'AI is Killing the Old Web' 108
Rapid changes, fueled by AI, are impacting the large pockets of the internet, argues a new column. An excerpt: In recent months, the signs and portents have been accumulating with increasing speed. Google is trying to kill the 10 blue links. Twitter is being abandoned to bots and blue ticks. There's the junkification of Amazon and the enshittification of TikTok. Layoffs are gutting online media. A job posting looking for an "AI editor" expects "output of 200 to 250 articles per week." ChatGPT is being used to generate whole spam sites. Etsy is flooded with "AI-generated junk."
Chatbots cite one another in a misinformation ouroboros. LinkedIn is using AI to stimulate tired users. Snapchat and Instagram hope bots will talk to you when your friends don't. Redditors are staging blackouts. Stack Overflow mods are on strike. The Internet Archive is fighting off data scrapers, and "AI is tearing Wikipedia apart." The old web is dying, and the new web struggles to be born. The web is always dying, of course; it's been dying for years, killed by apps that divert traffic from websites or algorithms that reward supposedly shortening attention spans. But in 2023, it's dying again -- and, as the litany above suggests, there's a new catalyst at play: AI.
Chatbots cite one another in a misinformation ouroboros. LinkedIn is using AI to stimulate tired users. Snapchat and Instagram hope bots will talk to you when your friends don't. Redditors are staging blackouts. Stack Overflow mods are on strike. The Internet Archive is fighting off data scrapers, and "AI is tearing Wikipedia apart." The old web is dying, and the new web struggles to be born. The web is always dying, of course; it's been dying for years, killed by apps that divert traffic from websites or algorithms that reward supposedly shortening attention spans. But in 2023, it's dying again -- and, as the litany above suggests, there's a new catalyst at play: AI.
It's not AI (Score:5, Insightful)
... it's people who can't resist the siren song of bullshit generation that are killing the Web.
Re:It's not AI (Score:5, Funny)
... it's people who can't resist the siren song of bullshit generation that are killing the Web.
You cannot stop web 3!!
All posts will be NFT's owned by the user that created them not by the faceless corporations! And everyone will be able to trace your posts to you as well! What could go wrong! It's totally not a scam!
Re: It's not AI (Score:4, Insightful)
Halfway true-
Megacorporations have discovered that there's more money to make from AI generated content than user generated content.
Why pay actors when you can have an AI? All people need to be is consumers,
Just go back and re-watch Max Headroom.
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Megacorporations have discovered that there's more money to make from AI generated content than user generated content.
Then I think they'll be surprised when the money made trends sharply down the board. Scratching their heads over why Internet usage has sharply declined. People can only take so much of this before it's just not worth it any more.
Sadly, no. (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems you were not paying attention to the number of votes for Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Or, for that matter, the number of idiots who cleave to Fox News, Newsmax and similar. Or the number of people who are taken in by scammers even now, after about 30 years of continuous Internet scamming, phishing and social engineering.
A very large number of people lean into nonsensical, deceptive bullshit with great enthusiasm. All it takes is pushing their particular buttons, which are both numerous and well known.
The point a lot of people are making is that generative systems can create exactly this kind of socially toxic garbage at a much higher rate, composed of much better spelling and grammar, and at less ultimate financial cost, than can the human turdpockets who were previously responsible for doing it first hand.
These same people don't seem to think that the audience for this crap is likely to get any smarter. They're unlikely to be wrong after 30 years of "nope, still dumb as posts."
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It may be wishful thinking on my part. It does seem to me like this sort of thing can only go so far before sensible people just disengage though. Even that's only 50% of people, that still puts a big dent in the audience. Plus these things have to have a certain social critical mass for the less sensible to visit as well. Sadly though, you probably make a good point, but I'm going to keep on hoping.
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Oh dear. It's kind of sad that, after all this time, you still don't understand what you were seeing or have any grasp of how elections work.
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The reality of voter fraud is dealt with though. We hear about specific cases of voter fraud all the time. It usually seems to be Republicans doing it. The reality of voter fraud is something we seem to mostly have a handle on. I'm more worried about fake voter fraud: the stuff made up by people like you either maliciously or because you really just don't understand how things work. It's the same old: "jet fuel can't burn hot enough to melt steel" or "there's no stars in the background of moon photographs,
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I rewatch of the confessional booth scene in THX-1138 [youtube.com] also seems appropriate.
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:watches Max Headroom :spontaneously explodes due to an AI-generated blipvert
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Re: It's not AI (Score:2)
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It'll be fine (Score:5, Insightful)
Pockets of the internet not filled with AI generate garbage will survive and thrive. The hype will die down and we'll all move on to the next fad.
Re:It'll be fine (Score:5, Interesting)
Trying to "exclude AI" is going to work as well as trying to "exclude technology". It's going to be in most of the tools you use, and in many cases, you're not even going to realize you're using it. A tool as powerful as AI is not just going to "die down", as much as you hope to wish that into happening. A couple days ago in a I wrote a tool, running on my own computer with a consumer-grade GPU, to summarize a page of text per second. Which (now that I have over 100k samples) I plan to use to train a model to do it much faster, and on a cheap GPU. After that I'm going to set it up as a corruption / illegal activity detection algorithm, using the Enron emails dataset as a test case. Should be able to scan through the entire dataset in a few days.
AI has basically handed the world magic wands, and you can be mad about that, but most people aren't going to give up their wands.
AI is here, and you can't put the genie back in the bottle. You can adapt to a world that has AI in it, or increasingly cut yourself off from technology and become the New Amish. It's your call.
Oh, and obligatory XKCD [xkcd.com]
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Yes. Exactly this. Just like the lawyers let AI reference case law.
It's not that I'm a Luddite but what good is it when you can't really be sure if it's accurate. Just like the self driving car and the automated attendant. It a long way from what is advertised.
What good... well... (Score:3)
It's just as useful as heman generated data; if you treat it the same way you would if presented to you by a human: You research the answer, carefully fact-check it, before you assume it's spot on and commit to altering your course based on those results.
If you're going to swallow anything generative systems produce like a drooling Fox News viewer accepts constant streams of verbal diarrhea, then yes, bullshit will get into your workflow and/or w
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Totally not flamebait in communist echo chambers.
Snopes fact checked it, and calling Fox News viewers retarded is 100% accurate, and not an insult.
Re:It'll be fine (Score:4, Insightful)
AI is here,
We've had AI since the 1950's. Transformers are neat, but so was Eliza ... and expert systems, RNNs, GANs, CNNs, Watson, AlphaGo, DALL-E, ... you get the idea. This time is no different than all of the others.
We've already gone from "ChatGPT is going to end college writing assignments" to "well, maybe students can use it to give them a place to start". Remember when GTP-2 was "too dangerous" to be released to the public? It's all very silly.
as much as you hope to wish that into happening.
Wishes and hopes are for the true believers. Haven't you noticed that they're always pointing towards the future? It's never about what can be done right now, but about the "potential" to actualized in the perpetually not-too-distant future.
A couple days ago in a I wrote a tool, running on my own computer with a consumer-grade GPU, to summarize a page of text per second. Which (now that I have over 100k samples) I plan to use to train a model to do it much faster, and on a cheap GPU. After that I'm going to set it up as a corruption / illegal activity detection algorithm, using the Enron emails dataset as a test case. Should be able to scan through the entire dataset in a few days.
Prepare to be disappointed. Even the big models aren't exactly great at producing accurate summaries, for reasons that should be obvious to you by now. Do you think AI is a magic wand or something?
AI has basically handed the world magic wands,
Talk about magical thinking! I don't know exactly what you think we have, but I can say with absolute certainty that we don't have it.
You can adapt to a world that has AI in it, or increasingly cut yourself off from technology and become the New Amish.
Here in reality, the hype will die down when people realize that the technology simply can't do all the amazing things they believed it could. We'll likely see a few more entirely predictable high-profile failures and the world will move on to the next distraction.
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We've had AI since the 1950's.
Railway tracks and wagons on them have been in use for thousands of years. Hero of Alexandria had a simple steam turbine working in 30 BC.
But it was much later, in the 19th century, that steam railways changed the world.
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Abandoned? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Twitter is being abandoned"
No-one goes to Twitter anymore, it's too crowded...
I've seen zero sign people are abandoning Twitter, my own observations are that people use it more than ever, especially around news events.
There were a handful of people that left for Mastodon, but most of those came back once they actually got a taste of what it was like to use Mastodon.
I totally disagree with the broader assertion that AI is killing "The Old Web". What it's killing is clickbait news sites. Slashdot for instance is very "old web", what has changed here? Nothing.
Re: Abandoned? (Score:1)
What has changed here is that factually based opinions, if they are not fitting current trendy social guidelines, are instantly modded to -1. Who/what has been doing that? Some kind of automation, or is it actually paid mods?
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Why do you care what you are modded to here, people can still read your comments, I read at -1 its fine, sure you get a few trolls posting but I'm an adult I can handle it. If you want your post curated for you sure read at what ever level you choose.
Re: Abandoned? (Score:1)
It matters because I no longer receive mod points. I used to receive them continuously.
What is voted up eventually plays into otherâ(TM)s opinions.
The inorganic modding (which is obviously not just happening here) is deliberate, and for likely nefarious purpose. At least I donâ(TM)t think shadowbanning is happening here yet, though Iâ(TM)ve deliberately put out a few deliberate troll posts, which received zero response⦠well I guess maybe it is finally going on here too?
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Re: Abandoned? (Score:2)
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Ok, let us experiment: Most transsexuals have mental illness. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us... [theguardian.com]
What's your experiment ?
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Conclusion, drink more wine. Did you like my experiment?
Re: Abandoned? (Score:2)
Let me guess. You dropped out of high school, right?
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> See? I was modded down. An opinion based on fact. Exactly as expected.
I don't think you were modded down for an opinion based on fact.
You said "Most transsexuals have mental illness" and referenced the Guardian article that says "More than 50% of trans and non-binary youth in US considered suicide"
There's two major issues with what you said. First, more than 50% doesn't mean "most". More precisely, the study said an average by state of around 54% of trans youth have considered suicide, and "most..." to
You're full of shit... (Score:4, Informative)
There's a factual FACT for ya - not an opinion.
Further, you're an asshole attached to very little brain. Another fact.
But let's talk about your biases and bigotry.
Which was obvious from your first post but it IS fun and helpful that you've declared yourself properly.
It makes my argument simpler, as you've just declared yourself and your worldview above - as bigoted, far-right and generally inhumane. And wrong. But more on that later.
What has changed here is that factually based opinions, if they are not fitting current trendy social guidelines, are instantly modded to -1. Who/what has been doing that? Some kind of automation, or is it actually paid mods?
So, first of all you are wrong with the claim that "SUCH" posts are "instantly modded to -1" - as there are plenty of loons like you around here.
Anyone even borderline sane knows that Slashdot has a noticeable libertarian bend and is mostly populated by US posters - which, objectively, makes that bend to the right. [gallup.com]
On a more anecdotal point, I personally, have had MANY posts downmodded when I'd clearly and objectively explain that some issue is a product of a right-wing, shit-for-brains, bias.
As in, I'd link to articles and studies and other sourced material in support of my argument - and still get downmodded for calling spade a spade. Or a fascist cunt.
Does that mean that there is a conspiracy? Some kind of automation, or is it actually paid mods? Are shadowy cabals after me, personally?
No. Of course not. Anyone thinking that would be suffering from a paranoid personality disorder. It is much simpler.
It just means that some snowflake with mod points got its little fashie nickers in a twist over being objectively proven to be a fascist little cunt - straight through their optic nerves and into their brain. Fun how reading works.
So, being mentally on a level with a 9-year-old child with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, said snowflake tried modding out the reality. Cause cognitive dissonance is an itchy bitch.
My personal solution for that is to simply repost the whole thing, while adding a few select lines calling out that, very human, though anonymous, little fascist snowflake for what it is - a little fascist snowflake cunt, afraid of reality, trying to mod it down.
There are times I had to do that two or three times in a row, before that particular little fascist cunt would run out of mod points.
Sad.
Second... your claim about transsexuals and mental illness is not supported by your source.
Most transsexuals have mental illness.
What you are doing is conflating and distorting reports of mental health ISSUES EXPERIENCED by TEENAGERS AND ADOLESCENTS living in a very hostile environment - with having an illness; i.e. being "ill" instead of being MADE ill.
Article literally lists everything from laws and regulations directed against them, through "conversion therapy" to being gunned down. To which anxiety, depression and suicide attempts are perfectly normal human reactions.
Particularly in teens already anxious and moody by default.
I.e. You distorted "queer and trans youth ages 13 to 24" into "most transsexuals", external factors causing mental issues into internal and ingrained issues - and all that just to have a cudgel against a vulnerable minority.
Why is that? Why do you feel you have a dog in that fight? And why do you feel it should be mauling some kids for just wanting to feel better about themselves and not be mauled by dogs?
Why are you afraid of kids being different?
Also, by your logic, someone experiencing depression, anxiety or even suicidal thoughts as a result of a death of a loved one OR even someone suffering from PTSD as a result of war simply IS ILL - wasn't made so by a hostile environment.
They simply ARE. Always were. You have dead grandparents and you're not depressed or suicida
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> Well, since Gender Dysphoria is in the DSM 5, I am pretty sure that means that it literally is a mental illness.
Parent didn't say or imply what you say isn't true.
The grand parent wasn't referring to people diagnosed with Gender Dysphoria.
"Not all transgender people suffer from gender dysphoria and that distinction is important to keep in mind." - https://www.psychiatry.org/pat... [psychiatry.org]
> Your denial of such looks hilarious btw, and the calling above a bigot just outs yourself as an anti-science moron.
What
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And this behavior is new?
Not to me. Modding down posts because you don't like the truth they express is as old as, well, as old as /. Older. Remember Usenet? lIce? X, Y, and Z?
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I'm really enjoying Twitter since the censorship stopped. It seems the people who bad mouth Twitter are the kinds of people who would bad mouth any non-censored platform.
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Twitter is losing users by it's own figures
It's less and less useful for news as the noise drowns out the actual news ...
Mastodon is not a Twitter replacement, it was never meant to be - but the 12 million users on it are quite happy...
Re:Abandoned? (Score:4, Informative)
Twitter has gotten a lot worse this year.
First they let all the banned Nazis and such back on. Believe it or not, most users don't like seeing that kind of stuff, or having Nazis reply to their tweets.
Then Elon made it so that people who pay him $8/month appear at the top of all the replies. Instead of seeing the best or earliest responses, you see the worst ones from idiots who paid $8 to force you to look at their "lol me too" reply.
Because many of the advertisers left, they have cranked up the frequency of ads to the point where it's about 30-40% paid posts now.
There is a browser extension that auto-blocks people who paid $8 and advertisers, which makes it somewhat usable again. It takes a while to be effective though.
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First they let all the banned Nazis and such back on
According to the people who call Daryl Davis and Jews "Nazis", Asians "resource hoarders", and who openly advocate for racist discrimination and segregation policies.
Funny how the people who literally hate jews and repeatedly quote actual WW2 Nazi antisemitic conspiracies and canards, bluecheck accounts that openly promoted genocide and bragged about things like the forced sterilization program inflicted on Uighur women, and people organizing violent attacks on innocent people (which have resulted in multip
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No I mean the ones who self identify as Nazis, and people like David Duke who have been or currently are members of organizations with the word "Nazi" in their names.
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You say that, and yet your actions prove otherwise long term. I've never once seen you outraged at the actual (almost always rich and white) violent racists who used twitter to organize targeted political violence against women and minorities who got "uppity", or the governments bragging about the effectiveness of their forced sterilization campaigns, or the bluechecks literally quoting actual WW2 nazis.
In fact I've seen you outraged at people who wanted to see those people banned, you were outraged in defe
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Pay more attention. Also try browsing at -1, as I often get modded down for talking about woman and minorities getting harassed.
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I do both, and the only times you ever talk about women and minorities being "harassed" are when it's politically useful, which means at least half the time you're lying through your teeth or being a useful idiot for someone else that's lying through their teeth.
When someone calmly disagrees with a left wing woman screaming racial slurs at a black man who doesn't pander to her white savior complex you call that a neonazi harassing a woman. When a left wing terrorist murders a minority man in broad daylight
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This is nonsense, but feel free to provide an example of me doing it.
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I've seen zero sign people are abandoning Twitter
Twitter has seen high single digit percent fall in users year over year for the past few years running.
I have seen people leave Twitter and not come back.
I last Tweeted myself about 5 years ago.
You have anecdotes, the data is showing a steady decline. Although now that APIs have been priced out of reach ala Reddit, and the company is privately owned and no longer needs to publish performance data I guess going forward we'll have to rely on whatever Musk says as gospel.
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"Twitter is being abandoned"
No-one goes to Twitter anymore, it's too crowded...
The whole "Twitter is being abandoned to bots and blue ticks" is silly because Twitter has always been dominated by bot accounts. It's just that no one wanted to admit it until the Net's latest supervillain bought Twitter. Twitter was always a shitty collection of low post-count bots. Hell, there's probably more real people there now than there has been in years. Twitter went to almost criminal lengths to cover up just how many of their "users" were fake during the sale.
Is it really here? (Score:2)
As someone who doesn't go to the big social media sites, I have to wonder, how bad is it really? I've been expecting a botpocalypse within the next few years, but is it really here?
I think probably the saddest outcome will be people who still hang around on LinkedIn or Bookface, knowing they're talking to bots. Somehow I don't expect the sites to shrivel and die entirely, but hopefully enough people will be motivated to pull the jack out of their brainstem that I'll no longer be expected to have an account.
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As someone who doesn't go to the big social media sites, I have to wonder, how bad is it really? I've been expecting a botpocalypse within the next few years, but is it really here?
I still use both faceboot and twitler and frankly they have really not changed that much from my perspective. With facebook though I spend almost all my time in private groups, and I am not an independent journalist or a trans person so the changes on twitter don't march up into my face and harass me.
Re: Is it really here? (Score:2)
I would agree on that. Some old school buddies hang on Facebook so I go there sometimes and there are surely good private groups there.
What I donâ(TM)t do is live there and tell every one what the shit looked like this morning after I ate a Burrito last night.
As for news? No frikkin way get that from Facebook
The Truth is that Facebook and WhatsApp works very well for common folk that do not want to go full nerd and run their own servers. It solves the problem of a small semi private group and quick day
the irony (Score:2, Troll)
/. "editor" cites The Verge for his one article a week. Meanwhile, The Verge is the canonical website for killing journalism. Junk writers, zero expertise, yet apparent experts compared to /. editors.
AI isn't enabling anything that wasn't already happening. SuperKendall has been killing the internet for a decade.
The most important death (Score:5, Informative)
Out of all the website examples, the submitter forgot to include Slashdot in the list. It's the standard once per post, right?
The listed examples seem to be modern social media or major websites where the top-executives are letting things rot. Twitter got taken over and became a cesspool, and so on. Almost all of them have to do with breaking down, not from AI but because of mismanagement. As of now, a portion of those sites are being replaced by different options - perhaps some new ones.
The only bit of concern is AI's self-feeding a misinformation loop, and that can be stopped simply by not using AIs as a reliable source - something that should have been learned when the lawyer cited ChatGPT's non-existent cases. It also impacts Ai-generated pictures, where the feedback loop greatly reduces the quality.
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Almost all of them have to do with breaking down, not from AI but because of mismanagement.
What's the difference? Management that does nothing but chase fads is directly linked to AI as the current managerial distraction.
Yeah Skype's new killer feature is that I can talk to a machine. It showed up in my users list without me asking. NO ONE ASKED FOR THIS.
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The "AI Revolution" will be the biggest wet firecracker in human history.
There is a fundamental realization, perhaps even a split in consciousness, going on right now. One group of people, the weak and easily led, simply want Technology to be the new gods to worship. Tech or AI will save us is the new conceptualization of 'God will save us.'
The other group knows everything feels broken and unsatisfying and is searching for a fix. Sooner or later their focus turns inwards. Things that nourish the huma
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For someone coming up with conspiracy theories, you're missing an obvious one: That capitalist organizations would use AI as much as possible in order to cut down on worker wages.
Additionally, there's an issue where regular people increasingly don't have sex, simply because housing and food prices are going up without the wages likewise going up. That is, it's expensive to hold a family, and thus results in large-scale gentrification because there's no new people coming in.
Allergies to everything is caused
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I honestly think you're a chatbot.
Or the opposite (Score:3, Insightful)
The AS (artificual stupidity) generated seas of junk misinformation will only make actual precise and correct information more valuable, at least to those who actually need it. The rest were misinformed anyway, and will continue to be so.
You had me at "enshitification." (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: You had me at "enshitification." (Score:2)
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Re: You had me at "enshitification." (Score:3)
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Can you just take your mind off of speaking before thinking and just read the article?
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I disagree in many aspects (Score:5, Insightful)
'AI is Killing the Old Web'
I'd call the Old Web the Geocities times, and it's dead in that form for long already. What AI might be killing is the "web 2.0".
Twitter is being abandoned to bots and blue ticks. There's the junkification of Amazon and the enshittification of TikTok.
I don't see what AI has to do with that. Maybe it intensified a bit some of it, but the main features (fake users on twitter, junk and paid review on Amazon, and "shit" is almost the very purpose of TikTok -- brainless entertainment for teens) all predated the AI explosion.
"AI is tearing Wikipedia apart."
No it's not. Here is the original article that used this expression https://www.vice.com/en/articl... [vice.com] and it becomes clear after reading they just made it a clickbait title. Wikpedia is specifically designed to handle this case. Everyone can write and there is no verification of credentials; it also works for AI. The criterion is humans will read it, and check if there are references and if those references say what the text claims. It does not matter if it was an adult, a child, a trucker, a PhD, or an AI that wrote the text.
The word "tear apart" is an exaggeration. reality is there are people at Wikipedia who want to use AI tools for certain things (summarizing), others who think we should not. This is not "tearing apart", there are such disagreement on a constant basis at Wikipedia, and they get resolved by consensus-designed policies and community votes.
To the contrary, the ease to create AI fakes means that now more than ever one needs trustable sources of information. For some, it will be a particular reputed news outlet; for others, it will be a Wikipedia page. More than ever, AI reinforces the role of Wikipedia in providing trustable information.
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Wikipedia was already destroyed by angry white men (Score:2)
claiming ownage over a lot of pages, refusing any additional edits.
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I'd call the Old Web the Geocities times, and it's dead in that form for long already. What AI might be killing is the "web 2.0".
This is it, or more precisely, the centralized platforms that have defined it. Got a niche subject you want to discuss and there isn't a place for it? Web 2.0 was great - it's a lot easier to create /r/$TOPIC than it is to set up and run your own forum for the subject. Unfortunately, once you're on someone else's platform, you're at someone else's mercy, as our recent Twitter and Reddit dramas have shown us.
It looks like the pendulum is swinging the other way now. Aside from federated systems, there are qui
Dhis is just more of the redefining that seems to (Score:3)
Happen every few years. I was part of the original enshittification, one of the hordes of people that flooded the internet in 1991, from aol. It was so fucking bad it gas named the "eternal September."
Well, this is just v3.0 or so, lol.
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Indeed. Eventually it will adjust, but some web things we know and love will get flattened in the process.
If your site has too much crap, most people will eventually stop visiting it. It may take a year or so until investors/owners get a clue, but except for some niches, you can't have too much crap and survive. The investors/owners will adjust.
Some sites already tried paying cheap desperate 3rd world workers to generate crap content using semi-AI for various reasons a decade or so ago. It worked to some ex
This Might Be For The Best (Score:4, Interesting)
If AI makes the internet totally shit, maybe people will stop using it as much and start turning to interacting with real people. And hopefully newspapers, actually newspapers and broadcast news make a comeback where readers/watchers have more of an impact based on how much they subscribe (keeping them honest... if they aren't good no one will buy). Etc etc etc. Make the internet shit to save the world.
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Make the internet shit to save the world.
At least you're doing your part to make it happen!
Waiting for bot wars (Score:2)
The peak of our intellectual capacity now in sight (Score:4, Interesting)
No, The lords of SEO are scapegoating AI (Score:5, Insightful)
The Internet was dead years ago, and SEO killed it. They're just using AI as a scapegoat. I've been looking for an out a while, and while I'm ashamed to admit how long it took me to get turned on to them, y'all should check out "awesome lists". It's basically curated content, and some of the interfaces to it have a kind of gopher-ish feel. Nobody owns that phrase, and there are all kinds of lists but they seem to be heavily tech focused for now (that's not a bad sign, it's still got that early feel). What remains to be seen is if it can resist populariztion; but for now it's obscure enough to avoid entanglements with The Empire. Pray they don't alter the bargain any further.
Chilling (Score:3)
I don't have much concern about the purported demise of some of the major social media sites but the polluting of them with AI is troubling. This seems very early for that to be happening. I'm concerned that soon it will be impossible to distinguish between humans and AI bots anywhere online, slashdot included of course.
What's even more troubling is that these LLM's will and are being fed input that's scraped from all the sites where people are posting their human content, whatever it may be. Anything the slightest bit creative posted by actual people will be ingested and used as feedstock for subsequent AI-generated content. Its seems entirely possible that the machines can suck us dry. At some point they may generate things that are more creative than we can do, and possibly already are in some areas.
Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if there was a way you could have iron-clad ownership of anything you do that's publicly available, and thereby deny it to the vacuuming suction of AI. Not realistically possible though. We are already seeing the effects of this.
From the article;
'Google’s new system is essentially a “plagiarism engine.” Its AI-generated summaries often copy text from websites word-for-word but place this content above source links, starving them of traffic.'
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essentially a “plagiarism engine.” Its AI-generated summaries often copy text from websites word-for-word but place this content above source links, starving them of traffic.'
That sounds like you're describing humans in general. Everything we do is based on plagiarism, from us learning our language to music and arts. You paint a building from an existing building, you make new music based on music you've heard before, you give a stone some eyes - because you've seen a stone and eyes before and now you have a cartoon character. A big youtuber eagerily watches smaller unknown youtubers to steal ideas for the next production, so does the big companies parasiting of others innovati
Re: (Score:3)
There's a specific definition for "plagiarism", and it is not the same as learning from the corpus of human knowledge and building new creations from it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
"Plagiarism is the fraudulent representation of another person's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions as one's own original work."
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe people will get the wiser (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And stop using services that are crap
It will take generations. Look at broadcast TV and cable news channels. Those should have died over a decade ago, but people still use them.
Look at Facebook and LinkedIn, still rolling in the cash even though the sites are annoying to use and loaded with garbage.
It's commercialization of the web that is killing (Score:5, Insightful)
not the old web (Score:4, Interesting)
Google, Twitter, Amazon and such, that is not the old web, but is web 2.0. Old web web was (still is?) personal websites.
TLDR (Score:2, Insightful)
Article incorrectly referring to the internet when they mean the World Wide Web.
The internet will continue as usual (as in the network) regardless of what fancy cyber, web 2.0/3.0 name you make up that is on top of it.
What about Bing? (Score:2)
That is a whole new level of shittyness for a search engine.
I had to remove it from Firefox as whenever Firefox blatently made me use that useless piece of shit, I was all confused looking for any relevant search results in between the ads and the AI generated crap.
Killing Search for good (Score:2)
The BING AI is the worst, when I ask stuff like:
"Give me a list of all the extra charges that EU countries asks for an emergency passport"
It just searches for an _existing list_ instead of putting one together like ChatGPT.
I want ANSWERS, not a list of webpages that may or may not have some tiny part of the stuff I'm looking for.
Dogs and cats, living together! (Score:2)
the enshittification of TikTok (Score:2)
Re: the enshittification of TikTok (Score:2)
That's what I was thinking. I looked at TikTok once and assumed it was some kind of misanthropy-inducing psy-op.
The truth is... (Score:2)
Vulgarity is the conduct of others.
entropy (Score:2)
The way of all things. From Rust to dust.