23 ms·

Chat GPT is the birth of the real Web 3.0, and it's not going to be fun

386 points by iraldir 4y ago

healthyusa 4y ago
LOVE It! Turning out pages of JS, SQL, Python code for me. Plus very detailed explanations. And know, it may disappoint some folks, but it ALL works. :-)
brookst 4y ago
Not a super well thought out article. Example: lots of speculative complaints that ChatGPT will lead to an explosion of low quality and biased editorial material, without a single mention of what that problem looks like today (hint: it was already a huge problem before ChatGPT). Ditto with the “ChatGPT gave me wrong info for a query” complaint. Well, how does that compare to traditional search? I’m willing to believe a Google search produced better results, but it seems like something one should check for an article like this. IMO we’re not facing a paradigm change where the web was great before and now ChatGPT has ruined it. We may be facing a tipping point where ChatGPT pushes already-failing models to the breaking point, accelerating creation of new tools that we already needed. Even if I’m wrong about that, I’m very confident that low quality, biased, and flat out incorrect web content was already a problem before LLMs.
- webjunkie 4y ago
  Agreed. What is it with everyone wanting to see Chat GPT only in the light of accessing information and then complaining about it?
  - brookst 4y ago
    It makes me wonder if these people have ever talked to a real person before. Spoiler: real people can be wrong too!
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      Real people take longer to be wrong. The potential volume one bad actor can generate matters; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop is a dangerous enough technique when someone has to actually physically come up with the bullshit. "Gish gallop as a service", essentially.
    - mahathu 4y ago
      You can trust your friends to not straight up make up facts when they don't know something, like Chat-GPT does, for example.
  - starkd 4y ago
    Because thats what you do to evaluate it as a service?
- fnfontana 4y ago
  And most people are thinking on ChatGPT like it couldn't evolve. Like it was statically attached to its current state. They are not considering its astonishing potential to evolve. It's just the beginning, just like the internet on the early 90s. Give it 30 more years and we all gonna be AI dependants, like we are on the internet. On the near decades the future generations will not be able to just imagine life before AIs.
- _fat_santa 4y ago
  It's already pretty bad with Github/SO threads. Guys will scrape threads on GH/SO and repost them to their sites, usually with a ton of ads but the post ranks higher than the original thread so it will come up first when you google an error.
  - Idk__Throwaway 4y ago
    [dead]
  - vernon99 4y ago
    How could it rank higher tho? SO has a huge domain ranking. How an arbitrary website can compete with that? I always thought it’s the opposite and platforms like SO and Medium incentivise posting there exactly via their crazy domain ranking.
    - kadoban 4y ago
      > How could it rank higher tho? SO has a huge domain ranking. How an arbitrary website can compete with that? It's unclear, but they do. My guess would be that they're willing to do shadier SEO than SO will, and any that get caught just stand up more domains.
      - adventured 4y ago
        It's usually temporary, until Google tags the copycat site as a spammy content farm and destroys its ability to rank. I haven't seen a site sustain high ranking / lots of traffic through copying Stackoverflow in maybe a decade at this point (since Panda etc.).
        omnicognate 4y ago
        It doesn't matter, though. It's a hydra. Different sites over time but the result is that google results on programming topics are reliably, and increasingly, shit. I gave up on it and pay for Kagi.
        4y ago
- neonnoodle 4y ago
  Quantity has a quality all its own.
- SinePost 4y ago
  Good point. I was already concerned about people's reliance on Google's zero-click answers as the deepest level of inquiry before ChatGPT hit the scene. ChatGPT feels like a multiplier of this convenience factor, being also slightly more specific and generally more consistent.
  - dheera 4y ago
    There's also just that Google's search ranking doesn't work anymore. I searched "lowest temperatures in boston every year" and got some shit-looking MySpace-like website with a table of temperatures, hell knows where it got its data, instead of a link to the correct page on NOAA or something more authoritative.
    - beezlewax 4y ago
      Full of Google ads probably
    - zaroth 4y ago
      This is a fun example; First hit in DDG for that query is a trash site but at least the data is there… https://www.currentresults.com/Yearly-Weather/USA/MA/Boston/extreme-annual-boston-low-temperature.php https://www.currentresults.com/Yearly-Weather/USA/MA/Boston/... Versus trying to pull the data from NOAA; https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/search https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/search The way that the first site works the keywords into the intro text repeatedly to juice their rank is almost impressive. Can the search engines really not see that the page is garbage?
      - soiler 4y ago
        I mean, what exactly makes the first page garbage? I'm not disagreeing, but "is this site garbage" is not a question that a search engine can ask.
        mh- 4y ago
        I agree. The real "problem" in this specific case is that the authoritative source (NOAA) seemingly doesn't make the data available in a manner that's discoverable by crawlers. The currentresults.com page seems.. fine? It has a proper source cited at the bottom of the data. I wish it didn't have display ads, but that's the nature of the web nowadays. That's not a problem solvable by a traditional search engine.
- rchaud 4y ago
  > Well, how does that compare to traditional search? Poorly. Traditional search is a dumb pipe, it gives you multiple links to review and evaluate on the basis of a well-understood PageRank algorithm. It's gotten a lot worse, but humans adapted to its limitations, and know what not to click on (affiliate marketing sites that rank #1 for instance). GPT3 is a dead end, it provides a single response and you can either accept what it tells you or not. It is not going to disclose what links it scraped to provide the information, and it's not going to change its mind about how it put that info together. This is because of the old Arthur C. Clarke axiom "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”." AI peddlers will use every UX dark pattern possible to make it look like what you are seeing really is magic.
  - somsak2 4y ago
    it doesn't have to be this way. check out perplexity ai. it's like gpt in that it's conversational but like google in that it provides references
  - blacksmith_tb 4y ago
    For sure, though it's easy to imagine a search results page that mixes current organic search results, search ads, and also some kind of AI 'answers' or 'sugestions'. Then we just have to vet those as possibly-dubious-but-maybe-helpful along with the rest.
- ghusto 4y ago
  > Even if I’m wrong about that, I’m very confident that low quality, biased, and flat out incorrect web content was already a problem before LLMs. Definitely, and I believe the post admits as much. The point he's making is that it's going to get exponentially worse, until the web is useless (the "tipping point" you mention). What are the "new tools that we already needed" though? I think I'm too pessimistic in my outlook on these things, and would be interested to hear your optimistic future scenarios. Right now, my view is that as that as long as something is profitable, it'll continue. A glimmer of hope is that once the web is completely useless, people will stop using it, and we can rebuild.
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  The difference is we can improve the AI to be more accurate, and I suspect before long it’ll generate better content than a human would that’s verifiable with citations. There may come a time where writing is done by a machine much as a calculator does our math. But knowledge maybe shouldn’t be canonically encoded in ascii blobs randomly strewn over the web - maybe instead of accumulated knowledge needs to be structured in a semantic web sort of model. We can use the machine to describe to use the implications of the knowledge and it’s context in human language. But I get a feeling in 20 years it’ll be anachronistic to write long form.
  - alfalfasprout 4y ago
    The model needs known "good" feedback to improve. The problem is that the quality of its training data declines with the more output produced. It's rather inevitable that we'll be drowning in AI generated garbage before long. A lot of people are confusing LLMs with true intelligence.
    - fnordpiglet 4y ago
      That’s why I think knowledge needs to be better structured than blobs of text scattered everywhere. An AI can be more than an LLM, Wolfram posted recently about that. You can use the LLM to convert a question into a semantic query and a semantic validator and check and amend and provide a semantic knowledge graph explaining an answer and the LLM can convert it back to meat language. I think people confuse LLM with true intelligence, but the cynics also confuse LLM with a complete and fixed point solution. Your point also seems to assume no curation can happen on what is ingested. Simply because that might be what’s happening now you could also simply train the LLM on known good sources and be as permissive or restrictive as is necessary. Depending on how good the classifiers are for detecting LLM output (openai released on recently) or other generated / automatically derived content you can start to be more permissive. My point is people seem to be blinded by what is vs what may be. This is not the end of the development cycle of the tech, it’s the pre-alpha release by the first meaningful market entrant. I’d be slower to judge what the future looks like rather than assuming everything stays fixed in time as it is.
- munificent 4y ago
  > without a single mention of what that problem looks like today (hint: it was already a huge problem before ChatGPT). I see this counter-argument all the time and it makes no sense to me. Yes, the web is already filled with SEO trash. How is that an argument that ChatGPT won't be bad? It's a force multiplier for garbage. The pre-existence of garbage does not at all invalidate the observation that producing more garbage more efficiently is even worse.
  - jerryzh 4y ago
    because most garbage now are all ready produced by script. chatgpt will actually improve them
    - argentier 4y ago
      Better garbage? More convincing bullshit? Are we winning?
  - brookst 4y ago
    I also see this argument all the time: “New thing X is going to destroy the world!” “Actually it’s an extension of decades-long trends and may accelerate issues we already face” “Well it’s still bad, so any negative statement should be treated as true, even if it’s false!” The article didn’t say ChatGPT was making low quality content worse. It said, in as many words, that ChatGPT will create this problem.
  - soerxpso 4y ago
    Search engines are already unusable for certain things that they used to be usable for. There's not really a such thing as "even more unusable." If I offer you an oven that doesn't get hot, that's not any better than an oven that makes things colder; you would not want either.
    - dTal 4y ago
      I think we call that a "fridge", and they're quite popular actually...
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  Cost Back in the day you'd have to pay to print your bullshit. Imagine if printing bullshit were free and instant?
- JSavageOne 4y ago
  I agree that the article doesn't really bring up anything new or interesting. One important implication of a ChatGPT centered web is the removal of reward/credit to content creators. Now when you Google for something you'll probably arrive at some StackOverflow, blog, or Reddit post where there's at least an author's name attached to an answer. But ChatGPT just crawls that content without citing sources, reducing any reward for contributing. Maybe this doesn't have serious implications - after all most people contribute under pseudonyms, but its worth bringing up.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- opportune 4y ago
  One major difference is that generated content up until recently was pretty obvious. Tons of stuff like finance articles are autogenerated using templates, and SEO spam is obviously not intended for you as a human. The rest is generally churned out en masse at the cheapest price, so in practice it contains no content and is very poorly written. ChatGPT can produce decent quality content faster and cheaper than most humans. Despite not being fully accurate, and falling apart in certain domains like math, it has an amazing breadth of topics and things it can do at an acceptable level. Right now, enough prompt engineering work is required that it still takes handholding to get ChatGPT to churn out content. But given where we are now it seems well within reach for the next gen of models to be able to go from “Write me an article about X that covers Y and Z” to “Write me 100 articles about varying topics in X” to “Take in the information from this corpus and distill it into 50 articles based on the most interesting parts.” The main thing that should stay safe is detailed technical content like programming guides where you need to actually be able to reason about the material to produce good content, and can’t just paraphrase the ten thousand related sample materials in your training set. ChatGPT is decent about giving mostly-working code snippets (especially if it can use a library, although it may just make one up) but getting it to reason through things will probably require an entirely different approach to how it works. Still, because it’s already capable of producing technical content that passes a basic first glance, it could precipitate a trust crisis. I worry more about what happens when people try to get ChatGPT to generate recipes, or give medical advice, or operate in the support group/personal advice/etc. space.
- MattyRad 4y ago
  Agreed, particularly given the grammar mistakes. Although, ironically, the grammar mistakes increase confidence that this is an article written by a human.
jmull 4y ago
This is incoherent... not worth reading
- oblio 4y ago
  AI generated? :-)
markstos 4y ago
I moderate a forum and a user recently started answer questions with links to his blog, where he made AI-generated pages of generated answers on the topics. The posts don't offer anything novel or personal to conversation, as they only repeat the most common talking points on the topic. Ugh.
- havefunbesafe 4y ago
  I really dont want the internet populated with meaningless garbage to give traffic to companies I dont care about. Hopefully google will create a classifier and downrank anyone who just shoots out AI generated bullshit. The process for identifying AI generated content does look fucking bonkers tho.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    Google can't even successfully detect the shitty "we copied all of StackOverflow's Q&As and put ads around it" clones. I tend to doubt their ability to do something 100x as difficult.
    - barbazoo 4y ago
      Can't or just doesn't need to? Their business isn't search, it's ads.
      - anamexis 4y ago
        If search quality degrades enough that people stop using it, it will impact ads.
        wizzwizz4 4y ago
        How bad does search quality have to get before people go back to books? Until that point, it's not bad for ads. (In fact, if the ads are the highest-quality search results…)
Snitch-Thursday 4y ago
Not to be a grumpy old man, but I will say, my known original definition of Web 3.0 was the Semantic Web [1] but I have no idea if that definition came before the one in TFA about those selling javascript webpage controls marketing their latest spinner product spinning it as web 3.0 > web 2.0. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
- snapcaster 4y ago
  Why do people always bring this up? Not to be rude but who gives a shit? You and some others wanted a term to mean something, everyone else disagreed and moved on. Let it go seriously
  - koolala 4y ago
    Language models and crawling the web for semantic data is sort of the same thing. It's like, an argument could be made that ChatGPT is itself a Semantic-created Internet. If AI becomes the way we consume data then Semantic patterns will only help it.
  - hdbsbsisbs 4y ago
    I suppose the point was that if every new tech is termed as web3.0 in the past decade and it still is something out there in the future, the least you can do is question it.
    - josephwegner 4y ago
      Seems like we need a new meme. `current_year` will be the year of web 3.0!
  - Idk__Throwaway 4y ago
    > Not to be rude but... And then you proceeded to intentionally use rude and abrasive language. You can disagree with someone and challenge their opinion without using phrases like "who gives a shit" and "let it go".
  - 4y ago
api 4y ago
I've been predicting since GPT-2 that AI text generators will mean the end of the open web and open social media. It will be destroyed by a Biblical tidal wave of unfilterable spam to the point that it becomes useless.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  Is there a reason AI can't filter the AI produced content?
  - api 4y ago
    That’s an arms race that rapidly converges on a thin margin of detection and a high false positive rate.
  - supriyo-biswas 4y ago
    To take a reductionist view, humans are language models too, so the better LLMs become, the closer they become to a human, and at that point differentiation is not possible.
DebtDeflation 4y ago
An endless loop of AI generated content that gets posted to the web as original human generated content, with LLMs getting re-trained on this content and spitting out more content that also gets re-posted, resulting in a cesspool of BS masquerading as organic knowledge. I'm old enough to remember when Google provided meaningful search results rather than just SEO spam, the problem is about to get an order of magnitude worse.
- Vvector 4y ago
  One step closer to wireheads, with a trickle current going across a wire inserted into the pleasure center of the brain, in Ringworld.
- btown 4y ago
  IMO it's more vital than ever to fund projects like the Internet Archive. They're the only ones incentivized to maintain a snapshot of un-LLM-clouded training data of human knowledge, unclouded by the hubris of "who cares about the old stuff, we should focus our archiving on the web as it exists today" that inevitably will take hold (or already has) in big tech companies who will have laid off the vast majority of those voicing these concerns. We owe it to future generations to prevent ourselves from falling into the training-cycle trap.
  - imhoguy 4y ago
    This! As data horder I see even more value in preserving pre-AI content, art, source code. That genuine stuff will be priceless.
  - williamcotton 4y ago
    We still have curated libraries and the knowledge contained in those books has a much better signal-to-noise ratio than the internet ever will!
    - throwanem 4y ago
      The Internet Archive is a library.
yyyk 4y ago
Web3 moniker is tainted. Let's just agree that version never existed and skip ahead to Web 5.0?
D13Fd 4y ago
This article lost me with it's definitions of "Web 1.0" and "Web 2.0," which are totally divorced from reality.
- iraldir 4y ago
  How so? I was curious if my memory was wrong but wikipedia seems to agree with me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0, what is your definition of web 2.0?
  - D13Fd 4y ago
    I specifically looked at the wikipedia definition and it's not consistent with what's in the article. There was a lot of interactivity even in Web 1.0, and Web 2.0 was about a lot more than just interactivity.
Zetobal 4y ago
I just want to make a twitch stream and have hundreds of gpt bots as audience. With enough energy you can pretty much make yourself an influencer now.
- zzbzq 4y ago
  That's been available for 10 years since all the popular streams were just full of bots spamming twitch emoji or parroting one another's one-liner
bob29 4y ago
emperor has no clothes but this forum is full of people who wasted their money investing it and/or get paid to work on it. today "AI is just spicy autocomplete" gets flagged off front page. For MONTHS, front page has been full of sub-script-kiddie level "AI" tools that are just `curl "{static_prompt} + {user_input}" http://chatgptapi http://chatgptapi` or mediocre examples of things that would have been impressive a computer could do in 1960, but are absolutely easier to do since 2010 with google or other tools.
TIPSIO 4y ago
Unlimited 24/7 AI streamers on Twitch. Unlimited 24/7 AI TV shows and movies (RIP Netflix, Hollywood). Unlimited AI opinions about any topics. Unlimited AI “grassroots” campaigns. Unlimited AI propaganda from every country and military (perfectly chosen each time). Unlimited AI comments, “friends”, and engagements on every social media platform for your posts. The bigger struggle will be for discovering authenticity and filtering the content down. Suddenly everyone’s frustration with their AI generated newsfeed and social feeds will become necessary filter tools to communicate and digest information. Just my opinion. Fun to think about. Will watch “Her” this weekend again.
- qsort 4y ago
  I see this take a lot and I don't get why this is different from what we have right now. > Unlimited 24/7 AI streamers on Twitch. So basically Twitch as it is? > Unlimited 24/7 AI TV shows and movies (RIP Netflix, Hollywood). Which is TV right now? > Unlimited AI opinions about any topics. Welcome to Twitter. You filter in the same way people always have. Studying, learning, acquiring taste.
  - mahathu 4y ago
    > Which is TV right now? Yeah, not much a change now, but I hope demand for real TV/film will remain. Imagine they were able to shit out entirely AI generated shows and slowly phase out real media because it's just too costly. A lot of good stuff (a lot of bad stuff too, but that's beside the point) would be thrown out with the bath water imo.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > Imagine they were able to shit out entirely AI generated shows and slowly phase out real media because it's just too costly I mean, its easy to imagine, because its the same effect that drove the reality TV displacing scripted content trend.
  - akaike 4y ago
    I think you missed the point that he/she means AI TV and AI Twitch, not Human TV and Human Twitch, or whatever you want to call it. The point is that the content will be 24/7 AI-generated
bluetomcat 4y ago
It could unlock a better web without overlapping, basic and repetitive content spread throughout millions of websites, optimised for search engine indexing. I see it as an interactive knowledge aggregator for basic fact checking on any subject. This creates an opportunity for the web to thrive with genuine, original and thought-provoking authored content.
- stephen_g 4y ago
  How can it be a fact-checking machine when it can take nonsense and make a plausible sounding response from it? GPT has no understanding of what truth is (let alone any real understanding of anything)…
  - bluetomcat 4y ago
    That's why I said "basic". It can tell me about the major philosophical schools and the corresponding philosophers if I am a newbie on the subject, but I wouldn't trust it for any deep "existential" or "metaphysical" reasoning.
- iraldir 4y ago
  It could. But that's not how you make a 10 billion valuation worth it. Much like facebook could have been a way to make us more connected to one another and less divided, but we all know how that went
itslennysfault 4y ago
Really wish people would stop conflating "Web 3.0" and "Web3" they're entirely different concepts that just have similar names, and don't get me started on "Web5" (but if they are achieving anything it's killing the "Web [version]" naming convention forever) More about Web3 ≠ Web 3.0 for the uninformed / curious: https://www.nexxworks.com/blog/web3-and-web-3-0-are-not-the-same-thing-heres-why https://www.nexxworks.com/blog/web3-and-web-3-0-are-not-the-...
- iraldir 4y ago
  Aren't those just different vision of what the third iteration of the web platform will / should / can be? Should I call mine 3.0.0 to differenciate it and introduce some proper semver whilst I'm at it?
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  Welcome to the social media iterated world where ignorant (or uncaring) people think they've coined a new term and don't realize, or care, that they're repurposing a term others are already using for another purpose. It's incredibly annoying but no matter how hard you push back the online majority zeitgeist quickly overwhelms the previous meaning.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  I hear you. But as someone who remains butthurt that "crypto" has been redefined to mean "cryptocurrency" rather than "cryptography", all I can say is you're farting against the wind here.
chrisbrandow 4y ago
I think that his diagnosis of Adtech is not quite grim enough. Knowing that advertisers can uniquely identify most users, pretty reliably, not only will the chat bots be able to produce responsive texts, they will be continually training on each individual’s unique psychology and vulnerabilities. It’s gonna be a gas!
sys32768 4y ago
I thought the fun part was going to be that Chat GPT would condense those bloated SEO preambles into neat paragraphs. I can picture a Chat GPT browser that transforms those pages into their essential meaning, if they have any. I think too there should be standards and rules regarding affiliate content. For example, affiliate review sites. If the reviewer cannot prove they actually purchased the product and used it, their reviews are filtered out, SEO rankings be damned. For now I'm mostly excited about Chat GPT going into role playing game engines and NPCs, and as a sort of dynamic encyclopedia to aid my research and learning.
bloqs 4y ago
This is the best time to use LLMs before the enshittening happens
isthisthingon99 4y ago
Stop guys, stop. Be young in your mind. Be young. How are young people interpreting this? "Oh wow, I can get it to write or help edit essays" "I can use it as something to bounce ideas off of" "I can use it to take ideas from my head into the digital realm." Stop being old people.
- altdataseller 4y ago
  Or just not play the game. If it's already this popular/hyped, it means it's too late to create a product and profit from it. Find the next big thing before it's overhyped
  - isthisthingon99 4y ago
    If you did not buy Tesla at the absolute bottom in 2000-whatever, could you still have been a multi-millionaire? So why do you need to "be first"?
    - altdataseller 4y ago
      You are comparing 2 different things. Buying a stock is instant. Starting a startup takes years and incumbents already have the same advantage as you. Also, you can sell a stock whenever - liquidity is easy. You can't just throw your hands up and give up a startup that easily, especially if you take funding.
      - isthisthingon99 4y ago
        Do you really go through life thinking of reasons why you shouldn't do a thing? How about "if X did it, I can too." Which way would you prefer to live?
        altdataseller 4y ago
        Neither? You think of the pros and cons and take it from there.
timcavel 4y ago
[dead]
px43 4y ago
Imagine a world where the only content you see is from publishers that you trust, and that your friends trust, and their friends, to maybe 4 or 5 hops or so, and the feed was weighted by how much they are trusted by your particular social graph. If you start seeing spammy content, you downvote it, and your trust level from that part of your social graph drops, and they are less likely to be able to publish things that you see. If you discover some high quality content, and you promote it, then your trust level will improve in your part of the social graph. I'd say that the actual web3 (they crypto kind) is largely about reclaiming identity from centralized identity providers. Any time you publish anything, you're signing that publication with a key that only you hold. Once all content on the internet is signed, these trust graphs for delivering quality content and filtering out spam become trivial to build. In this world, it doesn't matter if content is generated with ChatGPT, or content farms, or spammers. If the content is good, you'll see it, and if it's not, then you won't.
- idopmstuff 4y ago
  The problem is this is how social networks work - what you're describing is the classic social media bubble outcome. Everybody and their networks upvotes content from publishers they trust and downvotes content from publishers they don't but half of them trust Fox News and half trust CNN. Then of course the most active engagers/upvoters are the craziest ones, and they're furiously upvoting extreme content.
  - whamlastxmas 4y ago
    I think the extension of this concept is that if I downvote the crazy people then their voting habits don’t impact what I see
- nebula8804 4y ago
  What happens if the majority of your group is trusting fake news aka people who exclusively listen to sources like NewsMax. Do you just abandon these people as trapped?
  - 4y ago
misto 4y ago
This might just push users to more narrower content options. ”ChatGPT FREE Verified”, anyone? Has its ups and downs I guess, but already before ChatGPT I had grown quite a filter for estimating the trustworthiness of a site. I guess the BLOCK -rules just keep on piling..
latchkey 4y ago
PoW mining is about validation of transactions and getting paid by the network and the users for performing this service. As a miner, you're doing work, that you are paid for, and you don't even know your customers or any details about them. This is a novel concept. I see web3, from the business point of view, as being that whole concept. It won't just be PoW mining, but there will be cases where protocols are developed, that anyone can participate in, and incentives are developed to encourage that participation. web3 will morph into many things. It will be painful to watch and there will be many mistakes along the way, but I'm glad it is happening. I like to be positive about people experimenting with new ways of doing things.
LanceJones 4y ago
Perhaps "certified AI-free" zones/apps/websites will become a place of solace.
tyingq 4y ago
May not be terrible that something pushes Google and others to re-think how to bubble up actually good content.
labrador 4y ago
I made this comment on a post that got flagged for reasons I don't understand. I don't want to feel like I wasted my time so I'm re-commenting here: I was watching "HyperNormalisation" by Adam Curtis for the second time. In his segment on Eliza, an early example of a chat bot, I realized that Curtis makes a mistake in his interpretation of Eliza. For Curtis it's narcissism that makes Eliza attractive. Curtis levels the charge that Westerners are individualistic and self-centered often. But when an interview with the creator Joseph Weizenbaum is shown starting at 01hr:22min, he never says that. He relates how his secretary took to it, and even though she knew it was a primitive computer program, she wanted some privacy while she used it. Weizenbaum was puzzled by that, but then the secretary (or possibly another woman) says Eliza doesn't judge me and it doesn't try to have sex with me. What jumped out at me was that Weizenbaum's secretary was using Eliza as a thinking tool to clarify her thoughts. Most high school graduates in America don't learn critical thinking skills as far as I can tell. Eliza is a useful tool because it encourages critical thinking and second order thinking by asking questions and reflecting back answers and asking questions in another way. The secretary didn't want to use Eliza because she was a narcissist, she wanted to talk through some sensitive issues with what she knew was a dumb program so she could try and resolve them. That's how I feel about ChatGPT so far. It's a great thinking tool. Someone to bounce ideas around with. Of course, I know it's a dumb computer program and it makes mistakes, but it's still a cool new tool to have in the toolbox. HyperNormalisation by Adam Curtis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS_c2qqA-6Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS_c2qqA-6Y Eliza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
- freejazz 4y ago
  This is insane. People aren't going to use chatGPT to think, they are going to use it for the opposite. That chatGPT doesn't even know when it's wrong is why this is a problem. The vast majority of projects I've seen purport to replace your needs for other things (developers, lawyers, etc) but not being a domain expert, any such user is not going to be aware of the significant flaws chatGPT has in its answers. Heck, someone posted a chatGPT bot that is supposed to digest and make understandable legal contracts, but the bot couldn't get the basics of the ycombinator SAFE right and had the directionality of the share assignment completely opposite what it should be. This is a fatal mistake that a layman wont realize.
konart 4y ago
>it's not going to be fun Depends on how you define "fun". Just a few days ago this russian guy defended GPT written diploma and now we have a shitshow going on. Really fun to watch. https://twitter.com/biblikz/status/1620451262822252544 https://twitter.com/biblikz/status/1620451262822252544 PS: well, the diploma was not written entirely by GPT, but nevertheless...
hnthrowaway0315 4y ago
Although ChatGPT is going to worsen the problem of garbage information online, I don't think it affects anyone who is willing to learn slowly and deeply. We are already at the point that only certain books and videos are good references and their golden status is not going to wear down by time.
throwaway4aday 4y ago
Too late, ChatGPT isn't going to be the driving force behind inaccurate content on the web, we were there long ago. Google search is almost useless now for anything outside of "places to eat near me" and the blogosphere died long ago and was replaced by ad-rent-seeking recipe sites. All the value has moved on from web pages to small forum enclaves and video. There is a bright future though in direct real time communication. There's also a new search and indexing revolution waiting in the wings for whoever wants to lead the charge on distilling or better facilitating those conversations. LLMs will play a part in that if they can get the data of the quality question response interactions and use them to fine tune the models.
- beezlewax 4y ago
  Google has gotten progressively worse year in year out. Its promoting farmed content of stackoverflow posts riddled with ads over the actual posts. It's making money that way sure but at the dismay if it's users. This I think opens up the space for more niche search engines that actually work for what you're looking for. I'd take a search based off of only indexing sites I actually care about over the dribble it's peddling any day. Bring on the competition
  - mmkos 4y ago
    100% agree on the point that there's now space for niche search engines. I don't think a search engine for everything is a viable goal (there's too much crap to sift through), but I do think there's space for smaller search engines for particular domains. Even better, make them somewhat curated by domain experts so that users are served high quality content and not just low quality sites that magically rank high because they managed to tick all boxes in the ranking algorithm.
  - CamperBob2 4y ago
    Bring on the competition And this time, don't be afraid to charge for it. Because we know what "free" is worth now.
- jsemrau 4y ago
  Lunchclub is just that. It is really nice to talk to real people in an intimate 1:1 rather than the cocktail party of the modern Internet.
spandrew 4y ago
"The Web 2.0 changed the way we related to that information by making it interactive." Web 2.0 was about users generating content on shared platforms (social networks). It wasn't about making it interactive — that is just a feature. The benefit of 2.0 was scaling-up businesses was easier than ever with new web tech. This spiralled directly into the start-up boom of the last decade. Not sure I can take an article seriously that doesn't even understand its basic premises.
varelse 4y ago
[dead]
myth_drannon 4y ago
We will need something similar to the Biblical flood to flush everything away. And restart from local trust islands similar to what we had in 80's-90's with BBSs and possibly Fidonet. I don't know how it's going to work but I just don't see any future in Internet in its current commercial form.
- avitous 4y ago
  Herbert's "Butlerian Jihad" keeps coming to mind; I wonder if something similar lies in our future.
  - snapcaster 4y ago
    Hopefully, i'm more worried that in the real world there won't be a Serena Butler to lead us
zquzra 4y ago
All the criticisms I see directed at ChatGPT are met with "the web already sucks". So what revolution awaits us? I just think we're getting closer and closer to a boring dystopia.
crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
I'm so excited about ChatGPT making it much easier to spot people who went through an education system oriented toward learning versus the sit-in-class types. Bring on the fall of the bullshit tower coated in ivory! Hello, schools that help people learn about the Omniverse by playing with the Omniverse! This is the return of discipline.
ChikkaChiChi 4y ago
This is a case of a solution inventing the problem it was meant to solve. AI generated content is going to make search engine results effectively useless. The only reasonable conclusion to that end is that AI will be needed to answer the questions we used to rely on Google Search for. Has there ever been a situation like this before?
marban 4y ago
My biggest concern is the rise of the drag & drop content grifters — Zero-knowledge individuals that can pollute the Web at scale that was previously only possible for a much smaller group. E.g. Look at the amount of TikTok how-tos for creating & selling generated children's books on Amazon.
JohnFen 4y ago
The current web is already 90% worthless garbage. Everything I've heard from the Web 3 crowd makes me think that Web 3 will be 99% worthless garbage. So I guess Chat GPT will make that 100%? I already think the web is, if not dead, then doomed in terms of the value it used to provide. My fear about things like Chat GPT is that it will have a similar effect on things outside the web as well. But we'll see. I really wish I felt more optimistic about all this, but the trendlines don't encourage that.
kefka_p 4y ago
I’ve only had time for a cursory glance at this writing, but let me thank you for sounding the horn on the on Web 3.0. It was bad enough adding Ajax calls to websites and calling it Web 2.0. At least that had something to do with http, ECMA script, html, and web-related tech.
pupppet 4y ago
I say fantastic, bring it on. This might be the final nail in the coffin of automated gatekeepers like Google and social networks, and back to person-powered indexes.
boxingdog 4y ago
[dead]
ozten 4y ago
Each webpage should express a piece of metadata that is content-quality. * primary - The content on this page is a primary source * secondary - The content on this page is high quality, but which is primarily research based and may thus be tainted by unknown sources * bot - The content on this page is mostly automatically generated by one or more ML models with some human curated improvements HTML elements can also have data-content-quality to override the page level metadata. So if you have a primarily sourced paragraph. Search engines can index this signal. Sites that claim primary, but which frequently are provably wrong or bot generated can be penalized. (edited for formatting)
- chias 4y ago
  If I operate a webpage, and I incorporate this content quality metadata tag, why would I put anything other than "highest possible quality"?
  - jsemrau 4y ago
    And who judges the quality? one man's trash is another man's treasure .
    - ozten 4y ago
      Search engines are already judging content quality by dwell time and many other factors. Do they have perfect judgement, no. As long as we have centralized search engines than we have specific judges of quality.
      - jsemrau 4y ago
        We used to live in a world where the pagerank would be an indicator for quality. Yet, as we are now accessing the web through a pre-filtered aggregate on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and also YN, the use case for Google has fundamentally changed
    - sorry_outta_gas 4y ago
      Exactly, bro. Quality is subjective, so it's up to the owner of the website to determine the quality of their own content based on their own standards and goals.
seydor 4y ago
No offense but in a world that includes video why will advertisers pay for text? This article is less thought-out than clickbait ads
- iraldir 4y ago
  First because it's not an either-or situation. Marketing works by finding different channels and approaches. You could say "in a world with video, why would people pay for an ad on a bus stop" with the same logic. Secondly because advertisement is about trust. For a while, the ads on TV where all the rage because, if it's on TV then it's a proper brand. If in the short term future, like I postulate, the web becomes unreadable SEO filled trash, and people access it via Chat-GPT like technologies, then there will be an element of trust between the bot and the user. And that trust can be exploited, more or less subtly. So why would they not take advantage of it?
EGreg 4y ago
This is ridiculous. Why does everyone try to claim "Web 3.0" for over a decade? Tim Berners-Lee said Web 3.0 was the semantic web, and allowing others to query data with SPARQL etc. The Ethereum community said Web 3.0 involved signing transactions with private keys and storing data on blockchains rather than centralized servers. Now someone is claiming that ChatGPT is the birth of the "real" Web 3.0 -- okay, first of all, chat has NOTHING to do with web. Web means hyperlinks and at the very least letting a user move between domains that serve content, and hopefully increasing interoperability using standard approaches like REST and JSON-LD, as opposed to a centralized provider that is owned by a tiny number of people, and relies on with Big Tech cloud providers (Microsoft). This isn't even a web, let alone open. And secondly, why not already move on to Web 4.0? It's been a decade or more. Everyone is "denying" the last thing was Web 3.0 It's ridiculous. We have a semantic web now (Open Graph, for instance, or schema.org, and more). We have significant adoption also of "Web3"... crypto has co-opted the word cryptography, and Web 3... we just have to accept it https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/nov/18/crypto-cryptocurrency-cryptographers https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/nov/18/crypto-cr... ... many people on HN hate crypto so much that they think the Web3 term hasn't already been solidified, whereas somehow they do think that the word crypto has solidified to mean cryptocurrency rather than cryptography. Jack Dorsey is using the new OPEN technologies from Microsoft / Sidetree protocol / DID standards to build "Web5", and he thankfully gave up his ideas of trademarking it: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/30/jack-dorseys-tbd-is-looking-to-trademark-web5-to-deter-its-misuse/ https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/30/jack-dorseys-tb... It's time to move on. Build applications that combine all these different tools. The Web has come a long way now. It can do PaymentRequest. It can do WebRTC. It can do Web Push. Just use the tools. But definitely ChatGPT currently is everything that is OPPOSITE of what "The Web" was supposed to be. Maybe if an open source version comes out, and obliterates all current systems of content and reputation on the current web, then we can talk about "a new (dystopian) web", a kind of dark forest with chatbot swarms descending to shout down / annoy / destroy reputations of individuals and forums who espouse an inconvenient point of view. There is obviously going to be an arms race of bullshit drowning out actual thoughtful posting. But right now it's not even web.
1970-01-01 4y ago
This is a carry-over bug from Web 2.0..
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
andai 4y ago
Re: An electronic version of Tom Riddle's diary >“Ginny!" said Mr. Weasley, flabbergasted. "Haven't I taught you anything? What have I always told you? Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain?” ― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
- alexchantavy 4y ago
  I came here searching for this comment :-) Expressed in terms of Harry Potter, I guess ChatGPT is kind of magical.
clarge1120 4y ago
The solution for Google is to filter generated content, period. That will lead to an arms race of sorts, similar to the SEO keyword arms race. The SEO arms race resulted in keyword relevant, but unoriginal minimally useful content. The problem for Google is that their advertisers love generated content.
blueyes 4y ago
Surprised that such a poorly written article as this gets so much attention on HN. Trite thoughts, misspelled words, poorly defined concepts and pessimism that can't back itself up.
BiteCode_dev 4y ago
Well, this means that content curators and good content producers will gain in value. The hard part will be to stand out, and to create things that AI can't easily reproduce, such as linking content to a service. I think it's a good news for actual high quality original creator: they will rise to the sun.
zackmorris 4y ago
I agree with the headline and am glad that someone finally said it. Web 1.0 was great: designed by academics, it popularized idempotence, declarative programming, scalability and ushered in the Long Now so every year since has basically been 1995 repeated. Web 2.0 never happened: it ended up being a trap that swallowed the best minds of a generation to web (ad) agencies with countless millions of hours lost fighting CSS rules and Javascript build tools to replicate functionality that was readily available in 1980s MS Word and desktop publishing apps. It should have been something like single-threaded blocking logic distributed on Paxos/Raft with an event database like Firebase/RethinkDB and layout rules inspired by iOS's auto layout constraint solver with progressive enhancement via HTMX, finally making #nocode a reality. Oh well. Web 3.0 is kind of like the final sequel of a trilogy: just when everyone gets onboard, the original premise gets lost to merchandizing and people start to wish it would just go away. Entering the knee of the curve of the Singularity, it will be difficult to spot the boundary between the objective reality of reason and the subjective reality of meaning. We'll be inundated by never-ending streams of infotainment wedged between vast swaths of increasingly pointless work. Looking forward: the luddites will come out after the 2024 election and we'll see vast effort aimed at stomping out any whiff of rebel resistance. Huge propaganda against UBI, even more austerity measures to keep the rabble in line, the first trillionaire this decade. Meanwhile the real work of automating the drudgery to restore some semblance of disposable income and leisure time will fall on teenagers living in their parents' basement. Thankfully Gen X and Millenials are transitioning into positions of political power. There is still hope, however faint, that we can avoid falling to tech illiteracy. But currently most indicators point to calamity after 2040 and environmental collapse between 2050 and 2100. Somewhat ironically, AI working with humans may be the only thing that can save civilization and the planet. Or destroy them. Hard to say at this point really!
- CyberDildonics 4y ago
  Please tell me this is from chatGPT as a joke and you didn't write up a giant post about 'the singularity', 'ubi', future trillionaires, millennial politics and future environmental collapse on your own.
  - 4y ago
webdoodle 4y ago
Microsoft and others clearly created Chat A.I. because they can't trust journalists or there employee's to continue lying for them. This is all about information control.
xwdv 4y ago
I don’t care much about what happens to the modern web at this point, I just long for those days of the early web and wish there was some sort of alternative web I could still browse that was by design forced to be that way forever.
agentultra 4y ago
Definitely has a Fahrenheit 451 vibe going on. Wonder if we’ll have a generation of people who’ll be running off into the metaphorical woods with the old books and websites, away from society and modern culture.
ThomPete 4y ago
Chat GPT + Blockchain is the birth of the real Web 3.0 and it's going to be wild and weird but ultimately it's going to be an improvement. AI is the use case blockchain didn't know it was looking for. The exaflod of content and deep fakes, etc. that's coming towards everyone soon will require some sort of trust protocol, blockchain is great for that.
NotYourLawyer 4y ago
Neal Stephenson was right about the miasma.
mark_l_watson 4y ago
I now cringe when I hear "Web 3.0" I wrote a book a decade ago with Web 3.0 in the title (semantic web, linked data, etc.). "Web 3.0" has been used in so many contexts and meanings, that we need something more description in a name.
midnitewarrior 4y ago
Online dating is going to be a nightmare with chatbots flooding the dating sites catfishing everyone. User contrib sites like Reddit will be flooded with bots that keep the conversation going, but drop in sponsored mentions into things for revenue. I think a push for real, verifiable identities and digitally signing content may happen so people can attempt to wade through what is real and what is fake.
- alar44 4y ago
  Welcome to online dating since its inception.
- reidjs 4y ago
  Alternatively you can just go to real events now and spend less time on the Internet.
  - yamazakiwi 4y ago
    But then I have to deal with people...why would I want that?
    - matwood 4y ago
      Then chatbots are a good thing :)
- cyborgx7 4y ago
  When I heard you could pay for the twitter checkmark, I naively assumed they would use that money to actually verify the identity of the people they gave the checkmark to and twitter was being positioned as an authority on identity verification on the internet. I think that space is ripe for the taking, and twitter was in a good spot for it, before they devalued their checkmarks into a meaningless status symbol
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    They have changed it up a bit, there is a new checkmark that means "company official page", another one for "notable person" for politicians and journalists, and the blue checkmark which now just means paid for twitter.
evo_9 4y ago
I don't know, to me this is just going to make real human, authentic content that much more valuable.
redleggedfrog 4y ago
Information wants to be wrong.
- ripsawridge 4y ago
  I scrolled many pages for this. It is true! Information wants to be like an "earworm"...an annoying and "false" song that you just can't shake. Because then it's not anodyne. It has a personality. It will be remembered, not merely incorporated. In truth it is the purveyor of the information that has this desire, and it seeps into his leavings on the internet. In his many thousands of iterations. And so we are here.
galaxyLogic 4y ago
I think we need a new HTML tag which should be placed around all AI-generated content.
- Devasta 4y ago
  Such a tag would only be used to filter AI content, so no one who uses AI would use it.
bastardoperator 4y ago
Yawn, another doomsday post because someone is scared of change...
shadowgovt 4y ago
> The best I can hope for is that some hacker collective manages to make an open source version of it, that can be more trustworthy than the current one. It's always interesting to me when someone makes an assert like this for a Big Data technology. If this were tractable, we'd have an open-source Google alternative right now that someone would have built for the sheer joy of being the folks that took on Google. But open source doesn't work that way because code is download-once, use-forever, but data is continuously changing and costs perpetual money to update and maintain. "Open source data" looks like Wikipedia, and the world won't sustain more than a few of those; Wikipedia has about 100,000 active editors. So instead of some hacker-alternative-to-Google techno-utopia idea, we've got plenty of open-source crawlers and a handful of services paying the bills via rent-seeking their database and, often, advertising. No reason to think a ChatGPT-heavy future will be different.
- munificent 4y ago
  > because code is download-once, use-forever, but data is continuously changing and costs perpetual money to update and maintain. Not just the data, but also hosting the service and keeping it available. Open source works because the marginal cost of code is essentially zero. But the marginal cost of serving users is definitely not zero.
- breckenedge 4y ago
  Unlike Google, you can download Wikipedia and use it offline. I hope to see the same thing happening for a useful LLM. Of course that’s not feasible right now, but hopefully those costs will come down and we do actually get to run a self-hosted version of this.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    The tricky thing about data is that the world constantly changes. A downloaded Wikipedia has a lot of value, but it does grow stale. And it has the advantage of being a repository of relatively static facts in a way that, say, a search engine is not. Search engines (and I suspect a ChatGPT-style engine, if one wants to talk about it about current events, things currently available, or other topics of the day) have to be continuously refreshed to be relevant. So many things that those engines are used for frequently (including the keyword "ChatGPT" itself) had no definition months ago, let alone an inaccurate definition. Most data isn't static like code; it must be continuously re-invested in to stay relevant.
username3 4y ago
Web 4.0 will be deduplicating every possible opinion. We just choose from a path of opinions and we’re back to web directories.
HardwareLust 4y ago
I think it will be fun! We're seeing a paradigm shift right before our very eyes. Just think, you can tell your grandkids that you lived through the AI revolution. I'm excited to see what happens next, because nobody knows and certainly whoever wrote this article has no clue, either.
99_00 4y ago
The difference is that instead of clicking on 3 or 4 pages to get your low quality content, you'll get it with a prompt.
thrwawy74 4y ago
I'm pretty happy with Chat GPT. There was yet-another thread about the degradation of Google Search results a few weeks ago and folks here talked about the uselessness of it's results. I remember when my mom taught me to "search like a pro" back in the 90s. She was a librarian and she taught me valuable things before those search parameters were known as "Google hacks". I remember how powerful it felt to be able to find anything related to what I wanted to know. Google still provides useful results - buried in all the crap. There's so much valuable info to find, and so much more crap in 2023. The signal to noise ratio is worse. So I tried Chat GPT recently and I asked it about something I've never quite understood. "How is an antenna designed to prevent the feedline emanating radio waves?" and it gave me a very focused explanation of how impedance is matched between the feedline and antenna to reduce standing waves and power being reflected back to the transmitter. I was so happy with this, because although i could find countless resources on antenna design they were much too dry for my understanding. I was always lost navigating the text because I didn't have the formal education to piece together 'what they're saying over here relates to what is being said over here'. You have to have a certain level of comprehension with the subject material to locate information. I think Chat GPT and things like it represent the search engines of tomorrow. There's a DEFINITE risk of creating recycled, incorrect content and prompting it circularly into the same dumpster of misinformation. However, I spent 15-20 minutes re-articulating my question about antennas and "what part of the antenna prevents this?" and I came away very happy with my new understanding. I'm looking forward to AI-assisted learning, and it feels as magical as Google Search did in the 90s. In another instance, I asked it how to run a Powershell script on a remote computer with psexec and it produced the correct commands but did not warn me the script had to first be copied over to the remote machine. All good explanations / demonstrations should come with clarifying questions. I'm very happy I can ask technical things like this, embarrassing things, very abstract/broad things, and have an AI that will guide me into new understanding. Take it all with a grain of salt. Looks like I'll be doing the $20/month for ChatGPT Pro though. It's more valuable and entertaining to my day-to-day curiosities than something like Netflix.
- thrwawy74 4y ago
  I think we'll see research into how to appraise AI models for what has been weighted. Whether a model creates objectively fair reasonings or creates something harmful. Also data democratization of these models (having them available outside of large institutions) will be important. At the same time harmful: A comment a few down is mentioning how these things will be used to create AI influencers, or how propaganda campaigns could be entirely automated and deployed against other countries. Very real threats. :(
pelasaco 4y ago
maybe then people start to go back to their lives, have real life hobbies, start a family, engage themselves in their communities...
BuckyBeaver 4y ago
Ugh, "Web 3.0". The years of "Web 2.0" stupidity were bad enough. People want to revive this ignorance? Then again, they keep churning out the asinine labels for "generations" of people. In other news: Are we supposed to know what an "onsen" is?
chatterhead 4y ago
All AI projects need to be immediately nationalized. None of the people in Tech have shown themselves responsible enough for it and it will only be used against people. That's a red line.
- ddingus 4y ago
  I am rapidly arriving at the same conclusion
  - ddingus 4y ago
    Naysayers and passersby: I get it. No worries. So, sell me! Please take a moment and let's see what, "won't be used against the people" looks like. No joke. I will read with great interest.
- realce 4y ago
  I'm getting closer to this day by day too
hypefi 4y ago
Can we use blockchain technology to certify that a content is made by humans, is it possible, can someone enlighten me on the limitations ?
drakenot 4y ago
> “Early in the Reticulum-thousands of years ago-it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said. > “Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him. > “Yes-a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.” > “What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone. > “Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors-swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.” > “As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,” Osa said. “This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-First Millennium A.R.” > “Exactly!” Sammann said. “Artificial Inanity systems of enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that there was a sort of Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita forerunners were able to bring matters in hand.” -- Anathem, by Neal Stephenson
quattrofan 4y ago
[dead]
akagusu 4y ago
Bookmark this thread: ChatGPT is our Skynet, it will end our civilization as we know it.
SergeAx 4y ago
> The regular web is going to get worse Author implies that web = Google (or search engines in general). But web is not search, and Google doesn't own it, although it seems so. There are other methods of content discovery on the web, and we are at the beginning of exploring them.

386 points by iraldir 4y ago

LOVE It! Turning out pages of JS, SQL, Python code for me. Plus very detailed explanations. And know, it may disappoint some folks, but it ALL works. :-)

brookst 4y ago

Not a super well thought out article. Example: lots of speculative complaints that ChatGPT will lead to an explosion of low quality and biased editorial material, without a single mention of what that problem looks like today (hint: it was already a huge problem before ChatGPT). Ditto with the “ChatGPT gave me wrong info for a query” complaint. Well, how does that compare to traditional search? I’m willing to believe a Google search produced better results, but it seems like something one should check for an article like this. IMO we’re not facing a paradigm change where the web was great before and now ChatGPT has ruined it. We may be facing a tipping point where ChatGPT pushes already-failing models to the breaking point, accelerating creation of new tools that we already needed. Even if I’m wrong about that, I’m very confident that low quality, biased, and flat out incorrect web content was already a problem before LLMs.

webjunkie 4y ago
Agreed. What is it with everyone wanting to see Chat GPT only in the light of accessing information and then complaining about it?
- brookst 4y ago
  It makes me wonder if these people have ever talked to a real person before. Spoiler: real people can be wrong too!
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    Real people take longer to be wrong. The potential volume one bad actor can generate matters; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop is a dangerous enough technique when someone has to actually physically come up with the bullshit. "Gish gallop as a service", essentially.
  - mahathu 4y ago
    You can trust your friends to not straight up make up facts when they don't know something, like Chat-GPT does, for example.
- starkd 4y ago
  Because thats what you do to evaluate it as a service?
fnfontana 4y ago
And most people are thinking on ChatGPT like it couldn't evolve. Like it was statically attached to its current state. They are not considering its astonishing potential to evolve. It's just the beginning, just like the internet on the early 90s. Give it 30 more years and we all gonna be AI dependants, like we are on the internet. On the near decades the future generations will not be able to just imagine life before AIs.
_fat_santa 4y ago
It's already pretty bad with Github/SO threads. Guys will scrape threads on GH/SO and repost them to their sites, usually with a ton of ads but the post ranks higher than the original thread so it will come up first when you google an error.
- Idk__Throwaway 4y ago
  [dead]
- vernon99 4y ago
  How could it rank higher tho? SO has a huge domain ranking. How an arbitrary website can compete with that? I always thought it’s the opposite and platforms like SO and Medium incentivise posting there exactly via their crazy domain ranking.
  - kadoban 4y ago
    > How could it rank higher tho? SO has a huge domain ranking. How an arbitrary website can compete with that? It's unclear, but they do. My guess would be that they're willing to do shadier SEO than SO will, and any that get caught just stand up more domains.
    - adventured 4y ago
      It's usually temporary, until Google tags the copycat site as a spammy content farm and destroys its ability to rank. I haven't seen a site sustain high ranking / lots of traffic through copying Stackoverflow in maybe a decade at this point (since Panda etc.).
      - omnicognate 4y ago
        It doesn't matter, though. It's a hydra. Different sites over time but the result is that google results on programming topics are reliably, and increasingly, shit. I gave up on it and pay for Kagi.
      - 4y ago
neonnoodle 4y ago
Quantity has a quality all its own.
SinePost 4y ago
Good point. I was already concerned about people's reliance on Google's zero-click answers as the deepest level of inquiry before ChatGPT hit the scene. ChatGPT feels like a multiplier of this convenience factor, being also slightly more specific and generally more consistent.
- dheera 4y ago
  There's also just that Google's search ranking doesn't work anymore. I searched "lowest temperatures in boston every year" and got some shit-looking MySpace-like website with a table of temperatures, hell knows where it got its data, instead of a link to the correct page on NOAA or something more authoritative.
  - beezlewax 4y ago
    Full of Google ads probably
  - zaroth 4y ago
    This is a fun example; First hit in DDG for that query is a trash site but at least the data is there… https://www.currentresults.com/Yearly-Weather/USA/MA/Boston/extreme-annual-boston-low-temperature.php https://www.currentresults.com/Yearly-Weather/USA/MA/Boston/... Versus trying to pull the data from NOAA; https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/search https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/search The way that the first site works the keywords into the intro text repeatedly to juice their rank is almost impressive. Can the search engines really not see that the page is garbage?
    - soiler 4y ago
      I mean, what exactly makes the first page garbage? I'm not disagreeing, but "is this site garbage" is not a question that a search engine can ask.
      - mh- 4y ago
        I agree. The real "problem" in this specific case is that the authoritative source (NOAA) seemingly doesn't make the data available in a manner that's discoverable by crawlers. The currentresults.com page seems.. fine? It has a proper source cited at the bottom of the data. I wish it didn't have display ads, but that's the nature of the web nowadays. That's not a problem solvable by a traditional search engine.
rchaud 4y ago
> Well, how does that compare to traditional search? Poorly. Traditional search is a dumb pipe, it gives you multiple links to review and evaluate on the basis of a well-understood PageRank algorithm. It's gotten a lot worse, but humans adapted to its limitations, and know what not to click on (affiliate marketing sites that rank #1 for instance). GPT3 is a dead end, it provides a single response and you can either accept what it tells you or not. It is not going to disclose what links it scraped to provide the information, and it's not going to change its mind about how it put that info together. This is because of the old Arthur C. Clarke axiom "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”." AI peddlers will use every UX dark pattern possible to make it look like what you are seeing really is magic.
- somsak2 4y ago
  it doesn't have to be this way. check out perplexity ai. it's like gpt in that it's conversational but like google in that it provides references
- blacksmith_tb 4y ago
  For sure, though it's easy to imagine a search results page that mixes current organic search results, search ads, and also some kind of AI 'answers' or 'sugestions'. Then we just have to vet those as possibly-dubious-but-maybe-helpful along with the rest.
ghusto 4y ago
> Even if I’m wrong about that, I’m very confident that low quality, biased, and flat out incorrect web content was already a problem before LLMs. Definitely, and I believe the post admits as much. The point he's making is that it's going to get exponentially worse, until the web is useless (the "tipping point" you mention). What are the "new tools that we already needed" though? I think I'm too pessimistic in my outlook on these things, and would be interested to hear your optimistic future scenarios. Right now, my view is that as that as long as something is profitable, it'll continue. A glimmer of hope is that once the web is completely useless, people will stop using it, and we can rebuild.
fnordpiglet 4y ago
The difference is we can improve the AI to be more accurate, and I suspect before long it’ll generate better content than a human would that’s verifiable with citations. There may come a time where writing is done by a machine much as a calculator does our math. But knowledge maybe shouldn’t be canonically encoded in ascii blobs randomly strewn over the web - maybe instead of accumulated knowledge needs to be structured in a semantic web sort of model. We can use the machine to describe to use the implications of the knowledge and it’s context in human language. But I get a feeling in 20 years it’ll be anachronistic to write long form.
- alfalfasprout 4y ago
  The model needs known "good" feedback to improve. The problem is that the quality of its training data declines with the more output produced. It's rather inevitable that we'll be drowning in AI generated garbage before long. A lot of people are confusing LLMs with true intelligence.
  - fnordpiglet 4y ago
    That’s why I think knowledge needs to be better structured than blobs of text scattered everywhere. An AI can be more than an LLM, Wolfram posted recently about that. You can use the LLM to convert a question into a semantic query and a semantic validator and check and amend and provide a semantic knowledge graph explaining an answer and the LLM can convert it back to meat language. I think people confuse LLM with true intelligence, but the cynics also confuse LLM with a complete and fixed point solution. Your point also seems to assume no curation can happen on what is ingested. Simply because that might be what’s happening now you could also simply train the LLM on known good sources and be as permissive or restrictive as is necessary. Depending on how good the classifiers are for detecting LLM output (openai released on recently) or other generated / automatically derived content you can start to be more permissive. My point is people seem to be blinded by what is vs what may be. This is not the end of the development cycle of the tech, it’s the pre-alpha release by the first meaningful market entrant. I’d be slower to judge what the future looks like rather than assuming everything stays fixed in time as it is.
munificent 4y ago
> without a single mention of what that problem looks like today (hint: it was already a huge problem before ChatGPT). I see this counter-argument all the time and it makes no sense to me. Yes, the web is already filled with SEO trash. How is that an argument that ChatGPT won't be bad? It's a force multiplier for garbage. The pre-existence of garbage does not at all invalidate the observation that producing more garbage more efficiently is even worse.
- jerryzh 4y ago
  because most garbage now are all ready produced by script. chatgpt will actually improve them
  - argentier 4y ago
    Better garbage? More convincing bullshit? Are we winning?
- brookst 4y ago
  I also see this argument all the time: “New thing X is going to destroy the world!” “Actually it’s an extension of decades-long trends and may accelerate issues we already face” “Well it’s still bad, so any negative statement should be treated as true, even if it’s false!” The article didn’t say ChatGPT was making low quality content worse. It said, in as many words, that ChatGPT will create this problem.
- soerxpso 4y ago
  Search engines are already unusable for certain things that they used to be usable for. There's not really a such thing as "even more unusable." If I offer you an oven that doesn't get hot, that's not any better than an oven that makes things colder; you would not want either.
  - dTal 4y ago
    I think we call that a "fridge", and they're quite popular actually...
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
Cost Back in the day you'd have to pay to print your bullshit. Imagine if printing bullshit were free and instant?
JSavageOne 4y ago
I agree that the article doesn't really bring up anything new or interesting. One important implication of a ChatGPT centered web is the removal of reward/credit to content creators. Now when you Google for something you'll probably arrive at some StackOverflow, blog, or Reddit post where there's at least an author's name attached to an answer. But ChatGPT just crawls that content without citing sources, reducing any reward for contributing. Maybe this doesn't have serious implications - after all most people contribute under pseudonyms, but its worth bringing up.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
opportune 4y ago
One major difference is that generated content up until recently was pretty obvious. Tons of stuff like finance articles are autogenerated using templates, and SEO spam is obviously not intended for you as a human. The rest is generally churned out en masse at the cheapest price, so in practice it contains no content and is very poorly written. ChatGPT can produce decent quality content faster and cheaper than most humans. Despite not being fully accurate, and falling apart in certain domains like math, it has an amazing breadth of topics and things it can do at an acceptable level. Right now, enough prompt engineering work is required that it still takes handholding to get ChatGPT to churn out content. But given where we are now it seems well within reach for the next gen of models to be able to go from “Write me an article about X that covers Y and Z” to “Write me 100 articles about varying topics in X” to “Take in the information from this corpus and distill it into 50 articles based on the most interesting parts.” The main thing that should stay safe is detailed technical content like programming guides where you need to actually be able to reason about the material to produce good content, and can’t just paraphrase the ten thousand related sample materials in your training set. ChatGPT is decent about giving mostly-working code snippets (especially if it can use a library, although it may just make one up) but getting it to reason through things will probably require an entirely different approach to how it works. Still, because it’s already capable of producing technical content that passes a basic first glance, it could precipitate a trust crisis. I worry more about what happens when people try to get ChatGPT to generate recipes, or give medical advice, or operate in the support group/personal advice/etc. space.
MattyRad 4y ago
Agreed, particularly given the grammar mistakes. Although, ironically, the grammar mistakes increase confidence that this is an article written by a human.

jmull 4y ago

This is incoherent... not worth reading

oblio 4y ago
AI generated? :-)

markstos 4y ago

I moderate a forum and a user recently started answer questions with links to his blog, where he made AI-generated pages of generated answers on the topics. The posts don't offer anything novel or personal to conversation, as they only repeat the most common talking points on the topic. Ugh.

havefunbesafe 4y ago
I really dont want the internet populated with meaningless garbage to give traffic to companies I dont care about. Hopefully google will create a classifier and downrank anyone who just shoots out AI generated bullshit. The process for identifying AI generated content does look fucking bonkers tho.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  Google can't even successfully detect the shitty "we copied all of StackOverflow's Q&As and put ads around it" clones. I tend to doubt their ability to do something 100x as difficult.
  - barbazoo 4y ago
    Can't or just doesn't need to? Their business isn't search, it's ads.
    - anamexis 4y ago
      If search quality degrades enough that people stop using it, it will impact ads.
      - wizzwizz4 4y ago
        How bad does search quality have to get before people go back to books? Until that point, it's not bad for ads. (In fact, if the ads are the highest-quality search results…)

Snitch-Thursday 4y ago

Not to be a grumpy old man, but I will say, my known original definition of Web 3.0 was the Semantic Web [1] but I have no idea if that definition came before the one in TFA about those selling javascript webpage controls marketing their latest spinner product spinning it as web 3.0 > web 2.0. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

snapcaster 4y ago
Why do people always bring this up? Not to be rude but who gives a shit? You and some others wanted a term to mean something, everyone else disagreed and moved on. Let it go seriously
- koolala 4y ago
  Language models and crawling the web for semantic data is sort of the same thing. It's like, an argument could be made that ChatGPT is itself a Semantic-created Internet. If AI becomes the way we consume data then Semantic patterns will only help it.
- hdbsbsisbs 4y ago
  I suppose the point was that if every new tech is termed as web3.0 in the past decade and it still is something out there in the future, the least you can do is question it.
  - josephwegner 4y ago
    Seems like we need a new meme. `current_year` will be the year of web 3.0!
- Idk__Throwaway 4y ago
  > Not to be rude but... And then you proceeded to intentionally use rude and abrasive language. You can disagree with someone and challenge their opinion without using phrases like "who gives a shit" and "let it go".
- 4y ago

api 4y ago

I've been predicting since GPT-2 that AI text generators will mean the end of the open web and open social media. It will be destroyed by a Biblical tidal wave of unfilterable spam to the point that it becomes useless.

anonymouskimmer 4y ago
Is there a reason AI can't filter the AI produced content?
- api 4y ago
  That’s an arms race that rapidly converges on a thin margin of detection and a high false positive rate.
- supriyo-biswas 4y ago
  To take a reductionist view, humans are language models too, so the better LLMs become, the closer they become to a human, and at that point differentiation is not possible.

DebtDeflation 4y ago

An endless loop of AI generated content that gets posted to the web as original human generated content, with LLMs getting re-trained on this content and spitting out more content that also gets re-posted, resulting in a cesspool of BS masquerading as organic knowledge. I'm old enough to remember when Google provided meaningful search results rather than just SEO spam, the problem is about to get an order of magnitude worse.

Vvector 4y ago
One step closer to wireheads, with a trickle current going across a wire inserted into the pleasure center of the brain, in Ringworld.
btown 4y ago
IMO it's more vital than ever to fund projects like the Internet Archive. They're the only ones incentivized to maintain a snapshot of un-LLM-clouded training data of human knowledge, unclouded by the hubris of "who cares about the old stuff, we should focus our archiving on the web as it exists today" that inevitably will take hold (or already has) in big tech companies who will have laid off the vast majority of those voicing these concerns. We owe it to future generations to prevent ourselves from falling into the training-cycle trap.
- imhoguy 4y ago
  This! As data horder I see even more value in preserving pre-AI content, art, source code. That genuine stuff will be priceless.
- williamcotton 4y ago
  We still have curated libraries and the knowledge contained in those books has a much better signal-to-noise ratio than the internet ever will!
  - throwanem 4y ago
    The Internet Archive is a library.

yyyk 4y ago

Web3 moniker is tainted. Let's just agree that version never existed and skip ahead to Web 5.0?

D13Fd 4y ago

This article lost me with it's definitions of "Web 1.0" and "Web 2.0," which are totally divorced from reality.

iraldir 4y ago
How so? I was curious if my memory was wrong but wikipedia seems to agree with me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0, what is your definition of web 2.0?
- D13Fd 4y ago
  I specifically looked at the wikipedia definition and it's not consistent with what's in the article. There was a lot of interactivity even in Web 1.0, and Web 2.0 was about a lot more than just interactivity.

Zetobal 4y ago

I just want to make a twitch stream and have hundreds of gpt bots as audience. With enough energy you can pretty much make yourself an influencer now.

zzbzq 4y ago
That's been available for 10 years since all the popular streams were just full of bots spamming twitch emoji or parroting one another's one-liner

bob29 4y ago

emperor has no clothes but this forum is full of people who wasted their money investing it and/or get paid to work on it. today "AI is just spicy autocomplete" gets flagged off front page. For MONTHS, front page has been full of sub-script-kiddie level "AI" tools that are just `curl "{static_prompt} + {user_input}" http://chatgptapi http://chatgptapi` or mediocre examples of things that would have been impressive a computer could do in 1960, but are absolutely easier to do since 2010 with google or other tools.

TIPSIO 4y ago

Unlimited 24/7 AI streamers on Twitch. Unlimited 24/7 AI TV shows and movies (RIP Netflix, Hollywood). Unlimited AI opinions about any topics. Unlimited AI “grassroots” campaigns. Unlimited AI propaganda from every country and military (perfectly chosen each time). Unlimited AI comments, “friends”, and engagements on every social media platform for your posts. The bigger struggle will be for discovering authenticity and filtering the content down. Suddenly everyone’s frustration with their AI generated newsfeed and social feeds will become necessary filter tools to communicate and digest information. Just my opinion. Fun to think about. Will watch “Her” this weekend again.

qsort 4y ago
I see this take a lot and I don't get why this is different from what we have right now. > Unlimited 24/7 AI streamers on Twitch. So basically Twitch as it is? > Unlimited 24/7 AI TV shows and movies (RIP Netflix, Hollywood). Which is TV right now? > Unlimited AI opinions about any topics. Welcome to Twitter. You filter in the same way people always have. Studying, learning, acquiring taste.
- mahathu 4y ago
  > Which is TV right now? Yeah, not much a change now, but I hope demand for real TV/film will remain. Imagine they were able to shit out entirely AI generated shows and slowly phase out real media because it's just too costly. A lot of good stuff (a lot of bad stuff too, but that's beside the point) would be thrown out with the bath water imo.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > Imagine they were able to shit out entirely AI generated shows and slowly phase out real media because it's just too costly I mean, its easy to imagine, because its the same effect that drove the reality TV displacing scripted content trend.
- akaike 4y ago
  I think you missed the point that he/she means AI TV and AI Twitch, not Human TV and Human Twitch, or whatever you want to call it. The point is that the content will be 24/7 AI-generated

bluetomcat 4y ago

It could unlock a better web without overlapping, basic and repetitive content spread throughout millions of websites, optimised for search engine indexing. I see it as an interactive knowledge aggregator for basic fact checking on any subject. This creates an opportunity for the web to thrive with genuine, original and thought-provoking authored content.

stephen_g 4y ago
How can it be a fact-checking machine when it can take nonsense and make a plausible sounding response from it? GPT has no understanding of what truth is (let alone any real understanding of anything)…
- bluetomcat 4y ago
  That's why I said "basic". It can tell me about the major philosophical schools and the corresponding philosophers if I am a newbie on the subject, but I wouldn't trust it for any deep "existential" or "metaphysical" reasoning.
iraldir 4y ago
It could. But that's not how you make a 10 billion valuation worth it. Much like facebook could have been a way to make us more connected to one another and less divided, but we all know how that went

itslennysfault 4y ago

Really wish people would stop conflating "Web 3.0" and "Web3" they're entirely different concepts that just have similar names, and don't get me started on "Web5" (but if they are achieving anything it's killing the "Web [version]" naming convention forever) More about Web3 ≠ Web 3.0 for the uninformed / curious: https://www.nexxworks.com/blog/web3-and-web-3-0-are-not-the-same-thing-heres-why https://www.nexxworks.com/blog/web3-and-web-3-0-are-not-the-...

iraldir 4y ago
Aren't those just different vision of what the third iteration of the web platform will / should / can be? Should I call mine 3.0.0 to differenciate it and introduce some proper semver whilst I'm at it?
anonymouskimmer 4y ago
Welcome to the social media iterated world where ignorant (or uncaring) people think they've coined a new term and don't realize, or care, that they're repurposing a term others are already using for another purpose. It's incredibly annoying but no matter how hard you push back the online majority zeitgeist quickly overwhelms the previous meaning.
JohnFen 4y ago
I hear you. But as someone who remains butthurt that "crypto" has been redefined to mean "cryptocurrency" rather than "cryptography", all I can say is you're farting against the wind here.

chrisbrandow 4y ago

I think that his diagnosis of Adtech is not quite grim enough. Knowing that advertisers can uniquely identify most users, pretty reliably, not only will the chat bots be able to produce responsive texts, they will be continually training on each individual’s unique psychology and vulnerabilities. It’s gonna be a gas!

sys32768 4y ago

I thought the fun part was going to be that Chat GPT would condense those bloated SEO preambles into neat paragraphs. I can picture a Chat GPT browser that transforms those pages into their essential meaning, if they have any. I think too there should be standards and rules regarding affiliate content. For example, affiliate review sites. If the reviewer cannot prove they actually purchased the product and used it, their reviews are filtered out, SEO rankings be damned. For now I'm mostly excited about Chat GPT going into role playing game engines and NPCs, and as a sort of dynamic encyclopedia to aid my research and learning.

bloqs 4y ago

This is the best time to use LLMs before the enshittening happens

isthisthingon99 4y ago

Stop guys, stop. Be young in your mind. Be young. How are young people interpreting this? "Oh wow, I can get it to write or help edit essays" "I can use it as something to bounce ideas off of" "I can use it to take ideas from my head into the digital realm." Stop being old people.

altdataseller 4y ago
Or just not play the game. If it's already this popular/hyped, it means it's too late to create a product and profit from it. Find the next big thing before it's overhyped
- isthisthingon99 4y ago
  If you did not buy Tesla at the absolute bottom in 2000-whatever, could you still have been a multi-millionaire? So why do you need to "be first"?
  - altdataseller 4y ago
    You are comparing 2 different things. Buying a stock is instant. Starting a startup takes years and incumbents already have the same advantage as you. Also, you can sell a stock whenever - liquidity is easy. You can't just throw your hands up and give up a startup that easily, especially if you take funding.
    - isthisthingon99 4y ago
      Do you really go through life thinking of reasons why you shouldn't do a thing? How about "if X did it, I can too." Which way would you prefer to live?
      - altdataseller 4y ago
        Neither? You think of the pros and cons and take it from there.

timcavel 4y ago

[dead]

px43 4y ago

Imagine a world where the only content you see is from publishers that you trust, and that your friends trust, and their friends, to maybe 4 or 5 hops or so, and the feed was weighted by how much they are trusted by your particular social graph. If you start seeing spammy content, you downvote it, and your trust level from that part of your social graph drops, and they are less likely to be able to publish things that you see. If you discover some high quality content, and you promote it, then your trust level will improve in your part of the social graph. I'd say that the actual web3 (they crypto kind) is largely about reclaiming identity from centralized identity providers. Any time you publish anything, you're signing that publication with a key that only you hold. Once all content on the internet is signed, these trust graphs for delivering quality content and filtering out spam become trivial to build. In this world, it doesn't matter if content is generated with ChatGPT, or content farms, or spammers. If the content is good, you'll see it, and if it's not, then you won't.

idopmstuff 4y ago
The problem is this is how social networks work - what you're describing is the classic social media bubble outcome. Everybody and their networks upvotes content from publishers they trust and downvotes content from publishers they don't but half of them trust Fox News and half trust CNN. Then of course the most active engagers/upvoters are the craziest ones, and they're furiously upvoting extreme content.
- whamlastxmas 4y ago
  I think the extension of this concept is that if I downvote the crazy people then their voting habits don’t impact what I see
nebula8804 4y ago
What happens if the majority of your group is trusting fake news aka people who exclusively listen to sources like NewsMax. Do you just abandon these people as trapped?
- 4y ago

misto 4y ago

This might just push users to more narrower content options. ”ChatGPT FREE Verified”, anyone? Has its ups and downs I guess, but already before ChatGPT I had grown quite a filter for estimating the trustworthiness of a site. I guess the BLOCK -rules just keep on piling..

latchkey 4y ago

PoW mining is about validation of transactions and getting paid by the network and the users for performing this service. As a miner, you're doing work, that you are paid for, and you don't even know your customers or any details about them. This is a novel concept. I see web3, from the business point of view, as being that whole concept. It won't just be PoW mining, but there will be cases where protocols are developed, that anyone can participate in, and incentives are developed to encourage that participation. web3 will morph into many things. It will be painful to watch and there will be many mistakes along the way, but I'm glad it is happening. I like to be positive about people experimenting with new ways of doing things.

LanceJones 4y ago

Perhaps "certified AI-free" zones/apps/websites will become a place of solace.

tyingq 4y ago

May not be terrible that something pushes Google and others to re-think how to bubble up actually good content.

labrador 4y ago

I made this comment on a post that got flagged for reasons I don't understand. I don't want to feel like I wasted my time so I'm re-commenting here: I was watching "HyperNormalisation" by Adam Curtis for the second time. In his segment on Eliza, an early example of a chat bot, I realized that Curtis makes a mistake in his interpretation of Eliza. For Curtis it's narcissism that makes Eliza attractive. Curtis levels the charge that Westerners are individualistic and self-centered often. But when an interview with the creator Joseph Weizenbaum is shown starting at 01hr:22min, he never says that. He relates how his secretary took to it, and even though she knew it was a primitive computer program, she wanted some privacy while she used it. Weizenbaum was puzzled by that, but then the secretary (or possibly another woman) says Eliza doesn't judge me and it doesn't try to have sex with me. What jumped out at me was that Weizenbaum's secretary was using Eliza as a thinking tool to clarify her thoughts. Most high school graduates in America don't learn critical thinking skills as far as I can tell. Eliza is a useful tool because it encourages critical thinking and second order thinking by asking questions and reflecting back answers and asking questions in another way. The secretary didn't want to use Eliza because she was a narcissist, she wanted to talk through some sensitive issues with what she knew was a dumb program so she could try and resolve them. That's how I feel about ChatGPT so far. It's a great thinking tool. Someone to bounce ideas around with. Of course, I know it's a dumb computer program and it makes mistakes, but it's still a cool new tool to have in the toolbox. HyperNormalisation by Adam Curtis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS_c2qqA-6Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS_c2qqA-6Y Eliza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

freejazz 4y ago
This is insane. People aren't going to use chatGPT to think, they are going to use it for the opposite. That chatGPT doesn't even know when it's wrong is why this is a problem. The vast majority of projects I've seen purport to replace your needs for other things (developers, lawyers, etc) but not being a domain expert, any such user is not going to be aware of the significant flaws chatGPT has in its answers. Heck, someone posted a chatGPT bot that is supposed to digest and make understandable legal contracts, but the bot couldn't get the basics of the ycombinator SAFE right and had the directionality of the share assignment completely opposite what it should be. This is a fatal mistake that a layman wont realize.

konart 4y ago

>it's not going to be fun Depends on how you define "fun". Just a few days ago this russian guy defended GPT written diploma and now we have a shitshow going on. Really fun to watch. https://twitter.com/biblikz/status/1620451262822252544 https://twitter.com/biblikz/status/1620451262822252544 PS: well, the diploma was not written entirely by GPT, but nevertheless...

hnthrowaway0315 4y ago

Although ChatGPT is going to worsen the problem of garbage information online, I don't think it affects anyone who is willing to learn slowly and deeply. We are already at the point that only certain books and videos are good references and their golden status is not going to wear down by time.

throwaway4aday 4y ago

Too late, ChatGPT isn't going to be the driving force behind inaccurate content on the web, we were there long ago. Google search is almost useless now for anything outside of "places to eat near me" and the blogosphere died long ago and was replaced by ad-rent-seeking recipe sites. All the value has moved on from web pages to small forum enclaves and video. There is a bright future though in direct real time communication. There's also a new search and indexing revolution waiting in the wings for whoever wants to lead the charge on distilling or better facilitating those conversations. LLMs will play a part in that if they can get the data of the quality question response interactions and use them to fine tune the models.

beezlewax 4y ago
Google has gotten progressively worse year in year out. Its promoting farmed content of stackoverflow posts riddled with ads over the actual posts. It's making money that way sure but at the dismay if it's users. This I think opens up the space for more niche search engines that actually work for what you're looking for. I'd take a search based off of only indexing sites I actually care about over the dribble it's peddling any day. Bring on the competition
- mmkos 4y ago
  100% agree on the point that there's now space for niche search engines. I don't think a search engine for everything is a viable goal (there's too much crap to sift through), but I do think there's space for smaller search engines for particular domains. Even better, make them somewhat curated by domain experts so that users are served high quality content and not just low quality sites that magically rank high because they managed to tick all boxes in the ranking algorithm.
- CamperBob2 4y ago
  Bring on the competition And this time, don't be afraid to charge for it. Because we know what "free" is worth now.
jsemrau 4y ago
Lunchclub is just that. It is really nice to talk to real people in an intimate 1:1 rather than the cocktail party of the modern Internet.

spandrew 4y ago

"The Web 2.0 changed the way we related to that information by making it interactive." Web 2.0 was about users generating content on shared platforms (social networks). It wasn't about making it interactive — that is just a feature. The benefit of 2.0 was scaling-up businesses was easier than ever with new web tech. This spiralled directly into the start-up boom of the last decade. Not sure I can take an article seriously that doesn't even understand its basic premises.

varelse 4y ago

[dead]

myth_drannon 4y ago

We will need something similar to the Biblical flood to flush everything away. And restart from local trust islands similar to what we had in 80's-90's with BBSs and possibly Fidonet. I don't know how it's going to work but I just don't see any future in Internet in its current commercial form.

avitous 4y ago
Herbert's "Butlerian Jihad" keeps coming to mind; I wonder if something similar lies in our future.
- snapcaster 4y ago
  Hopefully, i'm more worried that in the real world there won't be a Serena Butler to lead us

zquzra 4y ago

All the criticisms I see directed at ChatGPT are met with "the web already sucks". So what revolution awaits us? I just think we're getting closer and closer to a boring dystopia.

crawfordcomeaux 4y ago

I'm so excited about ChatGPT making it much easier to spot people who went through an education system oriented toward learning versus the sit-in-class types. Bring on the fall of the bullshit tower coated in ivory! Hello, schools that help people learn about the Omniverse by playing with the Omniverse! This is the return of discipline.

ChikkaChiChi 4y ago

This is a case of a solution inventing the problem it was meant to solve. AI generated content is going to make search engine results effectively useless. The only reasonable conclusion to that end is that AI will be needed to answer the questions we used to rely on Google Search for. Has there ever been a situation like this before?

marban 4y ago

My biggest concern is the rise of the drag & drop content grifters — Zero-knowledge individuals that can pollute the Web at scale that was previously only possible for a much smaller group. E.g. Look at the amount of TikTok how-tos for creating & selling generated children's books on Amazon.

JohnFen 4y ago

The current web is already 90% worthless garbage. Everything I've heard from the Web 3 crowd makes me think that Web 3 will be 99% worthless garbage. So I guess Chat GPT will make that 100%? I already think the web is, if not dead, then doomed in terms of the value it used to provide. My fear about things like Chat GPT is that it will have a similar effect on things outside the web as well. But we'll see. I really wish I felt more optimistic about all this, but the trendlines don't encourage that.

kefka_p 4y ago

I’ve only had time for a cursory glance at this writing, but let me thank you for sounding the horn on the on Web 3.0. It was bad enough adding Ajax calls to websites and calling it Web 2.0. At least that had something to do with http, ECMA script, html, and web-related tech.

pupppet 4y ago

I say fantastic, bring it on. This might be the final nail in the coffin of automated gatekeepers like Google and social networks, and back to person-powered indexes.

boxingdog 4y ago

[dead]

ozten 4y ago

Each webpage should express a piece of metadata that is content-quality. * primary - The content on this page is a primary source * secondary - The content on this page is high quality, but which is primarily research based and may thus be tainted by unknown sources * bot - The content on this page is mostly automatically generated by one or more ML models with some human curated improvements HTML elements can also have data-content-quality to override the page level metadata. So if you have a primarily sourced paragraph. Search engines can index this signal. Sites that claim primary, but which frequently are provably wrong or bot generated can be penalized. (edited for formatting)

chias 4y ago
If I operate a webpage, and I incorporate this content quality metadata tag, why would I put anything other than "highest possible quality"?
- jsemrau 4y ago
  And who judges the quality? one man's trash is another man's treasure .
  - ozten 4y ago
    Search engines are already judging content quality by dwell time and many other factors. Do they have perfect judgement, no. As long as we have centralized search engines than we have specific judges of quality.
    - jsemrau 4y ago
      We used to live in a world where the pagerank would be an indicator for quality. Yet, as we are now accessing the web through a pre-filtered aggregate on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and also YN, the use case for Google has fundamentally changed
  - sorry_outta_gas 4y ago
    Exactly, bro. Quality is subjective, so it's up to the owner of the website to determine the quality of their own content based on their own standards and goals.

seydor 4y ago

No offense but in a world that includes video why will advertisers pay for text? This article is less thought-out than clickbait ads

iraldir 4y ago
First because it's not an either-or situation. Marketing works by finding different channels and approaches. You could say "in a world with video, why would people pay for an ad on a bus stop" with the same logic. Secondly because advertisement is about trust. For a while, the ads on TV where all the rage because, if it's on TV then it's a proper brand. If in the short term future, like I postulate, the web becomes unreadable SEO filled trash, and people access it via Chat-GPT like technologies, then there will be an element of trust between the bot and the user. And that trust can be exploited, more or less subtly. So why would they not take advantage of it?

EGreg 4y ago

This is ridiculous. Why does everyone try to claim "Web 3.0" for over a decade? Tim Berners-Lee said Web 3.0 was the semantic web, and allowing others to query data with SPARQL etc. The Ethereum community said Web 3.0 involved signing transactions with private keys and storing data on blockchains rather than centralized servers. Now someone is claiming that ChatGPT is the birth of the "real" Web 3.0 -- okay, first of all, chat has NOTHING to do with web. Web means hyperlinks and at the very least letting a user move between domains that serve content, and hopefully increasing interoperability using standard approaches like REST and JSON-LD, as opposed to a centralized provider that is owned by a tiny number of people, and relies on with Big Tech cloud providers (Microsoft). This isn't even a web, let alone open. And secondly, why not already move on to Web 4.0? It's been a decade or more. Everyone is "denying" the last thing was Web 3.0 It's ridiculous. We have a semantic web now (Open Graph, for instance, or schema.org, and more). We have significant adoption also of "Web3"... crypto has co-opted the word cryptography, and Web 3... we just have to accept it https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/nov/18/crypto-cryptocurrency-cryptographers https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/nov/18/crypto-cr... ... many people on HN hate crypto so much that they think the Web3 term hasn't already been solidified, whereas somehow they do think that the word crypto has solidified to mean cryptocurrency rather than cryptography. Jack Dorsey is using the new OPEN technologies from Microsoft / Sidetree protocol / DID standards to build "Web5", and he thankfully gave up his ideas of trademarking it: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/30/jack-dorseys-tbd-is-looking-to-trademark-web5-to-deter-its-misuse/ https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/30/jack-dorseys-tb... It's time to move on. Build applications that combine all these different tools. The Web has come a long way now. It can do PaymentRequest. It can do WebRTC. It can do Web Push. Just use the tools. But definitely ChatGPT currently is everything that is OPPOSITE of what "The Web" was supposed to be. Maybe if an open source version comes out, and obliterates all current systems of content and reputation on the current web, then we can talk about "a new (dystopian) web", a kind of dark forest with chatbot swarms descending to shout down / annoy / destroy reputations of individuals and forums who espouse an inconvenient point of view. There is obviously going to be an arms race of bullshit drowning out actual thoughtful posting. But right now it's not even web.

1970-01-01 4y ago

This is a carry-over bug from Web 2.0..

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

andai 4y ago

Re: An electronic version of Tom Riddle's diary >“Ginny!" said Mr. Weasley, flabbergasted. "Haven't I taught you anything? What have I always told you? Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain?” ― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

alexchantavy 4y ago
I came here searching for this comment :-) Expressed in terms of Harry Potter, I guess ChatGPT is kind of magical.

clarge1120 4y ago

The solution for Google is to filter generated content, period. That will lead to an arms race of sorts, similar to the SEO keyword arms race. The SEO arms race resulted in keyword relevant, but unoriginal minimally useful content. The problem for Google is that their advertisers love generated content.

blueyes 4y ago

Surprised that such a poorly written article as this gets so much attention on HN. Trite thoughts, misspelled words, poorly defined concepts and pessimism that can't back itself up.

BiteCode_dev 4y ago

Well, this means that content curators and good content producers will gain in value. The hard part will be to stand out, and to create things that AI can't easily reproduce, such as linking content to a service. I think it's a good news for actual high quality original creator: they will rise to the sun.

zackmorris 4y ago

I agree with the headline and am glad that someone finally said it. Web 1.0 was great: designed by academics, it popularized idempotence, declarative programming, scalability and ushered in the Long Now so every year since has basically been 1995 repeated. Web 2.0 never happened: it ended up being a trap that swallowed the best minds of a generation to web (ad) agencies with countless millions of hours lost fighting CSS rules and Javascript build tools to replicate functionality that was readily available in 1980s MS Word and desktop publishing apps. It should have been something like single-threaded blocking logic distributed on Paxos/Raft with an event database like Firebase/RethinkDB and layout rules inspired by iOS's auto layout constraint solver with progressive enhancement via HTMX, finally making #nocode a reality. Oh well. Web 3.0 is kind of like the final sequel of a trilogy: just when everyone gets onboard, the original premise gets lost to merchandizing and people start to wish it would just go away. Entering the knee of the curve of the Singularity, it will be difficult to spot the boundary between the objective reality of reason and the subjective reality of meaning. We'll be inundated by never-ending streams of infotainment wedged between vast swaths of increasingly pointless work. Looking forward: the luddites will come out after the 2024 election and we'll see vast effort aimed at stomping out any whiff of rebel resistance. Huge propaganda against UBI, even more austerity measures to keep the rabble in line, the first trillionaire this decade. Meanwhile the real work of automating the drudgery to restore some semblance of disposable income and leisure time will fall on teenagers living in their parents' basement. Thankfully Gen X and Millenials are transitioning into positions of political power. There is still hope, however faint, that we can avoid falling to tech illiteracy. But currently most indicators point to calamity after 2040 and environmental collapse between 2050 and 2100. Somewhat ironically, AI working with humans may be the only thing that can save civilization and the planet. Or destroy them. Hard to say at this point really!

CyberDildonics 4y ago
Please tell me this is from chatGPT as a joke and you didn't write up a giant post about 'the singularity', 'ubi', future trillionaires, millennial politics and future environmental collapse on your own.
- 4y ago

webdoodle 4y ago

Microsoft and others clearly created Chat A.I. because they can't trust journalists or there employee's to continue lying for them. This is all about information control.

xwdv 4y ago

I don’t care much about what happens to the modern web at this point, I just long for those days of the early web and wish there was some sort of alternative web I could still browse that was by design forced to be that way forever.

agentultra 4y ago

Definitely has a Fahrenheit 451 vibe going on. Wonder if we’ll have a generation of people who’ll be running off into the metaphorical woods with the old books and websites, away from society and modern culture.

ThomPete 4y ago

Chat GPT + Blockchain is the birth of the real Web 3.0 and it's going to be wild and weird but ultimately it's going to be an improvement. AI is the use case blockchain didn't know it was looking for. The exaflod of content and deep fakes, etc. that's coming towards everyone soon will require some sort of trust protocol, blockchain is great for that.

NotYourLawyer 4y ago

Neal Stephenson was right about the miasma.

mark_l_watson 4y ago

I now cringe when I hear "Web 3.0" I wrote a book a decade ago with Web 3.0 in the title (semantic web, linked data, etc.). "Web 3.0" has been used in so many contexts and meanings, that we need something more description in a name.

midnitewarrior 4y ago

Online dating is going to be a nightmare with chatbots flooding the dating sites catfishing everyone. User contrib sites like Reddit will be flooded with bots that keep the conversation going, but drop in sponsored mentions into things for revenue. I think a push for real, verifiable identities and digitally signing content may happen so people can attempt to wade through what is real and what is fake.

alar44 4y ago
Welcome to online dating since its inception.
reidjs 4y ago
Alternatively you can just go to real events now and spend less time on the Internet.
- yamazakiwi 4y ago
  But then I have to deal with people...why would I want that?
  - matwood 4y ago
    Then chatbots are a good thing :)
cyborgx7 4y ago
When I heard you could pay for the twitter checkmark, I naively assumed they would use that money to actually verify the identity of the people they gave the checkmark to and twitter was being positioned as an authority on identity verification on the internet. I think that space is ripe for the taking, and twitter was in a good spot for it, before they devalued their checkmarks into a meaningless status symbol
- Gigachad 4y ago
  They have changed it up a bit, there is a new checkmark that means "company official page", another one for "notable person" for politicians and journalists, and the blue checkmark which now just means paid for twitter.

evo_9 4y ago

I don't know, to me this is just going to make real human, authentic content that much more valuable.

redleggedfrog 4y ago

Information wants to be wrong.

ripsawridge 4y ago
I scrolled many pages for this. It is true! Information wants to be like an "earworm"...an annoying and "false" song that you just can't shake. Because then it's not anodyne. It has a personality. It will be remembered, not merely incorporated. In truth it is the purveyor of the information that has this desire, and it seeps into his leavings on the internet. In his many thousands of iterations. And so we are here.

galaxyLogic 4y ago

I think we need a new HTML tag which should be placed around all AI-generated content.

Devasta 4y ago
Such a tag would only be used to filter AI content, so no one who uses AI would use it.

bastardoperator 4y ago

Yawn, another doomsday post because someone is scared of change...

shadowgovt 4y ago

> The best I can hope for is that some hacker collective manages to make an open source version of it, that can be more trustworthy than the current one. It's always interesting to me when someone makes an assert like this for a Big Data technology. If this were tractable, we'd have an open-source Google alternative right now that someone would have built for the sheer joy of being the folks that took on Google. But open source doesn't work that way because code is download-once, use-forever, but data is continuously changing and costs perpetual money to update and maintain. "Open source data" looks like Wikipedia, and the world won't sustain more than a few of those; Wikipedia has about 100,000 active editors. So instead of some hacker-alternative-to-Google techno-utopia idea, we've got plenty of open-source crawlers and a handful of services paying the bills via rent-seeking their database and, often, advertising. No reason to think a ChatGPT-heavy future will be different.

munificent 4y ago
> because code is download-once, use-forever, but data is continuously changing and costs perpetual money to update and maintain. Not just the data, but also hosting the service and keeping it available. Open source works because the marginal cost of code is essentially zero. But the marginal cost of serving users is definitely not zero.
breckenedge 4y ago
Unlike Google, you can download Wikipedia and use it offline. I hope to see the same thing happening for a useful LLM. Of course that’s not feasible right now, but hopefully those costs will come down and we do actually get to run a self-hosted version of this.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  The tricky thing about data is that the world constantly changes. A downloaded Wikipedia has a lot of value, but it does grow stale. And it has the advantage of being a repository of relatively static facts in a way that, say, a search engine is not. Search engines (and I suspect a ChatGPT-style engine, if one wants to talk about it about current events, things currently available, or other topics of the day) have to be continuously refreshed to be relevant. So many things that those engines are used for frequently (including the keyword "ChatGPT" itself) had no definition months ago, let alone an inaccurate definition. Most data isn't static like code; it must be continuously re-invested in to stay relevant.

username3 4y ago

Web 4.0 will be deduplicating every possible opinion. We just choose from a path of opinions and we’re back to web directories.

HardwareLust 4y ago

I think it will be fun! We're seeing a paradigm shift right before our very eyes. Just think, you can tell your grandkids that you lived through the AI revolution. I'm excited to see what happens next, because nobody knows and certainly whoever wrote this article has no clue, either.

99_00 4y ago

The difference is that instead of clicking on 3 or 4 pages to get your low quality content, you'll get it with a prompt.

thrwawy74 4y ago

I'm pretty happy with Chat GPT. There was yet-another thread about the degradation of Google Search results a few weeks ago and folks here talked about the uselessness of it's results. I remember when my mom taught me to "search like a pro" back in the 90s. She was a librarian and she taught me valuable things before those search parameters were known as "Google hacks". I remember how powerful it felt to be able to find anything related to what I wanted to know. Google still provides useful results - buried in all the crap. There's so much valuable info to find, and so much more crap in 2023. The signal to noise ratio is worse. So I tried Chat GPT recently and I asked it about something I've never quite understood. "How is an antenna designed to prevent the feedline emanating radio waves?" and it gave me a very focused explanation of how impedance is matched between the feedline and antenna to reduce standing waves and power being reflected back to the transmitter. I was so happy with this, because although i could find countless resources on antenna design they were much too dry for my understanding. I was always lost navigating the text because I didn't have the formal education to piece together 'what they're saying over here relates to what is being said over here'. You have to have a certain level of comprehension with the subject material to locate information. I think Chat GPT and things like it represent the search engines of tomorrow. There's a DEFINITE risk of creating recycled, incorrect content and prompting it circularly into the same dumpster of misinformation. However, I spent 15-20 minutes re-articulating my question about antennas and "what part of the antenna prevents this?" and I came away very happy with my new understanding. I'm looking forward to AI-assisted learning, and it feels as magical as Google Search did in the 90s. In another instance, I asked it how to run a Powershell script on a remote computer with psexec and it produced the correct commands but did not warn me the script had to first be copied over to the remote machine. All good explanations / demonstrations should come with clarifying questions. I'm very happy I can ask technical things like this, embarrassing things, very abstract/broad things, and have an AI that will guide me into new understanding. Take it all with a grain of salt. Looks like I'll be doing the $20/month for ChatGPT Pro though. It's more valuable and entertaining to my day-to-day curiosities than something like Netflix.

thrwawy74 4y ago
I think we'll see research into how to appraise AI models for what has been weighted. Whether a model creates objectively fair reasonings or creates something harmful. Also data democratization of these models (having them available outside of large institutions) will be important. At the same time harmful: A comment a few down is mentioning how these things will be used to create AI influencers, or how propaganda campaigns could be entirely automated and deployed against other countries. Very real threats. :(

pelasaco 4y ago

maybe then people start to go back to their lives, have real life hobbies, start a family, engage themselves in their communities...

BuckyBeaver 4y ago

Ugh, "Web 3.0". The years of "Web 2.0" stupidity were bad enough. People want to revive this ignorance? Then again, they keep churning out the asinine labels for "generations" of people. In other news: Are we supposed to know what an "onsen" is?

chatterhead 4y ago

All AI projects need to be immediately nationalized. None of the people in Tech have shown themselves responsible enough for it and it will only be used against people. That's a red line.

ddingus 4y ago
I am rapidly arriving at the same conclusion
- ddingus 4y ago
  Naysayers and passersby: I get it. No worries. So, sell me! Please take a moment and let's see what, "won't be used against the people" looks like. No joke. I will read with great interest.
realce 4y ago
I'm getting closer to this day by day too

hypefi 4y ago

Can we use blockchain technology to certify that a content is made by humans, is it possible, can someone enlighten me on the limitations ?

drakenot 4y ago

> “Early in the Reticulum-thousands of years ago-it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said. > “Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him. > “Yes-a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.” > “What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone. > “Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors-swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.” > “As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,” Osa said. “This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-First Millennium A.R.” > “Exactly!” Sammann said. “Artificial Inanity systems of enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that there was a sort of Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita forerunners were able to bring matters in hand.” -- Anathem, by Neal Stephenson

quattrofan 4y ago

[dead]

akagusu 4y ago

Bookmark this thread: ChatGPT is our Skynet, it will end our civilization as we know it.

SergeAx 4y ago

> The regular web is going to get worse Author implies that web = Google (or search engines in general). But web is not search, and Google doesn't own it, although it seems so. There are other methods of content discovery on the web, and we are at the beginning of exploring them.