google.com. Do you know how many people search for the word Facebook to get to Facebook?

7:15All the aunties. Google knows this. They're like a primary use case for Google is navigational. And so we don't mess with those pages. We don't put featured snippets or have the AI do it. We're like, here's the link to Facebook. So a huge number of people are just getting around the internet in the most basic way by asking Google to help them. Then you land on a webpage, and most webpages that are free are monetized with advertising. That Google runs. That Google runs. At every point in sort of the chain of technologies that put advertising in front of you on the internet, Google owns a company or a technology that is the one or two player in that marketplace.

7:56So ad tech is a complicated thing, But basically, Google is in prime position to control it end to end. So if you have a website and you've got ads on that website, Google is in your business. They know what's happening. They're the ones providing the targeting. They're the ones serving the ads, the whole thing. That's Google. And then if you want to get traffic to your website, you can buy ads on Google. And people searching for car insurance, the car insurance companies literally buy the keywords. So they show up in search results at the top of the list. or you can play these SEO games. And that means there's an entire industry of people who help optimize websites to show up in search engine rankings.

8:38And they're SEO experts. And I would tell you that they are more like a priesthood than a consultancy. They interpret what Google says about what it wants the web to be into rules, into design. So if you look at websites, their design of most websites has become the same over time. For Google. Because it's easier for Google to understand that design. So this is the thing that I realized once you told me this. I think we always imagine that Google is just code that is nonpartisan, unbiased, probably not changing and kind of just works. But in actuality, Google is, internet-wise, a god who asks its subjects to consistently tweak the way they do things to make it happy.

9:34Yeah. So Google is a company just like any other. It has employees. The employees have arguments. It makes a lot of money, but it projects this exterior image of just being your friend, the search provider that has slides in the office and a big colorful logo. and you peel one layer off of that, and you're like, oh, this is a company that makes a lot of money and has a lot of investors who want the company to make more money. And the thing that makes Google the most money by far is search. It's the entire business, and that business is an advertising business. And I am talking on a Vulture podcast, and if I just ask you to imagine what an advertising business looks like, you already know, right?

10:17It's an ad business. They're trying to get you to buy stuff. and they help companies. I'd be reading these HelloFresh ads. I sure do. And you know, like that piece of it, Google hides that aspect of what they do. They're in the business of helping companies find an audience for their products and then getting you to buy those products. We've explained how dominant Google actually is when it comes to internet and how much they bend everything to their will. That's about to change. Allegedly, I keep reading these articles that say pretty soon at some point We won't experience the internet through Google search.

10:53We'll experience it through AI and AI search. I want you to tell me at a one-on-one level what that actually looks like, Neelai. So Google search now, you're looking for a chocolate chip recipe. It finds a bunch of websites with recipes on them. You go to one of those websites. And that's Google search, and that is the default way of operating the internet. AI search is an AI chatbot just tells you a recipe for chocolate chip cookies. right chat gpt just tells it to you or you say hey i'm looking for uh a tv for my living room it needs to be about this size i want these features and right now google search will take you to the verge or it'll take you to one of a hundred of our competitors in the future and ai is just gonna be like here's a list i i went and read the internet for you and here's a list of tvs that meet meet your specs and that is a big threat to google right the whole business depends on selling the advertising to be the first sponsored result and then selling the advertising across the whole web when you click on those links.

11:52If ChatGPT is just answering questions like that, or Bing, which is powered by ChatGPT, is just answering questions like that and taking market share from Google, this is a big threat to them. It also changes what kinds of questions you might ask the internet. If you can now ask these vastly more general purpose questions, hey, can you write me a resume? You would never type that into Google today. But now you might ask a chatbot. So now you're changing your relationship to the computer. Well, yeah, yeah. And so Google I.O. released a bunch of these features, right? There's a preview of a Google search that is much more AI-driven, that does talk to you just like that.

12:28You can ask it follow-up questions, which is really interesting. They're building a generative AI function directly into Gmail and Google Docs. So you can say, hey, write a note to my boss that says he did a good job. This was a demo on stage. Wow. The whole thing. They're doing the whole thing and they need to prove that they can do the whole thing because the threat to the business, the conventional wisdom is that they're behind in these new AI companies like OpenAI, like Stable Diffusion, like these new tools that we're seeing will somehow disrupt Google because they were late. Yeah. Yeah. This is the question I have for you now.

13:04How in the hell was Google late? They're supposed to be smart. They're supposed to be powerful. How did they get caught off guard? It seems like they were caught off guard whenever I read about the rise of AI. Google invented a lot of this technology. They were the first to tell you that the T in chat GPT stands for transformer, which is technology that was invented at Google that allows for those large language models to just talk to you like a person. They just didn't deploy it because they were scared of being wrong. And this is like a very classic business problem where the big incumbent has too much to risk, makes too much money, and then the smaller startup can come along and say, hey, this is a little bit crappier, but it's a little more fun.

13:45And use this instead and over time it gets better and it unseats the incumbent. And this happens all the time in the technology industry. and right now it looks very much like they're in a cycle of here's the big, extremely lucrative, kind of getting a little worse search engine because of all the content farms and SEO scams but we invented the technology and we're afraid of ever getting anything wrong or the AI hallucinating so we're just going to demo it and then suddenly ChatGPT shows up and it's like, yeah, this thing will just lie to you. Bing is like, yeah, this thing is definitely going to try to bang you.

14:15Like no hesitation. Bing is like trying to get in your pants, right? And Google's like caught flat-footed because they weren't willing to take those risks. Yeah. Well, also, was part of the reason Google was slow on embracing or trying AI was because the company had become so reliant on an ad-heavy business? And it seems like ads work a lot less and make a lot less money when AI is dominant. Yeah, there's something to that. Again, they did invent all the technology. Sunur Pichai has been calling Google an AI-first company for seven years. I have watched him give demos of AI chatbots since at least 2015.

14:54So it's not that they missed it or they didn't invent it. Again, they invented the underlying technology that is making all this happen. It's they wouldn't turn it into products because of the thing you're talking about. Their existing products were too lucrative. And I'll give you just one extremely narrow example. Right now, a Google search, they've got to have computers that actually run the search and display the results to you. A Google search costs nothing. If you just think about the cost to Google and electricity, they've optimized this so much over the past 20 years they've been running Google search.

15:32You type something into Google and a computer spins its wheels and gives you an answer, and this costs like fractions of a penny. I know people who have released AI-based chatbots where every question costs$0.10. What? Yep, it's just 10 cents of computing power. That's how much every query to some specialized AI chatbots will cost. But if you're staring at the market and you're like, we're working on this technology that we think one day will change search forever, and right now there's no competition to search, so we're just going to keep working on it and try to make it cheaper before we roll it out.

16:06Like you as a rational business person, you would never say, okay, when this user pushes a button, it costs us fractions of a penny. We're going to replace it with a thing that costs us 10 cents. without any competitive threat whatsoever. You would just never, you would be a horrible business person if you made that choice without a competitive threat. But now there's the competitive threat. And the competitive threat is from ChatGPT, it's from Microsoft, it's from all these other companies. And Microsoft in particular is very happy to show up and say, yeah, it'll cost 10 cents, but you'll use us instead of Google.

16:35And this is the first time we've taken market share from Google in search. And Google's version of the internet might become Microsoft's version of the internet. Like what if we all start changing our websites, changing our content, changing our search strategies to tailor to be better for Microsoft instead of Google? All right, time for a break. But you know the drill. We are currently on the Intuit team campaigning for a team pizza party. I have been told by the powers that be, if we get enough ratings and reviews on Apple Podcasts and other apps, we'll get some pizza. So I'm asking you to consider rating and reviewing this show on Apple Podcast, following the show, all of these things.

17:20I have this big dream, and we'll see if it works out. We'll clear it with legal. Once we hit this benchmark, I want an IRL pizza party, and I want it at Chuck E. Cheese, and I want some folks who are listeners to be involved too. I've got dreams. But to get there, you've got to help us out. rate and review. I will thank you with rat pizza. Yeah, it'll be great.

18:06battle-tested reliability. AWS is how leading businesses power next-level innovation.

18:16Support for this show comes from MongoDB. Innovation is the key to success, but innovation also comes with its own set of challenges. And if you're a developer who wants to find a new way in and think outside of the box and think beyond legacy code, it's time to check out MongoDB. MongoDB is a flexible, unified platform that's built for developers by developers. MongoDB is ACID compliant, enterprise ready, with the capabilities you need to ship AI apps fast. That's why so many of the Fortune 500 trust MongoDB with their most critical workloads. Ready to think outside rows and columns? Start building at mongodb.com slash build.

19:00This is what I really want to get into, and this is what makes it a vulture conversation, because I'm really obsessed in how this shift to AI-ville and all of the internet, how it affects the creation of popular culture and the consumption of it. Let me give you an example. Beyonce's tour just started this week. I am going to see her at the end of the month in London because I'm stupid and gave her all my money. But a thing I do every day now is just Google up on Beyonce in that tour. I Google every few hours and see if there's new images. I Google every few hours and see if there's reviews of the concerts already.

19:38I Google every few hours and see if there's more talk about whether she'll release the visuals or not. I look online for people who are writing fun stuff about it and online communities talking about it. My entire consumption of Beyonce and her tour and the run-up to going to the tour is Google-based, and it's this weird way that I'm kind of building my internet community and anticipation around this event. Seriously. It's Google-based. Seriously. I'm searching. And then if I'm not searching on Google, I'm, like, searching, like, on Instagram, but it's search-based. Sure. How does that creation of internet community and anticipation around a piece of pop culture change when it's AI?

20:22Yeah. I don't know how to give myself constant Beyonce updates every few hours every day until I see her on tour when it's AI. So I'm surprised that it's search-based because I think we all saw this arc with Taylor Swift and her tour, and it's all TikTok-based. I'm 38 years old. Well, it's just funny because this is another threat to Google's dominance in searches. People are just searching TikTok for stuff all the time. You want to know how to cut an onion? TikTok is actually better at showing you the answer than Google right now because it's going to show you 100 videos of people and their weird ways to cut onions.

20:58You want to see Taylor Swift played in the rain last night in Nashville? TikTok is going to show you 100 videos right away. But you know what I mean, right? I don't. I want to look at that flying glitter horse that Beyonce rode. Hell yeah. You want to see that? Where are you going to find that right away? You're going to find 100 videos of that thing on TikTok. You're not going to Google it and then go to a web page that probably has an embed of a TikTok. So this is already moving. I'm already old. Right? It's already moving in this other way. And you're using Instagram, so it's kind of the same vibe, right?

21:29It's a more visual, more immediate search experience. But then there's the lore, right? The Bayhive is looking for Easter eggs in the show. They're looking for set lists. They're looking for all this. That is structured data. Oh, right. I just TikTok searched Beyonce horse. Yeah. This is a better experience. It's a way better experience, right? Thank you. But you look at sort of the lore, the world building that everyone wants to do with every kind of property right now, and all of that is targeted at search. Guardians of the Galaxy 3 is happening. This is the thing. And it's search. It's search.

22:03You think about how many entertainment publications or entertainment writers spend hours of productive of time, knowing that people are going to search for the post-credits scene of a Marvel movie, knowing that people are desperate to find out who Taylor is dating today, right? Like, and all of that stuff is search demand driven. And so now people launch properties. Like, Marvel knows it has to seed the lore before a movie comes out. So it's available to you. And so, like, we've built an architecture of information around culture, around entertainment that you know that people are watching this stuff with a phone in their hand or the first thing they're going to do when they're done watching the movie is Google lost ending explained.

22:48Yes, yes, exactly. I'm sitting here still stuck on all these Beyonce on the horse videos. Let me tell you, she's one of the four horsewomen of the apocalypse. She's got that leg up and she's high in the air. And I'm like - She's high in the air. Man, if I was still a church kid, I'd be putting the blessed oil on my phone. But I'm not. I'm a parent. I'm not going that high.

23:14So even though I'm still searching on Google, the young kids that were searching for Beyonce content on TikTok, they're still using search. And I'm even thinking like I'm finally at some point going to finally watch Yellow Jackets. And when I finally do that, I'm going to search to see what Vulture wrote about it. I'm going to search to see which app. I think it's Showtime. I don't know. How much does that cost? Where do I get to do to find it? I'm going to search Christina Ricci and see what she's been up to because she's in the show. I'm going to Google some recaps. I'm going to search for funny tweets about this show.

23:42My consumption of this thing will be search-based, whether it's Google search, TikTok search, Twitter search. What happens when the searchification we all do around the pop culture we love becomes AI-based? And I kind of want you to give me an example from your world of culture consumption. Yeah. So whenever I'm done watching anything, I just start Googling it. So an episode of Succession is over, and I'm already looking for somebody to write a recap of a thing I just watched to tell me what Easter eggs I missed. And I just find that incredibly delightful. Like, it's like I really enjoyed watching whatever I was watching.

24:22Now it's over, and I'm going to relive it again in text. I don't know why I do this. I didn't do this before. But now it's just a habit. I think it picked up with Game of Thrones in particular, right? And if you're at the place where you're like, Beyonce on this horse could be in Game of Thrones. I'm sorry. I'm still watching Beyonce horse. I like knowing that I have to compete with literally a glitter horse on TikTok. I'm putting my phone down. Like an entire Chinese psyop designed to capture the attention of millions of Americans. And I'm here talking about SEO with you. Like I stand no chance.

24:53It's so horrible. Go ahead. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. No. So just think about that. Like what if you're like I want to read a recap of Succession and it's already been ingested into Google. The script is already into Google and Google's AI is just going to write you the answer. Is that going to be good? Is it going to meet what you want? What if you want to Google – Well, this is the question though. Is it going to give you a mashup of 12 shitty recaps? Yeah, where is it going to come from? And not the best one. Whose labor is going to be compensated for that work? I don't know the answer to that question.