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It's the End of the Web as We Know It
- willmill1989 2y ago"Eventually, people may stop writing, stop filming, stop composing—at least for the open, public web. People will still create, but for small, select audiences, walled off from the content-hoovering AIs." A quote that's unironically behind the paywall.
- seydor 2y agoWhich end? End number 2? 3? 113?
- palata 2y agoIt's literally answered in the first four sentences.
- skilled 2y agohttps://archive.is/yscVH https://archive.is/yscVH
- jamesholden 2y agoIrony. The end of the web as we know it... can't be read fully because of paywall. Thank you, kind stranger.
- xoac 2y agoIt’s not irony at all. There’s nothing inherent to the web that guarantees you free access to its content.
- podgorniy 2y agoThis sentence does not make sence because it is applicable to everything > There’s nothing inherent to the X that guarantees you free access to its content. Libraries, public transport? Taxes. Love of your parents? Depends on them. Give me something for which I can say use the phrase and it will be true.
- palata 2y agoWell it does make sense in the context where it comes from: it's an explanation for why the author of that quote thinks that it is not irony. And you are free to disagree with that opinion, but I wouldn't say that the sentence makes no sense. I could do the same with you: this sentence does not make sense: > Taxes.
- petepete 2y agoBut it's frustrating that search engines are able to index the whole page, so things I don't have access to are listed in search results and I can only find out when I've clicked.
- rob74 2y ago...and I feel fine (?) (I know I will probably get downvoted for this, but as an old R.E.M. fan, I just couldn't help it)
- Terr_ 2y agoUltimately this is a offline problem as well: Trust, reputation, social-proof, and webs of attestation. If we want to look for solutions to apply to the internet, we need to look at what has developed in the real-world domain, where different interests have been trying to alternately solve and exploit trust-issues for millennia. It might not have final definitive answers, but we can at least avoid reinventing too many wheels.
- drewcoo 2y agoSo look at banks or militaries - two scenarios involving a lot of risk hinging on identity. What do they do? They use computers for that stuff now.
- Terr_ 2y agoSince when did the military start letting a computer assign everyone their command-ranks? :p I don't understand what you're trying to say here. Sure, people are using more computers everywhere, but that doesn't necessarily change fundamental guidelines we already used, like "each time someone could betray you and doesn't, that suggests they are trustworthy in the future."
- louwrentius 2y ago‘The end of … as we know it’ is such a terrible and deeply dishonest trope in my view, I really dislike it.
- beachy 2y agoGoogle's SEO malarkey created the intense vacuum which AI will now happily rush to fill. The article mentions recipe articles, and how these now invariably have a waffly preamble designed to please the SEO algorithms. It's been obvious to humans how stupid this is for years, just as it's obvious that sites that simply copy from stack overflow are leaches on our attention and should not be highly ranked. Yet Google hasn't dealt with any of these problems, and with a focus on short term profits, has consistently preferred to take the money from ads hosted on these crappy sites instead of delivering a quality search experience. Now the chickens are coming home to roost for Google, which can only benefit a range of competitors, from Kagi to OpenAI.
- palata 2y agoI think it's incorrect to say that AI has come to where it is today because of Google. AI researchers would have done exactly the same. One valid question, though, is why technologists don't think about the consequences of what they do before they do it? Because they focus on short term profits, like you mentioned for Google?
- drewcoo 2y ago> technologists don't think about the consequences of what they do before they do it Software "engineers" are not part of a professional body at all, let alone one that espouses ethics. That only seems to happen in professions with a high risk of lawsuits due to customer death. How deeply would you expect an interior designer or a landscaper to think about future consequences?
- pyrale 2y agoIt is well known that more regulated professionals have never done anything morally questionable.
- chongli 2y agoOne valid question, though, is why technologists don't think about the consequences of what they do before they do it? Because they can’t. There’s no way Larry and Sergei could’ve foreseen the multi billion dollar SEO industry back when they were at Stanford. Every decision they’ve made since then has been of the form “stay on the gravy train or jump off?” I don’t think anyone knows how to solve the problem of adversarial inputs in either the search space or the ML space. It’s a chicken and egg problem: you’re trying to build intelligence but the task of filtering out the adversarial inputs requires intelligence in the first place.
- dijksterhuis 2y agoI agree with some of this, sort of. Up until this absolutist claim — > the web … will cease to exist in any useful form What has tended to happen in the past is, drum roll please, competition appears making the interwebs more useful again. Example: DuckDuckGo’s popularity came out of the desire for a more privacy friendly search engine. The only constant in life is change. Just because a thing becomes less useful short term, does not mean it will always be less useful long term. On a more meta note — Title —> Subtitle —> Advert —> Four sentences —> Advert -> Four sentences —> Paywall I find it mildly ironic that it will be the push for GenAI’s fault, when the publisher is doing everything they can to stop me from reading an article about how it’s going to be the push for GenAI’s fault. I am for fair pay for creators, and I’m definitely not a big fan of GenAI. I just found it to be an interesting irony, given the setup of the article wrt the origins of the interwebs.
- a_bonobo 2y ago>Example: DuckDuckGo’s popularity came out of the desire for a more privacy friendly search engine. DDG has a market share of 0.66% [1], that doesn't feel like popularity. That feels like an 'etc.' [1] https://backlinko.com/duckduckgo-stats https://backlinko.com/duckduckgo-stats
- throwthrowuknow 2y agoOut of curiosity, what percentage of people who are currently online were also online in the early days that we are reminiscing about?
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y agoI can't claim to have partaken acoustic couplers, but do 2400 baud modems count? Or do you mean the era of fuchsia Comic Sans marquee blink tags and yellow text on blue pages with animated GIFs and colored ball bullet point items?
- dijksterhuis 2y agoEh maybe it’s my personal biases in play. Fair point on the bad example.
- listenallyall 2y agoSeems there is a market opportunity for a search engine to promote itself as AI-free... no AI prompts, just the same search keywords people have been using for 25 years, and more importantly, a commitment to avoid returning AI-generated content, as much as possible. As Google increasingly returns garbage results, I'll happily use something else.
- red_trumpet 2y ago> a commitment to avoid returning AI-generated content, as much as possible That's the hard part, isn't it? The emergence of LLMs makes it increasingly difficult to automatically distinguish AI-generated content from human made content. Heck, even humans may find this difficult!
- BlueTemplar 2y agoSounds like an education problem ? This kind of spam is an annoyance, but you learn to filter it out soon enough. Stack Overflow is a great example : its value is not so much in giving you a quick answer, but even more because you will see several answers, and the discussion around them. And yes, sure, convincing malicious actors there are always possible, but not probable. Same thing with Wikipedia's Talk pages, blog's comments (with the censorship issue), or third party comment sites like HN (with the platform issues). I'm much more concerned about artists that make works for their aesthetic value losing their already precarious livelihood to AIs. And even considering that it's sometimes feels like it's worth it : https://youtube.com/@D4BadRadio https://youtube.com/@D4BadRadio (who would have paid enough for this to be made by artists ? nobody)
- palata 2y ago> This kind of spam is an annoyance The problem is that LLMs are a whole new level of spam, orders of magnitude more powerful than anything we know. Before LLMs, you could not generate millions of comments for e.g. TripAdvisor without the users realizing that those were generated. With LLMs, users cannot say anymore if a review was written by a human or not. You just cannot trust any anonymous review you find online anymore. If Google cannot automatically discriminate between spam and genuine content, then Google is broken. And one fundamental promise of LLMs is that it is (or will be) powerful enough to reach that point, and therefore to break Google.
- BlueTemplar 2y agoI don't think that your Trip Advisor example is a good one, because there's already a threshold there : having to make a Trip Advisor account (and keep it from being flagged). Unless TripAdvisor's reviews are actually anonymous rather than pseudonymous ?! Isn't that the kind of super-targeted, high cost / high reward scam that smarter bots don't help with because its automation doesn't help much ? Also, if even pseudonymous accounts can be (meaningfully) penetrated by bots, then what prevents article's deep web from being penetrated and destroyed too ? (In fact we've already seen it happen on the likes of Facebook years ago, its faster, pseudo-ephemeral nature making things worse I guess ?)
- DeathArrow 2y agoMaybe we need human curated content. If we rely on bots such as Google to recommend content, there is always going to be a lot of spam, a lot of noise, a lot of SEO and a lot of AI generated content.
- ReptileMan 2y ago>Maybe we need human curated content. We can also name it altavista
- xoac 2y agoToo bad step one was to replace human curation with algorithms
- drewcoo 2y agoThe thing is . . . human curation is an algorithm. And businesses tend to seek more profits, in part by cutting costs. So what's the obvious way to cut the cost of an algorithm that involves a bunch of slow, unreliable meat?
- xpe 2y ago> human curation is an algorithm This phrase seems too muddled to be useful to me. An algorithm that aggregates preferences of people isn't "just" a "a finite sequence of mathematically rigorous instructions". If we run amok with the usage above (which I don't care for), what _isn't_ an algorithm? When everything is an algorithm, the word has no meaning.
- podgorniy 2y ago_Like reddit subreddit admins_? -- I agree with the idea. But I can't come up with any feasible model of motivations on how to implement it.
- palata 2y agoSomething like RSS feeds, maybe? You can follow a blog because you trust the author. Then the blog may link another website that you then add to your feed. You could check the feeds of your friends, too. This all existed not so long ago.
- tannhaeuser 2y ago> The advent of AI threatens to destroy the complex online ecosystem that allows writers, artists, and other creators to reach human audiences. I gleaned these words before TFA fades and prompts me for a subscription; how about we stop linking to paywalls and excessive data collectors, or at least flag posts as such? Actually, writers haven't been able to reach audiences for a long time now, much less make a living (see also the "nobody reads books" story featuring on HN right now) as illegal ad providers/search engine monopolies and others have established themselves as new men in the middle, something the web was designed to break to begin with. The other route to monopolies is lack of payment options/microtransactions, the subversion of regulated stacks with fair access (such as 3G networks used to be) by de facto "platforms", and the utter and complete failure of politicians to uphold currency sovereignty or (pretend to) even grasp the problem. Perhaps the web dying as it is can benefit actual authors and other content producers? At least we don't have to endure BS freeriding articles like these pretending to "save the web".
- palata 2y agoI do understand that you are frustrated because you were not able to read the article (not to find the webarchive link on this page). But because you could not read the article does not mean that it is "BS freeriding articles like these pretending to "save the web"". Did you check who the authors are (you can see that for free). Bruce Schneier is a very respected cryptographer. And usually after a few days he publishes the article for free on his blog. So, there's that.
- tannhaeuser 2y agoNo I mean it exactly as I wrote: The Atlantic wants the attention of public links and forums yet only provide a snippet or single sentence, and archive.is/.ph (usually if not in this case) just inserting their own ads and tracking is only a tactical solution in a consumerist way of thinking rather than solving the problem of extraction of value by very few and general lack of sustainability of content production on the web, and immoral if not outright in violation of copyright law.
- throwthrowuknow 2y agoFrom what I could glean from the couple of paragraphs peaking out from behind all the ads occupying 2/3 of the screen and before I hit the paywall this seems to be an article complaining about the quality of content on the internet.
- palata 2y agoNope. This is an article by two authors including Bruce Schneier (who is not exactly nobody), explaining the risks of LLMs for the Internet. It does make the point that people are getting more and more used to conclude stuff without reading the actual articles, though :-). I'm expecting that the essay will be published on his blog in a few days, with free access.
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y agoThen we need content "reCAPTCHA" signatures such as artful inclusions of code comments containing ASCII art and poetry embedded in web page content that include multiple layers of beauty that would not be easy to replicate by an LLM. And also socially through authenticity and originality pledges from content producers and their platforms identifying what was created entirely by humans and what predictive text completion tools were used, if any.
- HonestOp001 2y agoThe internet died in 2016, when Google announced they would do more to influence elections. After that, the powers that are in charge have engaged in social manipulation to try and steer the internet to provide only the ”approved” concepts. Gemini’s results on blacks proliferating in the confederate army is an example of how far it has gone. Wikipedia is not trustworthy on articles on notable people (watch when an election kicks off and how manipulated they are) and Google tries to openly manipulate search results because of the SEO decisions made years ago. Our only hope is Web3 and an ability to host stuff on there.
- el_don_almighty 2y agoEvery night is the end of the world as you know it