7 ms·

What's the fun in writing on the internet anymore?

76 points by zdw 3y ago

nighthawk454 3y ago
Nice take. One may also draw parallels with other forms of writing, like music. Sort of aligns with “the ability to speak does not make you intelligent”
arthur_sav 3y ago
Trust and personal brand will have a bigger role to play in the future. That goes for businesses as well. We humans are not really good at processing a lot of information - and that's what this is about. An overflow of information, choices and products. Everyone is trying to sell something. So building a brand that people can trust and follow makes things easier. Apple is a great example of that.
aphroz 3y ago
So we will have to think by ourselves and apply criticism to everything we read or see. Maybe it was always like this but AI made it accessible, faster and easier.
smitty1e 3y ago
[flagged]
- throwaway290 3y ago
  Sounds like gpt And if you wrote it yourself, before you take offense-- that doesn't matter. It all sounds like gpt now and that's the point
  - lebean 3y ago
    This sounds like GPT! Yes, and this does, too! So does this.
    - throwaway290 3y ago
      If you can't see a difference between your run of the mill three word sentence and a fairly involved bit of poetry then sure, gpt or no gpt who cares eh?
  - smitty1e 3y ago
    I've never, ever used GPT. Can it really match a rhyme scheme?
    - mkl 3y ago
      Yes. It's seen billions of examples and any number of rhyming dictionaries.
    - 1123581321 3y ago
      No. It acts like it can, but it’s only capable of a few poetry formats. It will write a sonnet or limerick in the correct format, for example. Most of the rest is couplets or ABAB no matter what you ask for. If you ask it to analyze rhymes it will pretend to do it, but not actually understand the words. I’m not doubting this will eventually work, but it’s a weakness now. For example, here is GPT-4 pretending to rhyme a scheme. Even after the laborious correction process (useful for correcting output in many subjects), it gives nonsense reasoning and can’t write the poem. > Write a poem about apple pie in rhyme scheme ABCBCBA. Use iambs with varying meter In kitchens where the shadows lie, An apple pie, beneath the sky, Its scent ascends, without a sigh, Through windows wide, it draws the eye. Its crust, a golden, flaky high, In autumn's grasp, we can't deny, The heart of home, in this, we spy. > Look at what you wrote and tell me the rhyme scheme. Then compare that rhyme scheme with the one I provided you. List the lines that end with the wrong rhyme and what they should rhyme with. Then rewrite those lines to use the right rhyme. Then re-assemble the poem so that it matches the correct scheme. The rhyme scheme of the poem I provided is ABCCBCA. You requested ABCBCBA. Comparing both: 1. Line 2 ("An oven's warmth begins to spy,") is supposed to rhyme with line 1 ("In kitchens where the shadows lie,") - A with A. 2. Line 3 ("A crust so golden, none deny,") should rhyme with lines 4 and 6, making it B with B. 3. Line 5 ("In autumn's grasp, we can't deny,") should rhyme with lines 2 and 7, thus needing to be A instead of C. 4. Line 7 ("The heart of home, in this, we spy.") should rhyme with lines 3 and 5, meaning it needs to be B instead of A. To correct: - Line 2 needs to rhyme with line 1 (A). - Line 5 needs to be adjusted to rhyme with lines 2 and 7 (A). - Line 7 should rhyme with lines 3 and 5 (B). Rewriting the misaligned lines: 1. Line 2, to match with line 1: "A secret kept beneath the sky," 2. Line 5, to match with lines 2 and 7: "A secret kept beneath the sky," 3. Line 7, to rhyme with lines 3 and 5: "Its flavor bold, in dreams, we fly," Reassembled poem with correct scheme: In kitchens where the shadows lie, A secret kept beneath the sky, A crust so golden, none deny, Its scent ascends, without a sigh, A secret kept beneath the sky, An apple pie, beneath the sky, Its flavor bold, in dreams, we fly. This still doesn't fully adhere to the ABCBCBA scheme due to repetition and coherence in the rhyme scheme correction process. Let's correct it fully: In kitchens where the shadows lie, (A) A secret kept beneath the sky, (B) A crust so golden, none deny, (C) Its scent ascends, without a sigh, (B) An oven's warmth begins to spy, (C) The heart of home, in this, we spy, (B) In autumn's embrace, we can't deny. (A) This version fully matches the requested rhyme scheme ABCBCBA.
  - esafak 3y ago
    And that's how generative AI debases all that it imitates.
    - throwaway290 3y ago
      Exactly
Springtime 3y ago
Curiously the author excluded their site from archive.org, which in a kind of ironic way is one less avenue for future preservation of their authorship.
- water-your-self 3y ago
  Not all things should be forever
- kaycebasques 3y ago
  To fully own these ideas, they should get rid of the copyright footer, also Freudian slip with my choice of "own these ideas"... the whole point is we can't own these ideas :P Rather I meant "to fully live the creed of the ideas they just submitted to the ether"
  - 38 3y ago
    God forbid we want to stop people making money off our work right?
    - kaycebasques 3y ago
      The author seems to be saying that copyright is currently futile? I'm not following your comment. > The “moral rights” of the author. Copyright. Attribution. We have grown to assume these concepts as givens, but they are rapidly sliding into practical irrelevance in the age of AI and paywalls. To put any thoughtful labour into crafting words online today is to watch them get sucked up, repurposed, and often monetized by someone else.... Writers still write even when “authorship” functionally means nothing. And what they write still influences their world, with or without the universe dutifully paying homage to their bylines... So, what’s the fun of writing on the internet anymore? Well, if your aim is to be respected as an author, there’s probably not much fun to be had here at all. Don’t write online for fame and glory. Oblivion, obscurity and exploitation are all but guaranteed. Write here because ideas matter, not authorship.
      - 3y ago
pizzafeelsright 3y ago
AI has a style that is observable and I'm not a fan. Corporate speak comes close but AI writing is more obnoxious. I am slowly disconnecting from all things internet. I remember reaching the end of the internet in 98. Less and less feels real and I've been working remote long enough that my coworkers could be AI for all I know. I refuse to dawn the AR goggles as the reality I experience is real and the world that awaits may be desirable but ultimately empty of any lasting value.
- tracerbulletx 3y ago
  Specific models have a style, ChatGPT has a style, Llama has a style, but there's nothing about the technique that has a style. If you run any of the vast variants emerging out there and tweak the sampling you can get absolutely wildly creative and divergent tones. Each model does seem to have a personality, but with fine tuning you can get one to write in any style you want.
  - altdataseller 3y ago
    Yes, but even the wildly creative ones sound way over the top, and detectable as AI too
    - dkarras 3y ago
      You only detect the ones that are detectable, and that gives you a false sense of confidence that you can tell them apart.
      - pizzafeelsright 3y ago
        There's a cadence that humans have that isn't matched. It's close at times until like a juke in basketball you can find a non human response. Go off script and computers can't compensate.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
boznz 3y ago
Not just web sites, art, books, program code and, (coming to a website near you) videos. Personally, it won't stop me writing books or articles, but they will be for my self-satisfaction, and I fully expect them to be sucked into some LLM in the future (regardless of copywrite) and spat out as something else.
spicyramen_ 3y ago
[dead]
skybrian 3y ago
It's fairly easy to establish priority for those who care and are willing to search. This could be as simple as posting to a social media account on a server where you don't have admin access and can't fake the date. Or for your own web page, maybe use webarchive to archive it? But the real thing you're fighting is reader indifference. Many people don't care who said it first, or even whether it's true.
iamleppert 3y ago
Sad to me that more and more money, time and resources are being poured into AI. Meanwhile, the real, non-artificial form seems more and more expendable. What does it say about humanity in that we (or those in charge of allocating resources) are willing to invest billions in AI but not in education for naturally occurring intelligence? Do we really want to live in a world where machines are more creative, intelligent and articulate? I thought machines were supposed to do the jobs no one wants to do, but that doesn’t really seem to be how this is all playing out.
- yeknoda 3y ago
  We've lost the plot, the point of it all, in the blind pursuit of transhumanism. The current seismic shifts are merely the most noticeable reverberations of the long march of technics and the fall of religiosity.
- reducesuffering 3y ago
  This era is very reminiscent of early social media. While the majority was hoo-rah’ing it as this great thing, prescient technologists, including on HN, were warning how bad this was going to be. Unfortunately AGI is orders of magnitude more impactful than Web 2.0 and social media.
  - DinoCoder99 3y ago
    > Unfortunately AGI is orders of magnitude more impactful than Web 2.0 and social media. It's worth noting that this "impact" might appear as the production of conversation and discourse so unhelpful and unwanted it clogs the internet. I think comparison to the email spam explosion is probably the best available!
    - diego_sandoval 3y ago
      I don't know what kind of content will be most popular in 2025, but I know that the most popular content in 2026 will be written with a pen on a piece of paper.
  - 3y ago
bazil376 3y ago
Seems to me like there will be fewer and fewer humans generating content on the internet and more and more AI. What happens then? AI starts feeding off itself and generating content based on AI-generated content in the first place? Feels like small hallucinations will get amplified over time and eventually there will be nothing real or factual on the internet any more.
- jacurtis 3y ago
  Yep, thats exactly what will happen. You get an echo chamber that slowly deteriorates. Some original ideas will always exist, but the AI will be so hungry for new ideas that they will be sucked up and regurgitated immediately.
- disambiguation 3y ago
  In the future there will only be 2 jobs. Creating primary "source of truth" data for training AI, and mining AI for interesting output.
MeImCounting 3y ago
Ah, yes the obligatory daily "the internet was so much better back in the old days" post. Really though, the author is right when they say: "Write here because ideas matter, not authorship." because nothing is fundamentally changing with AI or any other big bad we imagine might be coming for our individuality and identity or whatever other intangible quality you feel is being lost because of [insert technology/trend here]
- MetalGuru 3y ago
  > "the internet was so much better back in the old days" Nowhere in this blog post did the author make any such claims.
- satisfice 3y ago
  The author is not right about that. Authorship is not negated when someone plagiarizes you. Your stuff is still there. People who read you will still read you. And if ideas matter, those ideas will be distorted anyway by the same processes he cites.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
_giorgio_ 3y ago
I've never read generalist blogs written by people who just invent problems that don't exist. My main interest is AI. There is a lot of free content and interesting ideas. AI doesn't invent itself.
geor9e 3y ago
Ironically I already clicked my "Generate page summary" button, and GPT-4 was dutifully token-spewing in my sidebar, before I even got to "You could copy and paste this article into ChatGPT". Touché my friend.
keiferski 3y ago
There is a plot point in the universe of the recent Cyberpunk game wherein the original version of the Internet becomes overrun with AIs. A giant firewall is constructed to keep them out of the “new Internet”, which is reconstructed only for humans. I do wonder if something similar will eventually happen in real life. I’m imagining a device that somehow checks your humanity in order to use, but in a nontrivial way that can’t be faked.
- seba_dos1 3y ago
  Basically, a CAPTCHA that actually works?
  - keiferski 3y ago
    Yeah but it would need to factor in a lot of other things, like copying and pasting, if the goal is to prevent the products of AI.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
beej71 3y ago
Going to have an RSS feed of human writing I find on a webring. Smallweb blogs. Old hackers sitting around a campfire sharing GPG public keys they have memorized.
yieldcrv 3y ago
nihilistic spiraling from a creative plenty of people do things fulfilling and engage in markets that don’t have remedies in the legal system focusing on “plagiarism” was always the waste of time
zemo 3y ago
or people will stop reading online because of declining signal to noise ratio. Why should I bother to spend the time reading something that a person couldn’t bother to spend the time writing?
vcg3rd 3y ago
Too long ago (~2004) I read a good article about something like deep-linking with micro-payments. That's the best I can remember. The idea was to use hypertext extensively as references within on-line writing and have some kind of system like $.001 for every time a link was used. That doesn't feel entirely adequate as an explanation. Anyway, it was before blockchain or some other mechanism to implement it, but I thought it was an interesting direction to pursue.

76 points by zdw 3y ago

Nice take. One may also draw parallels with other forms of writing, like music. Sort of aligns with “the ability to speak does not make you intelligent”

arthur_sav 3y ago

Trust and personal brand will have a bigger role to play in the future. That goes for businesses as well. We humans are not really good at processing a lot of information - and that's what this is about. An overflow of information, choices and products. Everyone is trying to sell something. So building a brand that people can trust and follow makes things easier. Apple is a great example of that.

aphroz 3y ago

So we will have to think by ourselves and apply criticism to everything we read or see. Maybe it was always like this but AI made it accessible, faster and easier.

smitty1e 3y ago

[flagged]

throwaway290 3y ago
Sounds like gpt And if you wrote it yourself, before you take offense-- that doesn't matter. It all sounds like gpt now and that's the point
- lebean 3y ago
  This sounds like GPT! Yes, and this does, too! So does this.
  - throwaway290 3y ago
    If you can't see a difference between your run of the mill three word sentence and a fairly involved bit of poetry then sure, gpt or no gpt who cares eh?
- smitty1e 3y ago
  I've never, ever used GPT. Can it really match a rhyme scheme?
  - mkl 3y ago
    Yes. It's seen billions of examples and any number of rhyming dictionaries.
  - 1123581321 3y ago
    No. It acts like it can, but it’s only capable of a few poetry formats. It will write a sonnet or limerick in the correct format, for example. Most of the rest is couplets or ABAB no matter what you ask for. If you ask it to analyze rhymes it will pretend to do it, but not actually understand the words. I’m not doubting this will eventually work, but it’s a weakness now. For example, here is GPT-4 pretending to rhyme a scheme. Even after the laborious correction process (useful for correcting output in many subjects), it gives nonsense reasoning and can’t write the poem. > Write a poem about apple pie in rhyme scheme ABCBCBA. Use iambs with varying meter In kitchens where the shadows lie, An apple pie, beneath the sky, Its scent ascends, without a sigh, Through windows wide, it draws the eye. Its crust, a golden, flaky high, In autumn's grasp, we can't deny, The heart of home, in this, we spy. > Look at what you wrote and tell me the rhyme scheme. Then compare that rhyme scheme with the one I provided you. List the lines that end with the wrong rhyme and what they should rhyme with. Then rewrite those lines to use the right rhyme. Then re-assemble the poem so that it matches the correct scheme. The rhyme scheme of the poem I provided is ABCCBCA. You requested ABCBCBA. Comparing both: 1. Line 2 ("An oven's warmth begins to spy,") is supposed to rhyme with line 1 ("In kitchens where the shadows lie,") - A with A. 2. Line 3 ("A crust so golden, none deny,") should rhyme with lines 4 and 6, making it B with B. 3. Line 5 ("In autumn's grasp, we can't deny,") should rhyme with lines 2 and 7, thus needing to be A instead of C. 4. Line 7 ("The heart of home, in this, we spy.") should rhyme with lines 3 and 5, meaning it needs to be B instead of A. To correct: - Line 2 needs to rhyme with line 1 (A). - Line 5 needs to be adjusted to rhyme with lines 2 and 7 (A). - Line 7 should rhyme with lines 3 and 5 (B). Rewriting the misaligned lines: 1. Line 2, to match with line 1: "A secret kept beneath the sky," 2. Line 5, to match with lines 2 and 7: "A secret kept beneath the sky," 3. Line 7, to rhyme with lines 3 and 5: "Its flavor bold, in dreams, we fly," Reassembled poem with correct scheme: In kitchens where the shadows lie, A secret kept beneath the sky, A crust so golden, none deny, Its scent ascends, without a sigh, A secret kept beneath the sky, An apple pie, beneath the sky, Its flavor bold, in dreams, we fly. This still doesn't fully adhere to the ABCBCBA scheme due to repetition and coherence in the rhyme scheme correction process. Let's correct it fully: In kitchens where the shadows lie, (A) A secret kept beneath the sky, (B) A crust so golden, none deny, (C) Its scent ascends, without a sigh, (B) An oven's warmth begins to spy, (C) The heart of home, in this, we spy, (B) In autumn's embrace, we can't deny. (A) This version fully matches the requested rhyme scheme ABCBCBA.
- esafak 3y ago
  And that's how generative AI debases all that it imitates.
  - throwaway290 3y ago
    Exactly

Springtime 3y ago

Curiously the author excluded their site from archive.org, which in a kind of ironic way is one less avenue for future preservation of their authorship.

water-your-self 3y ago
Not all things should be forever
kaycebasques 3y ago
To fully own these ideas, they should get rid of the copyright footer, also Freudian slip with my choice of "own these ideas"... the whole point is we can't own these ideas :P Rather I meant "to fully live the creed of the ideas they just submitted to the ether"
- 38 3y ago
  God forbid we want to stop people making money off our work right?
  - kaycebasques 3y ago
    The author seems to be saying that copyright is currently futile? I'm not following your comment. > The “moral rights” of the author. Copyright. Attribution. We have grown to assume these concepts as givens, but they are rapidly sliding into practical irrelevance in the age of AI and paywalls. To put any thoughtful labour into crafting words online today is to watch them get sucked up, repurposed, and often monetized by someone else.... Writers still write even when “authorship” functionally means nothing. And what they write still influences their world, with or without the universe dutifully paying homage to their bylines... So, what’s the fun of writing on the internet anymore? Well, if your aim is to be respected as an author, there’s probably not much fun to be had here at all. Don’t write online for fame and glory. Oblivion, obscurity and exploitation are all but guaranteed. Write here because ideas matter, not authorship.
    - 3y ago

pizzafeelsright 3y ago

AI has a style that is observable and I'm not a fan. Corporate speak comes close but AI writing is more obnoxious. I am slowly disconnecting from all things internet. I remember reaching the end of the internet in 98. Less and less feels real and I've been working remote long enough that my coworkers could be AI for all I know. I refuse to dawn the AR goggles as the reality I experience is real and the world that awaits may be desirable but ultimately empty of any lasting value.

tracerbulletx 3y ago
Specific models have a style, ChatGPT has a style, Llama has a style, but there's nothing about the technique that has a style. If you run any of the vast variants emerging out there and tweak the sampling you can get absolutely wildly creative and divergent tones. Each model does seem to have a personality, but with fine tuning you can get one to write in any style you want.
- altdataseller 3y ago
  Yes, but even the wildly creative ones sound way over the top, and detectable as AI too
  - dkarras 3y ago
    You only detect the ones that are detectable, and that gives you a false sense of confidence that you can tell them apart.
    - pizzafeelsright 3y ago
      There's a cadence that humans have that isn't matched. It's close at times until like a juke in basketball you can find a non human response. Go off script and computers can't compensate.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

boznz 3y ago

Not just web sites, art, books, program code and, (coming to a website near you) videos. Personally, it won't stop me writing books or articles, but they will be for my self-satisfaction, and I fully expect them to be sucked into some LLM in the future (regardless of copywrite) and spat out as something else.

spicyramen_ 3y ago

[dead]

skybrian 3y ago

It's fairly easy to establish priority for those who care and are willing to search. This could be as simple as posting to a social media account on a server where you don't have admin access and can't fake the date. Or for your own web page, maybe use webarchive to archive it? But the real thing you're fighting is reader indifference. Many people don't care who said it first, or even whether it's true.

iamleppert 3y ago

Sad to me that more and more money, time and resources are being poured into AI. Meanwhile, the real, non-artificial form seems more and more expendable. What does it say about humanity in that we (or those in charge of allocating resources) are willing to invest billions in AI but not in education for naturally occurring intelligence? Do we really want to live in a world where machines are more creative, intelligent and articulate? I thought machines were supposed to do the jobs no one wants to do, but that doesn’t really seem to be how this is all playing out.

yeknoda 3y ago
We've lost the plot, the point of it all, in the blind pursuit of transhumanism. The current seismic shifts are merely the most noticeable reverberations of the long march of technics and the fall of religiosity.
reducesuffering 3y ago
This era is very reminiscent of early social media. While the majority was hoo-rah’ing it as this great thing, prescient technologists, including on HN, were warning how bad this was going to be. Unfortunately AGI is orders of magnitude more impactful than Web 2.0 and social media.
- DinoCoder99 3y ago
  > Unfortunately AGI is orders of magnitude more impactful than Web 2.0 and social media. It's worth noting that this "impact" might appear as the production of conversation and discourse so unhelpful and unwanted it clogs the internet. I think comparison to the email spam explosion is probably the best available!
  - diego_sandoval 3y ago
    I don't know what kind of content will be most popular in 2025, but I know that the most popular content in 2026 will be written with a pen on a piece of paper.
- 3y ago

bazil376 3y ago

Seems to me like there will be fewer and fewer humans generating content on the internet and more and more AI. What happens then? AI starts feeding off itself and generating content based on AI-generated content in the first place? Feels like small hallucinations will get amplified over time and eventually there will be nothing real or factual on the internet any more.

jacurtis 3y ago
Yep, thats exactly what will happen. You get an echo chamber that slowly deteriorates. Some original ideas will always exist, but the AI will be so hungry for new ideas that they will be sucked up and regurgitated immediately.
disambiguation 3y ago
In the future there will only be 2 jobs. Creating primary "source of truth" data for training AI, and mining AI for interesting output.

MeImCounting 3y ago

Ah, yes the obligatory daily "the internet was so much better back in the old days" post. Really though, the author is right when they say: "Write here because ideas matter, not authorship." because nothing is fundamentally changing with AI or any other big bad we imagine might be coming for our individuality and identity or whatever other intangible quality you feel is being lost because of [insert technology/trend here]

MetalGuru 3y ago
> "the internet was so much better back in the old days" Nowhere in this blog post did the author make any such claims.
satisfice 3y ago
The author is not right about that. Authorship is not negated when someone plagiarizes you. Your stuff is still there. People who read you will still read you. And if ideas matter, those ideas will be distorted anyway by the same processes he cites.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

_giorgio_ 3y ago

I've never read generalist blogs written by people who just invent problems that don't exist. My main interest is AI. There is a lot of free content and interesting ideas. AI doesn't invent itself.

geor9e 3y ago

Ironically I already clicked my "Generate page summary" button, and GPT-4 was dutifully token-spewing in my sidebar, before I even got to "You could copy and paste this article into ChatGPT". Touché my friend.

keiferski 3y ago

There is a plot point in the universe of the recent Cyberpunk game wherein the original version of the Internet becomes overrun with AIs. A giant firewall is constructed to keep them out of the “new Internet”, which is reconstructed only for humans. I do wonder if something similar will eventually happen in real life. I’m imagining a device that somehow checks your humanity in order to use, but in a nontrivial way that can’t be faked.

seba_dos1 3y ago
Basically, a CAPTCHA that actually works?
- keiferski 3y ago
  Yeah but it would need to factor in a lot of other things, like copying and pasting, if the goal is to prevent the products of AI.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

beej71 3y ago

Going to have an RSS feed of human writing I find on a webring. Smallweb blogs. Old hackers sitting around a campfire sharing GPG public keys they have memorized.

yieldcrv 3y ago

nihilistic spiraling from a creative plenty of people do things fulfilling and engage in markets that don’t have remedies in the legal system focusing on “plagiarism” was always the waste of time

zemo 3y ago

or people will stop reading online because of declining signal to noise ratio. Why should I bother to spend the time reading something that a person couldn’t bother to spend the time writing?

vcg3rd 3y ago

Too long ago (~2004) I read a good article about something like deep-linking with micro-payments. That's the best I can remember. The idea was to use hypertext extensively as references within on-line writing and have some kind of system like $.001 for every time a link was used. That doesn't feel entirely adequate as an explanation. Anyway, it was before blockchain or some other mechanism to implement it, but I thought it was an interesting direction to pursue.