Live data from Hacker News

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

thewalrus.ca

851–860 of 912 posts

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

#851
> a German court recently held Google liable for false statements generated by its AI overview feature. The case arose after Google’s AI wrongly linked two publishing companies to scammy business practices. Because the search engine extracts and rewrites information in its own words, the court reasoned, it is doing more than impartially pointing users toward the public record.

This is, I think, a really important topic. As a society (I mean all humans here) we don't yet have sufficient muscle memory for asking questions of the flawed oracle that is LLMs.

We have deep cultural memory -- about a quarter century -- of asking Google for things and, for most of that time, getting back pointers to sources, and those sources being either reliable (e.g. respected newspaper, government website), or detectably suspect (some random blog you've never heard of, known propaganda site, The Onion...).

Google's insane escapade of substituting the responses of an incredibly weak LLM model for the job we've been relying on it for for 25 years is especially unfortunate, because "Google says..." was, while imperfect, a reasonable approximation for a quick reality check in 2010. Today people say "Google says..." followed by whatever the stupid AI Overview model has output.

I get that Google thinks they're saving a ton of money by not using anything close to a frontier model since they run this on billions of searches a day. The risk to Google is that people start to catch on that asking even free-tier ChatGPT is at least twice as likely to give back a correct answer, notice that Google barely provides webpage results other than AI slop anyway, and just stop using Google.com entirely.

Anyway bringing it back to the quote, Google's used to having no responsibility for anything, 'we're just a search engine showing you pointers to other people's stuff.' But I actually hope that, due to liability problems, that habit will be beaten out of them and they'll make a shift to, especially outside the context of an actual chatbot, reduce reliance on their own AI output to 'answer questions with search results.' It's too risky to just show people, who are used to getting back mostly facts, to replace that with mostly BS coming from that same endpoint. Even with the fine print.

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

#852
post #783
post #773

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And make sure "follow" means "buy their stuff on Bandcamp or directly from them". Streaming platforms send most of the money you pay to bands you probably never listen to.

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

#853

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I wonder if there's a way to keep the positive effects of such diversity but mitigate the drawbacks The answer society mostly settled on is representative democracy. You appoint qualified candidates via consensus, and then give them the microphone and some measure of control as long as the consensus stays strong. This is sort of what we have now with influencer culture. The flaw has always been human nature. It tur…

> It turns out that half of all people are of below average intelligence and they consequently make bad decisions.

Worse than that; it turns out that even people of above average intelligence consistently make bad decisions! AND they still attempt to control others!

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

#854

Earlier quoted context omitted.

people who generate entire blogposts with claude probably do not care about substance, tho. before llms, people would have to put effort into what they write and be mindful about the things that they are saying. now it just generates the whole thing, the people who "signs it" barely reviews it fully most of the time, IF they review it at all, proceed to say "eh, good enough" and publishes it.

Ironic anecdote. Although I don't care about AI, I'm triggered by your own carefree attitude to orthography (no capitalization, unpronounceable words like "llms"). At least AI is easy to parse!

Did you actually find that comment hard to read or are you just choosing to be offended by it?

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

#855

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on you know what he means. Blog posts, articles, that sort of thing. AI has definitely made reading things posted to HN a much worse experience (even if they aren't all slop). It doesn't seem to have infected the comments yet, mercifully. I guess for a quick comment it's still easier to write it yourself than get Claude to do it.

It has infected the comments. Our patrons are fighting a good fight, but good slop is mostly indistinguishable from a worthless karma-farming comment. Mods are probably just cheating because there are people with 15-20 year old accounts, many of whom they personally know, and you can assume that the stuff they're interacting with is not slop or is at least worthy slop.

What's infected HN is the same old discourse; old people find the kids social tropes dangerous

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

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

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

What's more realistic; 50+ year olds of today just parroting sensory experience where they heard their dead or dying elders complain about the kids back in the 00s, 90s, 80s, 70s, 60s... etc etc

Or the 50+ year olds actually figured out how everything must work for the next 1,000 years they won't be around for

The olds who grew up in a PTSD addled post world war and cold war social reality while huffing leaded gas smog? They figured it out forever, everyone!

...No. You figured out yourselves relative to technology of your day. Tech will change and the living will figure themselves out relative to their technology.

You're just engaged in parroting specifics of your own experience.

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

#856
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.

Not just reading, videos have been ruined in many ways as well. My base reaction to seeing anything surprising on video form has switched from "Interesting!" to "Probably fake". Novel events caught on video are now immediately suspected as being AI and discounted by many people.

Same for software for that matter. GenAI has killed my interest in releasing web apps outside of work. Before I used to find value in putting stuff on the web for others to find and enjoy, and it sparked some interesting interaction with other people. Now anything I publish will mostly be consumed by bots and thrown into an AI blender that completely divorces it from the creator.

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

#857
post #773
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.

Wait I’m confused- is this because you believe all music produced post 2024 is ai generated/ai assisted?

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

#858
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.

Am I really the only one who doesn't care whether or not prose was written by AI? Assuming that a text is signed off on by a person, then surely what counts is its substance, not who or what actually strung the words together. I'm constantly surprised by this obsessive need to falsify what is unfalsifiable. And among nerds of all people. It feels religious, like a modern form of heresy-purging.

Why shouldn't people be upset if authors are being replaced by like a handful of the same ghostwriters?

An LLM can't convey your ideas and your voice better than you can convey them to the LLM, right? It's a middleman between you and those you want to reach that adds more points of failure, an additional entity that must be understood and made to understand, or else meaning is lost.

EDIT: Never mind the motivations behind a majority of LLM-generated articles, which is to be One Unit Whole Content, a colloid for ads.

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

#859
post #645
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.

Yep. Almost all of the top results I get from my searches are AI-generated garbage if the content was published after 2025. It's essentially guaranteed now. Whatever; let the people have what they asked for. At least there's an infinite supply of old books.

Who asked for this? Lol

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

#860
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”

It's the great filter. 99% of knowledge workers will lose their skills and/or their jobs.
Post reply on HN