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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

#501

Post by Cthulhu_ »

morkalork wrote: post #476
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 feel like if you had wanted to you could have done it before. When I got a pool in 2020,there were still old school phpBB forums out there dedicated to DIY and maintenance. That same summer, my neighbour who in no way is techie or handy redid his plumbing too.

I think insecurity, over-estimating difficulty / effort, and risk aversion are all to blame. I think these things would improve a lot if people have DIY tasks as part of their upbringing or education, if only to get experience with it.

But the education system - at least for me, 20ish years ago - was very much tiered or broken up into classism: if you were highly intelligent or a good learner you'd go to advanced schools where you'd get higher level math, latin, etc. If you were "dumb" you'd get taught how to do woodworking and masonry. At best I was taught how to use a figure saw, drill press safety measures, and how to patch an inner tube (welcome to the Netherlands, this is very important. Or, was, it's much simpler and cheaper to just buy a new inner tube nowadays).

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

#502

Post by nuclearnicer »

customguy wrote: post #441
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…

I called it 2001/2002 or whenever they appeared when I tried to explain why personalized search results are the beginning of the end of a shared reality and therefore the ability to reason and act in public, and with others. I bet some still consider it hyperbole. It's just taking in trends and seeing where the glacier moves to, how the cookie will crumble so to speak.

It is an astute point. I agree that we have largely lost a lot of our shared reality. But as with any "beginning" of a long, diffuse process, people might quibble about the specifics.

I offer a few other moments you might gesture toward as the beginning of the end of shared reality.

First, 1987, with the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine and the subsequent boom in partisan talk radio shows.

Second, 1989, when cable TV became a mature technology reaching half of U.S. households.

And finally, maybe a lesser item, the introduction of the DVR circa 2000, when we stopped watching scheduled TV together.

I wonder if more historically informed people would find the fracturing going further back as other advancements in publishing technology allowed more people to share more views.

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

#503

Post by joenot443 »

gosub100 wrote: post #477
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…

In the 90s and prior you could have done the same thing using the public library.

Definitely! My understanding is everything I did has been pretty well established pool maintenance for decades now. I'm sure there are loads of good books on the topic, though I'm a good 45min from the nearest library so it wouldn't have been my first choice.

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

#504

Post by j45 »

Intralexical wrote: post #440
Rperry2174 wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Flooding the market with supply while quality might not be the same is a real risk.

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

#505

Post by KPGv2 »

netcan wrote: post #457
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…

I think a lot of this is "accelerating trends." That is, the www was "being killed" already in a lot of ways. "Democratization" and suchlike open ideals had already been receding for a long time. In part, this is because of "democratization" of access. The old web was a self selected, subpopulation. After smartphones, it is the whole population. Facebook's walled garden and other apps using the web as "merely infrast…

If the timeline of things as you present them is taken as accurate, then I would say the www being killed was good, with FB opening up to everyone being the inflection point toward bad.

Webrings are nostalgic, but the old web sucked, and there was a dearth of information and fun to be had. I remember getting online and being able to confirm "nope, no new anime content worth looking at today" by quickly checking Usenet and Yahoo's index (which was updated manually) and a few webrings.

now, I'm able to watch a show that aired in Brazil the day after, with English subtitles.

People who long for the web of the 90s, I always feel like they must not be very interesting. Imagine complaining that we can't go back to libraries of the 1970s when the ones today have 3D printers, DVDs to rent, etc. because "there are too many teenagers"

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

#506

Post by Razengan »

pjc50 wrote: post #249
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…

This is better for you as an individual, but worse for society as a whole. As you've noticed, monetization is the weak spot. AI will not escape being ruined by monetization, but it might be harder to notice when it arrives.

Correct, the enshittification of AI would fuck us up more widely and deeply than the enshittification of the internet

but..that's not a problem inherent to the technology or medium itself.

That's a separate problem that's the responsibility of laws and society to solve

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

#507

Post by smrtinsert »

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…

Google and good is of some debate. Appearing on a list of 10 links is not a democratic representation of the web. I'm hoping this reckoning is also an opportunity for a better method of web organization

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

#508

Post by [deleted] »

chrisjj wrote: post #240
t0bia_s wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]

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

#509

Post by throwaway63467 »

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…

99 % of the Internet was already slop before AI existed it was just written by hand. At least AI can give you a nuanced overview of medical information whereas before you had the exact same content about medical conditions on hundreds of SEO optimized pages. Collective memory, yeah alright.

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

#510

Post by gosub100 »

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 just used a VPN yesterday and the NY times blocked me because they think I look like a bot. It gave a couple possible reasons, one being "a bot was also using this IP address".

VPNs are great for torrenting but any serious website like an online bank or web email provider will turn you away. They claim it's for bots but really it because they only want customers they can track.

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