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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

#191

Post by boredhedgehog »

pferde wrote: post #147
littlecranky67 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

> it's just about the getting the knowledge out there that's motivating the creator

In that case the creator should welcome AIs with open arms; a human reader will forget eventually, but the AI will preserve the knowledge forever.

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

#192

Post by charcircuit »

nitwit005 wrote: post #138
charcircuit wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even if the alternatives would have no advertising the number of ad impressions of Google Search would go down.

In the article it mentions the rise of other search competitors like Qwant implying they are causing Google to die as it bleeds market share to them.

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

#193

Post by dd8601fn »

shoobiedoo wrote: post #189
sph wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Internet has been shrinking massively. My earliest experiences with the Internet were discovering the world of hobby OS dev around the turn of the millennium, when I chanced upon someone’s personal website talking about their OS, with source code and screenshots and dedicated forum. My mind was blown. I spent two years finding hundreds of small websites dedicated to the topic, hung out on IRC communities with oth…

On a whim I watched my favorite childhood movie last week, Hackers. It's goofy in some ways, but man it captures the "wild west" feeling of early and mid 90's internet. It was just you, a slow connection to anywhere, and open ports all over the place. Right after I watched it, I dusted off an old hub, connected a few external usb-to-ethernet adapters to my work PC VM's, and now run them through an OpenBSD packet filt…

That movie is ridiculous and still great. At least as a nostalgia pump.

And the red box references and pots patching and such were true enough, even if everything else got hilarious hollywood treatment.

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

#194

Post by oblio »

robinsonb5 wrote: post #150
no-name-here wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Incentives. Which is why platforms (such as search) should never be allowed to be in the same company with things built on top of them (such as ads), if the combined company is significant for an important market.

We used to know better, Standard Oil vertical integration was dismantled.

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

#197

Post by szundi »

gspr wrote: post #177
gostsamo wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi is not russian. The founder is from Serbia and the company is american. PS: I hope not many people are the type to see a slavic name and conclude Russia.

Kagi pays Yandex for data. Yandex is definitely Russian.

[dead]

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

#198

Post by oblio »

renegat0x0 wrote: post #162
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 "In…

> People created things out of passion, or boredom. We can returned to that scheme.

Turns out, people want food and shelter more than entertainment. And psycho billionaires want money more than fun.

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

#199

Post by oblio »

CommieBobDole wrote: post #86

The article touches on something that I've been thinking about with regards to Google's AI strategy; the automatically-generated AI search summaries are not great. They very frequently confidently misinterpret what the user is searching for and generate half a page of useless information that pushes actual results down the page, and they are occasionally hilariously incorrect, with hallucinated facts. This is probabl…

> not even Google can afford to devote enough compute to each query to reliably generate quality results

https://www.dw.com/en/german-court-holds-google-liable-for-f...

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

#200

Post by graemep »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #97
satvikpendem wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People write and create regardless of profit motive, it has been that way for thousands of years.

Actually no. The original copyright laws were created in part because of the realities of needed profit motive to have high value writing done, time consuming compilation work done. It was even titled "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning". The thousands of years writing you are talking about was often funded by patrons, who kept the output in their private libraries to show off (and maybe lend out) for prestige.…

Actually it grew out of censorship and monopolies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne#Background

Cheap access came from the invention of cheap printing . The laws were passed to restrict it.

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