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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

#461

Post by baubino »

bonoboTP wrote: post #444
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s likely it missed some crucial subtlety that will come to bite you in the ass down the line. That’s the thing with AI - its responses sound plausible enough to non-experts but time and time again I see experts in any given field being able to identify AI content by pinpointing subtle but crucial errors. That’s one of its dangers - it gives you enough confidence to shoot yourself in the foot.

Human workers also wreck these jobs horribly that come to bite your ass in the end. I think an intelligent person equipped with AI and common sense and real stake in the thing being well done (because it's their own, so they care) is better than whatever is possible to pay for or book in a realistic timeline from another human. Also, ask people in the trades to review each other's jobs. They will harshly criticize ea…

> Human workers also wreck these jobs horribly

Yes, but with a human worker there is a chain of accountability. With AI, there is none.

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

#462

Post by joenot443 »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #423
joenot443 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It’s likely it missed some crucial subtlety that will come to bite you in the ass down the line. That’s the thing with AI - its responses sound plausible enough to non-experts but time and time again I see experts in any given field being able to identify AI content by pinpointing subtle but crucial errors. That’s one of its dangers - it gives you enough confidence to shoot yourself in the foot.

> It’s likely it missed some crucial subtlety that will come to bite you in the ass down the line.

Maybe, but that's part of the experience of learning. I plan to maintain pools for the rest of my life, if I made an oversight which costs me down the line then the lesson will be that much more memorable.

This is an above-ground pool with a pump and a filter, the stakes are relatively low. In the absolute worst case I could rip it all out and pay a pro to do it for the price I was quoted.

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

#463

Post by joenot443 »

gilrain wrote: post #431
joenot443 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I hope your DIY projects go well and you don't need any repairs at all.

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

#464

Post by baubino »

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.

This only matters if the answer is correct.

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

#465

Post by Intralexical »

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…

> This was my first exposure to any kind of outdoor plumbing, I'd never touched PVC before.

I find it telling that the highest praise for LLMs comes from people using it for something where they admittedly have very little domain knowledge. Domain experts usually mention major caveats. I've been testing them on subjects where I already understand the problem well, and I've yet to see any outputs that would make me trust them on things I don't already know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/confidence_trick

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

#466

Post by IshKebab »

nba456_ wrote: post #355
erfgh wrote: post #341

AI has killed reading-anything-written-after-AI for me. Due to this effect it is probably the worst invention in human history or pre-history.

Then why are you on HN right now? Everything on this page was written after AI.

Come on you know what he means. Blog posts, articles, that sort of thing. AI has definitely made reading things posted to HN a much worse experience (even if they aren't all slop). It doesn't seem to have infected the comments yet, mercifully. I guess for a quick comment it's still easier to write it yourself than get Claude to do it.

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

#467

Post by sph »

HSO wrote: post #354
sph wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the same conclusion I reached. I'll keep publishing static websites, so I don't even have to worry about load and CPU usage. I don't care who reads it, the value for me is in writing. I still haven't changed my mind on the "shall I have kids" problem :P

if the value is for oneself, why go through the extra trouble of publishing it though?

If one other human sees value in it, it has been worth the extra trouble. When I advertised my blog on my HN profile, people came to read, some even wrote to me.

So what if 99.99% of Internet users won’t find it any more because they use LLMs? Then write for the 0.01%. Those are the people I want to engage with anyway.

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

#468

Post by rnd33 »

root-parent wrote: post #302
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.

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...

The end goal though (in my understanding) has never been for an LLM to regurgitate knowledge it ingested during its training. The end goal is to use the patterns and correlations found in internet data to generate an emergent prediction and problem-solving machine.

Whether that's possible is something we'll discover, but no one is throwing billions on AI companies for the hope of them building a giant natural language queryable internet information repository.

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

#469

Post by bogzz »

gspr wrote: post #163
littlecranky67 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "humans would visit the website and the creator would get some reward" That expectation is a problem, has always been a problem, and Tim Berners Lee never mentioned anything about a reward structure when coming up with the WWW.

Did the operators of HN mention anything about a reward structure for posting comments here? I'm sure you can see how that's still attractive to some.

I finally got the downvote powers yesterday, and I was irrationally pleased about that.

It's not even about votes, I don't even need votes. Whenever I write something that I am happy with, I read and reread it imagining I am reading it as a third person. Sometimes it forces me to rework my arguments. I wouldn't write to convey my ideas through a chatbot. And that's what this post is about-- killing the internet and with it decimating any audience you might have accrued if you had something to say and you published it on a website.

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

#470

Post by sph »

inigyou wrote: post #352
sph wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still a work in progress of an idea. I'm thinking more like mesh networks. I spoke of Reticulum elsewhere in this thread, but here I'm thinking I'd like the ability to easily join multiple TCP/IP networks ( islands of connectivity ) by social group (my friends) or by interest (pirate file-sharing group, my work intranet, a knitting community with their own IRC server, FTP, etc.). Basically easy-to-use private &…

The purpose of The Inter-Network , or internet for short, was to connect together precisely these "multiple networks" that you refer to. It's failed because of CGNAT, but come back because of IPv6.

Thanks but I am talking about the complete opposite of connecting multiple networks together.

I’m not sure why we’re talking past each other. CGNAT has nothing to do with the public web dying because it’s both too large, too spammy and too juicy a target for mass surveillance.

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