So why is there so much outrage now when Google and other search engines did it 30 years ago? They literally said their objective was to collect and index all the world's knowledge, and when they scraped the internet clean a thousand times over they invested in scanning and digitizing everything that wasn't on the internet yet.

AI is better at repackaging it back to the end user but ultimately I'm arguing it's the same thing.

(caveat: yes I know there were plenty of people that objected to Google et al indexing everything; famously, Gmail was scary to a lot of people because they read your email to give you ads)

Because they aggregated links to that information rather than copy it outright. It’s like the difference between an encyclopedia and its table of contents.

It's not the same at all though. Google indexes the original content, hosted at the original location. It just gives you a way to find it. LLMs ingest the original data, throw it away, and spit it back out in whatever form they like back to the user. And since it's gotten so popular, many peoples' interactions with the content are no longer in the original form at all; their site traffic / book sales diminished.

Google didn't immediately create $20 and $200 per month paid tiers. The free thing lasted a long time (and you didn't need to sign in), and the initial monetization with ads, when it eventually came, was not immediately shoved in the user's face. the enshittification and bean counting came way later compared to the monetization blitz that occured with the AI companies.