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

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

#761

Post by ryandrake »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #708
davnicwil wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 People have to post very defensively online, otherwise some "um ackshully" guy will be immediately jumping down their throat If you write anything negative about AI without stroking the ego of the AI bros first by praising their machine best friends they will be all…

Yes, this is really stereotypical HN: You can't really post an unqualified generalization here, because someone will inevitably jump out of the woodwork with a canned "You said X is generally Y, but here is counterexample X0 which is not Y! Your post is incorrect!"

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

#762

Post by qlte »

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.

  > The quality it is today, is the worst it's ever going to be.
Someone in 2004:

  A few years ago it would have been insane to say that you got help from Google’s I’m Feeling Lucky button to fix your outdoor plumbing. 

  The quality it is today, is the worst it's ever going to be.

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

#763

Post by recitedropper »

Gigachad wrote: post #278
mittensc wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

he's missing out on any attention that his shared thoughts would bring? and all benefits that might bring if he's good at what he does. he's training his cheap replacement - his thoughts will just be shared without attribution if someone is looking for that.

It feels like volunteering at an Amazon warehouse when you previously volunteered at a charity store. Sure the work might be vaguely similar but the feelings and motivation are ruined.

This is such a good analogy, I might have to steal it. :)

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

#764

Post by svachalek »

mike_hearn wrote: post #334
renegat0x0 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a world, where everything can be stolen it will be hard to produce anything. I still have hope though. Maybe the Internet will be better. Currently everything has to be monietized. Everything is ad heavy. At the beginning it was not so. People created things out of passion, or boredom. We can returned to that scheme. I have seen neocities, personal blogs created and maintained in this year. I know I run my own "In…

This is a common misremembering of the early internet. The internet was never ad free. The first ad was posted online in the 1970s (for DEC)! It pissed people off but not everyone: supposedly it generated $18M in sales. There was very little advertising back then only because the internet was restricted to a handful of large companies and universities. The web itself was launched in 1991 and the early web was inacces…

This is such a warped and cynical view of history. Yes, advertising existed if the binary existence is what matters to you, but most online spaces were nearly free of it until the DoubleClick days -- that's 25+ years.

Even then, huge swaths of the web were people putting up their personal pages, blogs about their interests, pages for their church or club or hobby, etc etc. Sites like Geocities ran dumb ads on the pages to provide the hosting service, not so every single kid with an animated gif on the page could get rich.

Early advertising was primitive by today's standards, the amount of tracking and spying we consider normal now would have been an outrage and would have gotten those companies regulated into bankruptcy if they'd tried it in the 90s.

TLDR no, just no. The early internet was nothing like the garbage we have now.

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

#765

Post by bluefirebrand »

ryandrake wrote: post #761
bluefirebrand wrote: post #708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 People have to post very defensively online, otherwise some "um ackshully" guy will be immediately jumping down their throat If you write anything negative about AI without stroking the ego of the AI bros first by praising their machine best friends they will be all…

Yes, this is really stereotypical HN: You can't really post an unqualified generalization here, because someone will inevitably jump out of the woodwork with a canned "You said X is generally Y, but here is counterexample X0 which is not Y! Your post is incorrect!"

Yeah. It's all over on HN for sure. I associate it a lot with Reddit too

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

#766

Post by ryandrake »

joenot443 wrote: post #490
Intralexical wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This was my first exposure to any kind of outdoor plumbing, I'd never touched PVC before. I find it telling that the highest praise for LLMs comes from people using it for something where they admittedly have very little domain knowledge. Domain experts usually mention major caveats. I've been testing them on subjects where I already understand the problem well, and I've yet to see any outputs that would make me tr…

That's a good point - I've heard people make the same one whenever LLMs are brought up. I hope someday you're able to get more value from them. Anyway, my pool's looking great and I gained some new skills. I probably could have gotten there with books and YouTube alone, but having another tool at my disposal made me a bit more confident.

I remember this was brought up about a month or so on HN, in the context of describing how one person's experience using LLMs can be so vastly different than another person's:

"LLMs seem good at things you are not good at."

So, if you've never touched PVC before, LLM sounds plausibly competent--it may actually be or it may not be, but you'll walk away from it thinking you learned something. If you are a professional plumber and ask an LLM the same thing, the output will more look flawed and possibly dangerous.

Same for software writing: If you're not a good software developer, you probably think an LLM is great and writes much better code faster than a human developer can. But if you are a good software developer, LLM output is slop and requires huge rework to be passable.

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

#767

Post by jorblumesea »

hliyan wrote: post #213
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.

Recently, I had some ideas I would normally just put up on a blog, in the public domain for anyone to develop on top of. Now, I'm feeling slightly reluctant because an LLM will ingest it, remix it and serve it in response to a query by some unimaginative individual who will either conclude that they are smart, or that LLMs are capable of original thought, or both. And they will have no clue where the idea originated…

This is kinda silly, AI is just a faster re-tranmission of information but it's not fundamentally different from stackoverflow or older styles of communication. If you wrote a blog and some kid in 2025 spouting opinions that weren't their own. it sucks that right now it's controlled by a large corpo but open source models also train on the internet corpus.

freedom of knowledge and open sourcing should always exist, and if anything, even more important in the AI era.

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

#768

Post by sph »

davnicwil wrote: post #611
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 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…

More than a bubble signal, the “but it is so useful” disclaimer is what makes it a tragedy of the commons.

“I know it is ruining all that I hold dear, but what else can I do but profit from it like everyone else?”

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

#769

Post by Dylan16807 »

BeetleB wrote: post #705
Dylan16807 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand your argument. It's not their core value proposition so it's crazy? That's quite a leap. But giving a good answer is just as core as their search results. The answer is what you're there for and they get to show ads. It's not any stupider to use that info than a dedicated site. Both could be wrong, and you're not a moron if it is. Installing an app to learn a single time would be the real moron opt…

> But giving a good answer is just as core as their search results. What I'm saying is all Google has to do is stop giving those types of "custom" answers it already has. No one will abandon using Search if it goes away. > It's not any stupider to use that info than a dedicated site. Both could be wrong, and you're not a moron if it is. It is. Using a well vetted, dedicated app is the way to go, and it's extremely un…

To borrow an analogy, installing a dedicated app starts at negative one hundred points. The risk of bad behavior and junky ads needs a lot of use to overcome. I'm not sure where "well vetted" came from since your first post but doing that vetting takes much longer than getting the answer! And without vetting there's a good enough chance a dedicated site is worse than a dedicated Google widget (the ai is bottom of the barrel).

Let's not forget that Google's actual sunset widget does a good job.

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

#770

Post by sph »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #608
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…

Yes, there's certainly less of a monoculture now that people have greater choice in what media they consume. Personally I have trouble seeing that as a bad thing. Greater diversity of taste, culture, and opinion makes for a richer, more interesting society in my opinion. Though I recognize it does have downsides. I wonder if there's a way to keep the positive effects of such diversity but mitigate the drawbacks. Cert…

Culture is shared experiences. There is no culture if everyone lives in their own little bubble of reality.
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