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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

#561

Post by rubyfan »

KPGv2 wrote: post #505
netcan wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Usene…

I am one of the people that long for the old internet. I don’t long for it because there are too many normal people on it now.

The old internet was interesting, open, simple, un-gated, and relatively egalitarian with few corporate interests in commanding positions. The new internet is basically a predatory environment disguised as a library.

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

#562

Post by rayiner »

KPGv2 wrote: post #505
netcan wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Usene…

> 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"

The Internet used to be a space for high-IQ people, and now it's filled with low attention span, low impulse control people. Tik Tok and Instagram are the worst offenders in this regard, because it enabled borderline illiterate people to communicate on the Internet.

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

#563

Post by nuclearnicer »

m0llusk wrote: post #551
nuclearnicer wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another good one. My impression of the VCR is not too many people managed to use it for DVR-style rescheduling live TV. Although it did have that feature. We mainly used it to watch movies that we had already been in the theater. But, for sure, another fracturing. We weren't all talking about the nine movies in the theaters, but whatever we had rented and watched on tape instead.

My family used it to capture programming we couldn't normally be around for, especially late night BBC content on PBS. Pretty much all we used it for was DVR style recording.

My neighbor's house was awash in PBS recordings! https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/

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

#564

Post by pessimizer »

dzonga wrote: post #497
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…

how I handle this - if I find an interesting web page - I save to pdf & save to my external sdd. ideally I should get one of the 8tb HDD to save material I see on the web. coz yeah good quality material is disappearing on the web fast. the only thing remaining is people building their own private search indexes.

I've been using Zotero for that, although it gets slow as hell eventually because it is a whole-ass firefox instance. They're real references so I might as well treat them like real references.

I've been working on a project that basically is a superset of Zotero, just efficient. As if you expected to have more than a few thousand references. I'm sure I'll get it done after the web is long gone.

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

#565

Post by intended »

umvi wrote: post #14

I feel like collecting, curating, and protecting high quality corpuses of "truth" is going to become increasingly important for high quality AI. There will come a day (and probably soon) when "training on the public internet" (Reddit, etc) will taint your model with metric tons of corporate contamination, political poison, and other adversarial content intentionally crafted to bias AIs for various reasons (corporate…

That’s what is going on right now.

As I recall there are data labelling jobs now for people who have experience working at McKinsey.

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

#566

Post by [deleted] »

nuclearnicer wrote: post #533
pamcake wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of those are pretty specific to US national culture whereas GP is talking about something more global.

Good point! Interested to hear about the RoW. Where are you from? Was there pre-custom search results fracturing or did you have a (relatively) uniform national media before that?

[deleted]

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

#567

Post by pessimizer »

daishi55 wrote: post #530
wesleywt wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, AI writing is overwhelming real writing but contributes nothing new.

You don’t seem to have read the comment you are replying to.

I think they understood it pretty well. What in it was worth any other reaction?

edit: I might add that anna's archive and sci-hub are good alternatives to the slopweb.

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

#568

Post by hnlmorg »

nuclearnicer wrote: post #502
customguy wrote: post #441

Earlier 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…

What even is a “shared reality”? For example my mum and I could watch the exact same movie and showing at the cinema and still come away with a completely different opinion of it.

And even when TV was limited to a small few national OTA (over the air) channels, different people would tune in at different times to watch their different preference of shows. So just because content was fewer, it didn’t necessarily equate to different people consuming the same content.

The real crux of the modern problem isn’t preference drive choices. It’s independent publishers being driven out by corporate greed. Eg AI traffic making it unviable for independent blogs. But then one could argue that the current ecosystem, where the barrier for publishing being so low, is an anomaly because historically that was always prohibitively expensive. To go back to the TV example: you couldn’t commission a show without deep pockets and a lot of TV exec contacts.

I’d love our golden age of information to be persistent. But, and as yourself and others have alluded to, that’s not guaranteed unless we fight to keep it that way.

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

#569

Post by flir »

rayiner wrote: post #555
nuclearnicer wrote: post #502

Earlier 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…

That was a temporary blip. Specific technologies facilitated an age of mass, top-down communications in the mid 20th century, just by virtue of how those technologies worked. It enabled a small group of people in charge of the radio/TV stations to have a monopoly on communications and media. The technology both before (printing presses with myriad newspapers) and after (the Internet) were by their nature decentralize…

Not totally convinced about the printing press example (expensive, technical). The biggest presses, with the longest reach (daily newspapers) were often owned by the richest people.

What's unique now is decentralized + extreme potential reach. Or it was. Now we have to consider bias in the algorithm that sticks stuff in front of us and is, I suspect, the modern equivalent of those daily newspaper presses.

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

#570

Post by NewsaHackO »

Intralexical wrote: post #465
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…

> 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 tr…

Well, I guess another plausible explanation is that usually "domain experts" are people that get paid for their expertise, and have a vested interest in saying that LLMs cannot replicate what they want people to pay them for.
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