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I wonder if we will get to a point where the web is so saturated with this junk that the web itself starts to lose its luster. If AI can dream up a million imp

I wonder if we will get to a point where the web is so saturated with this junk that the web itself starts to lose its luster. If AI can dream up a million impressive wood carvings, it seems like the real carving I saw in person is the only one that is actually interesting.

MrDarcy 3y ago
We blew past that point around 2015.
- dpflan 3y ago
  Can you provide details of this watershed date?
  - syndicatedjelly 3y ago
    That was the year that the phrases “influencer” and “content creator” entered the vernacular.
  - simiones 3y ago
    This suggests the problem pretty well: https://xkcd.com/331/ https://xkcd.com/331/
    - agumonkey 3y ago
      no joke, when I close my eyes, the strange light patterns behind my eye lids are somehow pixelated now, i'm afraid LCDs altered cells in my retina somehow
      - araes 3y ago
        You are what you eat, hear, touch, smell, see. ...all your life will ever be.
        simiones 3y ago
        For anyone intrigued, this is paraphrasing a beautiful line from Pink Floyd's "Breathe (In The Air)" from Dark Side of the Moon.
  - RGamma 3y ago
    From my memory around that time (2014-2016), smartphones went big and became easy to use such that the dumber half of the population now also had access, platformication intensified, and the human scale social norms that held most of the web together were displaced by noise and oblivion by way of engagement maximization. It's also the time I got rid of Reddit and FB (though FB was only ever chat bridged to weechat for me) for good. Also, algorithmic feeds, "influencers" and "content".
  - sneed_chucker 3y ago
    That's when I remember shit starting to get ridiculously astroturfed with everything related to the 2016 election, it's also when I remember YouTube starting to crack down on any videos it seemed not ad-friendly. But I don't think there's that much of a watershed date, more like a slow march that accelerated during the Trump era and then went into overdrive after 2020.
cubefox 3y ago
Perhaps the real wood carving is also no longer interesting, because you already saw so many (fake ones) before.
- I_Am_Nous 3y ago
  At that point, the process is the interesting thing. Instead of an AI generating "cool" shapes and delicate carvings, a real person had to painstakingly carve out each tiny channel in the wood - a combination of art, skill, and patience. I can come watch them work each day until I see the transformation of a single block of wood into something functional or beautiful (or both!) On the other hand I might be able to print out a copy of the AI generated one, hang it at my desk, and enjoy looking at it a few times before it becomes part of the background of my disposable life.
  - mzz80 3y ago
    The only time I go to see how ancient cultures lived without electricity and weaved their own clothes in in museums and tourist attractions. They’re also typically incredibly boring.
    - Vegenoid 3y ago
      Many people find interest and meaning in learning about all the ways that people have lived, and the things they did and made. Great museums are a source of pride for many of the world's largest cities, and widely regarded as culturally important and valuable.
    - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
      This isn't even about ancient cultures, it's about valuing the product that comes from a persons work. Valuing their time and labor, valuing the craft itself. Compared to a "tribal wood carving designed by GPT" a real world piece of wood is, well, real. The novelty of everything wears off eventually so it won't matter if GPT could still show you nearly infinite carving designs. Without that being turned into actual physical objects by people, they are disposable bytes of data with no real meaning.
bushbaba 3y ago
Already happening. It’s why younger generations are preferring to spend on experiences over things.
- ruszki 3y ago
  Wait, what, really? Is there some article or study, or something where I can read about this? It sounds quite interesting.
- iamacyborg 3y ago
  People were parroting that about Millenials a decade ago. It’s just a function of being young and nothing to do with any particular generation.
BoxOfRain 3y ago
I definitely think authenticity or at least perceived authenticity will become more important in the future. There's a reason vacuum tubes are still produced industrially for guitarists and HiFi enthusiasts despite being over half a century obsolete and it's because despite digital modelling being just better from an engineering perspective people value the perceived authenticity of the real thing. I'm drawing up plans to build a valve amp myself, despite the fact it'll be worse at being an audio amplifier than one I can buy for a tenth of the price of the parts I value the gently glowing glass and straightforward analogue approach to amplifying sound. I think whether AI content will put people off the web in general will depend on whether it's actually any good or not. 'That looks like an AI made it' is usually an accusation of shoddiness at the moment!
- beej71 3y ago
  I've been listening to live recordings on Internet Archive for a bit after listening to only highly-produced music for years. There's something refreshingly human about it. I guess AIs could always be made to emulate that, but it seems it could make legitimately human stuff have higher value. Sharing with your friend a bootleg live recording that you made might be a greater gift. I could certainly imagine digitally-signed material from human artists, as well. Maybe I'm just old, but when I'm consuming some kind of art, I want to know that thinking, feeling humans were behind it. If I just want to look at pretty pictures, AI is fine. And I am actually old, because I'm already put off the modern web. :) HN-style websites are just my speed.
carlosjobim 3y ago
Don't worry, the shadow libraries have about 20 million books and 100 million scientific papers available, always increasing. There is little risk of AI spam seeping in there, since piracy is a certain threshold for quality. Who'd risk going to jail for pirating generated spam? ePUB books are basically HTML and CSS, so it's a matter of making a "book browser" instead of a web browser, that can inject links to things mentioned in the book text: such as a name, a place, and especially to another book.
- jprete 3y ago
  I'm hoping you were intending sarcasm. Speaking for myself, the _last_ thing I care about is AI researcher access to massive corpora of pirated clean text. Who knows, maybe AI people _want_ the Web to fill with garbage so people have to ask their creations for information.
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    You completely misunderstood my comment. I don't understand how you could interpret it so wrongly?
    - jprete 3y ago
      I'm curious what you were aiming at?
      - carlosjobim 3y ago
        When the normal Internet becomes unusable because it is filled with AI spam, people will still find untainted information among the 20 million books and 100 million scientific papers in the shadow libraries. If we have a software that can make browsing books a little bit more like browsing the web, then usability will be better.
        philomath_mn 3y ago
        There are already many examples of AI generated books spamming Amazon -- how do we separate the wheat from the chaff?
CSMastermind 3y ago
IMO one of the main things ChatGPT offers is the ability to interact with the knowledge of the internet without wading through ads and SEO spam.
- pfd1986 3y ago
  Agreed. I think this is a good argument towards development of open LLMs. If you're old enough, similar arguments existed about "open / free internet" and we're seeing some of the consequences of having it be controlled by mega corps.
  - janoc 3y ago
    That's naive. There are open LLMs already. The problem is not the LLMs but that data they are being trained on is going to be increasingly spammy, scammy garbage. The LLMs don't have any sort of magical way of filtering that out. So if you train an LLM on spam, hoaxes and similar garbage you will get recommendations to drink bleach as a cure for covid. And that applies regardless of whether the bot is trained by a megacorp or someone in their garage using open source network and tools.
- janoc 3y ago
  The problem is that you are outsourcing that information curation to a bot that is 100% happy to feed you bullshit - and you have no recourse and no way to check because it doesn't tell you how did it arrive at the information it is feeding you. Also that information is by definition old. For something it doesn't matter, for many other things, like current news, it very much does. So while the attraction of having a personal "butler" doing the hard work for you is great, no doubt, it is ultimately no better than getting one's information from Facebook - you have ceded control and get whatever the creators of the system deem you worthy of having. Including political and other agendas. Just look at the censorship the Baidu bot is applying and the entire "jailbreaking" industry around escaping the artificially imposed boundaries on these bots, for good or bad reasons. And ultimately even ChatGPT and its ilk won't help us any when the web they scrape will be filled with machine-generated spam and crap drowning out all the useful information. Garbage in, garbage out applies even to these robots. They aren't magic.
reustle 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory Often referred to as the dead internet theory
memish 3y ago
This applies to discussion too. For instance, how many Reddit comments are bots? With the extreme groupthink present there, it wouldn't be a huge shock if it already makes up over half of the comments in popular subs.
- sensanaty 3y ago
  Whenever I read comments on big subredditss I'm convinced ~95% of them are astroturfing bots Real question is who pays for 'em?
- pixl97 3y ago
  I don't even have an account on Reddit these days, but still view it regularly. On the popular subs if you read at least half the posts (not comments) you'll see "Op is a bot that reposts content". They typically have some algorithm that digs up old popular posts that haven't been posted in a while and reposted them. With the number of people complaining they are reposted crap I have my doubts their initial upvotes legit, instead getting enough bot votes to get them on the subs front page which then gains more natural votes.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    https://medium.com/collapsenews/new-study-at-least-15-of-all-reddit-content-is-corporate-trolls-trying-to-manipulate-public-b249bd42ab42 https://medium.com/collapsenews/new-study-at-least-15-of-all...
justapassenger 3y ago
[dead]
nestes 3y ago
I'm not even sure you need to invoke AI for saturation of the web, at least for things that don't have to do with current events -- our collective archives just keep getting bigger and bigger. This may be a bit tangential, but something like 1/8th of surviving classical Greek literature (1000 years!) is attributed in part to Galen. While he was quite prolific, the point is that the entire corpus is extremely small. We didn't even have the capability to record audio and video until the early 1900s, and certainly not in a mass, centralized, easily-distributable sense until the internet. Having a million monkeys write Shakespeare is pure happenstance, but having a million Shakespeares is inevitable. I abstractly worry that even besides the junk, there will actually be so much PHENOMENALLY GOOD stuff that would-be creators and artisans will be discouraged instead of inspired. Let's hope that you're right about the real carvings. That at least is not so scalable.
Beijinger 3y ago
"I wonder if we will get to a point where the web is so saturated with this junk that the web itself starts to lose its luster." Why should it? 50% of IP traffic is caused by robots, maybe in the future 99% will be. Robot shit viewed by AI robots, SISO. Shit in, shit out.
araes 3y ago
So much worse. Luster? Huge portions of the Earth depend on the web as their only info source. News has turned into "somebody ran their mouth on (the symbol formerly known as Twitter)." Also, utterly false news: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2023/12/these-ai-generated-news-anchors-are-freaking-me-out/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2023/12/these-ai-generated-news-a... The comments are disturbing "I always suspected Anderson Cooper and Lisa Ling were computer generated." Also, you might not be able to read this, because I might already be shadow / hell / heaven banned. (A 2012 update to Hacker News introduced a system of "hellbanning") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning Far too easy to write a script that says if( [user] ) then ( "hide" ). Also, if you can, we might just live in a ban circle together. Since all news in the future will be personalized based on your tracking pixel and router location. 'ChatGPT, write me a fake nightly news cast for "so and so" location.'
dbtc 3y ago
From Plato to Sontag there have been people trying to remind us all that the representation is not the real thing. Perhaps AI will finally deliver the message. But then... What if AI dreams the carvings and then drives the CNC? Would that be interesting? Or is there something special about the human being?
- philomath_mn 3y ago
  There is something special about the human being

MrDarcy 3y ago

We blew past that point around 2015.

dpflan 3y ago
Can you provide details of this watershed date?
- syndicatedjelly 3y ago
  That was the year that the phrases “influencer” and “content creator” entered the vernacular.
- simiones 3y ago
  This suggests the problem pretty well: https://xkcd.com/331/ https://xkcd.com/331/
  - agumonkey 3y ago
    no joke, when I close my eyes, the strange light patterns behind my eye lids are somehow pixelated now, i'm afraid LCDs altered cells in my retina somehow
    - araes 3y ago
      You are what you eat, hear, touch, smell, see. ...all your life will ever be.
      - simiones 3y ago
        For anyone intrigued, this is paraphrasing a beautiful line from Pink Floyd's "Breathe (In The Air)" from Dark Side of the Moon.
- RGamma 3y ago
  From my memory around that time (2014-2016), smartphones went big and became easy to use such that the dumber half of the population now also had access, platformication intensified, and the human scale social norms that held most of the web together were displaced by noise and oblivion by way of engagement maximization. It's also the time I got rid of Reddit and FB (though FB was only ever chat bridged to weechat for me) for good. Also, algorithmic feeds, "influencers" and "content".
- sneed_chucker 3y ago
  That's when I remember shit starting to get ridiculously astroturfed with everything related to the 2016 election, it's also when I remember YouTube starting to crack down on any videos it seemed not ad-friendly. But I don't think there's that much of a watershed date, more like a slow march that accelerated during the Trump era and then went into overdrive after 2020.

cubefox 3y ago

Perhaps the real wood carving is also no longer interesting, because you already saw so many (fake ones) before.

I_Am_Nous 3y ago
At that point, the process is the interesting thing. Instead of an AI generating "cool" shapes and delicate carvings, a real person had to painstakingly carve out each tiny channel in the wood - a combination of art, skill, and patience. I can come watch them work each day until I see the transformation of a single block of wood into something functional or beautiful (or both!) On the other hand I might be able to print out a copy of the AI generated one, hang it at my desk, and enjoy looking at it a few times before it becomes part of the background of my disposable life.
- mzz80 3y ago
  The only time I go to see how ancient cultures lived without electricity and weaved their own clothes in in museums and tourist attractions. They’re also typically incredibly boring.
  - Vegenoid 3y ago
    Many people find interest and meaning in learning about all the ways that people have lived, and the things they did and made. Great museums are a source of pride for many of the world's largest cities, and widely regarded as culturally important and valuable.
  - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
    This isn't even about ancient cultures, it's about valuing the product that comes from a persons work. Valuing their time and labor, valuing the craft itself. Compared to a "tribal wood carving designed by GPT" a real world piece of wood is, well, real. The novelty of everything wears off eventually so it won't matter if GPT could still show you nearly infinite carving designs. Without that being turned into actual physical objects by people, they are disposable bytes of data with no real meaning.

bushbaba 3y ago

Already happening. It’s why younger generations are preferring to spend on experiences over things.

ruszki 3y ago
Wait, what, really? Is there some article or study, or something where I can read about this? It sounds quite interesting.
iamacyborg 3y ago
People were parroting that about Millenials a decade ago. It’s just a function of being young and nothing to do with any particular generation.

BoxOfRain 3y ago

I definitely think authenticity or at least perceived authenticity will become more important in the future. There's a reason vacuum tubes are still produced industrially for guitarists and HiFi enthusiasts despite being over half a century obsolete and it's because despite digital modelling being just better from an engineering perspective people value the perceived authenticity of the real thing. I'm drawing up plans to build a valve amp myself, despite the fact it'll be worse at being an audio amplifier than one I can buy for a tenth of the price of the parts I value the gently glowing glass and straightforward analogue approach to amplifying sound. I think whether AI content will put people off the web in general will depend on whether it's actually any good or not. 'That looks like an AI made it' is usually an accusation of shoddiness at the moment!

beej71 3y ago
I've been listening to live recordings on Internet Archive for a bit after listening to only highly-produced music for years. There's something refreshingly human about it. I guess AIs could always be made to emulate that, but it seems it could make legitimately human stuff have higher value. Sharing with your friend a bootleg live recording that you made might be a greater gift. I could certainly imagine digitally-signed material from human artists, as well. Maybe I'm just old, but when I'm consuming some kind of art, I want to know that thinking, feeling humans were behind it. If I just want to look at pretty pictures, AI is fine. And I am actually old, because I'm already put off the modern web. :) HN-style websites are just my speed.

carlosjobim 3y ago

Don't worry, the shadow libraries have about 20 million books and 100 million scientific papers available, always increasing. There is little risk of AI spam seeping in there, since piracy is a certain threshold for quality. Who'd risk going to jail for pirating generated spam? ePUB books are basically HTML and CSS, so it's a matter of making a "book browser" instead of a web browser, that can inject links to things mentioned in the book text: such as a name, a place, and especially to another book.

jprete 3y ago
I'm hoping you were intending sarcasm. Speaking for myself, the _last_ thing I care about is AI researcher access to massive corpora of pirated clean text. Who knows, maybe AI people _want_ the Web to fill with garbage so people have to ask their creations for information.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  You completely misunderstood my comment. I don't understand how you could interpret it so wrongly?
  - jprete 3y ago
    I'm curious what you were aiming at?
    - carlosjobim 3y ago
      When the normal Internet becomes unusable because it is filled with AI spam, people will still find untainted information among the 20 million books and 100 million scientific papers in the shadow libraries. If we have a software that can make browsing books a little bit more like browsing the web, then usability will be better.
      - philomath_mn 3y ago
        There are already many examples of AI generated books spamming Amazon -- how do we separate the wheat from the chaff?

CSMastermind 3y ago

IMO one of the main things ChatGPT offers is the ability to interact with the knowledge of the internet without wading through ads and SEO spam.

pfd1986 3y ago
Agreed. I think this is a good argument towards development of open LLMs. If you're old enough, similar arguments existed about "open / free internet" and we're seeing some of the consequences of having it be controlled by mega corps.
- janoc 3y ago
  That's naive. There are open LLMs already. The problem is not the LLMs but that data they are being trained on is going to be increasingly spammy, scammy garbage. The LLMs don't have any sort of magical way of filtering that out. So if you train an LLM on spam, hoaxes and similar garbage you will get recommendations to drink bleach as a cure for covid. And that applies regardless of whether the bot is trained by a megacorp or someone in their garage using open source network and tools.
janoc 3y ago
The problem is that you are outsourcing that information curation to a bot that is 100% happy to feed you bullshit - and you have no recourse and no way to check because it doesn't tell you how did it arrive at the information it is feeding you. Also that information is by definition old. For something it doesn't matter, for many other things, like current news, it very much does. So while the attraction of having a personal "butler" doing the hard work for you is great, no doubt, it is ultimately no better than getting one's information from Facebook - you have ceded control and get whatever the creators of the system deem you worthy of having. Including political and other agendas. Just look at the censorship the Baidu bot is applying and the entire "jailbreaking" industry around escaping the artificially imposed boundaries on these bots, for good or bad reasons. And ultimately even ChatGPT and its ilk won't help us any when the web they scrape will be filled with machine-generated spam and crap drowning out all the useful information. Garbage in, garbage out applies even to these robots. They aren't magic.

reustle 3y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory Often referred to as the dead internet theory

memish 3y ago

This applies to discussion too. For instance, how many Reddit comments are bots? With the extreme groupthink present there, it wouldn't be a huge shock if it already makes up over half of the comments in popular subs.

sensanaty 3y ago
Whenever I read comments on big subredditss I'm convinced ~95% of them are astroturfing bots Real question is who pays for 'em?
pixl97 3y ago
I don't even have an account on Reddit these days, but still view it regularly. On the popular subs if you read at least half the posts (not comments) you'll see "Op is a bot that reposts content". They typically have some algorithm that digs up old popular posts that haven't been posted in a while and reposted them. With the number of people complaining they are reposted crap I have my doubts their initial upvotes legit, instead getting enough bot votes to get them on the subs front page which then gains more natural votes.
- pixl97 3y ago
  https://medium.com/collapsenews/new-study-at-least-15-of-all-reddit-content-is-corporate-trolls-trying-to-manipulate-public-b249bd42ab42 https://medium.com/collapsenews/new-study-at-least-15-of-all...

justapassenger 3y ago

[dead]

nestes 3y ago

I'm not even sure you need to invoke AI for saturation of the web, at least for things that don't have to do with current events -- our collective archives just keep getting bigger and bigger. This may be a bit tangential, but something like 1/8th of surviving classical Greek literature (1000 years!) is attributed in part to Galen. While he was quite prolific, the point is that the entire corpus is extremely small. We didn't even have the capability to record audio and video until the early 1900s, and certainly not in a mass, centralized, easily-distributable sense until the internet. Having a million monkeys write Shakespeare is pure happenstance, but having a million Shakespeares is inevitable. I abstractly worry that even besides the junk, there will actually be so much PHENOMENALLY GOOD stuff that would-be creators and artisans will be discouraged instead of inspired. Let's hope that you're right about the real carvings. That at least is not so scalable.

Beijinger 3y ago

"I wonder if we will get to a point where the web is so saturated with this junk that the web itself starts to lose its luster." Why should it? 50% of IP traffic is caused by robots, maybe in the future 99% will be. Robot shit viewed by AI robots, SISO. Shit in, shit out.

araes 3y ago

So much worse. Luster? Huge portions of the Earth depend on the web as their only info source. News has turned into "somebody ran their mouth on (the symbol formerly known as Twitter)." Also, utterly false news: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2023/12/these-ai-generated-news-anchors-are-freaking-me-out/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2023/12/these-ai-generated-news-a... The comments are disturbing "I always suspected Anderson Cooper and Lisa Ling were computer generated." Also, you might not be able to read this, because I might already be shadow / hell / heaven banned. (A 2012 update to Hacker News introduced a system of "hellbanning") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning Far too easy to write a script that says if( [user] ) then ( "hide" ). Also, if you can, we might just live in a ban circle together. Since all news in the future will be personalized based on your tracking pixel and router location. 'ChatGPT, write me a fake nightly news cast for "so and so" location.'

dbtc 3y ago

From Plato to Sontag there have been people trying to remind us all that the representation is not the real thing. Perhaps AI will finally deliver the message. But then... What if AI dreams the carvings and then drives the CNC? Would that be interesting? Or is there something special about the human being?

philomath_mn 3y ago
There is something special about the human being