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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

#321

Post by lofaszvanitt »

keiferski wrote: post #292
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…

Ideas, once they go into the world, aren’t really yours anymore. Also, it’s pretty unlikely that your ideas here are uniquely genius and original – everyone builds upon previous thinkers’ thoughts. Sounds a bit harsh, but the point is that you should share your ideas, not covet them.

That's why you don't share them, until comes a time when the ideabringers gets the money and recognition they deserve. Until then, good luck going knee deep in the sewers of ideas.

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

#322

Post by HappyPanacea »

smackeyacky wrote: post #264
zombot wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why we don’t allow stealing. With the not-so-minor qualification that the biggest thieves have always gotten away scot-free. AI is just the international whole-internet version of this.

Behind every great fortune is a great crime

What is the great crime behind Norway's sovereign wealth fund?

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

#323

Post by keiferski »

lofaszvanitt wrote: post #321
keiferski wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideas, once they go into the world, aren’t really yours anymore. Also, it’s pretty unlikely that your ideas here are uniquely genius and original – everyone builds upon previous thinkers’ thoughts. Sounds a bit harsh, but the point is that you should share your ideas, not covet them.

That's why you don't share them, until comes a time when the ideabringers gets the money and recognition they deserve. Until then, good luck going knee deep in the sewers of ideas.

Can’t say I agree. The most influential ideas in history were not conceived of by people looking for money and recognition. Nor were they “radically original.”

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

#324

Post by Retr0id »

sph wrote: post #173
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.

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…

Most hobby communities in my spheres of interest have been subsumed into Discord. It is yet another silo, but it does feel lively. I don't think I'm contradicting you here, I just feel less negatively about it.

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

#325

Post by rcxdude »

bko wrote: post #315
frabcus wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If all you care about is financial, expected value of someone reading your blog and asking to collaborate is MUCH lower than odds of being part of some settlement in the future with these AI companies ingesting your data for training purposes.

From their phrasing I don't think the reward they're looking for is financial: more the emotional reward of knowing that someone else appreciated their ideas. I dunno how much less likely this is in the age of LLMs, though.

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

#326

Post by Steve16384 »

larodi wrote: post #222

What a joke. Google did that already 10 year ago when they started evicting stuff from its page rank caches. AI is merely amplifying what social media and FAANG in general already have done to the 90s web.

Before AI, the way people were gaming Google was by filling their pages with pages of verbose fluff (have you ever tried googling how to make a specific cocktail?). Now the AI just makes it easier to generate that fluff.

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

#327

Post by rcxdude »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #304
sph wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than a facilitator of theft, LLMs are the tragedy of the commons at industrial scale. The public internet is dead, the future is private invite-only walled gardens. Corporations love a walled garden, what we need is open-source frameworks to create these islands, rather than defaulting to horrible systems like Discord and Twitter-clones.

To understand your comment correctly: What does "these islands" refer to? Walled gardens that we create ourselves using the open source frameworks?

I think probably things along the lines of what's been called the 'cozy web': networks of smaller groups that don't publish to or expect responses from effectively the entire internet as a whole. (This kind of thing has always existed, it's basically the group chat with your friends but perhaps slightly bigger, but I think there's a bit of a trend of focusing on it more because of the feeling that the twitter/facebook attention and feed model is bad for your mental health. I've always felt the twitter model especially was pretty cursed so I'm glad there's some agreement building there).

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

#328

Post by lofaszvanitt »

keiferski wrote: post #323
lofaszvanitt wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why you don't share them, until comes a time when the ideabringers gets the money and recognition they deserve. Until then, good luck going knee deep in the sewers of ideas.

Can’t say I agree. The most influential ideas in history were not conceived of by people looking for money and recognition. Nor were they “radically original.”

Which were?

Look at AI. AI companies throw out their models and let the "community" develop the ideas what to do with them. They don't really know what they are capable of. All they do is implement these things that the dev community digs up and creates.

It's a reprehensible tactic. So why give drops of blood to a desert, when there is zero incentive and in the end you will revitalise the desert, but it will turn against you and rob you of your job.

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

#329

Post by chrisjj »

jfyi wrote: post #307
chrisjj wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

With photos, I could see a cryptographic solution. Of course it would still need some kind of centralized trust, but it's doable if people cared enough. It could be applied by cameras themselves.

> It could be applied by cameras themselves.

And equally faked by bots.

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

#330

Post by user432678 »

chrka wrote: post #243
neuropacabra wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So only GitHub Copilot can read it then? Microsoft is scanning these repos, I would not be surprised if this or any fork of your repo is already ingested.

They say they don't do that. But maybe I should be more skeptical.

Ha, that’s why I’m hosting simple cgit server for myself only. Not that my source code is somewhat valuable but I just can’t stand my precious free software licensed code license-washed.
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