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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

#821

Post by Cipater »

Retr0id wrote: post #324
sph wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Internet has been shrinking massively. My earliest experiences with the Internet were discovering the world of hobby OS dev around the turn of the millennium, when I chanced upon someone’s personal website talking about their OS, with source code and screenshots and dedicated forum. My mind was blown. I spent two years finding hundreds of small websites dedicated to the topic, hung out on IRC communities with oth…

Most hobby communities in my spheres of interest have been subsumed into Discord. It is yet another silo, but it does feel lively. I don't think I'm contradicting you here, I just feel less negatively about it.

I think Discord is one of the worst things to happen to the web. So much useful, interesting content gets walled off and locked away. It's not public, not searchable, not linkable, not indexable.

I'm never going to stumble across an interesting tidbit of information on Discord while browsing the web.

And even when you do have access to a particular server, you'll often struggle to find something posted a while back, even if you know exactly what you're looking for.

I hate Discord with a passion.

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

#823

Post by CyLith »

jimmaswell wrote: post #820
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.

I feel honored if my ideas are processed by an AI and then used to help others. I feel no more entitled to exclusive use or credit for my ideas as used by AI than I would if I had talked to someone at a conference who went on to be influenced by my ideas to do something good after forgetting my name. The prospect of all human ideas accumulating inside a machine that makes these ideas accessible and useful to everyone…

I think what people are taking issue with is that the machine is not accessible to everyone; OpenAI and Anthropic have monetary incentive to not only gatekeep the knowledge acquired, but also to destroy the original copies, or make them impossibly difficult to find.

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

#824

Post by jimmaswell »

nunez wrote: post #666
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…

This is a conundrum I always found interesting. If you know how to use a search engine (i.e. knowing how to use operators and structure a search query), you're almost always able to find what you're looking for very quickly, and in most cases (well, before SEO), the results are high-quality. You'll spend the same amount of time trying to fact-check an LLM (since you'll likely skim the articles it used in generating i…

> you're almost always able to find what you're looking for very quickly[...] You'll spend the same amount of time trying to fact-check an LLM

I've been an expert Google user for over a decade and I can only partially agree with the first statement, and not at all with the second. Yes, a search engine alone is fantastic at finding things based on keywords if you know how to invoke it properly. However, there are lots of things one may want to find out which can't be reduced to a keyword search, because you can't have the vocabulary to search for it directly unless you already know the answer. Indirect questions such as "framework options to do x and y in z situation in this language". The best you could hope for pre-LLM was to find forum posts asking the same or a vaguely similar question and comparing a lot of options, finding out you picked a dud after spending an hour on it because it's fundamentally incompatible due to reasons, searching again, etc. It's hard to overstate what a massive improvement LLM's are for this kind of search to find and compare options for exactly what you're asking for given the context of your situation.

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

#825

Post by exmadscientist »

jefftk wrote: post #381
frabcus wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure they know about you if you ask, but generally they won't credit you if they cite an idea from their latent space that came from you.

That's fine! Humans who read my blog typically won't credit me if I help inspire them either. (I was pointing out that "they'll train on a version that strips out you as the author" seems to be is incorrect about how training works)

It knows you, but it doesn't know me. Perhaps you are legitimately noteworthy enough to not worry about this!

My experience being on the searching end is that these things are terrible about attribution of where they find anything. Which has bad consequences not just for authorship, but for correctness (which is the usual reason I'm poking at them -- they're being wrong again). This makes a lot of sense when you consider the massive, massive compression that's got to occur during training, but it's still frustrating.

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

#826

Post by [deleted] »

switchbak wrote: post #757
hnlmorg wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tim…

[deleted]

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

#827

Post by Denzel »

jimmaswell wrote: post #820
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.

I feel honored if my ideas are processed by an AI and then used to help others. I feel no more entitled to exclusive use or credit for my ideas as used by AI than I would if I had talked to someone at a conference who went on to be influenced by my ideas to do something good after forgetting my name. The prospect of all human ideas accumulating inside a machine that makes these ideas accessible and useful to everyone…

You’re missing the bigger picture concepts of value exchange vs. value extraction and how those magnify power differentials in groups.

> I feel no more entitled to exclusive use or credit for my ideas as used by AI

Do you feel you have the right to decide whether to exchange your ideas or not?

> if I had talked to someone at a conference who went on to be influenced by my ideas to do something good after forgetting my name.

Yes, you’ve decided to share that information freely with that person. Do you decide to share every idea or thing you do for free with everyone? Why or why not?

> The prospect of all human ideas accumulating inside a machine that makes these ideas accessible

Right now, this idea of “a machine” is trending towards private ownership — an extractive process that does not incentivize further contribution.

Accessibility is no longer determined by you, you don’t have a decision point on the production side (deciding whether to share) nor the consumption side (guaranteeing access). We might even say your rights have been reduced.

It should be obvious to see how a healthy society is built upon value _exchange_ over _extraction_. Extraction typically leads to destruction… by definition.

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

#828

Post by exmadscientist »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #93
exmadscientist wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The danger that's concerning people (rightly or wrongly) isn't that LLMs are going to be an intermediary to your website. It's that they'll be the only thing reading it. No one will ever read your post or know what you wrote. The only consumers will be LLMs, they'll train on a version that strips out you as the author (probably more due to expedience than any sort of malice; it's not like you're famous , are you?), a…

Not the OP, but I suspect no one goes to my website anyway. (I write nonetheless.)

There's massive differences between "my site isn't hugely popular, but I get some readers", "my site is up and findable but genuinely no one visits except scraping bots" and "it's available, people would visit if they knew it existed, but they're not being offered it, they're being offered bot distillations with no reference back".

The last one is the worry.

The middle is... where we all start.

The first is not a bad place to be, all things considered!

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

#830

Post by tome »

bulder wrote: post #754
tome wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Would you be willing to do free work for a corporate entity that explicitly financializes that work's benefits?

Yes, that was one of the things that I hope happens with the open source software I write.

> 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?

Sure, that's what doing SEO on one's own blog is, isn't it?

> 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.

I think this is probably the crux: that writing is no longer discoverable because people aren't using search engines any more. It would be interesting to put some hard numbers on that. I reckon writing is still more discoverable (in absolute numbers) than it was when blogs first took off (over 20 years ago?)

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