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The disconnect between advocates of a "Semantic Web" and the commoditised reality of the WWW is that the advocates implicitly see an orderly structure of inform

The disconnect between advocates of a "Semantic Web" and the commoditised reality of the WWW is that the advocates implicitly see an orderly structure of information as being a first principle of knowability/usability and education. The commoditised reality of the WWW is that content is lucrative, but the content need not be of any social or educational value as long as the ice cream cone licks itself. Cyberlarceny is more lucrative than order, usability, and education. And now, algorithmic text generation will provide the full experience of half-baked verbiage refreshed daily. Society does need reliable, true information. But we will not have a semantic Web for economic reasons far beyond the value of education.

sandworm101 3y ago
>> Society does need reliable, true information. I believe otherwise. They are perfectly happy with the errors. I see this as wikipedia 2.0. Wikipedia was once derided for being full of errors and holes. Now it is a de facto encyclopedia, the go-to place for the "true" description of most anything. AI will do the same. Eventually its error and subtle biases will become the accepted version of reality. Society needs only actionable information. Accuracy is great, but volume of content wins the audience.
api 3y ago
It’s not just the cost, it’s what humans are drawn to. If you sort content by what leads to maximum engagement the stuff that comes out on top is absolutely not informative, intelligent, or positive. You get repetitive addictive filler, inflammatory fear/hate/outrage porn, and lurid tabloid style trash. When you scroll the limbic system appears to be in charge, not the neocortex. The lambic system seeks only dopamine. The easiest path to dopamine wins. This means that on an ad supported web content like the above will swamp everything else. There is zero incentive to produce anything else. AI can now produce maximally engaging content on demand, so the future is Twitter or TikTok but largely without human creators. The future of the open web and free apps is a Skinner box full of AI generated outrage porn and silly filler that scrolls forever, only pausing for ads. The dynamics can be very different when people pay directly for content. The neocortex appears to get more involved in buying decisions than passive consumption. But very very few people pay for content so there is either not much of this or it will have to be expensive. We may be going back to the days when actual knowledge and quality discourse was costly, not because of the cost of printing it but as a filter mechanism to find it in the vast sea of trash. The net was already headed here before AI. Generative models will just accelerate this.

sandworm101 3y ago

>> Society does need reliable, true information. I believe otherwise. They are perfectly happy with the errors. I see this as wikipedia 2.0. Wikipedia was once derided for being full of errors and holes. Now it is a de facto encyclopedia, the go-to place for the "true" description of most anything. AI will do the same. Eventually its error and subtle biases will become the accepted version of reality. Society needs only actionable information. Accuracy is great, but volume of content wins the audience.

api 3y ago

It’s not just the cost, it’s what humans are drawn to. If you sort content by what leads to maximum engagement the stuff that comes out on top is absolutely not informative, intelligent, or positive. You get repetitive addictive filler, inflammatory fear/hate/outrage porn, and lurid tabloid style trash. When you scroll the limbic system appears to be in charge, not the neocortex. The lambic system seeks only dopamine. The easiest path to dopamine wins. This means that on an ad supported web content like the above will swamp everything else. There is zero incentive to produce anything else. AI can now produce maximally engaging content on demand, so the future is Twitter or TikTok but largely without human creators. The future of the open web and free apps is a Skinner box full of AI generated outrage porn and silly filler that scrolls forever, only pausing for ads. The dynamics can be very different when people pay directly for content. The neocortex appears to get more involved in buying decisions than passive consumption. But very very few people pay for content so there is either not much of this or it will have to be expensive. We may be going back to the days when actual knowledge and quality discourse was costly, not because of the cost of printing it but as a filter mechanism to find it in the vast sea of trash. The net was already headed here before AI. Generative models will just accelerate this.