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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

#591

Post by Nasrudith »

mittensc wrote: post #227
Gigachad wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Google conspiracy has been getting shared for long before AI slop came in to the picture. The fact is that SEO people got too good at their jobs and filled the search results with junk.

Google can properly classify email spam. They should be able to fight this as well. Problem is they are the ones funding the poor quality spam and they're in turn profiting by taking money from advertisers.

Spamming can be found by metadata and reports. There is no "this site is absolute crap" button for them to find useful feedback in searches.

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

#592

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

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…

It takes some technologies more time than others to succumb to the corrupting pressures of money, but they all fall eventually. We must keep outrunning it, building ever more resistant methods of communication.

I'm hopeful that the next one will last even longer since we'll have to build it explicitly for resisting corruption. Neither the printing press nor radio nor webs 1 or 2 had fighting back as part of their DNA. 3 was a bit of a flop, but there's a lot of design space still out there to explore.

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

#593

Post by taude »

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.

google searches have been terrible for a long time, which is why i have to kind of index all the links and blog posts of use from hackernews....

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

#594

Post by thijson »

gilrain wrote: post #436
bko wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Climate change is inevitable, whether we exist or not. The sun will continue to get hotter over the next few billion years. Life is a struggle, it sounds like you would rather just give up. I guess evolution is working as intended.

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

#595

Post by chrisjj »

hnlmorg wrote: post #568
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…

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 equat…

> 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.

A: It excludes opinion.

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

#596

Post by redsocksfan45 »

baubino wrote: post #461
bonoboTP wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[dead]

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

#597

Post by flippant »

>But what if the “truth” is harder to find online because the infrastructure that once stored it is breaking down? Some of that is wear and tear. Link rot erases pages every day. Key sections of the United States Constitution briefly disappeared from the Library of Congress website because of a coding error.

This has bothered me for years. I think the solution lies in personal, private archives, and lending access to archived content within small communities.

https://memoryhole.app/blog/welcome-all

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

#598

Post by chrisjj »

chongli wrote: post #482
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…

We’re burning the new library of Alexandria on the altar to a new god.

Worse, we gave the matches to the new god then stood back and watched.

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

#599

Post by erfgh »

bluebarbet wrote: post #543
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.

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.

The problem is that AI writing uses a pretty distinctive style and when you read a whole newspaper that was written or edited by AI it is very monotonous. Also, I can't really trust it because I know that the author probably phoned in his fact-checking.

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

#600

Post by chrisjj »

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…

> It's unlikely I would have had the confidence

Perhaps with good reason?

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