Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

thewalrus.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 1001 posts

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#131

Post by dudefeliciano »

paxys wrote: post #40
comrade1234 wrote: post #7

I spent the last three days (off and on) using Gemini to configure my edge router 4 with my iOS devices on a vpn and it's been awesome. In the past I'd do a google search and read a few sources of documentation, do another google search and read another set of documentation. Now, Gemini aggregates multiple pages together so all of the work of reading source docs from multiple locations is now n a single step. Oh, I s…

All the information Gemini surfaced was created with human effort and published on the internet with the expectation that humans would visit the website and the creator would get some reward - advertising dollars, bragging rights, popularity, subscribers or whatever else. If the only visitors to websites are now LLM training bots then what incentive is there to publish anything new? For how long can we continue to re…

Well companies are starting to put hidden ads in text content if the user agent is an AI crawler

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#132

Post by JohnMakin »

we built extremely powerful plausible bullshit machines targeted toward and trained on an electorate and population that has historically bad education and reading levels, built on top of an already fraught and fragile web which was also built off predatory basically unregulated behavior with a shaky relationship with “truth” and are surprised people have no idea what’s going on?

This was the whole point of it all and why the people in power have bet the farm on it.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#134

Post by keybored »

comrade1234 wrote: post #7

I spent the last three days (off and on) using Gemini to configure my edge router 4 with my iOS devices on a vpn and it's been awesome. In the past I'd do a google search and read a few sources of documentation, do another google search and read another set of documentation. Now, Gemini aggregates multiple pages together so all of the work of reading source docs from multiple locations is now n a single step. Oh, I s…

AI is on the whole bad but it’s impossible to forget that the ostensibly human-curated Web as presented by modern search engines is bad too. Invasive ads, popups, and worst of all the substantive content has a nine inch frame of SEO filler and a three inch picture (what you were after). And some things are not even high-tech slop stolen. It is just old-school verbatim copied from another website and repackaged with another frame.

But yeah, text remix machines are not a long-term solution to that problem.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#135

Post by matherial »

Grimburger wrote: post #130
neuralkoi wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen websites put up some draconian measures to try and get a grip on the scraping. So much for the sub-second loading experience when you have Cloudflare, Google, Anubis, and all these other captcha services trying to see if you're a human. It's made the web browsing experience so much worse. Some of the proposals to address this include charging bots for access to web resources, but they will also have repercu…

Cloudflare specifically has a block for LLM and AI training bots now. Not sure of the effectiveness but it's there.

Minimal. I'm behind Cloudflare and 90% of the traffic is still scrapers. I don't think they're serious about the long tail.

I think the main thing Cloudflare is trying to do is block direct traffic from frontier labs and then start charging them for access. They might end up shooting themselves in the foot, as this simply empowers sketchy residential-proxy outfits to undercut Cloudflare and sell the data to labs for less.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#136

Post by ekianjo »

paxys wrote: post #40
comrade1234 wrote: post #7

I spent the last three days (off and on) using Gemini to configure my edge router 4 with my iOS devices on a vpn and it's been awesome. In the past I'd do a google search and read a few sources of documentation, do another google search and read another set of documentation. Now, Gemini aggregates multiple pages together so all of the work of reading source docs from multiple locations is now n a single step. Oh, I s…

All the information Gemini surfaced was created with human effort and published on the internet with the expectation that humans would visit the website and the creator would get some reward - advertising dollars, bragging rights, popularity, subscribers or whatever else. If the only visitors to websites are now LLM training bots then what incentive is there to publish anything new? For how long can we continue to re…

> incentive is there to publish anything new? For how long can we continue to rely on pre-2024 non-AI generated content?

obviously new content still has value because it remains the source layer for LLM agents. it just wont be ads giving you revenues thats all.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#138

Post by nitwit005 »

charcircuit wrote: post #10
echelon wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is probably a lag time before advertisers give up on AdSense. A lot of corporate ad spend is already planned, and Google can adjust the costs up as much as they like. They hold the lever.

If search engine competitors were really eating Google's lunch then ad impressions would go down.

They don't have much of an offering yet. OpenAI has some conventional ads, but everyone expects more involved advertising integrated into the conversation itself somehow.
Post reply on HN