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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

#831

Post by sellmesoap »

ndriscoll wrote: post #642
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…

Independent blogs are perfectly viable. It is basically free to publish. What's not viable and never was is to be a professional blogger. At best, some people could try to be professional shills with blogs as bait (it is good if these go away; they were noise), and an extremely tiny minority might actually make a living with people paying to support their blog directly.

I think being a professional blogger is on the rise, the driver for the viability of being a pro blogger has risen. Substack/medium etc. streamline the getting paid part. The fracturing social narrative, (rise in censorship, cancel culture, tribalism) actually drive people to pay to gain access to periodtical writing from specific people seen as authorative on one or more subjects. These subjects that mainstream media are too shy to surface, too dry to feature, or have a tendency to twist to a narrative that supports the sponsors etc.

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

#832

Post by rightbyte »

hnlmorg wrote: post #803
switchbak wrote: post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything is perceived, and our perception gets filtered based on our prior experience. Just because we're not directly perceiving objective reality, that does not mean _everything_ is opinion. JFK was shot, that's not just my opinion. Unless you choose to believe some kind of post-modern crazyness, in which case - have at it.

You don’t actually know JFK was shot from your own personal experience. You just choose to believe what credible source claim. And even if you were there, who’s to say that your fallible memory is incorrect? To be clear, I don’t think this line of thinking helps much. But it’s an interesting philosophical dilemma.

There is an pink elephant behind you. In practice, I believe that at least after the dust have settled, events of the type of "Count Ferdinand was shoot dead infront of 100 witnesses", like maybe 1/50 are fake? Dunno what share.

The faking part would be in who is blamed and what country to bomb etc.

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

#834

Post by jfyi »

chrisjj wrote: post #779
hamdingers wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it were generally possible to forge cryptographic signatures we'd have bigger things to worry about than AI generated photos.

I agree, but this doesn't require a general capability. The suggestion is a camera could apply the signature. Cameras could be hacked.

A camera should not need to be hacked. What do you expect to accomplish by hacking the camera?

We should be able to move certificates on and off it because they would most likely expire anyway. So, you can get the keys from the camera, what then? You use openssl to sign an image that shouldn't be signed... what then? You do this enough and get caught, you lose your cert and can never pass the kyc to get another one.

Then every picture you used it for in the past would start showing a big red exclamation point with a note, "This is a scumbag user known for forging images".

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

#836

Post by rightbyte »

hamdingers wrote: post #714
mapt wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personalization came along in MMOs around the same time, and it was hard to communicate the difference to people between a persistent MMO zone as a "place" where people and things exist, even if those things are inappropriate for your character or hostile to the point that you can't survive there or too crowded for the intended flow... versus an instanced MMO zone, a little pocket universe for you specifically that h…

Similar impact to non-massive multiplayer online games. Skill based matchmaking destroyed the third place that once existed on public game servers. I still don't understand the appeal of an online game where you're algorithmically guaranteed a ~50% win rate after a calibration period. Seems to be selling well enough though.

I think the lure with matchmaking was that when it was introduced, it made you really good compared to before by easier access to better practice.

In Data 2 the skill level shifted upwards enourmously for pro players and I feel also for normal players. But the scene also got kinda lame and boring with too optimized strategies.

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

#837

Post by beepbooptheory »

prolly97 wrote: post #367
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.

You're comparing almost three millennia of text, to a couple of years worth of text. Let's see this play out. Plato also threw shade on writing. Which is an invention that turned out alright for humanity, imho. Maybe it'll turn out that we can push through to a yet-unknown-but-better state, as we've so far done, rather than relying on just going back to a previous state that we were content with. Sorry for the somewh…

Plato did not throw shade on writing. This often comes up! Where are people getting this misinformation? The Phaedrus is not that long.. just read it!

Also it doesn't even make sense... How could we know this without Plato writing it down??

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

#838

Post by alexashka »

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

Or, just ban advertising.

Humans are only now figuring out pointy shoes are bad for people's feet. This species is wrong about almost everything when it comes to its own well being and like pointy shoes - it's a completely unnecessary self-own that barely benefitted anyone.

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

#839

Post by cyanmoonx »

StableAlkyne wrote: post #672
chongli wrote: post #482

Earlier 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…

True, LinkedIn posts were AI slop before AI was AI slop

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

#840

Post by SoftTalker »

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?

Better quality recording than tapes, and easier (for many people) to program.
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