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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

#431

Post by gilrain »

joenot443 wrote: post #394
inigyou wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what value do we get from AI?

Last month I rebuilt my pool's plumbing system with the help of YouTube and GPT. I was quoted $6k and it ended up costing me about $1k of materials and a few days of work. This was my first exposure to any kind of outdoor plumbing, I'd never touched PVC before. It's unlikely I would have had the confidence to do it from YouTube alone, specific diagnostic help and a full diagram to work off of was extremely helpful. I…

I hope what you’ll discover to be wrong needs only $5000 of repairs.

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

#432

Post by iamcalledrob »

Borg3 wrote: post #154
robinsonb5 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure - it sucks, unfortunately the alternative is the sites going away entirely. When the load from scraper bots is constantly knocking the site offline the choices are literally to allow it to remain inaccessible for much of the time, put up a layer of defenses with all the user-annoyance compromises that entails, or just give up and unpublish the site.

The alternative is simple.. Go dark. VPN tech is known from like 30 years. Pretty much everyone can use it (VPN providers). But instead using it to browse net, build VPN overlay networks of interest for people. Gaming networks, R&D networks, Retro Networks. People will peer to PoP and use resources. Bad actor? BAN it from network. You have control. This could be done in Internet, but big corpos and big money won the…

I think you'd struggle to keep LLM bots off the network unfortunately.

If it had any real value, anyway.

Small, truly private communities could be an interesting thing though.

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

#433

Post by dwedge »

inigyou wrote: post #344
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…

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

Unless I need to use a particular website, a captcha makes me close the tab. I always found them disrespectful to users and there is no way I would read a blog with one

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

#434

Post by vee-kay »

rcxdude wrote: post #327
zelphirkalt wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/faceboo…

[dead]

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

#435

Post by duskdozer »

sertraline wrote: post #407

I find it ironic how people talk with a high hand about "Google dying", "Internet dying" and "AI eating everything" and then I open their website and it forces me to waste 10 seconds as cloudflare "checks" my browser, then reloads, checks it again, finally lets me through and then I end up on a useless page because the scroll is broken - thanks javascript. Then I need to hit F5 and finally I can read in peace. Websit…

Yeah, stack overflow has recently either added cloudflare or changed its settings, so I am completely unable to access it. I assume I'll pretty much be locked out of the majority of the internet in a couple of years at most.

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

#436

Post by gilrain »

bko wrote: post #314
sixtyj wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just do it for yourself. I stopped worrying about who’s gonna use it. 20 years ago I thought that we will wait to have kids as “a war will come”. I was overthinking and I am happy now that I changed my mind :) Is it useful or does it make you happy? Or it might even make some money? Nice. Do it. My life is easier.

Really happy for you. It's disheartening how many people put off or choose not to have kids because they think some combination of climate disaster, famine, overpopulation, war or skynet will ensure a life of misery for their children. There's definitely a risk of over-thinking things. Just do things. You're not likely to regret it.

My partner and I adore our childfree lives… not worrying about them suffering climate change is just the gravy!

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

#437

Post by malfist »

gsinclair wrote: post #383
inigyou wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what value do we get from AI?

Answers to a lot of questions, with breadth, depth and nuance. And assistance in carrying out work on a lot of fields, not just programming.

Do not mistake confidence and verbosity with breadth, depth and nuance

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

#438

Post by bogzz »

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.

I've been using duckduckgo exclusively for two weeks now, and I haven't needed to go back to Google even once yet.

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

#439

Post by bojan »

randusername wrote: post #411
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.

The key question to me is whether AI only undermines the financial incentive to make internet content. If nobody can expect to make money on the internet, that could be a good thing. But we won't get an indie-web authenticity utopia if people are still incentivized in other ways to filter their intellectual and cultural contributions to the internet through AI.

The problem is people losing bandwidth money to AI scrapers.

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

#440

Post by Intralexical »

Rperry2174 wrote: post #427
figassis wrote: post #336

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…

Whatever AI is doing to how we find / share information aside, I do think that one under appreciated effect is on how software (and other things) get built. Lowering the barrier to entry for writing code and other tasks feels democratizing , but we may just not have had enough time to see how that hopefully has positive effects a decade out. Its funny how fast we forget that when Google came out and arguably now many…

I've noticed these big tech companies use the word "democratize" when they do something that looks more like commoditizing. Flooding a market with supply consolidates their own power, by suppressing other economic actors' bargaining power and making quality controls uncompetitive.
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