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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

#681

Post by YurgenJurgensen »

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.

They already have all the data, all the money and all the chips. It’s actually the best it’ll ever be, as newer models will have to start paying off all that capex, newer models will be trained mostly on slop, and the SEO and influence op leeches will have begun their arms race to insert their products and values into the training data. We’ve seen this pattern before. AirBnB, Uber, social media, streaming video, et cetera didn’t get better once the VC money ran out and they needed to start turning a profit, they got much much worse.

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

#682

Post by snek_case »

pjc50 wrote: post #294
goekjclo wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"ideas are cheap" was one of the most succesful psyops of all time, so unbelievably wrong

Possibly "bad ideas are cheap". A lot of people got tired of "ideas guys" who never build anything themselves. The best case of a raw idea is an uncut diamond, it will inevitably require work.

Most people (and most companies) can't tell bad ideas from good ideas. This is also true of LLMs to some degree. They need post-training in specific domains (e.g. coding) to become competent in that specific area.

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

#685

Post by daishi55 »

pessimizer wrote: post #567
daishi55 wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t seem to have read the comment you are replying to.

I think they understood it pretty well. What in it was worth any other reaction? edit: I might add that anna's archive and sci-hub are good alternatives to the slopweb.

Nothing they said demonstrated any understanding of what they replied to. They simply restated their opinion with no reference to any of the points made in the comment they were ostensibly replying to.

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

#686

Post by flir »

rayiner wrote: post #624
flir wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not totally convinced about the printing press example (expensive, technical). The biggest presses, with the longest reach (daily newspapers) were often owned by the richest people. What's unique now is decentralized + extreme potential reach. Or it was. Now we have to consider bias in the algorithm that sticks stuff in front of us and is, I suspect, the modern equivalent of those daily newspaper presses.

> The biggest presses, with the longest reach (daily newspapers) were often owned by the richest people. You're assuming that "rich" is the only relevant dividing line, which it isn't.

Gnomic.

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

#687

Post by qudat »

t-writescode wrote: post #29
qudat wrote: post #25

Funny as I just cancelled my Kagi sub to get the Gemini ai pro sub. The deal was too good to pass up

Kagi does have AI too, for what it’s worth. I found it pretty damn good, but I wish I could give them more money. I have a year subscription so I’m stuck without being able to give them *anything* until it’s done.

Yes and this month I hit my $10 AI assistant cap for the first time, which is why I started looking around for other options.

I do like Kagi but the Gemini deal was too good to pass up as it also gives my a code agent.

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

#688

Post by IsTom »

sph wrote: post #320
exo762 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The failure of the GPL is that you can't force anyone to collaborate and share if they don't really want to. Failure of the GPL? How can you even put those words next to each other? GPL is an amazing success. It took software out of hands of SV / VC / corpo crowd and put it where it should be - users.

Allow me to disagree. GPL was a great idealistic dream that led to less-restrictive open-source licences such as MIT/BSD which have been the greatest catalyst towards the establishment of tech corpo giants and the software ecosystem we have today. GPL gave us Linux, but also gave us Amazon, Google and 2020s Microsoft. GPL is why 90+% of libraries on Github are MIT licensed. GPL gave us OpenAI and Anthropic and this h…

> but also gave us Amazon, Google and 2020s Microsoft.

The major fault I see here is that people didn't forsee that the default GPL should have had AGPL's clauses.

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

#690

Post by bluebarbet »

inknight wrote: post #556
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.

people who generate entire blogposts with claude probably do not care about substance, tho. before llms, people would have to put effort into what they write and be mindful about the things that they are saying. now it just generates the whole thing, the people who "signs it" barely reviews it fully most of the time, IF they review it at all, proceed to say "eh, good enough" and publishes it.

Ironic anecdote. Although I don't care about AI, I'm triggered by your own carefree attitude to orthography (no capitalization, unpronounceable words like "llms"). At least AI is easy to parse!
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