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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

#21

Post by hadlock »

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…

I think most everyone already has a curated training library; Web scraping exists but I don't think anyone is still using it as a primary information vector

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

#22

Post by forgetfreeman »

The most frustrating part of all of this is the underlying premise that the internet is, has been, or could ever be a credible cultural record is deeply stupid. Or maybe more charitably it's both historically and technically illiterate. It has always taken continuous unwavering effort on some person's part to keep any given piece of content online. And while managing a simple hosting account and updating domain registration periodically doesn't take a tremendous amount of effort 20 years is a long time to expect anyone to maintain enthusiasm. The internet has always been a frothy, ever changing blend of the odd nugget of truth drifting in a sea of unadulterated bullshit. Treating this, or worse what comes from statistically averaging it, as a source of capital T truth is totally unhinged. From whence did this mythology of online truth spring?

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

#23

Post by jessetemp »

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…

All of that already existed for the purpose of biasing people and now it biases ai for free. A company would have to make an effort to remove or change the bias

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

#24

Post by stringfood »

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…

no, no, no. you are supposed to romanticize the hunt for correct information /s

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

#26

Post by BeetleB »

tayo42 wrote: post #6
danpalmer wrote: post #2

It's hard to get past the beginning of this article and take it at all seriously. The quote someone who missed a sunset because they asked google and supposedly got the wrong time... but they didn't think to look at the sun or lack thereof to check? Also when I put "when does the sun set today" I get a single exact figure at the top of my results, not from AI, which is honestly the best kind of result – an exact corr…

They were planning their day for a specific time to be somewhere. If you're looking at the sun it's to late...

That's fine, but arguing that Google should give accurate times based on where you are is ... crazy?

In the pre-LLM days it was cool that Google did weather, unit conversions, sports results, etc. But that's not even close to their value proposition. Even 5 years ago if someone told me they had planned a photograph and got it wrong because Google gave them the wrong time for sunset, I would have called them a moron for relying on Google! There are sites and apps dedicated to this. Use one of them!

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

#27

Post by Chinjut »

charcircuit wrote: post #8

It would be beneficial for the author to look at the revenue for Google Search. Revenue is still growing.

Indeed. Money over everything. It is absurd to complain about decreasing quality of a product that makes increasing money for increasingly rich people (thus, by definition, better).

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

#28

Post by bloaf »

georgemcbay wrote: post #20
bloaf wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who regularly reads things online, then wants to read them again like 3 years later, Google has been monotonically declining in quality. Also I realized the other day how hard it is to find song lyrics for anything other than quite mainstream songs.

> As someone who regularly reads things online, then wants to read them again like 3 years later, Google has been monotonically declining in quality. I generally agree, but I think AI mode actually improved things somewhat compared to how things were just prior to it existing. And I'm not saying what we have now is better than Golden Age Google, but things were just getting worse and worse for almost a decade. AI did…

I think they make things worse, because they very very often present straight inaccurate information.

Just the other day I was trying to find out "What american tree species have the deepest roots". And all the AI responses were giving me back generic lists of big trees and claiming that roots going 20ft deep were the deepest. I know for a fact the mesquite trees behind my house can easily grow roots > 100 ft deep.

If I had clicked on the articles with generic lists of big trees, I would have realized they were all low quality clickbait sources and moved on. But the AI presentation makes you think that the information comes well-researched.

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

#29

Post by t-writescode »

qudat wrote: post #25

Funny as I just cancelled my Kagi sub to get the Gemini ai pro sub. The deal was too good to pass up

Kagi does have AI too, for what it’s worth. I found it pretty damn good, but I wish I could give them more money. I have a year subscription so I’m stuck without being able to give them *anything* until it’s done.

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

#30

Post by dylan604 »

hadlock wrote: post #21
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…

I think most everyone already has a curated training library; Web scraping exists but I don't think anyone is still using it as a primary information vector

Otherwise they'd be slurping in their own slop
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