Even if AI isn’t further “abused” in similar ways to those described in the article, it’s going to ruin the Internet anyway. There’s very little motive to publish a web page when some robot is going to copy its content and regurgitate a bastardized version of it to someone who’d otherwise have used a search engine to find it.
What’s left of the web are inevitably going to be marketers trying to game the results (think thousands of websites claiming Acme Widgets are the best, now that there’s actually an incentive to do so because while no human would read such sites, bots have no such qualms) and the occasional ecommerce website. Maybe some social media. And the rest will be a paper thin construction resembling the pre-2000 Internet built by the same types of people who built Lemmy and Mastodon - missing search engines and public visibility because nobody wants their system to be eaten by the LLMs. Such constructions will never attract the large audiences, those audiences happy to have every question solved by asking a computer programmer designed to produce things that look like answers. And, in the unlikely event they do, they’ll get the unwanted visibility that results in them being sucked into the LLM databases.
It was a nice run, but I’m not seeing a happy outcome. We started this all, the public bit, the bit with hypertext and images and so on, in the early 1990s, and by the mid-2000s created something truly great. The LG Prada clones (iPhone and Android) seemed to take us in the wrong direction, as did social media, but I never expected something to happen so fundamentally dumb and damaging to the Internet, as this.
Even if AI isn’t further “abused” in similar ways to those described in the article, it’s going to ruin the Internet anyway. There’s very little motive to publish a web page when some robot is going to copy its content and regurgitate a bastardized version of it to someone who’d otherwise have used a search engine to find it.
What’s left of the web are inevitably going to be marketers trying to game the results (think thousands of websites claiming Acme Widgets are the best, now that there’s actually an incentive to do so because while no human would read such sites, bots have no such qualms) and the occasional ecommerce website. Maybe some social media. And the rest will be a paper thin construction resembling the pre-2000 Internet built by the same types of people who built Lemmy and Mastodon - missing search engines and public visibility because nobody wants their system to be eaten by the LLMs. Such constructions will never attract the large audiences, those audiences happy to have every question solved by asking a computer programmer designed to produce things that look like answers. And, in the unlikely event they do, they’ll get the unwanted visibility that results in them being sucked into the LLM databases.
It was a nice run, but I’m not seeing a happy outcome. We started this all, the public bit, the bit with hypertext and images and so on, in the early 1990s, and by the mid-2000s created something truly great. The LG Prada clones (iPhone and Android) seemed to take us in the wrong direction, as did social media, but I never expected something to happen so fundamentally dumb and damaging to the Internet, as this.
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