AI is killing the old web
theverge.com
theverge.com
I was skeptical of this new wave of AI and still am but the open source side has been absolutely stunning. llama.cpp, whisper.cpp. HuggingFace and all the insane models. The community documenting and converting and explaining models.
Let this wave of LLM generated trash choke the gills of content marketing once and for all.
If I want mindless content, I'll ask my laptop now, and I won't ask your poor, pitiful click-farmer intern.
The corporate web might be good for buying things from companies, but it is an absolute cancer for knowledge and culture.
I know Hacker News is almost universally at the "angry man yelling at clouds" stage when it comes to the web, but there is actually a baby to be lost with the bathwater.
I've tried for years to get people to understand that this web has become diseased. That it harms them in ways they may not understand as a less technical person. No one cares. I'm at a stage now where I stopped caring as well.
People will only understand when it affects them personally. It's sad. It hurts me to know that people will get hurt. But the current incarnation of the web needs to implode under the weight of its own garbage so it will finally be so obviously diseased and disgusting that no one will be able to not see it.
I say let it happen. I don't know how else to convince people to look away from the box.
This quote stuck out to me especially
"There are a bunch of words, but no real value in what’s written,"
That has been my main problem with so many top search results, business insider being the most recognizable culprits IMO, for years.
Carbon capture technology has moved out of R&D and into the productionization phase. There are multiple ongoing efforts to remove plastic from the ocean and other waterways which are currently actually removing plastic, not just working on R&D. There's also tons of work on how to breakdown plastic, so we aren't stuck with it forever. Mental health is honestly a harder problem because there's less that can be directly qualified, but I'd point to the recent successes with drugs like MDMA, Ketamine, and mushrooms as a very promising avenue. Currently they seem most well suited for those who are worst off, but that is likely just the start.
The knowing you're drowning part is super important. We haven't been visibly drowning in atmospheric pollution until say the past decade or so, even though the levels were absolutely astonishingly high. Similar with mental health, in the US we are now really drowning in mass shootings, which wasn't the case even 10 years ago.
Search results similarly have been like kind of shitty for a long time, the past 5 years at least, but they were and are still navigable. The drowning hasn't started in search yet either.
[1]: https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-...
Next all LLM's will need to find other training data and other approaches, as reddit, wikipedia and stackoverflow will all be dead.
> Redditors are staging blackouts.
The implication that the Reddit blackouts are related to recent AI advances is ridiculous. The embedded link also makes no mention of AI.
I dislike this kind of disingenuous clickbait. It's not worth my time to keep reading.
In a way I should thank them for the early red flag. This way I don't need to waste my time on the whole article.
The allegation is that most of ChatGPT can be traced back to their using sites like Reddit and Twitter to scrape the information from for its training data. Reddit is changing the cost of accessing its APIs as a direct result of this and not really about killing off third party clients. That's the connection.
What's your opinion?
Yes. In a few ways it’s considerably worse. Your website is referencing major world events, including war and freedom of press, by leveraging uninformed comments from the web (many of them themselves written by AI). That would be a problem even if your content weren’t auto-generated (random comments don’t make good or accurate journalism) but it’s worse when it’s churned at a high rate and introduces its own false interpretations.
Since this project just went live I'm still figuring out how to communicate that.
That’s good in theory, but people will use it like that anyway. We’re living in an era of rampant misinformation. Provable truths we’ve know for thousands of years are being called into question (the shape of the Earth). Even people who should know to do their own research (see recent case of lawyers using ChatGPT) are taking AI output as unquestionable truth. Your website won’t eliminate bias, it will only give people more sources to cherry pick.
> Hence, I try to highlight different view points along with contrasting opinions
Which exacerbates the issue. If we can prove the Earth is a sphere and 99% of people understand that, making it seem like the “contrasting opinion” is equally valid and deserves the same weighted consideration makes the problem worse, not better. John Oliver illustrated the problem in 2014, using climate change as the example.
There needs to be a dial between 100% stories about Prigozhin/wagner and 100% stories about Elon Musk's narcissistic press headline grab of the week.
That they make you a profit is true though, but that is both good and bad. It finds your antispam work but could also create perverse incentives where you want spsmmers.