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As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
731–740 of 905 posts
Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
#732Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a dream, to ban targeted advertising globally. It would solve many problems and possibly, cherry on top, kill some corporations
Stop the purchase and sale of user data, period. Kill the weed at the root.
There are many indirect ways to get information though. Better would be to ban "discrimination" of customers/humans (no loyalty programs for long term customers/whales or people who know people), and ban of usage of all personal information for decision making except short pre approved lists. Most industries would do fine with "payment received", some maybe could make legitimate cases for also "delivery address" or perhaps "age". Would probably also be good for efficient competition on merit, which should appeal to the groups with enough wealth to use it to accumulate wealth.
Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
#733I 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…
The writing has been on the wall for quite a while, thanks to Google itself and SEO, plus Google advertising channels.
Some websites already had minimum “for humans” content for years, as it was all used to appease the algorithm.
And Social Media was the cherry on top, with information overloading, walled gardens, personalization and companies using it to pull a “Hey Fellow Kids” when using it for marketing.
Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
#734Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And yet, inexplicably it does.
Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
#735I 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.
Before search engines, we had personalized search results in the form of yellow pages. The yellow pages in Chattanooga are different than the Wichita.
There was no global yellow pages where plumbers from Odessa were listed beside plumbers from Tokyo, was there?
If you were looking for something more esoteric, you were going to find different results in the World Christian Encyclopedia than you would in the Encyclopedia Britannica
Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
#736Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're so horrible that I've started defaulting to their AI summaries. And I hate those summaries. It's just that the regular results are so terrible now, and seemingly getting worse at a noticeable pace. I used to not worry. I was sure that a competitor would come along and fix search. But the longer that's not happening, the more nervous I'm getting that we'll actually lose search. If a few more years pass in the…
Brave search works really well, I haven't switched to Google search for months.
I stopped paying attention to Brave years ago when it started fiddling with advertising-linked cryptocurrency and content injection. Is there any reason I should extend it any trust now?
Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
#737Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
#738I 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 thi…
It happens everywhere with every topic on the internet. You need to let your fellow tribemates know you're in the same tribe before you say anything negative, otherwise they will discard your argument and flame you to death.
Go into any subreddit and you see the exact same pattern.
Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
#739Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> The only thing that's changed is the quantity of slop
The most important thing that's changed is the proportion of slop.
When it was humans originators v human sloppers, we stood a chance.
Now it is going fewer human originators v. vastly more machine sloppers. No chance.
Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
#740Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was a temporary blip. Specific technologies facilitated an age of mass, top-down communications in the mid 20th century, just by virtue of how those technologies worked. It enabled a small group of people in charge of the radio/TV stations to have a monopoly on communications and media. The technology both before (printing presses with myriad newspapers) and after (the Internet) were by their nature decentralize…
It takes some technologies more time than others to succumb to the corrupting pressures of money, but they all fall eventually. We must keep outrunning it, building ever more resistant methods of communication. I'm hopeful that the next one will last even longer since we'll have to build it explicitly for resisting corruption. Neither the printing press nor radio nor webs 1 or 2 had fighting back as part of their DNA…
Yes. I thought maybe Blockchain might be able to provide some of that robustness for the public web, but it's all about speculative investment now.