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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

#231

Post by lopis »

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…

That only works when there's an abundance of documentation for your specific device. The moment you're on a more recent version of something and have a weird issue, all hope is lots. You get stuck in loops because all LLMs keep recycling old advice that no longer applies. This problem will only get worse and worse as people no longer as questions on public forums, so answers are not publicly available either.

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

#232

Post by suslik »

laughing_man wrote: post #96
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…

I've run into major problems with LLMs as I maintain my home Linux systems. If I just copied commands they list, I would have a near 100% failure rate, as most of the information they have has been gleaned from forum posts that are years out of date. They're a good jumping off point, but I need to delve into the original sources just like I did when I used Google.

I'm not sure. I run a homelab tailscale/k3s setup with gitops, dozens of services, VMs, backups, etc, all vibed by claude, and works just fine. Didn't write a single line of code for this. I don't know kubernetes and never will.

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

#233

Post by Good4boothee »

marcd35 wrote: post #190
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…

Reddit has already begun the effort to start poising the well - https://www.reddit.com/r/poisonai/

Isn't that effort totally redundant? As in - plenty of people are already filling entire internet with slop for SEO purposes? And LLM slop by default is a mix of facts with few plausible but made up facts - it might be harder to craft such perfect poison on purpose.

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

#234

Post by [deleted] »

tome wrote: post #220
hliyan wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently, I had some ideas I would normally just put up on a blog, in the public domain for anyone to develop on top of. Now, I'm feeling slightly reluctant because an LLM will ingest it, remix it and serve it in response to a query by some unimaginative individual who will either conclude that they are smart, or that LLMs are capable of original thought, or both. And they will have no clue where the idea originated…

Is there some downside of that to you? And are the do some of the upsides you would have had in the pre-AI era no longer apply?

[deleted]

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

#235

Post by mittensc »

tome wrote: post #220
hliyan wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently, I had some ideas I would normally just put up on a blog, in the public domain for anyone to develop on top of. Now, I'm feeling slightly reluctant because an LLM will ingest it, remix it and serve it in response to a query by some unimaginative individual who will either conclude that they are smart, or that LLMs are capable of original thought, or both. And they will have no clue where the idea originated…

Is there some downside of that to you? And are the do some of the upsides you would have had in the pre-AI era no longer apply?

he's missing out on any attention that his shared thoughts would bring? and all benefits that might bring if he's good at what he does.

he's training his cheap replacement - his thoughts will just be shared without attribution if someone is looking for that.

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

#236

Post by Razengan »

Tarq0n wrote: post #218
Razengan wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, just as the "internet" supplanted newspapers, magazines (gosh those classic gaming mags), and broadcast television for many people, and how the newspapers replaced the town criers before them, why shouldn't the "internet" be supplanted by a more accessible medium? Why should I have to suffer through Fandom raping me with screen-obscuring banners and "PLEASE ALLOW ADS" just to make some sense of fucking Warhamme…

Where is the information going to come from though? LLMs aren't primary sources, they consume and regurgitate.

I guess/hope that's where Yann LeCun and their proposed "world models" etc are going to fill in :)

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

#237

Post by bulder »

tome wrote: post #220
hliyan wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently, I had some ideas I would normally just put up on a blog, in the public domain for anyone to develop on top of. Now, I'm feeling slightly reluctant because an LLM will ingest it, remix it and serve it in response to a query by some unimaginative individual who will either conclude that they are smart, or that LLMs are capable of original thought, or both. And they will have no clue where the idea originated…

Is there some downside of that to you? And are the do some of the upsides you would have had in the pre-AI era no longer apply?

The downside, as stated in the message, is implicitly supporting the LLM data ingestation pipeline by providing fresh content. It's not a direct harm in itself, but feels very tragedy of the commonsy

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

#238

Post by frabcus »

tome wrote: post #220
hliyan wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently, I had some ideas I would normally just put up on a blog, in the public domain for anyone to develop on top of. Now, I'm feeling slightly reluctant because an LLM will ingest it, remix it and serve it in response to a query by some unimaginative individual who will either conclude that they are smart, or that LLMs are capable of original thought, or both. And they will have no clue where the idea originated…

Is there some downside of that to you? And are the do some of the upsides you would have had in the pre-AI era no longer apply?

Yes - previously there was some chance someone reading the ideas on the blog would contact the author to thank them, or ask them to collaborate.

When laundered via LLMs whose pretraining destroys all credit, that can't happen.

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

#239

Post by lnrd »

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…

That works now because there are human made sources that the AI can find and summarize for you. But now there are no incentives at all for humans to write anything on the internet and if they do the content will be buried by hallucinated content someone else posted at a larger scale.

I had the similar experience to yours yesterday and it lead nowhere. Funnily enough I was also trying to configure a vpn on a router, google didn't return anything useful (besides a blog post clearly written by AI and with absolutely no information in it). Claude managed to give some interesting pointers, but its suggestions were not working and I also noticed that it started to hallucinate badly about ipv6 and gave me some suggestions that were just plain untrue. Claude Opus is smart, usually when it gets so convinced about something is after researching the internet and not just based on its training data. I wonder where it got so convinced about it. Maybe reading some other hallucinated blog post like the one I stumbled upon?

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

#240

Post by chrisjj »

t0bia_s wrote: post #223
ChiMan wrote: post #196

AI will kill the internet because it is killing the incentive to make it. It is an industrial-strength example of why we don’t allow stealing.

It depends on filed. As documentary photographer it motivates me even more to capture authentic images of life around me. I don't care about remixing, because that is not what makes documentary photography valuable.

And how is any future viewer going to tell your images from "AI" fakes?
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