The web was getting kind of useless before AI crashed the party. This is why now curated content is key - newsletters, for example, is how I find most of my content.
As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
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Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
#542Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm glad it went well for you. But I run a not-for-profit pinball museum, and I have specifically had to ban volunteer repairpeople from using the chatbots because it will confidently propose idiotically wrong solutions. Which will then get proposed to me, or just directly applied, with equal confidence. At this point I'd rather hear, "My horoscope said..." than "ChatGPT said..." I expect that it's good for common us…
The horoscope reference is resonating for me. I know very little about pinball machines, out of curiosity, do some come with any amount of schematics or diagrams?
Not OP, but this channel does a lot of walkthroughs of popular machines and explains how those systems work in-game:
Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
#543AI 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.
Am I really the only one who doesn't care whether or not prose was written by AI? Assuming that a text is signed off on by a person, then surely what counts is its substance, not who or what actually strung the words together. I'm constantly surprised by this obsessive need to falsify what is unfalsifiable. And among nerds of all people. It feels religious, like a modern form of heresy-purging.
Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
#544So let it be. Why don't we build another place for our memories to go? Why don't we build the _unstructured_ internet, where the intelligence is not in the mind but in the eye and the pleasure is in finding not in disseminating?
Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
#545Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cabl…
I never thought of the DVR as a particularly significant development. I thought of it as just a replacement for the VCR. That's what it was for me. But perhaps in some areas DVRs were used to a greater extent than VCRs had been?
Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
#546AI 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.
I don't know how long you've been on the internet but the incentive to create new and original content was never that strong. Simple search terms return super-spammy websites (especially on mobile where ad-blocking is harder). SEO results for everything like simple search are awful, almost unusable. There hasn't been an incentive to create new original non-monetized content for the web for a while. I trust LLMs more…
If the Internet was nothing but the newspapers of record online, it would have been a good place to stop. The quality disappeared after the barrier of entry went - social media.
At one time, running a blog post was also not exactly trivial, and that would have been a great middle ground between access to publishing and reading.
Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
#547It would be beneficial for the author to look at the revenue for Google Search. Revenue is still growing.
The is something that someone really should study, along with "Who are buying ad space". My theory is that the quality, for a lack of a better term, of advertisers are going down.
Let's say I need a new vacuum cleaner and do a Google search. I get eight sponsored products. Three a links to stores I'd expect, the rest are fairly unknown sites, mostly the "We sell everything" stores. Weirdly enough also only one of them are via Google ads directly, the rest are via PriceToro and Channable, both of which I don't know.
My personal theory is that Google is still making pretty good money, but from increasingly questionable ads.
Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
#548Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cabl…
I never thought of the DVR as a particularly significant development. I thought of it as just a replacement for the VCR. That's what it was for me. But perhaps in some areas DVRs were used to a greater extent than VCRs had been?
Yeah, I readily concede it's lesser. For me it was the moment that we stopped watching a particular thing and discussing it the next day. But maybe that's more personal biography than sociology.
Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
#549Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the photographer builds trust, over years, by not manipulating their images using AI. All trust is erased if anyone spots the manipulation.
Unfortunately that solution fails where "AI" manipulation is not detectable by viewers.
Many famous images was edited. It's part of process. However we talk about generative manipulation that change or generate new content.
Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
#550But this is a similar argument to “the 1950s were great let’s go back to then”.
We never really were a united society with a common set of agreed facts. And depending on which “we” we mean the difference is radical. White America and Black America is a tiny gap between the gulfs of India, USA in the 1970s and 80s.
Yet today, we don’t recognise the same facts but we do have access to all the facts all the time. And I think more of the narratives are being challenged in the “internet” -people might run from it but it’s hard not to be challenged - whereas I would be amazed if an American voter knew what the seesaw of foreign policy was doing in India US relations