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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

#641

Post by nedt »

Google wasn't great for a very long time. Switched to Duckduckgo years ago. I just love the bangs, because I tend to go to sources I trust anyway.

Doesn't mean I'm not also using duck.ai. It makes searching faster and more targeted. But then it's still giving me links to verify and is actually more limited, which means less hallucination and more directly going to the sources. Also it avoids having to open five pages first which all either sell your data or want you to pay.

I don't see the web or the internet dying yet. Just a lot of people not using the right tools and having a harder time accessing what's useful. But that hasn't started with AI.

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

#642

Post by ndriscoll »

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…

Independent blogs are perfectly viable. It is basically free to publish. What's not viable and never was is to be a professional blogger. At best, some people could try to be professional shills with blogs as bait (it is good if these go away; they were noise), and an extremely tiny minority might actually make a living with people paying to support their blog directly.

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

#643

Post by Ajedi32 »

GrinningFool wrote: post #387
penneyd wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well in the example above the manufacturer still has incentive to provide the manual's and guides that describe how to use their products, and if that is subsequently served by an LLM that's totally fine. The only sites that LLM's would have a negative effect on are those that are only hosting content for the ad views.

> are those that are only hosting content for the ad views. I might never blog/publish code again amidst all this. I never had ads on my sites. I am not alone in this.

Those hosting content for ad views, or for fame or other personal gain.

Sites like Wikipedia or developer documentation pages which exist to distribute knowledge for its own sake don't have any reason to care whether that knowledge is consumed by a human or a computer being used by a human.

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

#644

Post by customguy »

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…

> 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.

yeah because there is a shared reality in which you can both see the same movie. enjoy it while it lasts.

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

#645

Post by nunez »

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.

Yep. Almost all of the top results I get from my searches are AI-generated garbage if the content was published after 2025. It's essentially guaranteed now. Whatever; let the people have what they asked for. At least there's an infinite supply of old books.

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

#646

Post by backlava12 »

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.

> Assuming that a text is signed off on by a person, then surely what counts is its substance

Unfortunately that's a big assumption and for many their "signing off" process will amount to "skimmed it and seems ok?".

When I get an LLM-generated doc or runbook, my first thought is that its very possible that I'm the first person who has ever read this. It used to be that writing something took a big time and energy investment up front by one person so that many others could comprehend the ideas with less time and energy needed. LLMs flip this equation around which is a very bad thing.

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

#647

Post by wpietri »

Finbel wrote: post #616
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…

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.

Maybe? It's a plausible theory. But these operations are all wildly unsustainable financially at the moment, and it's not clear where they'll get future data from, having destroyed a lot of the incentives that generated their current source content.

Bubbles are not a great time to form intuitions. WebVan [1] and Kozmo [2] also seemed to herald a new age. Decades later, brick-and-mortar grocery stores and convenience stores are still doing fine.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webvan

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com

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

#648

Post by Ajedi32 »

bojan wrote: post #439
randusername wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key question to me is whether AI only undermines the financial incentive to make internet content. If nobody can expect to make money on the internet, that could be a good thing. But we won't get an indie-web authenticity utopia if people are still incentivized in other ways to filter their intellectual and cultural contributions to the internet through AI.

The problem is people losing bandwidth money to AI scrapers.

Maybe we just need a standardized way to publish a dump of your content to BitTorrent? Remove the incentive to scrape.

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

#650

Post by Timwi »

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…

> No. The court specifically determined that the Internet Archive was guilty of unauthorized copying.

You're not wrong, but you're treating “guilty of unauthorized copying” as a statement of physical fact when in reality it just means it falls under an arbitrary rule invented by humans (namely, the law that defines unauthorized copying). This rule is ambiguous at its edges because it's not written as an algorithm or equation. It was perfectly reasonable for Kahle to believe that the rule can be interpreted in a way that it wouldn't apply and, by dragging it through the courts, have that interpretation be made the established one.

Even though the court has now established a competing interpretation, it is still not unreasonable to ask whether the law is fair and just under this interpretation. I feel that it isn't and should be changed.

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