They get basically everything they want (keeping it all in the tent), plus a negotiating position on search deals where they can refuse something because they can't do it now.
Quite why the judge is so concerned about the rise of AI factoring in here is beyond me. It's fundamentally an anticompetitive decision.
You might think "but ChatGPT isn't a search engine", and that's true. It can't handle all queries you might use a search engine for, e.g. if you want to find a particular website. But there are many many queries that it can handle. Here's just a few from my recent history:
* How do I load a shared library and call a function from it with VCS? [Kind of surprising it got the answer to this given how locked down the documentation is.]
* In a PAM config what do they keywords auth, account, password, session, and also required/sufficient mean?
* What do you call the thing that car roof bars attach to? The thing that goes front to back?
* How do I right-pad a string with spaces using printf?
These are all things I would have gone to Google for before, but ChatGPT gives a better overall experience now.
Yes, overall, because while it bullshits sometimes, it also cuts to the chase a lot more. And no ads for now! (Btw, someone gave me the hint to set its personality mode to "Robot", and that really helps make it less annoying!)
Stack Overflow isn’t dead because of AI. It’s dead because they spent years ignoring user feedback and then doubled down by going after respected, unpaid contributors like Monica.
Would they have survived AI? Hard to say. But the truth is, they were already busy burning down their own community long before AI showed up.
When AI arrived I'd already been waiting for years for an alternative that didn’t aggressively shut down real-world questions (sometimes with hundreds of upvotes) just because they didn’t fit some rigid format.
It is dead because of both of those things. Everyone hated Stackoverflow's moderation, but kept using it because they didn't have a good alternative until AI.
> When AI arrived I'd already been waiting for years for an alternative that didn’t aggressively shut down real-world questions
Exactly.
The reason why I resort to AI is to find out alternative solutions quickly. But quite honestly, it's more of a problem with SO moderation. People are willing to answer even stale, actual/mistaken duplicate or slightly/seemingly irrelevant questions with good quality solutions and alternatives. But I always felt that their moderation dissuaded the contributors from it.
Meanwhile, the first reason why I always double check the AI results is because they hallucinate way too much. They fake completely believable answers far too often. The second reason is that AI often neglects interesting/relevant extra information that humans always recognize as important. This is very evident if you read elaborate SO answers or official documentation like MDN, docs.rs or archwiki. One particular example for this is the XY-problem. People seem to make similar mistaken assumptions and SO answers are very good at catching those. Recipe-book/cookbook documentation also address these situations well. Human generated content (even static or archived ones) seem to anticipate/catch and address human misconceptions and confusions much better than AI.