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

thewalrus.ca

341–350 of 959 posts

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

#342

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.”

The entire edifice of intellectual property would like to interject and say hi.

Patents, copyrights, trade marks exist because rewarding people for their insights and inventions matters.

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

#343

I called this maybe 3y ago, but I think so did everyone else that was sane. Sure, we get immense value from AI, but indiscriminately injecting into everything, the one thing we know to be unreliable above the threshold we used to fire people for, is probably the greatest undoing of all the good companies like Google brought to the internet. I mean what a way to destroy your legacy of democratizing information. The am…

what value do we get from AI?

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

#344
post #213
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.

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…

Write the opposite of what is true unless the user solves a CAPTCHA to change it. AI will ingest it and learn from it.

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

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I recall correctly, the film actually had Emmanuel Goldstein of 2600 and Kevin Mitnick as consultants, so despite the hollywood treatment you have moments of accuracy like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U9MI0u2VIE . Probably the only time Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools made it to the big screen. At the yearly 2600 conference, they used to always do a big group rollerblade through NYC.

Interesting, yeah I thought there must have been some consultation there. Especially because there's a couple instances where the hackers rely on social engineering over the phone first, and faking the "coin added" noise on the payphone. I guess a hollywood suit could have come up with that, but I doubt it

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

#346
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.

And that will kill AI itself, since much of what it knows is from what learned from StackExchange before this latest one demise. And before the obvious comments on how GenAI is creative , then please do this OpenAI and Anthropic, for your next LLM. Just teach it Python, C and Rust and give it some good books. But dont give it access to Github...lets see what you can do then...

LLM training will eventually transition from real data to synthetic data, same as alphago -> alphazero.

AI companies are also working to integrate training with real-world experience through sensors and robotics, to shrink the gap between human experience and hallucinated LLM experience.

They all have archives of pre-LLM content. There's also archive.org, google books, and pirate ebook archives. I don't know what they're doing to build video and audio archives, but judging from the cost of spinning rust, they're storing significant quantities of that, too.

Some parts of the internet are curated, and even with LLM influence they're still worth training on. I doubt wikipedia or stackexchange or rosettacode will ever cease to be useful at all.

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

#347

I called this maybe 3y ago, but I think so did everyone else that was sane. Sure, we get immense value from AI, but indiscriminately injecting into everything, the one thing we know to be unreliable above the threshold we used to fire people for, is probably the greatest undoing of all the good companies like Google brought to the internet. I mean what a way to destroy your legacy of democratizing information. The am…

what value do we get from AI?

It's really good at writing code.

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

#348
post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In modern times don't we all think that ideas are cheap: don't we all mostly regurgitate the same stock of them. Have we yet lost the open ideals of university sharing? The core of open source? The failure of the GPL is that you can't force anyone to collaborate and share if they don't really want to.

> The failure of the GPL is that you can't force anyone to collaborate and share if they don't really want to. Failure of the GPL? How can you even put those words next to each other? GPL is an amazing success. It took software out of hands of SV / VC / corpo crowd and put it where it should be - users.

It's failed in that most software doesn't use it. Because of the psyop, people who would be very sad if Amazon stole their software are licensing it MIT so Amazon can legally steal it.

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

#349
post #315

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.

I don’t think that’s fair. Some bloggers may hope for financial reward, but many just want recognition for their creativity, to attract a readership, or build a community around their work. Those are meaningful ends, apart from financial reward. What’s not meaningful is to perform free labor to produce the raw materials that a mega corp then goes on to monetize without any recognition.

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

#350
post #243

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.

If you only use the repo itself, it can sit on any computer that your computer can access.
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