Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder
21–30 of 390 posts
Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
> AI can now read through SEO fluff text and ads and present the user with the information they are looking for. Little comfort when so much of that fluff is now being AI generated. There becomes a point at which we dilute the quality of the information on the web so much, the detail is just lost. AI generating summaries of AI generated garbage is not going to create a better web. I’ve been reading AP News recently,…
We're heading into a future where text is generated by language models, then other language models are used to generate summaries for human consumption. We will drown in AI bullshit and then use more AI to try and extract the meaningful kernel.
What was it about the internet being five big sites filled with screenshots from the other four…? Let’s turn that up to 11.
Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
> AI can now read through SEO fluff text and ads and present the user with the information they are looking for. Little comfort when so much of that fluff is now being AI generated. There becomes a point at which we dilute the quality of the information on the web so much, the detail is just lost. AI generating summaries of AI generated garbage is not going to create a better web. I’ve been reading AP News recently,…
We're heading into a future where text is generated by language models, then other language models are used to generate summaries for human consumption. We will drown in AI bullshit and then use more AI to try and extract the meaningful kernel.
Yeah. If we can “solve” AI and make systems that develop genuine knowledge, then we will be okay. But that may never happen and we may find ourselves stuck at the current “bullshit generator” phase and if that happens the internet is absolutely fucked.
Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Therefore, there will be no more incentive to create those types of sites. There will also be no more incentive to create sites with actual useful information since AI will just appropriate it. AI will destroy the source of its training data.
The sites with actual useful information don’t need much effort to create and maintain. If it was all just wikis it’s perfectly great. The problem only became when “entrepreneurs” realized they can game this system to gain money.
The sites with actually useful information don't care about AI anyway. There's no way in which LLM being trained or used on them hurts them - if anything, it helps the information become more widely available (which is the goal of such sites anyway). If anything, this reduces the load on the site and expense of hosting it - which is a good thing.
Such sites would only be hurt if they somehow derived benefit from marginal reader visiting their site - but this doesn't apply to sites with quality, trustworthy information, as the only such benefits you can get is either ego stroking or earning money by subjecting the visitor to some kind of abuse. For sites doing that, if AI kills them, I call good riddance.
Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder
#25It feels a bit hypocritical to bash on the company that acquired your startup.
Less ethical for someone to keep their mouth shut about an entity's questionable behaviour because they got paid by said entity.
Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder
#26This is why I use ChatGPT and Kagi over Google search now.
Same, but perplexity.ai for me. Search enabled LLMs that can slog through the search results for me is where it's at.
Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder
#27It feels a bit hypocritical to bash on the company that acquired your startup.
Why it would be hypocritical? Living in capitalism is not hypocritical, it's the reality. Assuming capitalism works the way it's proponents are saying it works, it doesn't matter who you sell the company to - the market will find the optimum regardless. If you're making a sub-optimal decision to sell company to someone else, the free market should self-correct this. So if you believe in capitalism, your individual mo…
> So if you believe in capitalism, your individual moral decisions do not matter.
I understand what you're saying, and I agree with emphasizing the power of market design and regulation over individual responsibility.
But I wouldn't go so far as to say individual moral decisions do not matter. Firstly, consumer decisions matter. They are not as effective as the law in directing the market, but they aren't meaningless.
Secondly, ethical decisions matter to me as an individual even if their utilitarian outcome isn't clear. I try to behave as I wished everyone would behave, even if a few badly behaved people negate my efforts. I don't drop rubbish on an already littered street. Not because the street will look any better for my restraint, but because I don't want to normalise or implicitly condone antisocial behaviour through my actions. And I guess it's just intrinsically important to me.
That said, I might well have sold my company to Google for a big payout in 2014. I would certainly be more reluctant today however.
Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder
#28This is why I use ChatGPT and Kagi over Google search now.
All hail the paid web. It sure took a long time to get here, from humble beginnings 20+ years ago when salon.com toyed with the idea of charging a micro-fee per article view.
Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder
#29The web thrived for a decent number of years with ads before it began to really spiral down.
For me the biggest cause of that spiral was the shift from most users using desktops to most users using mobile to interact with google.
In the desktop search world, google used to respond with large comprehensive articles on subjects that not just answered peoples questions but also educated them on the subject around their question. This was the golden age so to speak, it answered your question along with 10 others on a subject but also helped you to understand if your question was even the right one in the first place.
With mobile, google shifted to trying to directly answer the question you asked and nothing else, presumably because people were far less willing to read large articles on mobile and just wanted fast answers.
This latter approach is much easier to SEO garbage than the original that took real knowledge and effort to write.
Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder
#30This is why I use ChatGPT and Kagi over Google search now.
A few weeks ago, I had a question and I couldn't find the answer with Wikipedia or with internet searches. So I asked ChatGPT. I got an answer. Even better, it was sourced... Except that the source was a Wikipedia page that I had read and that didn't contain what I wanted. ChatGPT's answer was "fouled up beautifully", as Donald Knuth would say. A plain search is just a link and a quote, while the IA's answer is an educated guess.
TL;DR ChatGPT can "lie" and its bad extrapolations are hard to debunk.