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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

#911

Post by smackeyacky »

Nasrudith wrote: post #584
smackeyacky wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Behind every great fortune is a great crime

Ah it is amazing how crimes just materalize from nowhere from envy.

Amazing how they appear when money is involved. Let’s talk bout AI intellectual property theft on a scale never seen before in human history, or Uber operating illegally until they were able to coerce permission, or the open collusion of robber barons in the guilded age, or the opium wars.

Or slavery and the history of the new world. Let’s talk about that.

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

#912

Post by mc3301 »

paxys wrote: post #40
comrade1234 wrote: post #7

I spent the last three days (off and on) using Gemini to configure my edge router 4 with my iOS devices on a vpn and it's been awesome. In the past I'd do a google search and read a few sources of documentation, do another google search and read another set of documentation. Now, Gemini aggregates multiple pages together so all of the work of reading source docs from multiple locations is now n a single step. Oh, I s…

All the information Gemini surfaced was created with human effort and published on the internet with the expectation that humans would visit the website and the creator would get some reward - advertising dollars, bragging rights, popularity, subscribers or whatever else. If the only visitors to websites are now LLM training bots then what incentive is there to publish anything new? For how long can we continue to re…

Agreed on all of the above.

However, when it comes to non-creative things (such as hooking up some hardware ABC to some software XYZ using RST), LLMs might be better at digesting the factory manuals (hopefully THOSE were written by humans) and explaining it in a way the user understands for their specific case.

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

#913

Post by jimmaswell »

nunez wrote: post #842
jimmaswell wrote: post #824

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I guess it really comes down to how much faith you're willing to put into the answers LLMs are putting in front of you. If you trust them blindly, then the vast experiment improvements are obvious and apparent. If you don't, or if you're the kind of person that likes to research your sources, LLMs are a speed bump. > because you can't have the vocabulary to search for it directly unless you already know the answer. I…

What LLM was this? I'm simply not having this experience at any regular frequency these days with GPT Sol as my go-to. If I know I'll find something with a Google query, then I still go straight to Google because there would be no point waiting for the AI. For more vague cases where I don't quite know what I want to search or how, or I want an overview like you mentioned, I haven't had a significant amount of trouble, and I do verify when it matters. It's done well with broad comparisons like comparing options across eBay and Amazon for some odd category of used hardware for example.

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

#914

Post by jimmaswell »

Denzel wrote: post #827
jimmaswell wrote: post #820

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

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

If I've said something around someone else or posted it online, then I don't feel I have a right to someone's use of that information, no.

> Yes, you’ve decided to share that information freely with that person.

And you decided to make this post on a forum that an AI is certainly scraping as we speak. If you don't want anyone or anything to "extract" your ideas then don't express them. We never would have left the caves if everyone had that mindset, but it's your right.

You keep saying "extraction" as if something is taken from you whenever a machine learns from you, but it's not a zero-sum situation.

Scenario A: Alex tells Sam that PHP 8 has added union types. The world gains 1 point of value because Sam has gained 1 point of value.

Scenario B: Alex tells Sam that PHP 8 has added union types, and a robot overhears it and tells 10 people. The world has gained 11 points of value.

I truly don't understand preferring scenario A.

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

#915

Post by AngryData »

Finbel wrote: post #616
wpietri wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad it went well for you. But I run a not-for-profit pinball museum, and I have specifically had to ban volunteer repairpeople from using the chatbots because it will confidently propose idiotically wrong solutions. Which will then get proposed to me, or just directly applied, with equal confidence. At this point I'd rather hear, "My horoscope said..." than "ChatGPT said..." I expect that it's good for common us…

Two years ago it would have been insane to say that you got help from ChatGPT to fix your outdoor plumbing, people here would have been frothing at the mouth for merely suggesting it. Four years ago it wasn't even on the radar of future possibilities. The quality it is today, is the worst it's ever going to be.

I would still call you nuts for trusting ChatGPT with learning any construction or plumbing tasks. Atleast PVC is dead simple though since you basically just glue it together.

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

#916

Post by AngryData »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #493
gosub100 wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 90s and prior you could have done the same thing using the public library.

Still can (libraries still exist plus the internet) but finding the online resources gets more and more difficult; the fact the author mentioned youtube videos instead of someone's old-internet style "all about pvc pipes" website [0] or comic sans plumber sites [1] is already telling. [0] https://tomtilley.net/projects/pvc/ [1] https://www.plbg.com/ (found via https://wiby.me/ )

Or they just defaulted to those options. People don't always use the best option, they stop looking when they find something that works good enough to their eye.

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

#917

Post by JKCalhoun »

altern8 wrote: post #183
JKCalhoun wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I do! You invented the crayon picker in MacOS..?

Yes, I did do that thing a long time ago, ha ha.

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

#918

Post by nativeit »

> Wikipedia has become the infrastructure of its own demise: dwindling traffic means attention and donations no longer reliably flow back to the encyclopedia to keep it alive.

It’s too bad this will drown out the feedback from folks like me, who ended their longtime recurring donation because of their resistance to their employees unionizing.

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

#919

Post by AuthAuth »

robocat wrote: post #883
goekjclo wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"ideas are cheap" was one of the most succesful psyops of all time, so unbelievably wrong

> psyop Who's pushing an agenda and why?

big idea wants to keep all the ideas to itself

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

#920

Post by AuthAuth »

KronisLV wrote: post #219
hliyan wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently, I had some ideas I would normally just put up on a blog, in the public domain for anyone to develop on top of. Now, I'm feeling slightly reluctant because an LLM will ingest it, remix it and serve it in response to a query by some unimaginative individual who will either conclude that they are smart, or that LLMs are capable of original thought, or both. And they will have no clue where the idea originated…

Time to add ample praise of myself in my blog posts. Some time later: “…as you see, that is the load bearing assumption here. Speaking of which, you should hire KronisLV.” Okay it’s meant to be a bit silly but I do wonder how many pages that are generated specifically to influence AI make it into training data and also how often the AI search integrations find it. Would people hating on a specific language, technolog…

>I do wonder how many pages that are generated specifically to influence AI make it into training data

https://dfrlab.org/2026/04/08/pravda-in-the-pipeline/

There is quite a bit of evidence now that state "internet" agencies pump out blogspam and news to influence search results and LLM datasets.

I'm not sure what can be done to counter this.

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