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The rise in AI generated content affects us all, generally negatively, sighted or not. There are a vast number of sites that are largely LLM generated that exi
by gerdesj 3y ago
The rise in AI generated content affects us all, generally negatively, sighted or not.
There are a vast number of sites that are largely LLM generated that exist to deliver adverts. Basically, the old school link farms have evolved into automatically generated content farms.
For example, if you search for a few IT technical terms you will often get a lot of blog style returns. They will often look like a Word Press site with a selection from a colour and font scheme. With luck you will find some Stack overflow posts and with the Good Lord (pick your deity) looking down, you might get some real content.
The situation for finding and engaging on the internet is pretty dire and if one or more of your faculties are a bit shag ... really dire.
Perhaps what we need is some sort of Open Access to add to Open Source. I have deliberately picked Access even though its been sort of taken by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access
The Access I envisage is actual ability to access something. The other effort might consider Open Research or similar instead.
- skydhash 3y agoI don't know how worse it will get, but my current solution is a hoard of pdfs (books and articles), saving links (in case I can't find that one good site), and a documentation browser (Dash on macOS). A current trend is curated lists of links (awesome lists, blogrolls,…) so maybe one day, the only good way to experience the web will be this small web which will act like a human filter.
- rand0mx1 3y agoDo you hoard web pages using extension like SingleFile Web?
- skydhash 3y agoI probably should, but so far, there's only a few articles I've saved this way (long-form writing that get saved to my read-later list). Most of the links I've saved are objects-related (apps, libraries,...), and will only be useful if I need to interact with the object. If something is useful to me (techniques, recommendations,…) I put it in my notes. If the whole site is useful, I archive it.
- gerdesj 3y agoGood idea to stash stuff away. I have access to an IT company (I own it) and a fair amount of storage but nothing like Archive! One day we shall meet on HN and link our Nextcloud instances, links to some weird static HTML and so on and form a new web of information. The internet (web) will never die, per se, but it does feel awfully siloed off at the moment. Mind you I do manage to run my company email on prem (Exchange - soz, but HA Proxy fronts its webby stuff and Exim is my SMTP weapon of choice). I also run my family email domain and several others too. No hyper-scalers here, thank you very much. I'm looking into the fediverse. I think that's where this stuff really belongs - the front pages of the internet have become mega corps. Its all looking a bit half hearted in fediland but Lemmy and Mastodon and co are starting to look quite useful. The internet is still really diverse and flourishing but it needs a right good kicking as do the users of it.
- webspinner 3y agoThe Fediverse is definitely where all the stuff belongs. I do use a service for all of this. I pay $12 per a year, and have stashed away quite a lot of stuff there.
- idle_zealot 3y agoI've already personally encountered a website in search results that when visited shows just a headline/title that is suspiciously spot-on to your search parameters, then a bunch of content-loading placeholders with ads interspersed. After a few seconds the placeholders start filling in, one section at a time, with what is clearly AI-generated filler text related to the title topic.