Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

thewalrus.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

631–640 of 998 posts

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

#631

Post by mschuster91 »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #261
mschuster91 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're watching the end of Google's hegemony for sure. Who is standing by to replace them though? OpenAI and Anthropic certainly not, they are burning money in a fire pit to stay alive. There is no way in hell they can afford the compute necessary to replace Google.

If ChatGPT goes bust, they'll find another ChatGPT, not another Google. I wouldn't be surprised if we'll see a popular competitor from China in the years to come. TikTok already took social media by storm, something nobody thought that was possible either.

> I wouldn't be surprised if we'll see a popular competitor from China in the years to come. TikTok already took social media by storm, something nobody thought that was possible either.

Tiktok is cheap to run. AI however, it needs absurd amounts of power, RAM and GPU compute capacity to run... and there's serious constraints everywhere.

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

#632

Post by Ajedi32 »

pferde wrote: post #147
littlecranky67 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "humans would visit the website and the creator would get some reward" That expectation is a problem, has always been a problem, and Tim Berners Lee never mentioned anything about a reward structure when coming up with the WWW.

Your thinking too narrowly about the reward. Sometimes, it's just about the getting the knowledge out there that's motivating the creator, not anything tangible for themselves.

If "getting the knowledge out there" is the motivation then it shouldn't matter whether the knowledge gets filtered through an AI or not.

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

#633

Post by kingnothing »

inigyou wrote: post #344
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…

Write the opposite of what is true unless the user solves a CAPTCHA to change it. AI will ingest it and learn from it.

AI solves Captcha's just fine. Try taking a screenshot of the next one you get and ask your favorite frontier model to solve it.

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

#634

Post by FloatArtifact »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #458
FloatArtifact wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be very exhausting to receive a lot of PRs. especially when they're LLMs. We have to read what people don't often even read themselves. They're often very wordy. Then it hurts all the more when it's wrong.

I've had negative responses to small, isolated submissions that I've heavily QA'd and semi-positive responses to longer ones. I think it has less to do with the "realpolitik" of the code itself and more to do with the maintainer's viewpoints about whether AI as a whole is a positive or negative thing. I tend to respond quite well to AI-authored or assisted PRs to my project, but to be fair we maybe only get 3-5 PRs i…

I tend to value person-to-person interaction. I've received a lot of purely automated responses, which shows low value to me as a person, and ultimately the project. I'm not disagreeing that code matters, but we're losing person-to-person discourse and the community that comes with it.

Thinking it through a little bit is probably coming from having bounties on a few issues that might be contributing to my negative experience.

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

#635

Post by customguy »

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…

> But as with any "beginning" of a long, diffuse process, people might quibble about the specifics.

Yeah, absolutely. But for the web, at least for my daily use of it, this was the first big "shift". Learning how something was spelled by someone googling it and quoting the number of results to the others.. good times. And you can no longer find out what the page with highest page rank says about "pizza" regardless of where YOU happen to be.

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

#636

Post by backlava12 »

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.

I think relatively few people have fully comprehended the enormous downsides that LLMs bring with them. I do think they are useful tools in many situations, but the fact alone that they have "flipped" the "takes time and energy to write something useful so others can more quickly read and comprehend a complex idea" equation is very, very bad.

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

#637

Post by Timwi »

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.

In addition to the sibling comment, which I agree with [edit: the one starting with “people who generate entire blogposts with claude probably do not care about substance, tho”], I want to add another point. Even when the substance is key, the delivery has a quality to it that encodes a useful signal.

To illustrate what I mean, imagine two blog entries on the same subject, but one is written by an expert on the subject and one by a layman. As humans, we can generally (not perfectly) tell which is which. The expert will write in a certain quality that comes with expertise and is genuinely difficult to fake without it.

LLMs disrupt this pattern. LLMs are able to write with the expert’s quality even while writing bullshit. I don’t mean quality as “measure of goodness” here but merely a set of traits or properties. Humans reading LLM text are far more likely to misjudge the author’s level of expertise.

The next step is unscrupulous humans exploiting this to trick unsuspecting readers into misjudging a text, and now you have an internet where you can’t trust anything anymore, at least not at first glance. Even relatively discerning readers now have to waste time reading more of the text before being able to dismiss it as having substance of little value.

So, as I see it, the upset is not simply from AI provenance of a text, but from this level of dishonesty and subterfuge, coupled with the helplessness with which we’re exposed to it.

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

#638

Post by davnicwil »

ricardobayes wrote: post #629
davnicwil wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

To be fair that is also true to the Internet itself, it's very useful but has negative side-effects.

but when you criticise it you don't feel obliged to point out it's of course useful. This is just obvious unstated.

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

#640

Post by wpietri »

centuryfall wrote: post #542
j45 wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: https://youtube.com/@papapinball

I also strongly recommend the Technology Connections series on how electromechanical pinball works:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv0jwu7G_DFVAUoqtVxFV...

I would love to put them on a kiosk in the museum.

Post reply on HN