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Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder
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Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder
#92[deleted]
Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ed…
Hallucinations have always been a problem with transformers. But with the replication crisis in many sciences and political meddling abound, I‘d be wary of any kind of critical information, especially on Wikipedia. Of course, transformer models have the same issues since they are trained on tainted info too.
> But with the replication crisis in many sciences and political meddling abound, I‘d be wary of any kind of critical information, especially on Wikipedia. Of course, transformer models have the same issues
I think this is a bad comparison. The issues OP described are not limited to tainted training data. Being critical of Wikipedia and critical of science is not equal to treating text as a black box looking for the most fitting continuation.
LLMs are not fact machines.
When you equate this kind of error with the scientific replication crisis or generally a crtique of scientific methods and political influence (what about commercial?), I don't think this demonstrates critical thinking.
Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder
#94I wrote a not-very-coherent in retrospect article about 12 years ago while working for an SEO firm about how SEO was killing the internet. The basis being companies were creating pages and blog posts specifically to target keywords without actually having coherent things to say on the topic. Moreover people within Google like Matt Cutts seemed to be at the time if not outright encouraging it, at the very least giving…
SEO / billboards / paid-for advertising is basically legal propaganda (arguably a form of mind control or more neutral we can say reality shaping through narrative structuring).
I think the only place advertising should be allowed is in a marketplace setting, anywhere else is "public domain" and shouldn't be allowed in my opinion. It is the root to many evils, it is the mechanism that trends towards hacking the user in the loop in a positive feedback system, which also optimizes at the users expense yet depends on the user. Quite parastic.
Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder
#95Recipe blogs are the most horrible example. The amount of BS you have to scroll through to get to the actual recipe.
Buy yourself a few recipe books from the seventies and the eighties in a thriftstore and your are good to go for a few bucks.
Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I think the clickbait sites are done long term, people will just ask the AI on their phone. The people who were capable of writing those large detailed posts on subjects have most likely already moved to youtube or moved on. The data that's actually useful to the LLM's will exist in places like Discord, reddit, twitter. It's pretty obvious that twitter and reddit are going to sell their data to the LLM companies…
Advertisers will simply begin to pay more money to inject their content on those platforms, to have it end up inside LLM models. It could be even worse, because it will be less obvious that the content we'll be consuming through LLMs is polarized/paid for. There will be less transparency.
Yeah, although I suspect there will be "hook points" for AI-targeted ads while you enjoy the cool refreshing Coca-Cola taste as 6ou read your LLM responses.
Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder
#97The 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…
Eternal summer
Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've recently deleted Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, etc from my phone and it's like night and day. I basically only go to hacker news now or look at my own websites. Suddenly all of the noise of the internet was silent.
That's great but there's a step 2. The sub-culture of people who like things better that way need to sustain each other and itself. Ideally, to grow in happiness and other measures of strength such that the surrounding dominant culture cannot destroy it, and in fact can influence the dominant culture to become more like it. It's that step 2 that I think we haven't figured out yet. Without step 2 we are merely opinion…
I think step 2 has been figured out a long time ago: personal not for profit blogs and sites with an rss feed and a "links" section (preferably divided by interests). Such sites still do exist, but usually around various hobbies.
Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder
#99The 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…
These days most non technical people just have their phone and live inside the FB/IG/TT/X/Gmail/Google apps on their phones and don't even go on the web. And app developers are doing everything to keep them inside the app with a crappy in-app browser which also benefits the Apple/Google app store ecosystem. Apples intention with Safari was inside the name. "Safari - you're in the African jungle, theres lions and tige…
> Apples intention with Safari was inside the name. "Safari - you're in the African jungle, theres lions and tigers, be careful, probably best avoided."
I thought the name "Safari" was along the lines of the early dominant browsers Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer.
But today possibly thinking closer to one of those curated tourist zoos that you drive through with your car windows rolled up, or sitting in a small train run by the place?
Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I think the clickbait sites are done long term, people will just ask the AI on their phone. The people who were capable of writing those large detailed posts on subjects have most likely already moved to youtube or moved on. The data that's actually useful to the LLM's will exist in places like Discord, reddit, twitter. It's pretty obvious that twitter and reddit are going to sell their data to the LLM companies…
Advertisers will simply begin to pay more money to inject their content on those platforms, to have it end up inside LLM models. It could be even worse, because it will be less obvious that the content we'll be consuming through LLMs is polarized/paid for. There will be less transparency.
Yes, I think this is where we're going. The entire Internet - what's left of it - will become one giant ad stream, with a few non-ad trimmings around the edges.
It'll be as if Gutenberg filled his books with ads for taverns and merchants and added a bit of a written content somewhere in the middle.
Ultimate hustle culture - submit, grift, or starve.