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

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

#871

Post by kcoul »

no_multitudes wrote: post #863
bluebarbet wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, I keep feeling the same thing once I know I'm reading something or watching something purely AI-generated - that there are good points being made, but the delivery is just so off that it kind of ruins the points themselves.

If people used AI to get the scaffolding of their article going and then re-humanized the entire article, it might be really good, still at a fraction of the time it would have taken to write it themselves, but no one seems to want to expend enough effort to go the extra mile.

With video it's pretty well hopeless, unless the AI helps accelerate fully human traditional production techniques.

With music, there might be a middle ground, I have had some success getting AI to generate good sounding loops to use in electronic music production, but it was just a matter of brute forcing enough outputs to finally get something decent, which isn't fun at all.

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

#872

Post by flir »

shimman wrote: post #704
flir wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not totally convinced about the printing press example (expensive, technical). The biggest presses, with the longest reach (daily newspapers) were often owned by the richest people. What's unique now is decentralized + extreme potential reach. Or it was. Now we have to consider bias in the algorithm that sticks stuff in front of us and is, I suspect, the modern equivalent of those daily newspaper presses.

This discounting how many of the 100s of worker owned newspapers/magazines that were in circulation. Not everything was controlled by a select few. How did you think labor movements in America during the 1800s collectively organized across the country sharing literal war stories?

I'm not discounting it by any means. And I know about the pamphlet era that was enabled by the invention of the printing press, and the profound effect it had on Europe. But what's the typical reach of one of those worker-owned newspapers, compared to the reach of a mass circulation newspaper?

I think you missed my point: printing at scale needs a support system and a distribution system, and that requires capital. The "age of mass, top-down communications" didn't start "in the mid 20th century", and the printing press should not be used as a counterexample to support rayiner's argument. William Randolph Hearst was born in 1863.

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

#873

Post by brandon272 »

nunez wrote: post #658
bluebarbet wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

> However, just look at this article! Zero pictures for a process that _really_ needs it. It just drones on.

Buckle up, because the next phase of this AI content generation nightmare will be articles like this featuring AI generated images of a bike repair in progress, except the bike will only kinda-sorta be like the real bike the article is describing.

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

#874

Post by bluebarbet »

bfbf wrote: post #866
bluebarbet wrote: post #678

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.

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”, beca…

If you or OP suspect (suspect) that a blogger's taking shortcuts, and that's a problem for you or OP, then you or OP can just skip that blog and find another that appears (appears) to meet some criteria for labor input. To the extent that this is all unfalsifiable, it just should not matter.

I'll go further. Even if it were falsifiable, why should it matter? An example: I subscribe to a reputable US publication and I enjoy its journalism. If it turned out that one of its writers had (somehow) used AI to generate their article (which I enjoyed) in a click, here's what I would say to them: Hats off to you! How did you do it?!

I don't care if the article took them two minutes or if they used AI any more than I care if they used a spellchecker or wrote it while standing upside down. Why should I? The author put their name to the article and I got something out of it. That is all I was ever looking for.

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

#875

Post by brandon272 »

bluebarbet wrote: post #678
nunez wrote: 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.

If the article doesn't help you fix your brakes, it has confused you and wasted your time. Not immaterial.

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

#876

Post by hnlmorg »

vlan0 wrote: post #741
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…

>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. Exactly. The shared reality is the experience. You both were given the same opportunity to take in the same information. The different opinion is what comes out of the other side of the meat suit processing the experience. Algo driven resu…

“Never” is a little dramatic. Sticking a TV show on from a streaming platform and watching it as family is still less effort than going to the cinema.

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

#877

Post by mapontosevenths »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #853
mapontosevenths wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

Good point. Humans in general are the problem... ChatGPT for president!

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

#878

Post by hamdingers »

rightbyte wrote: post #836
hamdingers wrote: post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And in the process I think it alienated all the players for whom getting really good wasn't the goal.

I never wanted to be the best CS:S player, I wanted to hang out with the regulars on the server I was a regular at. Like a bowling league or a group bike ride.

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

#879

Post by nicbou »

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…

Google as a search engine got much worse, especially in the last year or so. The index also got noticeably smaller. My 20+ years of Google Search experience are now failing me completely.

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

#880

Post by nixonpjoshua »

jdauriemma wrote: post #674

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…

Hopefully now that AI provides quick answers, web search can go back to providing and respecting boolean and more advanced techniques. If web search is no longer the go to tool for most users, then search can do better what it can do uniquely?
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