Isn’t it also destroying the internet with low-quality content and affecting content creation in general? Can LLMs still rely on data from the open internet for training?

▲

bmurphy1976 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm going to take issue with AI destroying the internet. Our short attention span profit driven culture was already well on it's way to trashing everything that was good. AI is only accelerating the inevitable.

▲

slopinthebag 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Ya but that's like saying we were going 10kmh, it's nbd that we accelerate to 1000kmh since we were gonna hit the wall anyways

▲

JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> that's like saying we were going 10kmh, it's nbd that we accelerate to 1000kmh since we were gonna hit the wall anyways

Devil's advocate: folks will take that wall a lot more seriously at 1,000 km/h.

"At Jena and Auerstedt the backwardness of the Prussian Army became apparent. By 1806, Prussian military doctrines have been unchanged for more than 50 years—tactics were monotonous, and the wagon system was obsolete" [1]. They had been obsolete for some time. But they didn't break until they hit Napoleon's army.

Similarly, we have a lot of social plumbing that became–with the benefit of hindsight–obsolete with social media. It was possible to ignore, however, because the rate of change was slow. Now it isn't.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Jena%E2%80%93Auerste...

▲

_heimdall 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is exactly how we collectively "solve" so many problems today though, its far from unique to this topic.

We over medicate people, especially the elderly, because each new med has side effects and they're dying eventually anyway. We print more and more debt to paper over massive budget surpluses because the unspoken reality is that we're financially screwed either way. We pile more and more regulations on because we'd rather further grow the government and kick the can a few more times. We bolt one new emissions system after another on our diesel engines because they're already unreliable, who cares.

We don't consider how we got here, only what the next step we take should be. And don't even ask where a step should be taken, progress requires changing things constantly and we rarely give ourselves time to look back and retrace our steps.

	▲	fyredge 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Your examples are not supporting your premise. Over medication is from all the attempts to fix all the various medical conditions found. Adding regulations are to fix all the problems of people finding new ways to abuse the system. This is entirely opposite from accelerationism, which would advocate for less medication so that sick people die quicker, and less regulation so that society would be exploited faster and collapse faster.

▲

bmurphy1976 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Well, then our disagreement is that I feel we were already going at 1000km/h. Nowhere did I say we should keep doing this or it was a good thing or we should ignore it. My point is simple: we already needed stop a long time ago.

Let me re-use your analogy. We were already driving off a cliff, and we are trying to blame the fact that we're pushing on the gas and accelerating however we're ignoring that we were already heading that way and brake lines were cut.

▲

api 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Beat me to it. Facebook/Meta, Twitter/X, Google/YouTube, and TikTok have done quite a bit more damage to the Internet than AI.

The future of the net was closed gated communities long before AI came along. At worst it’s maybe the last nail in the coffin. But the coffin lid was already on and the man inside was already dead.

AI is, I think, more mixed. It is creating more spam and noise, but AI itself is also fascinating to play with. It’s a genuine innovation and playing with it sometimes makes me feel the way I did first exploring the web.

	▲	JKCalhoun 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		"Facebook/Meta, Twitter/X, Google/YouTube, and TikTok have done quite a bit more damage to the Internet than AI." Sure… so far.
	▲	lelanthran 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		They didn't cause bug bounty programs to be withdrawn, objectively a bad thing for projects. The difference between AI slop and the existing large tech corps is that the large corps you list never strayed into the lane occupied by OSS.
	▲	krater23 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The difference is that the web had no borders, AI has strong borders what it does and what it doesn't does.

▲

mmooss 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Agreed: The Internet has long been up-to-your-eyeballs with low quality content (i.e., bullsh-t). Blaming LLM software for it is ignoring the well-known reality of just a year or two ago.

▲

krater23 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nope. You just miss the millions of SEO websites that was normally easy to spot and to ignore. Now you have millions AI generated SEO webites that are difficult to spot and only contain slop that doesn't help to find the information you search.

▲

add-sub-mul-div 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is the same stupid reasoning that told us Trump would be a good outcome because the system was imperfect and ruining it fully would magically create a better one.

	▲	bmurphy1976 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		What the hell? I didn't say this was a good thing, I only said things were already fucked. And Trump is also a symptom of a deeper rot in our system. He just happens to be the asshole who took advantage of it. If you don't fix the deeper issues, it doesn't matter what's going to happen. Blaming AI is blaming a symptom, not the cause. Stating that we need to fix the deeper problem isn't even close to the same thing as whatever this nonsense is you responded with.

▲

snarfy 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It doesn't have to be low quality. It really is another tool like any other. You can put low effort in and get working results. This low effort, working result gets shipped immediately and gives the whole process a bad wrap. The source is generated crap that lacks craftsmanship and quality. But this gets AI dismissed when it shouldn't be. You can get quality, well crafted source code if you make that a goal and keep iterating.

	▲	krater23 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You can, but when you go through this effort to bring AI to generate good code, you could just self write it. So there are only two kinds of code that are falling out of AI tools. Boilerplate code and shitty code.

▲

fullshark 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The Economics of content platforms already started destroying the internet. A lot of the reason the internet was so good for a long time was faith by creators that good content would win, that turned out to be false.

▲

5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

▲

stickynotememo 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So what's the alternative? Should we go back to reading encyclopedias from the 2010s? I ask this because the need for information hasn't decreased for human beings, just because the capability to produce slop has suddenly increased.

	▲	skeeter2020 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>> I ask this because the need for information hasn't decreased for human beings, just because the capability to produce slop has suddenly increased. Isn't that the complaint to which you're responding? the SUPPLY side of the equation is the problem, so reading encyclopedias wouldn't impact that. Funny enough the criticism of Wikipedia was that a bunch of amateurs couldn't beat the quality from a small group of experts curating a controlled collection, and we saw that wasn't true. Maybe AI has pushed this to a new level where we need to tighten access and attention once again?