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

thewalrus.ca

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

#141

Post by bsammon »

> While the web has always been organized around intermediaries that shape what survives online and who sees it,

This statement, from the sixth paragraph of the article, is something that I would have liked to see addressed more in the article. The article implies that this is something that must always be true, or cannot be changed, and simply focuses on how we could have better/better funded/better protected intermediaries (AKA gatekeepers), and doesn't discuss the possibility of an internet (or part of the internet) without gatekeepers (and doesn't ask if it has ever existed/does exist/should exist)

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

#142

Post by littlecranky67 »

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…

> "humans would visit the website and the creator would get some reward"

That expectation is a problem, has always been a problem, and Tim Berners Lee never mentioned anything about a reward structure when coming up with the WWW.

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

#143

Post by wartywhoa23 »

shuwix wrote: post #114
jefftk wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the only visitors to websites are now LLM training bots then what incentive is there to publish anything new? I write because I have ideas I want to share, and whether that happens with LLMs as an intermediary isn't important to me.

Your level of thinking is defined by ICD-10. Yeah, authors don't want to be recognized as authors, they don't want any reward for their work, they don't want to amass pool of loyal readers, interact with them, etc. All they want is for halucinating AI to take excerpts of their work and compile it with random sh!t. GENIUS

Thanatic drive masquerading as transhumanist virtue signalling.

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

#144

Post by mittensc »

jefftk wrote: post #67
paxys wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If the only visitors to websites are now LLM training bots then what incentive is there to publish anything new? I write because I have ideas I want to share, and whether that happens with LLMs as an intermediary isn't important to me.

I mainly shared my projects for learning, discussion and bragging rights.

LLMs just use everything, generate similar code with no attribution and keep users from visiting, so no bragging rights or attention.

Worse, there are some PRs that seem fully generated ...

So i mostly stopped sharing and started pulling my old repos offline.

At this pace, i don't want to compete with a clone of myself in the future that will do my work for much cheaper.

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

#145

Post by robinsonb5 »

neuralkoi wrote: post #87
paxys wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Sure - it sucks, unfortunately the alternative is the sites going away entirely. When the load from scraper bots is constantly knocking the site offline the choices are literally to allow it to remain inaccessible for much of the time, put up a layer of defenses with all the user-annoyance compromises that entails, or just give up and unpublish the site.

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

#146

Post by jononor »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #91
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…

Yes. When my kids wonder why I don't hate AI the way they do I tell them it's because I hate Google even more. To be more precise, I hate the SEO shithole the internet has become, that Google serves up, that Google facilitated, indirectly created. (I really don't have any tears to shed if there is a death of the Corporate Internet™.)

AI seems to be on the same trajectory? Search was very useful in the start also, until it became entrenched. Then search placement became a target, and they are just focusing on extracting rents. All way paying the content providers zero or near-zero. And with years of that dynamic, we end up where we are now. It was the same with "social media". The same will happen with AI. AI is a power for more enshittification - being currently less shit than Google is (mosy likely) temporary.

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

#147

Post by pferde »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #142
paxys wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> "humans would visit the website and the creator would get some reward" That expectation is a problem, has always been a problem, and Tim Berners Lee never mentioned anything about a reward structure when coming up with the WWW.

Your thinking too narrowly about the reward. Sometimes, it's just about the getting the knowledge out there that's motivating the creator, not anything tangible for themselves.

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

#148

Post by latexr »

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…

Exactly. What’s problematic about comments like your parent is the absence of mid-to-long term thinking.

It’s like bragging about a new highly addictive psychedelic drug that a dealer gave you a taste of for free. The effects are awesome today, you feel so fun and free! Never mind that it’s destroying your body and that the dealer will eventually charge you or demand you pay in other ways, that’s a problem for another day. Weeee!

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

#149

Post by arcade79 »

brikym wrote: post #108
a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was true until a few months ago. Now, it almost never has relevant results, and I've given up on it.

It seemed like Google was good ten+ years ago and then gradually trended towards being rotten around 2020-2022. In those days blogspam was king. I want a cooking recipe and it would show me a life story. Or I wanted a OG web game but a link farm would come up top. I think there are leaked internal comms where they discuss nerfing search results to pump engagement and ads impressions. No doubt it would boost ad bids t…

I know Google started deteriorating. It was in 2008 or 2009. Up until then Google would return 0 results if it couldn't find a document with all the words you specified.

Then it started serving synonyms, attempted to correct spelling, and so forth. Instead of serving up that there was 0 results, it attempted to be "helpful".

For a while, you could enable "verbatim" search, but even that has gotten corrupted.

Their search quality has deteriorated ever since that change. It is sad.

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

#150

Post by robinsonb5 »

no-name-here wrote: post #126
watwut wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google did not really lost to optimization, they enshittified to make you spwnd more time on search (and see more ads)

Ah, the argument is that Google intentionally avoids showing you the best results, so that you spend more time searching (and being exposed to ads)?

I'd frame it more that Google is incentivised to show you the results which are most lucrative for them to display, rather than the ones which are most beneficial for you to see.
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