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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

#781

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#782

Post by spiderfarmer »

mschuster91 wrote: post #631
spiderfarmer wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If ChatGPT goes bust, they'll find another ChatGPT, not another Google. I wouldn't be surprised if we'll see a popular competitor from China in the years to come. TikTok already took social media by storm, something nobody thought that was possible either.

> I wouldn't be surprised if we'll see a popular competitor from China in the years to come. TikTok already took social media by storm, something nobody thought that was possible either. Tiktok is cheap to run. AI however, it needs absurd amounts of power, RAM and GPU compute capacity to run... and there's serious constraints everywhere.

Why do people insist on making predictions for the future with today's numbers and constraints? Inference costs are plummeting, mostly driven by Chinese inventions.

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

#783

Post by hbn »

jmkr wrote: post #773
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.

Indeed, I also don't listen to music after 2024. I'm also not interested in anything my friends have made (with claude or others). Or how so much of creativity is now a prompt away. A lot of our culture is disappearing before our eyes and people are defending it.

You can find bands you like and follow what they put out, just like before.

I don't know why you'd ignore the output of talented musicians because AI exists.

You can't complain about culture disappearing if you're choosing to ignore it.

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

#784

Post by mrguyorama »

rayiner wrote: post #562
KPGv2 wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the timeline of things as you present them is taken as accurate, then I would say the www being killed was good, with FB opening up to everyone being the inflection point toward bad. Webrings are nostalgic, but the old web sucked, and there was a dearth of information and fun to be had. I remember getting online and being able to confirm "nope, no new anime content worth looking at today" by quickly checking Usene…

> People who long for the web of the 90s, I always feel like they must not be very interesting. Imagine complaining that we can't go back to libraries of the 1970s when the ones today have 3D printers, DVDs to rent, etc. because "there are too many teenagers" The Internet used to be a space for high-IQ people, and now it's filled with low attention span, low impulse control people. Tik Tok and Instagram are the worst…

A quick read of any old usenet arguments should instantly disabuse you of this absurd notion. Or the old archives of stupid IRC conversations.

The old internet was a space for people who were incentivized to spend significant effort dealing with technical things to connect to strangers, which has nothing to do with IQ or "intelligence" or anything like that.

There has always been plenty of people who are extremely stupid, but have no problem following technical minutia as required for things like the early internet.

Remember that early access was extremely expensive. Usually it was billed hourly, at significant rates. This means that the primary filter for internet users back then was connection to resources, through an academic connection, a corporate connection, a government connection, or a lot of personal wealth.

The quality of internet users early on, if it even existed (which I dispute), was more driven by organizations like the government, academia, and defense contractors.

And as much as people cried about "Eternal September", the internet mostly survived as a distributed place with real communities until the late 2000s, where it started to be really profitable to build walled gardens for Advertising economies.

The walls didn't really come up until the 2010s: Facebook being a dominant platform, Google owning Youtube and leveraging that to try and force their own social network, Apple controlling most phones, old forums dying, and the rise of AWS to centralize internet software design.

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

#785

Post by chasd00 »

bloak wrote: post #545
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…

I never thought of the DVR as a particularly significant development. I thought of it as just a replacement for the VCR. That's what it was for me. But perhaps in some areas DVRs were used to a greater extent than VCRs had been?

Tivo made it very easy and drove the DVR thing IMO. The whole "programming a vcr" was a meme back in the day for something overly confusing.

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

#786

Post by naidnegib »

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.

Funny how you go on about the world ending while merely repeating it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seduction_of_the_Innocent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_Advisory

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26328105

What's more likely? Reality is collapsing or you brainwave synced with elders riddled by post war and cold war PTSD and who huffed lead gas smog: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-waves-synch...

Have watched every generation act like this since getting online in the late 1980s; act like the end of their social truisms are akin to a black hole forming in the middle of the sun.

No; it's just them realizing they have fewer days ahead than behind.

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

#787

Post by bubblegumcrisis »

robocat wrote: post #255
hliyan wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In modern times don't we all think that ideas are cheap: don't we all mostly regurgitate the same stock of them. Have we yet lost the open ideals of university sharing? The core of open source? The failure of the GPL is that you can't force anyone to collaborate and share if they don't really want to.

"don't we all think that ideas are cheap"

No. We don't. Original good ideas are exceedingly rare.

Also, what we really have learned, is that the typical techie isn't interested in pureness of thought and originality, exploration of the beauty of the unknown, but rather making a quick buck.. A good idea will be taken and used without credit.

We'll see whether or not LLMs have original ideas soon I guess. I wonder.

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

#788

Post by chasd00 »

KPGv2 wrote: post #505
netcan wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of this is "accelerating trends." That is, the www was "being killed" already in a lot of ways. "Democratization" and suchlike open ideals had already been receding for a long time. In part, this is because of "democratization" of access. The old web was a self selected, subpopulation. After smartphones, it is the whole population. Facebook's walled garden and other apps using the web as "merely infrast…

If the timeline of things as you present them is taken as accurate, then I would say the www being killed was good, with FB opening up to everyone being the inflection point toward bad. Webrings are nostalgic, but the old web sucked, and there was a dearth of information and fun to be had. I remember getting online and being able to confirm "nope, no new anime content worth looking at today" by quickly checking Usene…

I think when people say they miss the web of the 90s what they're really missing from the 90s is themselves.

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

#789

Post by mrguyorama »

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.

That's the entire problem. The main thing LLMs gave you was confidence, and the thing to understand is that the confidence an LLM gives you is often utterly false and baseless.

Why were you not confident with literal how to videos and documentation, but became confident when a chatbot generated probable text?

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

#790

Post by qiine »

1kurac wrote: post #668
ghm2199 wrote: post #364

My sister, a journalist, mentioned to me that she only uses google search because she had learned how to get information typically only Google indexed in the country she lives in, in a way it was not exposed on chat bots. She often has to search for information like Old govt forms released as public record with a fixed a certain format photo scanned into a pdf and indexed by Google were often on the second page of th…

Would be interesting to know if those same long tail results come up in Alt-Power [0], which also uses Google's index. So far I get what I ask for, but would be reassuring to know the whole long tail index is indeed shared and I'm not missing relevant results. [0]: https://altpower.app

hum interesting never heard of this!
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