Tim Berners-Lee Says AI Will Not Destroy the Web (theverge.com) 54
Tim Berners-Lee thinks AI will help the web, not destroy it. The inventor of the World Wide Web has spent years warning about platform concentration and social media's corrosive effects, but he views AI differently. AI has accomplished what his Semantic Web project could not. The technology extracts structured data from websites regardless of how the information was formatted. Berners-Lee spent decades trying to convince database owners to make their systems machine-readable voluntarily. AI companies simply took the data anyway. They achieved the machine-readable internet through extraction rather than cooperation, but the result is the same.
Berners-Lee also weighed in on the growing browser competition in the market. OpenAI released Atlas a few weeks ago. Perplexity has launched Comet. Google has expanded AI features in Chrome. All these browsers run on Chromium, which Berners-Lee acknowledges is not ideal, but conceded that browser engines are expensive to build. He thinks Apple's decision to restrict iPhones to WebKit prevents web apps from competing with native apps.
Berners-Lee also weighed in on the growing browser competition in the market. OpenAI released Atlas a few weeks ago. Perplexity has launched Comet. Google has expanded AI features in Chrome. All these browsers run on Chromium, which Berners-Lee acknowledges is not ideal, but conceded that browser engines are expensive to build. He thinks Apple's decision to restrict iPhones to WebKit prevents web apps from competing with native apps.
Time to switch to iPhone then (Score:4, Insightful)
Time to switch to iPhone then and keep that AI cruft off the phone.
In all seriousness "AI is enshittifying the web" at a rate that we're going to start seeing a lot more snake-eating-it's-tail AI's and eventually model collapses left and right.
Let's be real, Nobody needed "AI" and nobody wants "AI" except people who seek to monetize it, and even then the largest use case I've seen someone legitimately try and use it for is shit-posting on twitter things that no artist would want their name on.
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It is his intention to imply that anyone who doesn't like AI is an evil sinner, like those nasty gays how have the other kind of AI. It's deliberately provocative, intended to keep anyone from actually thinking about what said sinner said.
I suspect he either a) works for an AI company, or b) is an AI itself.
Re: Time to switch to iPhone then (Score:1)
"It is his intention to imply that anyone who doesn't like AI is an evil sinner,"
Strawman, much? Did the first post hurt my feelings by equating me with "nobody" so I just used tit-for-tat to troll back, and suddenly I'm the offender?
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You're not doing anything to convince me that you're not either a paid shill or an AI bot.
And you won't, either. You won't even try.
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Forbid that anyone use a sensible and understandable acronym, let it offend those who own it...
Or, if you need more prompting, just stifle. I grokked that use of the acronym immediately. I won't ever confuse it with previous uses, because I possess more than two functional neurons.
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Did you... think it was unintentional?
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No, that would be you.
Some people are so obsessed with how great AI is in their mind they can't take it when others point out obvious problems. You would be one of those people. You need to recognize the technology isn't what it's sold as, and you shouldn't be worshipping a technology like a God anyway.
Except the Amiga. Obviously. That was perfect.
Re: Time to switch to iPhone then (Score:2)
"Time to switch to iPhone then and keep that AI cruft off the phone."
How would that help? You don't seem to have been keeping up with what apple is doing to your precious toy.
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People believe what they want to believe. He believe iPhones are super-sexy.
Unfortunately right now I believe we're about to get AI judges and AI cops. Good intentions under the old motto of "Justice delayed is justice denied." Instant "justice" for each of our crimes, and homo sapiens should be extinct within a week or two.
Me? I'll go down for aggravated littering with cold-blooded malice. Someone will hand me an ad for an iPhone and I'll throw it in the street.
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Unfortunately right now I believe we're about to get AI judges and AI cops..Me? I'll go down for aggravated littering with cold-blooded malice. Someone will hand me an ad for an iPhone and I'll throw it in the street.
(Narrator) Across town, an AI precog quiety shits 3 gallons of coolant all over a data center floor, trying to figure out what comes after fuck-he-guessed-it.
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So you want Apple Intelligence and Gemini? Or didn't you follow the news what Apple provides on its iPhones?
Re: People do want and need AI (Score:2)
People who are buried in make-work at the office.
People who don't like to read manuals.
People who want quick answers.
People who want ideas.
People who struggle with proper tone or form.
People who are busy.
There are a host of other kinds of people who want AI. I'm in several of these categries.
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People who want quick answers.
And don't care if the answer is wrong or not.
People who want ideas.
And can't think of any themselves.
People who struggle with proper tone or form.
And need to copy an answer off someone/something, and don't care if it's the correct answer.
People who are busy.
And don't care if they get the correct answer.
People who don't like to read manuals.
Can't be bothered to read or think and don't care if they get the correct answer.
People who are buried in make-work at the office.
And by def
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You repeated several times "don't care if you get a correct answer." It's true that AI hallucinates. But the major chatbots (ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini) have gotten *significantly* better in recent months. In my experience, they are right at least as often as humans you might ask, and in many contexts, *more* right than humans.
So while you can't turn your brain off when using AI, if it gets the answer right 95% of the time, that's still significantly helpful.
As for ideas, yes, there are times I can't think of
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I mostly use the Google search AI
(the default Google results behavior,
the Summary and Dive Deeper).
It says all kinds of crazy shit and even
contradicts itself in the same sentence.
It gives me broken wrong shit about 60% of the time.
When it says something correct, it turns out to be a
literal verbatim copy of what Wikipedia.
YMMV.
And these LLMs are not going to improve.
This whole craze is going to be a very drawn
out and painful lesson for the humans.
For example, they have you sold.
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Indeed they do have me sold.
Yesterday I wrote my first Vue.js application. AI (Copilot) was extremely helpful in that process. It laid out step-by-step instructions, and most importantly, was able to answer my questions about details that weren't obvious. Then when things didn't work right the first time, I was able to feed it the errors I encountered, and it helped me resolve them. In the old days of Stack Overflow, the same process would have taken me much longer and been more frustrating.
Did it make mist
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The web was already enshittified well before AI came along. AI is just consuming and regurgitating that shit, so the result actually ends up being a kind of rich fertilizer.
Tim Berners-Lee Says AI Will Not Destroy the Web (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not just the Web. But there are too many examples to pick from... However just recently I was meditating on how cosmetic and beauty product advertisements have harmed women in particular. Easy to create fake demand using comparisons against the extremes of beauty.
Yeah, I'm "pert' shure" you were focusing on the business model of advertising for "free" websites. TANSTAAFL, and businesses always wrap themselves around their revenue streams, but I just want a joke and I'm not seeing any good angles.
"Whatever y
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User tracking and its algorithms already has. There's a difference. Take away the tracking and it all reverts back because advertising won't find the web so attractive any more.
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adverts allready have,
Adverts pay for the web. And also clutter it up. Both of these things are true. Without advertising, there would be very little content that isn't paywalled, and there would be far less content than there is. Slashdot wouldn't exist, for example. The key is to keep advertising sufficiently profitable that it can fund the web, but not so intrusive that it make the web awful.
How do we do that? The best idea I've seen is to use adblockers that selectively block the obnoxious ads. But not enough people do
AI already is destroying the web (Score:3)
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You don't remember newspapers, huh? The quality of humanity's information has been variable for centuries. It's the discernment that is suffering recently. And that I'm includes the process of of seeking truth, rather then confirmation.
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AI is destroying not only the internet, but the quality of humanity's information, as a whole. AI, the fishing rod of the rich.
Bend Over.
You sound like you need a good fishing.
OrangeGPT (Re: inventor of WWW) (Score:1)
"I invented everything wonderful! I even invented Al Gore, believe me! Radios and TV's used to have big glass tits and wankers that glowed orange, such a wonderful color, but they were big and heavy, like Rosie O'Donnell, so nobody wanted them.
So I got one of my bone spurs med tablets, soaked it in Diet Coke for 3 days, stuck wires into it, and it became the very first Trans Sister. I hated that woke name so called it Capacitor instead, and even made it flux. Some say it can go back in time, which I may do
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Wait! I thought that was Al Gore!
I am sure that ChatGPT would confirm to you that ChatGPT (aka A.I. Gore) invented the Internet....
The web is now "Chrome Apps" (Score:3)
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News (Score:5, Insightful)
It's rotting the web (Score:1)
It's generating a bunch of crap nobody wants to read and with misleading information for people who want to churn out contents to get ad hits. It's populating all the search results with useless garbage. How is that helping?
Engineer, knight, sociologist? (Score:2)
So, his stance is it will be better for machines? (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't see anything suggesting that AI will make the web better for humans. Seems like he's arguing it'll make the web better for machines, and the AIs that run on those machines. Well, yeah. That's why us silly humans are calling everything being done to the web today "enshitification." Because, as stupid as it may seem to the hardcore tech crowd, sometimes humans care about the human experience. I know, how anti-progressive of me.
Re: So, his stance is it will be better for machin (Score:2)
If you can use your natural language to interrogate web pages to find specifically what you're looking for without wading through a bunch of irrelevant-to-your-particular-query crap, not to mention advertising, is it a good thing for the human in you?
Re: So, his stance is it will be better for machin (Score:4, Insightful)
If you can use your natural language to interrogate web pages to find specifically what you're looking for without wading through a bunch of irrelevant-to-your-particular-query crap, not to mention advertising, is it a good thing for the human in you?
(a) I did that fine previously without AI
(b) Nobody is following any of the links that supposedly support the conclusions of the AI;
nobody is reading any source material,
they just believe whatever the AI says
(c) The source material is quickly turning
into AI-generated slop, such that
(d) Humans can no longer access original, correct information sources. It is becoming impossible.
How is that better?
Re: So, his stance is it will be better for machi (Score:1)
Did you catch AI DS from the first poster?
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(a) I did that fine previously without AI
Me too, but it took a lot longer and I was a lot less thorough. I would skim a half-dozen links from the search result, the LLM reads a lot more, and a lot more thoroughly.
(b) Nobody is following any of the links that supposedly support the conclusions of the AI; nobody is reading any source material, they just believe whatever the AI says
I do. I tell the LLM to always include links to its sources, and I check them. Not all of them, but enough to make sure the LLM is accurately representing them. Granted that other people might not do this, but those other people also wouldn't check more than the first hit from the search engine, which is basically the same problem. If
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If you can use your natural language to interrogate web pages to find specifically what you're looking for without wading through a bunch of irrelevant-to-your-particular-query crap, not to mention advertising, is it a good thing for the human in you?
Maybe we shouldn't have allowed SEO to insist we garbage-spew single sentence answers into novel length diatribes that require AI to sort through to turn into something a human would want to read. Adding AI slop on top of the slop we created for ourselves is *NOT* good for humans. De-junking the lot and getting the machines out of the way would be, but apparently we're too far down the rabbit hole to turn back now.
Re: So, his stance is it will be better for machi (Score:1)
What if content producers are naturally interested in their own pet ideas and inject those into their content, along with stuff that's interesting to me, but I don't want to wade through their particular angle until I get to the info I'm interested in? Are SEOs the cause or just idiosyncratic human nature?
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What if content producers are naturally interested in their own pet ideas and inject those into their content, along with stuff that's interesting to me, but I don't want to wade through their particular angle until I get to the info I'm interested in? Are SEOs the cause or just idiosyncratic human nature?
If you've never been subjected to an SEO report, I'd understand that take. For a time I had a site set up to support my books, and the SEO reports continually told me to shit-up the content on the site with the typical nonsense. You can tell the difference between a site where someone is excitedly discussing something they're interested in, and a site that was SEO'ed into a dumpster fire. When you go to look at a recipe and have to read about how the family dog likes to accompany the owner to the grocery st
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He's Right! (Score:1)
The Web is Safe (Score:1)
Tim Berners-Lee or Wilber Wright? (Score:2)
Tim Berners-Lee opinion of the future of the web is about as insightful as Wilber Wright's assessment of the future of aviation in 1945. Sure, both are/were geniuses, but that doesn't mean either were at the forefront of the tech that originated with their work 20+ years later.
LLMs web scraping = dead internet theory validated (Score:2)
before the filter was active it was serving 80-100.000 pages per day 2-3GB traffic
after using geo&IP banning automated bots and scrapers: 17.000 pages per day good for 800 MB
and actual tracking visitors:
without filter: 30.000
filtered: 6400
actual measured unique visitors : 500
so about 1.67% was actual people visiting the site...