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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

#161

Post by gspr »

sgt wrote: post #153

Funny, I was just thinking this morning that Google searches are absolutely horrible these days. It's like it has amnesia, a lot of recent history seems to be just gone. Especially on non US specific sites too.

They're so horrible that I've started defaulting to their AI summaries. And I hate those summaries. It's just that the regular results are so terrible now, and seemingly getting worse at a noticeable pace.

I used to not worry. I was sure that a competitor would come along and fix search. But the longer that's not happening, the more nervous I'm getting that we'll actually lose search. If a few more years pass in the current state, I'm afraid the majority of people will forget what search was like and default to AI summaries.

I've tried alternatives, including Kagi (not actually relevant because there's no way I'm – directly or indirectly – buying Russian products) and Uruky, but they're not good enough.

(Edit: Added "directly or indirectly" about Kagi to point out that I'm not claiming that Kagi itself is Russian.)

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

#162

Post by renegat0x0 »

luciana1u wrote: post #133

we're building the world's largest library and then locking the doors, letting the bots photocopy everything before the lights go out.

In a world, where everything can be stolen it will be hard to produce anything.

I still have hope though. Maybe the Internet will be better. Currently everything has to be monietized. Everything is ad heavy. At the beginning it was not so. People created things out of passion, or boredom. We can returned to that scheme.

I have seen neocities, personal blogs created and maintained in this year. I know I run my own "Internet index" https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

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

#163

Post by gspr »

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.

Did the operators of HN mention anything about a reward structure for posting comments here? I'm sure you can see how that's still attractive to some.

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

#164

Post by latexr »

umvi wrote: post #14

I feel like collecting, curating, and protecting high quality corpuses of "truth" is going to become increasingly important for high quality AI. There will come a day (and probably soon) when "training on the public internet" (Reddit, etc) will taint your model with metric tons of corporate contamination, political poison, and other adversarial content intentionally crafted to bias AIs for various reasons (corporate…

> There will come a day (and probably soon)

That day has already arrived, it is already happening.

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

#165

Post by gspr »

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 write because I have ideas I want to share, and whether that happens with LLMs as an intermediary isn't important to me.

Sure. But you can see that for some people (myself included), writing for peers is part of the joy? And that if instead a megacorp places an opaque computer program between the author and the readers, that joy might be ruined?

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

#166

Post by onli »

gspr wrote: post #161
sgt wrote: post #153

Funny, I was just thinking this morning that Google searches are absolutely horrible these days. It's like it has amnesia, a lot of recent history seems to be just gone. Especially on non US specific sites too.

They're so horrible that I've started defaulting to their AI summaries. And I hate those summaries. It's just that the regular results are so terrible now, and seemingly getting worse at a noticeable pace. I used to not worry. I was sure that a competitor would come along and fix search. But the longer that's not happening, the more nervous I'm getting that we'll actually lose search. If a few more years pass in the…

Brave search works really well, I haven't switched to Google search for months.

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

#167

Post by ehnto »

gspr wrote: post #161
sgt wrote: post #153

Funny, I was just thinking this morning that Google searches are absolutely horrible these days. It's like it has amnesia, a lot of recent history seems to be just gone. Especially on non US specific sites too.

They're so horrible that I've started defaulting to their AI summaries. And I hate those summaries. It's just that the regular results are so terrible now, and seemingly getting worse at a noticeable pace. I used to not worry. I was sure that a competitor would come along and fix search. But the longer that's not happening, the more nervous I'm getting that we'll actually lose search. If a few more years pass in the…

Unsurprisingly all search engines seem to be struggling with AI content sites as well. It's rare to get human articles, sometimes rare to even get authorative websites. It's frequently a bot site with a plausible enough name like, potterspainterly.com or medhealthdirect or something with oddly specific articles written in the last year.

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

#168

Post by zkmon »

It happens when the deterministic precision was given away in return for the probabilistic guesses. It was one extreme until now (deterministic code), and we are swinging to the other extreme (probabilistic slop), but what the world wants could be somewhere in between. Some information does not need too much precision, while others do need precision.

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

#169

Post by crnkofe »

novafunc wrote: post #5

I occasionally use Google Search when DuckDuckGo fails to give me relevant. Almost always, Google has better results. Though I can find its AI answers annoying aggressive. I'll look up like two search terms and the AI will bullshit multiple paragraphs out of despite having zero context of what I am looking for. DuckDuckGo seems to have detection of whether it should give an AI answer. And it allows you to have more g…

The problem and what the article is pointing out is that original content is slowly and progressively being replaced by AI content. And since AI gets trained on this content as well it will eventually train itself on previous gen. content that was also AI generated. It is slowly eating the web. Eventually you won't even be able to evade it because it'll be everywhere. Before AI became this expressive I could at least expect someone writing articles, FAQs, blog posts to have some backbone. Now I frequently run into content that obviously was never even checked by a human.

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

#170

Post by spiderfarmer »

sgt wrote: post #153

Funny, I was just thinking this morning that Google searches are absolutely horrible these days. It's like it has amnesia, a lot of recent history seems to be just gone. Especially on non US specific sites too.

That's 100% correct. Since Google's "helpful content update" Webmasters get massive amounts of "Crawled, not indexed" reports for anything Google considers "more of the same" or "thin content". If you're not an authority on a subject, simply meaning: you already rank for similar content, or if you don't get links from more popular domains, your content is in the abyss.

It's all under the guise of "We're fighting SPAM", but the algorithm (or model) they use is heavily skewed towards intents (actions) and brands (because they 'trust' big names).

And it's not working.

A simple, short informative blog about a tool you used that could be of interest to max. 100 people on this planet is no longer getting ranked, if it gets indexed at all.

Those posts tick all boxes: no incoming links, no authority, thin content.

It changes somewhat between "Google Updates", but it's pretty clear that it's no longer working.

Multiply the 100 people not finding that post by millions of queries and it's now a big problem for Google.

My dad asked me the other day if Google got worse because smaller companies are not paying Google enough money.

He didn't see any difference between ads and content, because all results are now big brands only.

"Helpful content" is such a misnomer. It removes all helpful content in favour of AI overviews and only shows intent-driven, commercial content.

We're watching the end of Google's hegemony for sure.

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