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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

#671

Post by hombre_fatal »

root-parent wrote: post #302
ChiMan wrote: post #196

AI will kill the internet because it is killing the incentive to make it. It is an industrial-strength example of why we don’t allow stealing.

And that will kill AI itself, since much of what it knows is from what learned from StackExchange before this latest one demise. And before the obvious comments on how GenAI is creative , then please do this OpenAI and Anthropic, for your next LLM. Just teach it Python, C and Rust and give it some good books. But dont give it access to Github...lets see what you can do then...

I don't see how AI needs StackOverflow anymore.

It can either examine the ground truth source code to answer your question "How to expire cookies using RoR Devise gem" or it can read docs for you or it can spin up local experiments to black box examine some software. If humans had done that before posting on StackOverflow, the question never would have made it there.

Its reasoning ability is long passed hoping an example exists online for it to copy.

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

#672

Post by StableAlkyne »

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.

It was already on fire, AI just pointed a leafblower at the coals.

Before slop farms started using ChatGPT, they were using outsourced writers who had a tenuous (at best) grasp on the language and subject. If you searched anything on the web, your first page of search results was generally incredibly fluffy articles.

For example, you would search for "How to use python async" or whatever, and every non-stackoverflow result would go something like "Python is a useful language for async library usage. Python is a language created in... You can install Python by... Synchronous programming is... Asynchronous programming is... Python synchronous code looks like... Python async module code looks like... Popular libraries for async are... Other languages have async such as... To import async module you can..." with every paragraph interspersed with an ad. The content was surface level, relying upon blatant plagiarism of better-written articles and forum posts without attribution. It was an utterly miserable experience if you placed any value on your time.

The only thing that's changed is the quantity of slop, and the karmic irony that the content farmers who put the writing profession into a race-to-the-bottom were themselves discarded, in much the same way as the scabs who replaced striking workers were frequently discarded in the industrial era.

And that's without even getting into the subject of the people who made money as Internet point farmers of Reddit or Twitter, who would repost generic content then sell their accounts to spammers.

The Internet was already going in this direction; the only difference is the rate at which it enshittified. I agree that it's in a worse state than it was 10 years ago, but let's not look at the past through rose-tinted glasses.

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

#673

Post by FeteCommuniste »

randusername wrote: post #411
ChiMan wrote: post #196

AI will kill the internet because it is killing the incentive to make it. It is an industrial-strength example of why we don’t allow stealing.

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.

It undermines the social incentive as well if potential creators assume that everyone else will be getting their content through AI. They won't be looking at my stuff, they'll be looking at some LLM's pre-chewed version of it.

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

#674

Post by jdauriemma »

I see symptoms of this all the time. For example, it's a weekly annoyance for folks to pop into /r/strava to showcase their vibe-coded app that uses the Strava API to do $THING. Then someone invariably points out that an existing app (or even Strava itself) already does $THING, and often it's free. I don't mean to be negative, I think it's great that people are building useful niche software and I don't blame them for wanting to share it. A significant part of the problem is that it's much harder nowadays to find "prior art" because keyword/boolean web searches have been FUBAR.

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

#675

Post by arjie »

rmunn wrote: post #212
arjie wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems inevitable, doesn’t it? Expecting otherwise would have been hoping that notorious atheist Richard Dawkins somehow spared one specific god. Making websites accessible with history ignoring copyright is sort of what it does. That he would do it with books seems entirely in keeping with the philosophy.

I was initially confused what Dawkins was doing with books, until I realized that the "he" in your last sentence was Kahle, not Dawkins. Might want to edit your comment to put his name in, because otherwise you have a pronoun referring to a person named in a different comment (rather than the person named in your comment), which could get quite confusing if more people comment on the parent and their comments push yo…

Fair comment but sadly I noticed yours past the typo fix window. Fortunately it has your clarification. Thanks for being able to repair.

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

#676

Post by zajio1am »

ChiMan wrote: post #196

AI will kill the internet because it is killing the incentive to make it. It is an industrial-strength example of why we don’t allow stealing.

> AI will kill the internet because it is killing the incentive to make it.

You could make the same argument for Wikipedia (that webs get less traffic if people get their answers from Wikipedia article returned as the first from web search, which is based on internet sources).

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

#678

Post by bluebarbet »

nunez wrote: post #658
bluebarbet wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 care because in most (not all) cases, (a) AI UGC is one- to few-shotted with no concern for accuracy or readability, and (b) why would I read the results of someone else's prompt if I can achieve more or less the same result for free on ChatGPT? For example, I was searching for a guide for realigning the v-brakes on my wife's hybrid bike and found this: https://volatacycles.com/how-to-adjust-bike-brakes-rubbing/ No…

Sure, I get that argument. I just don't buy it. What counts is whether the article helps you fix your brakes. If it doesn't, it seems immaterial to me whether or not the bylined author sweated over it for hours. Not least because I have no means of knowing.

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

#680

Post by FeteCommuniste »

renegade-otter wrote: post #546
bko wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how long you've been on the internet but the incentive to create new and original content was never that strong. Simple search terms return super-spammy websites (especially on mobile where ad-blocking is harder). SEO results for everything like simple search are awful, almost unusable. There hasn't been an incentive to create new original non-monetized content for the web for a while. I trust LLMs more…

If the Internet was nothing but the newspapers of record online, it would have been a good place to stop. The quality disappeared after the barrier of entry went - social media. At one time, running a blog post was also not exactly trivial, and that would have been a great middle ground between access to publishing and reading.

The brief era where the "social web" consisted of blogs and old-school chronological forums was pretty nice. I enjoyed it, anyway.
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