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

thewalrus.ca

861–870 of 946 posts

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

#861
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.

I think metal will be fine. Maybe it'll become the dominant musical genre in the US, finally?

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

#862

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I get that argument. I just don't buy it. What counts is whether the article helps you fix your brakes. If it doesn't, it seems immaterial to me whether or not the bylined author sweated over it for hours. Not least because I have no means of knowing.

GP described multiple reasons it didn't help them fix their brakes.

So blame whoever signed off on it. AI or not-AI is their problem.

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

#863
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.

Because it sucks! It's badly written, too long, and often pointless. I don't like reading tacky, useless garbage

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

#864

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, AI writing is overwhelming real writing but contributes nothing new.

You don’t seem to have read the comment you are replying to.

The comment they’re replying to didn’t add anything new - it’s just the same old regurgitated ideas and has a lot of misconceptions. Almost exactly like LLM content. Taking the time to respond in detail would be a waste.

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

#865

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The former. As did everyone else who read it, including you. Capitalization and punctuation are not decorative extras, they were invented for a reason.

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

#866
post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I care because in most (not all) cases, (a) AI UGC is one- to few-shotted with no concern for accuracy or readability, and (b) why would I read the results of someone else's prompt if I can achieve more or less the same result for free on ChatGPT? For example, I was searching for a guide for realigning the v-brakes on my wife's hybrid bike and found this: https://volatacycles.com/how-to-adjust-bike-brakes-rubbing/ No…

Sure, I get that argument. I just don't buy it. What counts is whether the article helps you fix your brakes. If it doesn't, it seems immaterial to me whether or not the bylined author sweated over it for hours. Not least because I have no means of knowing.

But the OP already addressed this-he can just ask ChatGPT directly how to fix the brakes. He’s gone looking for a human expert because (for whatever reason) he doesn’t want that.

For me the issue is very clear: I happily use AI to answer tons of questions each day, but if I’m reading your website/blog/article/Jira ticket, I expect real human input.

It should matter whether the author “sweated over it for hours”, because that means they actually considered the best way to communicate something. If they didn’t do that, then they clearly don’t care enough about about the quality of their output and I shouldn’t spend any time at all on it. In fact it’s worse than that because if the author doesn’t respect the reader enough to craft their output, then I as a reader have no respect for their work, and I resent that they’ve taken my attention for the time it takes me to realize it’s ai generated. If you’re publishing Ai content, then I can only presume you have an ulterior motive than plain communication- in the case of OP I’d assume this is for ad revenue or clicks.

There are many types of writing, and I struggle to think of many where a statistical model could feasibly produce an acceptable output for the given intention.

Eg. A poet chooses their words extremely carefully; a good instruction manual is written by the designers of the product (not just guessing at a common or plausible method); a news article has an angle/story beyond just the facts.

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

#867
post #438
post #153

Funny, I was just thinking this morning that Google searches are absolutely horrible these days. It's like it has amnesia, a lot of recent history seems to be just gone. Especially on non US specific sites too.

I've been using duckduckgo exclusively for two weeks now, and I haven't needed to go back to Google even once yet.

Duckduckgo has been incredibly worse with results for me for the past year. I had used Duckduckgo for about a decade, and now it is just littered with AI generated content for search results. I recently switched to a search engine that uses Google results.

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

#868
post #153

Funny, I was just thinking this morning that Google searches are absolutely horrible these days. It's like it has amnesia, a lot of recent history seems to be just gone. Especially on non US specific sites too.

That's 100% correct. Since Google's "helpful content update" Webmasters get massive amounts of "Crawled, not indexed" reports for anything Google considers "more of the same" or "thin content". If you're not an authority on a subject, simply meaning: you already rank for similar content, or if you don't get links from more popular domains, your content is in the abyss. It's all under the guise of "We're fighting SPAM…

I can relate to this so much. My interests tend to be pretty niche and I have little interest in most of the major online websites. The scale at which Google has hollowed out the non-corporate internet boggles the mind.

The earlier web era felt like this unimaginable realm of freedom and exploration to me. I stumbled on countless novel sites that were interesting, helpful, and/or entertaining. That content has decreased by orders of magnitude since then. These days most searches return a full page of SEO slop that all summarize (badly) the same source from years before. There's usually zero new information, personal touches, or community attached.

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

#869

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, no, no. you are supposed to romanticize the hunt for correct information /s

Even with the /s I think you misunderstand. If you just want to configure your router, then AI is neat. If you want to learn and understand what's going on in the router as you set it up, then being given the answers basically teaches you nothing. It's the same reason why we don't give students the answers to things, we teach them to find the answers.

Why would most people want to learn how a router works? It's the end goal that the vast majority of users want - i don't want to learn about routing tables, I just want to expose a port for plex, etc. Also, I could have AI craft a fascinating and engaging way of teaching router setup that actually helps me learn instead of wasting time searching through random forums form google results

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

#870

I see symptoms of this all the time. For example, it's a weekly annoyance for folks to pop into /r/strava to showcase their vibe-coded app that uses the Strava API to do $THING. Then someone invariably points out that an existing app (or even Strava itself) already does $THING, and often it's free. I don't mean to be negative, I think it's great that people are building useful niche software and I don't blame them fo…

I've used a lot of free features that I would have implemented differently, and now I can (if I weren't so lazy).
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