AI will kill the internet because it is killing the incentive to make it. It is an industrial-strength example of why we don’t allow stealing.
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, technology or approach (let’s say OTLT/EAV in database design) be able to exert meaningful influence over say a decade? Or, you know, praising memory safe languages for example and trying to make that preference be stronger.
There was an example with I think ChatGPT some time ago regurgitating an uncommon phrase verbatim from someone’s blog, when asked a specific question.
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.
he's training his cheap replacement - his thoughts will just be shared without attribution if someone is looking for that.
> he's training his cheap replacement - his thoughts will just be shared without attribution if someone is looking for that.
So? That's not a harm.
I don't understand why that's a downside.
> It's not a direct harm in itself
I don't understand how it's a harm at all.
For some it's demoralizing to know that your work will be broken down and atomized into language model mush, and the credit will go to the computer.
Yes, that was one of the things that I hope happens with the open source software I write.
> Would you be willing to do free work for a corporate entity whose entire business model is making sure they sit as a gatekeeper between your free work and others who would benefit from your work?
Sure, that's what doing SEO on one's own blog is, isn't it?
> For some it's demoralizing to know that your work will be broken down and atomized into language model mush, and the credit will go to the computer.
I think this is probably the crux: that writing is no longer discoverable because people aren't using search engines any more. It would be interesting to put some hard numbers on that. I reckon writing is still more discoverable (in absolute numbers) than it was when blogs first took off (over 20 years ago?)
When laundered via LLMs whose pretraining destroys all credit, that can't happen.
Ditto for personal blogging and thought leadership pieces. You get drowned out by the volume of AI generated pieces, and any unique ideas you do propose will be presented by the models as their own.
Have we yet lost the open ideals of university sharing? The core of open source?
The failure of the GPL is that you can't force anyone to collaborate and share if they don't really want to.
- E.g. an idea is "Everybody should have cheap housing! Or an even better idea, everybody should have free housing."
- Ok, how exactly in concrete terms do we actually do that? (The very expensive Execution of the idea.)
- "Uh, well, I leave that as an exercise to the reader."
Ideas are easy and execution is hard. That's what jaded people mean when they say "ideas are a dime a dozen".
It leaves no escape-hatch to judge that an idea is bad. And bad execution can only be spotted if somebody else does good execution.
Similar to saying a startup needs to get product-market-fit to get success. Success defines that you have product-market-fit.
We are all horrifically bad at thinking about cause and effect, or talking about it.
But yes, I've slowly learnt that doing anything often matters more than a grand idea.
Almost everyone I know "came up with" some startup, ex. Uber before Uber existed, yet none of them did it. I have personally thought of maybe 2 startup ideas that later came into existence.
Come to think of it, people in my circle that have ideas left and right are _still_ not founding companies even with modern LLM's that supposedly solved programming, clearly there is a disconnect somewhere.
The correlation between cost and value can be very complicated, especially in the chaotic world (or chaotic situation).
I was thinking it would be great to have a trusted middle man to use to pay for things that wouldn't expose my own bank card details to every website, or to be able to generate one off transaction numbers.
Who's pushing an agenda and why?
ideas + execution - not really - (Linus Torvalds sharing his work on Linux and that taking off)
Failure of the GPL? How can you even put those words next to each other? GPL is an amazing success. It took software out of hands of SV / VC / corpo crowd and put it where it should be - users.
GPL gave us Linux, but also gave us Amazon, Google and 2020s Microsoft. GPL is why 90+% of libraries on Github are MIT licensed. GPL gave us OpenAI and Anthropic and this here article.
The less restrictive ~1984 MIT early version of the software license was several years before ~1989 GPL v1.
The major fault I see here is that people didn't forsee that the default GPL should have had AGPL's clauses.
Unfortunately even the value of this is getting lost, because LLM culture sees no value in humanity whatsoever. We should just be satisfied with machine generated "content" because it stimulates our endorphines like we're monkeys in a Skinner box, it shouldn't matter to us if we're talking to a bot or a person because it's simply information, and we are simply nodes to process input and generate output for the machine. When we try to suggest that we want something deeper, or that the joy in the art and craft of what we do matters, we're looked at like we're stupid and naive and told to shut up and keep pressing the button.
"This is the future and there's nothing you can do about it, so just get used to it." It's fucking depressing. Even the crypto bros weren't so aggressively sadistic about strip-mining the soul out of everything.
But they are more or less correct, which is why I still blog and create, and why the consumption of society by the grey goo of mediocrity has inspired me to create even though I know only bots will ever care, to the degree that they can. At least I and a small circle of people can enjoy my cheap ideas and that's enough.
No. We don't. Original good ideas are exceedingly rare.
Also, what we really have learned, is that the typical techie isn't interested in pureness of thought and originality, exploration of the beauty of the unknown, but rather making a quick buck.. A good idea will be taken and used without credit.
We'll see whether or not LLMs have original ideas soon I guess. I wonder.
20 years ago I thought that we will wait to have kids as “a war will come”. I was overthinking and I am happy now that I changed my mind :)
Is it useful or does it make you happy? Or it might even make some money? Nice. Do it. My life is easier.
I'll keep publishing static websites, so I don't even have to worry about load and CPU usage. I don't care who reads it, the value for me is in writing.
I still haven't changed my mind on the "shall I have kids" problem :P
So what if 99.99% of Internet users won’t find it any more because they use LLMs? Then write for the 0.01%. Those are the people I want to engage with anyway.
There's definitely a risk of over-thinking things. Just do things. You're not likely to regret it.
Agree, in general, people over-think a lot, and aren't "just doing things" enough, the world would be a better place if people acted more, over-think less.
With that said, some decisions are more long-lasting and have a greater impact than others. I'm another child-less person, mainly because I guess I'm selfish enough to enjoy my life with my wife exactly like it is, and she agrees, but also because I know that if we have a kid, then that's not something you can walk back on exactly, he/she/it/them are there, forever now. Very different from me deciding right now "You know, I'm gonna have a joint, grab a book and go to the beach for this entire Tuesday", the types of decisions I think people should overthink less :)
I was reminded of a tactic used by life insurance companies, which are more successful when they show a client a photo of themselves at age 70.
I pictured myself sitting there alone, lonely, perhaps without a wife by then (a 50/50 chance). And would I be calling friends my own age? Or my kids?
Although the likelihood that I won’t get along with them as an adult… you never know; another factor is their future partners…
Well, the kids - plus my wife, who wanted kids - won out.
But everyone has their own life, the best one they can imagine, so this is definitely not some kind of persuasion—just a description of the logical process I went through back then.
I don't think anyone claimed that either.
> Most people go through life never doing it at all.
That's unfair to others, of course they think. They think differently than you, and about different things than you, but doesn't mean they "go through life never thinking", probably no one does that.
Which made it really ironic that your second sentence served to disprove your point and not support it.
As I've grown older, I noticed the cardinal pleasures don't hit like they used to. I also get nostalgic at times about the wonders of youth, experiencing things for the first time, falling in love, getting my heart broken, the little things of life.
I've gotten great pleasure and reassurance knowing that's all ahead of my children. No matter how I progress personally, time marches on and I get to see my kids discover the world. If I do nothing else in my life, I would still feel immensely fulfilled.
I think the recent rise in things like Disney adults and interests around video games or popular media (TV/movies) is a kind of biological response. People are free to do whatever they want of course, but I can't help but think that these people, at least biologically, are drawn to these more adolescent interests precisely because they're not experiencing it through the eyes of their children.
> I also get nostalgic at times about the wonders of youth, experiencing things for the first time
Yeah, I guess at one point I'll feel like that too perhaps, but I still feel young, I feel like I have more energy each day than the previous one, and every month is experiencing new things for the first time, and personally I don't want that to stop and experiencing those things through the eyes of my children, I want to continue having those experiences myself, together with my wife :) I guess that's where the offhand "I'm selfish" sentiment from my previous comment comes from.
> If I do nothing else in my life, I would still feel immensely fulfilled.
Do you think you'd feel fulfilled if you didn't have children? Maybe this is the core differences, I feel fulfilled in my life already, more than ever and more every day, I live exactly the life I want today, and I wouldn't want to change it for anything. Even if I became deadly sick tomorrow, I'd feel fulfilled by the life I have lived.
As I approached 30 I felt what I now understand as anxiety. Nothing crazy but you wake up one day, you're a year old, you take stock of your life and see what you've accomplished. I chased credentials and new jobs, did well but not yet able to retire. Old relationships grew strained and new ones are hard to form. Etc. I was definitely more afraid of death than you are.
I stumbled into children. Met my wife, didn't overthink things and decided to marry her after several years of courtship. She wanted children so I went along with it.
After they were born, the anxiety went away entirely. I just watch them grow older. It might change after their grown but hopefully they'll have children and I'll be able to repeat the process (my parents sure have).
To answer your question, I don't see a way I could have been fulfilled without children. It brings a lot with it as well. Before children the worst thing that could happen to me is dying. After kids you realize there's a whole world of potential pain and sorrow that is now before you. You're also constantly reminded that every kid is a roll of the dice when you see others in a similar spot as you have children with health or behavioral issues. It's terrifying.
But for me life shouldn't be all pleasure. I've always liked exercise because it does feel terrible while you're doing it. But at least you're doing something. I feel that way about children.
My wife and I have been together 13 years and we found out fairly early that we can't have children. It's taken a lot of internal work to be ok with it, good days and bad. Ironically the same 'not over-thinking it' strategy is the most helpful for my well-being. Just focus on what I can do today.
Seems like kids really are the quickest path to meaning making, it takes a lot of active effort to try to get a sense of fulfillment without them, at least for me.
So with that comes the flexibility of not having to worry about any biological clocks :)
Even without children I'll never be alone though, luckily I live in the greatest place in the world!
> Regrets are a thing.
People keep telling me this, but after 35 years on this planet with still zero regerts, when is that supposed to be happening exactly? ;)
Are people living in/moving towards a saccharine utopia tough?
You have to feed them food, medical, clothes, life and anything else. I couldn't afford to have a child in this climate at this time.
Yourself, has to be prepared to sink all in to. You have a secure job for the next 25 years, it's a big commitment.
The world is overpopulated as it is, adopt.
But however, if you can afford all of that and can still support the child then do it, have a kid.
Ae overall children aren't cheap. Easy to produce, but extremely costly to maintain.
However, thought processes like the one you identified above are probably adaptive, as gene lines which spend time trying to find the "justifiable reasons" for breeding were likely eliminated.
Gene lines where "I can raise my kids with like-minded community of peers", "I feel ready for more in life", and "sharing children with my parents, and letting my kids bond with healthy gradparents" (restatements of your phrasings) win out and reliably produce healthy offspring. So those reasons become strong motivators (despite being un-necessary justifications), that may seem irrational at first glance.
The thing people are thinking about when deciding not to have children for climate reasons is climate change on a human timescale, not a geological/astronomical one. There is a very real chance that children born today will live through a wildly different climate than their parents did.
As far as evolution goes, there are plenty of species that will not breed or even eat their young when circumstances are not good enough to raise them. It's not that out-there for people to put off or avoid having children due to environmental stressors like climate change. We, as humans, can just rationalize and understand it over a longer time period than, say, a Spotted Hyena.
Somebody probably gave Trump the same advice, and he took it to heart.
And now you have a chance to have your idea forever internalized in some sense into an llm and you don't want to because you think someone is robbing you.
If we’re going to use human analogies let’s start with human rights for LLMs.
Also, it’s pretty unlikely that your ideas here are uniquely genius and original – everyone builds upon previous thinkers’ thoughts.
Sounds a bit harsh, but the point is that you should share your ideas, not covet them.
Look at AI. AI companies throw out their models and let the "community" develop the ideas what to do with them. They don't really know what they are capable of. All they do is implement these things that the dev community digs up and creates.
It's a reprehensible tactic. So why give drops of blood to a desert, when there is zero incentive and in the end you will revitalise the desert, but it will turn against you and rob you of your job.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_history
https://www.amazon.com/1001-Ideas-That-Changed-Think/dp/1476...
The notion that a philosopher would hoard his ideas because he wants to get money from them is pretty much antithetical to the field.
You seem to be referring to ideas as in, ideas about how AI systems should be designed.
Different scenarios, for sure.
Patents, copyrights, trade marks exist because rewarding people for their insights and inventions matters.
still, at least the existence of IP laws indicates that there is a need to reward creators for their creations.
freedom of knowledge and open sourcing should always exist, and if anything, even more important in the AI era.
The public internet is dead, the future is private invite-only walled gardens.
Corporations love a walled garden, what we need is open-source frameworks to create these islands, rather than defaulting to horrible systems like Discord and Twitter-clones.
I'm thinking more like mesh networks. I spoke of Reticulum elsewhere in this thread, but here I'm thinking I'd like the ability to easily join multiple TCP/IP networks (islands of connectivity) by social group (my friends) or by interest (pirate file-sharing group, my work intranet, a knitting community with their own IRC server, FTP, etc.).
Basically easy-to-use private & encrypted LAN overlays on top of the public internet. Each operator decides who to allow in or kick out of the network.
Wireguard solves the most of technical challenges, but it needs a frontend. The biggest concern probably is most software broadcasts their stuff across all interfaces, defeating the point of isolation between networks.
It's failed because of CGNAT, but come back because of IPv6.
I’m not sure why we’re talking past each other. CGNAT has nothing to do with the public web dying because it’s both too large, too spammy and too juicy a target for mass surveillance.
And before the obvious comments on how GenAI is creative, then please do this OpenAI and Anthropic, for your next LLM. Just teach it Python, C and Rust and give it some good books. But dont give it access to Github...lets see what you can do then...
AI companies are also working to integrate training with real-world experience through sensors and robotics, to shrink the gap between human experience and hallucinated LLM experience.
They all have archives of pre-LLM content. There's also archive.org, google books, and pirate ebook archives. I don't know what they're doing to build video and audio archives, but judging from the cost of spinning rust, they're storing significant quantities of that, too.
Some parts of the internet are curated, and even with LLM influence they're still worth training on. I doubt wikipedia or stackexchange or rosettacode will ever cease to be useful at all.
Going further, current LLMs have at least an order of magnitude more computing resources, but completely suck at go. Why would this suddenly change unless we dumped the countless games played by alphago for them to train on?
Whether that's possible is something we'll discover, but no one is throwing billions on AI companies for the hope of them building a giant natural language queryable internet information repository.
It can either examine the ground truth source code to answer your question "How to expire cookies using RoR Devise gem" or it can read docs for you or it can spin up local experiments to black box examine some software. If humans had done that before posting on StackOverflow, the question never would have made it there.
Its reasoning ability is long passed hoping an example exists online for it to copy.
If nobody can expect to make money on the internet, that could be a good thing. But we won't get an indie-web authenticity utopia if people are still incentivized in other ways to filter their intellectual and cultural contributions to the internet through AI.
You could make the same argument for Wikipedia (that webs get less traffic if people get their answers from Wikipedia article returned as the first from web search, which is based on internet sources).
And equally faked by bots.
And the value of the signature is also going to vary by who claims it. Improbable photos signed by a random camera body sold to an anonymous consumer should be treated with more suspicion than one a newswire agency publicly claims, for instance.
We should be able to move certificates on and off it because they would most likely expire anyway. So, you can get the keys from the camera, what then? You use openssl to sign an image that shouldn't be signed... what then? You do this enough and get caught, you lose your cert and can never pass the kyc to get another one.
Then every picture you used it for in the past would start showing a big red exclamation point with a note, "This is a scumbag user known for forging images".
You do whatever you want with your provably genuine fake image.
> You do this enough and get caught
How are you going to get caught? By the signature owner repudiating some of the images "he" signed? I can see that working out for him.
Besides wasn't your argument "hacking" a minute ago? So you concede that then? You seem to have moved on.
Public would know the pics were fake let alone know who to report.
> They and/or independent firms investigate.
What's to investigate? You have a fake pic that is indistinguishable from genuine and "proved" by a sig.
If your argument is that images can't be verified, you are going to need to provide some kind of backing to that. We know well that there are watermarks and tell tale signs to go off. Regardless, if they are depicting real world events, outside confirmation can be used.
You also don't seem to understand the point of the signature. It's not to prevent fake images, it's to tie an identity to images so that that trust can be established and permanently lost in the case of a malicious actor. Your arguments repeatedly have failed to engage with the actual system proposed.
It was proposed as a solution to: how is any future viewer going to tell your images from "AI" fakes?
You seem to be saying it is not a solution. I agree.
Let's also list the points you have conceded by quietly giving them up:
1. Hacking the camera is irrelevant.
2. Images can be verified.
Do you want to actually engage with the conversation? The funny thing is that there are engineering challenges in this space, but you don't seem to understand the basics well enough to even get to that point.
You've said it, but you've not credibly substantiated it.
Imagine a famous photo journalist dies and there emerge "AI" fake pics signed with creds stolen from his hacked camera. Trust isn't part of a solution. It is part of the problem.
Besides, after a famous journalist dies, their work is already famous, people already know it or don't. This is a contrived and irrelevant example.
Again, this is not hypothetical, we already know how this works. Next one please.
Next one please.
Let's see if you can even explain what I am telling you.
What would be the first step to resolve this issue in the system I am proposing?
I've seen no credible verification method.
If you have, then you are the one that needs to provide backing.
The idea is that a centralized source of trust would revoke certificates belonging to bad actors or those that were stolen.
I trust LLMs more than search engines to discover my content and propagate it to users. They might "steal" something, sure, but I'm essentially invisible to the search engines as I could never hope to break into the top 10 links on a popular search term. LLMs can scan thousands of links and (for now) are more interested in quality rather than click monetization or referral incentives.
Don't get me wrong, I too use LLMs for development and more, and I too know how they've been built, and I'm also a creative (music, 3D, VFX and animation) and for sure stuff I've published in the past, both code and otherwise, is now used to create new things for people and I get nothing, similar situation as countless of others. Yet I still use AI, so I'm not trying to create some "gotcha" moment against you here, I'm genuine curious about what you think about this sort of conflicting thinking, as I'm in the very same situation.
At one time, running a blog post was also not exactly trivial, and that would have been a great middle ground between access to publishing and reading.
The prospect of all human ideas accumulating inside a machine that makes these ideas accessible and useful to everyone on command is beautiful, not discouraging. Humans aren't discouraged from creating or exploring in Star Trek because of the computer, but I could imagine the Ferengi computer being hobbled at the kneecaps by requiring licensing and credit for every single idea inside it, and the user needs to insert a coin every time they want to ask it a question, which gets divided among every living Ferengi and the estates of every long-dead Ferengi whose writings influenced the output. We should not aspire to be like the Ferengi.
> 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 my name.
Yes, you’ve decided to share that information freely with that person. Do you decide to share every idea or thing you do for free with everyone? Why or why not?
> The prospect of all human ideas accumulating inside a machine that makes these ideas accessible
Right now, this idea of “a machine” is trending towards private ownership — an extractive process that does not incentivize further contribution.
Accessibility is no longer determined by you, you don’t have a decision point on the production side (deciding whether to share) nor the consumption side (guaranteeing access). We might even say your rights have been reduced.
It should be obvious to see how a healthy society is built upon value _exchange_ over _extraction_. Extraction typically leads to destruction… by definition.
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.
With the not-so-minor qualification that the biggest thieves have always gotten away scot-free. AI is just the international whole-internet version of this.
Or slavery and the history of the new world. Let’s talk about that.