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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

#601

Post by Xirdus »

smrtinsert wrote: post #507
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

In original Google, "appearing on a list of 10 links" was peak democracy. You needed people to vote for your website by linking to it. The more votes you get, the higher you are. Sure, like every democracy, it had some unfixable fundamental flaws. But lack of democracy was not one of them.

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

#602

Post by _DeadFred_ »

nairboon wrote: post #125
_DeadFred_ wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually no. The original copyright laws were created in part because of the realities of needed profit motive to have high value writing done, time consuming compilation work done. It was even titled "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning". The thousands of years writing you are talking about was often funded by patrons, who kept the output in their private libraries to show off (and maybe lend out) for prestige.…

It's not copyright that caused cheap access. The printing machine allowed for cheaper publications, that's what spawned the new age of knowledge. The raw materials and the duplication of knowledge was the bottleneck. With digital systems this cost is minuscule, but still there.

Disagree. The printing machine was killing the industry allowing copies where people earned nothing. Copyright was created to ensure quality works existed to be copied.

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

#603

Post by _DeadFred_ »

graemep wrote: post #200
_DeadFred_ wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually no. The original copyright laws were created in part because of the realities of needed profit motive to have high value writing done, time consuming compilation work done. It was even titled "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning". The thousands of years writing you are talking about was often funded by patrons, who kept the output in their private libraries to show off (and maybe lend out) for prestige.…

Actually it grew out of censorship and monopolies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne#Background Cheap access came from the invention of cheap printing . The laws were passed to restrict it.

No, cheap books came from the invention of cheap printing. But the quality of works was going down because printers were just printing with zero copyright protections. Copyright is what brought the wealth of works worth reading that were then printed using cheap printing. If the only money is in private works for private libraries, that is where the quality stuff is going to go.

Making the avenue of creating for the average person also the avenue for the most income was huge in creating our modern literature landscape.

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

#604

Post by user43928 »

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.

I would be fine with it conceptually, if the result was not as grating as Claude's ramblings about load-bearing seams and the real shape of the problem.

It's just exhausting to read, and it displays a lack of effort put into communication.

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

#605

Post by wookmaster »

inigyou wrote: post #343
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…

what value do we get from AI?

There's plenty of value from LLMs, if you treat them as an advanced search engine and auto complete machine like they are. I've used them quite heavily to research things...but these are done best in the hands of skeptical people.

The problem as usual is the mass of rich people trying to profit off of them, not the technology itself.

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

#606

Post by franktankbank »

ilamont wrote: post #82

After publishers successfully sued the Internet Archive over its digital lending program, calling it unauthorized copying No. The court specifically determined that the Internet Archive was guilty of unauthorized copying. It was not simply an unfounded or unproven allegation. The Authors Guild, the National Writers Union, the European Writers Council, and the Society of Authors in the UK all came out against the Inte…

> The court specifically determined that the Internet Archive was guilty

This doesn't seem to be a contradiction. Sometimes the courts are wrong or even the law is wrong. It is just a label.

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

#607

Post by jfyi »

inigyou wrote: post #353
jfyi wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With photos, I could see a cryptographic solution. Of course it would still need some kind of centralized trust, but it's doable if people cared enough. It could be applied by cameras themselves.

So take a photo of a screen showing an AI image.

The premise is not that it couldn't be faked. It would be more practical to remove the key from the hardware and just use it to sign images if you wanted to do that.

The idea is that a centralized source of trust would revoke certificates belonging to bad actors or those that were stolen.

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

#608

Post by Ajedi32 »

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…

Yes, there's certainly less of a monoculture now that people have greater choice in what media they consume. Personally I have trouble seeing that as a bad thing. Greater diversity of taste, culture, and opinion makes for a richer, more interesting society in my opinion. Though I recognize it does have downsides.

I wonder if there's a way to keep the positive effects of such diversity but mitigate the drawbacks. Certainly echo chambers are undesirable.

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

#609

Post by wpietri »

centuryfall wrote: post #536
wpietri wrote: post #425

Earlier 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…

By chance is it the one in Asheville, NC?

That's a good one! But no, we're in Chicago: https://www.theflip.museum/

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

#610

Post by yunwal »

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…

The greatest living mathematician uses it for Math

https://siliconreckoner.substack.com/p/terence-tao-on-machin...

To me it seems like people who are confident in their expertise generally find it useful, even if it's imperfect

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