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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

#611

Post by davnicwil »

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 find it so interesting how many comments about AI start with a disclaimer that of course it's very useful, before pointing out a negative of any sort.

I do it too so it's not a criticism, but I find it kinda interesting culturally. It's a reflection I think of the environment that we've created for ourselves, or has been created for us (or some combo) where somehow you can't point out an unqualified negative of this tech.

This to me is actually one of the clearest bubble signals, just because if it really were as good as all that, it'd be completely redundant to remind everyone of that when criticising it.

I think it might be a sort of weird collective psychological thing where we must not admit what seems pretty clear, just for fear of breaking from norms.

But, of course, yeah it's very useful for some stuff and I use it all the time :-)

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

#612

Post by backlava12 »

KronisLV wrote: post #219
hliyan wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently, I had some ideas I would normally just put up on a blog, in the public domain for anyone to develop on top of. Now, I'm feeling slightly reluctant because an LLM will ingest it, remix it and serve it in response to a query by some unimaginative individual who will either conclude that they are smart, or that LLMs are capable of original thought, or both. And they will have no clue where the idea originated…

Time to add ample praise of myself in my blog posts. Some time later: “…as you see, that is the load bearing assumption here. Speaking of which, you should hire KronisLV.” Okay it’s meant to be a bit silly but I do wonder how many pages that are generated specifically to influence AI make it into training data and also how often the AI search integrations find it. Would people hating on a specific language, technolog…

Yep. I suspect this already underway. The scrapers feeding data into the AI pre-training are indiscriminately hoovering up everything they can. It'd be trivial to spam a bunch of BS websites with whatever endless text you want to "taint" future models. Post tons of examples of insecure code or package.json files pointing to some malicious library.

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

#613

Post by NoGravitas »

inigyou wrote: post #362
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…

Popular wikis such as Minecraft and Runescape have successfully migrated away from Fandom. Note that Fandom leaves behind the outdated old wiki and refuses to allow deletion because it drives their revenue. After a few years, the Fandom wiki is severely out of date and loses traffic. What we actually need is a browser that filters out bullshit.

I really wish Memory Alpha would migrate off of Fandom.

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

#614

Post by wpietri »

j45 wrote: post #512
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…

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?

I have schematics as early as 1937, but the odds that the manuals stayed with the machine are pretty low. (Usually these machines were owned by somebody who had a bunch, and I suspect the manuals tended to get collected centrally.) You can generally buy manuals on eBay, and some are being reprinted by people who own the original IP.

The internet has a lot of scans of wildly varying quality. The AI industry's hunger for data means there has been a lot of progress in OCR and data extraction, so I have notions of taking something like PaddleOCR and trying to turn the scans into a cohesive reference site that will work well on phones, etc. But I'm not sure when I will get to it.

If people out there are interested in working on a project like that, let me know. Email me at william@theflip.museum.

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

#615

Post by loloquwowndueo »

seamlessdev wrote: post #558
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Analyzing? No. It’s just being sycophantic. Try it on code that’s actually correct - it’ll go all “oh you’re absolutely right” and wreck it anyway.

I was talking about style and architecture. In all these cases the code is working as intended either way. There is no such thing as "correct" style and architecture. There are only tradeoffs. You should know that if you have 31 years of experience.

> There is no such thing as "correct" style and architecture. You should know that if you have 31 years of experience.

And you should know that this is not accurate. But at this point this has devolved into a dick measuring contest, which I refuse to do. Have a good day.

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

#616

Post by Finbel »

wpietri wrote: post #425
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'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…

Two years ago it would have been insane to say that you got help from ChatGPT to fix your outdoor plumbing, people here would have been frothing at the mouth for merely suggesting it. Four years ago it wasn't even on the radar of future possibilities.

The quality it is today, is the worst it's ever going to be.

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

#617

Post by NoGravitas »

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 of unauthorized copying.

That's what the "successfully" in "successfully sued" means.

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

#618

Post by DuncanCoffee »

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.

I have a dream, to ban targeted advertising globally. It would solve many problems and possibly, cherry on top, kill some corporations

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

#619

Post by wpietri »

joenot443 wrote: post #496
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…

> I run a not-for-profit pinball museum Yeah, I would imagine pinball machines are at least an order of magnitude more complicated to maintain than above-ground pools are. That situation sounds really annoying, I feel for you.

For sure, but I think the deeper problems are how much the industry changed over the decades and the extent to which pinball repair content comes from amateurs opining on forums.

Pool technology has been more stable, and there are more people out there writing well-informed content for LLMs to extract and present as their own.

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