Personally for me, it got really bad years before GPT - because of SEO crap on Google. Trying to get accurate information on anything related to nutrition or health became, and still is, really hard.
So many seem to think that there was a Golden Age when the Ancients issued nothing but Gospel, and its is only modern Sin that has stained the purity of the collective intellect. I think Spafford's Usenet quote [1] has been applicable, in spriti at least, to most publishers. since long before the internet became extant.
[1] https://publicquotes.com/quote/448/usenet-is-like-a-herd-of-...
Mind you, "always" here means the last 15 years for me.
Their dumps page only has current dumps.
I know it’s not perfect (i.e. anyone can edit Wikipedia), but I think having it would be a good hedge in case things get really bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
I was able to quickly find some 2007/08 dumps, but it looks like there is a whole ecosystem of backups out there.
Take this quote from George Orwell on the Spanish Civil War
"I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories, and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’. Yet in a way, horrible as all this was, it was unimportant."
Jon Stewart had a great segment on this yesterday: https://x.com/TheDailyShow/status/1792752676830085605
> It will get to the point where when asked to show proof of something, you'll realize there is no way to actually find it.
This I think is just blatantly wrong. For all the hubbub around AI, I've seen pretty much nothing AI-generated persist past maybe 2 days after it was uploaded. AI-generated news articles and photos simply aren't held in high-regard, relative to the prevalence of factual and cross-referenced knowledge. People remember Pixar films, nobody remembers that stupid Pope Balenciaga trend from Twitter a few months back. Nobody likely ever will.
I believe in objective truth, but finding it has always been very difficult.
There's a confusion between quantity and quality. Your skills and ability to differentiate need to increase with the tech - even though consumption is always getting easier. Also understanding the limitations of these AI systems, which relatively few people do relative to how many use these tools now (also Social Media is largely to blame for the general decrease in content quality, even though it's one of the best distribution systems ever created).
On the other hand, if you're simply looking to learn about topics, this is easily the best time ever to be alive. MIT has had OCW for two decades now. I think Stanford has put much of their class material online. University of Illinois, Georgia Tech, and probably others at this point have put entire degree programs on MOOC platforms for a way more affordable than in-person schooling price. The current best known body of knowledge for any particular science is always changing, but stick to the fundamentals and even old textbooks are not going to mislead you. This is especially true of mathematics, in which everything you ever learn or are shown you can independently verify.
Finally, if you're looking for basic state of the world information and don't require a narrative, US government bodies collect and publish enormous amounts of statistics. The BLS, FRED, Census Bureau, CIA world factbook all put out tons of data, often with APIs. If you want the ground level truth of what some organization is doing, government budgets are all publicly available, though not always easy to find. The financial statements of publicly traded private companies are all publicly available. The tax returns of any qualified non-profit other than churches are publicly available. Stop relying on news organizations to do the research for you and definitely don't rely on LLMs. The data itself is there and it is factually accurate.