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

751–760 of 884 posts

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

#751

Post by rightbyte »

mrweasel wrote: post #547
charcircuit wrote: post #8

It would be beneficial for the author to look at the revenue for Google Search. Revenue is still growing.

The is something that someone really should study, along with "Who are buying ad space". My theory is that the quality, for a lack of a better term, of advertisers are going down. Let's say I need a new vacuum cleaner and do a Google search. I get eight sponsored products. Three a links to stores I'd expect, the rest are fairly unknown sites, mostly the "We sell everything" stores. Weirdly enough also only one of the…

I believe many of those "everything" sites are just middle men for ordering from other sites.

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

#752

Post by svachalek »

renegade-otter wrote: post #541

The web was getting kind of useless before AI crashed the party. This is why now curated content is key - newsletters, for example, is how I find most of my content.

Agreed. The combination of social media (walled gardens and plunging quality of content), advertising (I know what you were looking for but have this word from our sponsors instead), SEO (more advertising but we didn't pay for it), and plunging budgets (I don't remember the last time I went to a website expecting to find original quality work) did most of the job. AI just delivered the final chop.

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

#753

Post by chrisjj »

nearlyepic wrote: post #669
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 was just thinking yesterday that it might actually be worse than nuclear weapons. Both in terms of likelihood to destroy all of humanity and in terms of “how did nobody working on this see that this was an obviously horrifying idea”

> “how did nobody working on this see that this was an obviously horrifying idea”

Perhaps they did and quit?

Q2: How does nobody still working on this not see that this is an obviously horrifying idea?

A: They passed the filter. The fact such people are in control is even more horrifying.

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

#754

Post by bulder »

tome wrote: post #417
bulder wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downside, as stated in the message, is implicitly supporting the LLM data ingestation pipeline by providing fresh content. It's not a direct harm in itself, but feels very tragedy of the commonsy

> The downside ... is implicitly supporting the LLM data ingestation pipeline by providing fresh content I don't understand why that's a downside. > It's not a direct harm in itself I don't understand how it's a harm at all.

Would you be willing to do free work for a corporate entity that explicitly financializes that work's benefits? Would you be willing to do free work for a corporate entity whose entire business model is making sure they sit as a gatekeeper between your free work and others who would benefit from your work?

For some it's demoralizing to know that your work will be broken down and atomized into language model mush, and the credit will go to the computer.

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

#755

Post by ryandrake »

nuclearnicer wrote: post #535
jgtrosh wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The VCR became widespread during the 1980s > The industry boomed in the 1980s as more and more customers bought VCRs. By 1982, 10% of households in the United Kingdom owned a VCR. The figure reached 30% in 1985 and by the end of the decade well over half of British homes owned a VCR.

Another good one. My impression of the VCR is not too many people managed to use it for DVR-style rescheduling live TV. Although it did have that feature. We mainly used it to watch movies that we had already been in the theater. But, for sure, another fracturing. We weren't all talking about the nine movies in the theaters, but whatever we had rented and watched on tape instead.

My recollection was that the VCR's main selling point was the ability to record TV and play it back later, and I can say anecdotally, that that was the primary way my family used ours in the early 80s. Only later did the idea of Blockbuster and "using VHS merely as content distribution" take hold.

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

#756

Post by andai »

customguy wrote: post #441
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…

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.

(At the playground)

"...but how do I know that what I perceive as a certain meme, you also perceive as that same meme??"

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

#757

Post by switchbak »

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…

I think of it more as a basis for shared culture - I could chat about Seinfeld / Friends, and odds were high that the other person would know what I was talking about.

I imagine in prior ages this was perhaps more about folks reading a core collection of books. I expect there was less shared culture than in ^

Now it seems like we're in an era with (potentially) less of a shared cultural bases than either of those times. I've certainly met people where there's really no overlap - their core beliefs, values, etc - fundamentally different foundations. If that becomes more widespread, it's hard to know what that will do to our societies.

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

#758

Post by fouc »

DuncanCoffee wrote: post #618
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.

I have a dream, to ban targeted advertising globally. It would solve many problems and possibly, cherry on top, kill some corporations

I've always thought that if online advertising as a business model had been entirely banned from the internet in the 90s, the internet would've looked like a much better place today.

And micropayments would've taken off in a big way.

The only reason why micropayments doesn't really exist today isn't due to technical reasons, it's because advertising is too dominant, and because consumers got trained on expecting everything on the internet to be "free", not realizing they're the product.

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

#759

Post by 8organicbits »

ehnto wrote: post #175
8organicbits wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, I've seen much better results on DDG. Most recently was the search: `site:feeds.bbci.co.uk inurl:rss.xml` which works on DDG but gives zero results on Google. As far as I can tell, Google just decided not to index these.

I find DDG is struggling to, or chosen not to, filter or derank obvious AI generated content farm sites. Of which there are an insane amount of already. We thought blogspam was bad, at least it was easy to ignore. It's hard to find authoritative sources for a number of topics, worryingly health advice is one of them.

Idk, Google seems worse there too. I tried "my left hip is hurting".

Google shows an AI overview and "people also ask" with zero search results above the fold. If I page down I see a single search result for clevelandclinic.org, followed by youtube videos and image search results. The next page has a single search result from rush.edu and then "discussions and forums" which has Mayo Clinic and Quora.

DDG also starts with the AI overview (although I disable that) and has two results from webmd.com with deep links to multiple pages on the site, all above the fold. Then the same clevelandclinic.org result as Google but again, adding deep links to other related pages.

I can't comment on the quality of webmd, clevelandclinic, or rush, but Google pushing the user to youtube and quora for medical advise seems worrying.

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

#760

Post by fouc »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #630
DuncanCoffee wrote: post #618

Earlier 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.

Online advertising is what drives the desire for user data. Ban online advertising and the demand for user data withers.
Post reply on HN