AI isn’t the threat to the web that this article makes it. The threat that we currently face is another round of COPPA and forced personal identification for accessing the internet under the guise of ‘protecting the children’.
COPPA is 100% a threat to online privacy. AI, although just a tool, is absolutely empowering those with the goal of social manipulation through disinformation. Fabricated information can no longer be disproven at the rate it’s created, and too many “news” sites rely on trending web scrapers for content. By the time retractions and corrections are made, the masses are reading the next headline.
Por que no los dos?
Given the massive increase in search result garbage, it’s pretty clear “AI” is a massive problem.
And while I find things like COPPA massively invasive, offensive, and nothing more than more of the power-brokers reaching for more yet control, I can sidestep it, and it will have the unintended consequence of increasing encryption and public awareness of their bullshit.
Honestly, I just havent seen this increase. Search results were clogged with blogspam 3 years ago and they are clogged with it now. LLMs seem to have had little effect either way.
They can all be parts of the threat.
The threat itself is that governments and big corps have a comprehensive strategy on censoring and controlling the Web. Since the Web is nowadays the only media space that has preserved some appearance of freedom, this is bad. The end goal is so that nobody would hear you scream. I mean, they’ve already succeeded for most part.
Parts of that strategy are (I tried to separate them, but they intersect):
Attracting people to centralized controlled recommendation systems, which obscurely determine what you’ll see and what you won’t. Since your ability to process information is limited, this simply means that no outright censorship is even needed. You just won’t ever see “wrong” information or discourse or even emotion on something, if you don’t search for it intentionally. That’s Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, search engines, now also LLM chatbots when used instead of a search engine.
Confusing and demoralizing people out of organizing outside those. That’s a softer version of the first point, as in “maybe we won’t decide what you think about, but we will slow you down”. There are actions and laws and propaganda most efficient in that direction. Apathy is death.
Market pressure - businesses use the Web in a particular way, so small nudges for that culture to be on the track particularly convenient for control are made.
Fake progress and complexity race - yes, maybe enterprise software has to be complex. But Web technologies and Web browsers don’t. Most of the “new” things are apparently intended just to cut off the competition with smaller resources. Also oligopolization.
Legal climate endorsing oligopolization.
Then there are outright censorship and prosecution and bullying.
And then there are likely cases of mafia-style assassin sh*t, which we wouldn’t know about anyway. I think Aaron Schwarz and Ian Murdock may fit here.
Would you expand on how LLMs are not the threat as posed in the article?
And I (don’t) feel fine
Leonard Bernstein!
Birthday party cheesecake jellybean boom
I’ve seen the internet die already, in the early 00s. Google killed it.
What’s happening now with LLM chatbots is nothing new. And odds are that we’ll handle it just like we did it the last time - finding new ways to sort the noise out of the info.
Google briefly made the web an amazing, magical place. You could create powerful searches and find almost anything.
They ruined it once they started focusing more on driving income than driving good search results.
Yes, Google search did it. And that’s exactly why we allowed it to kill the internet - or rather, we killed the internet with it.
Older indexing systems relied on human labour, but they sorted and indexed the content by itself; Google instead did it by indirect means (the pagerank algorithm), because automated systems do not understand the content. At the same time that this allowed search to scale further, it also opened room to score higher in those indirect means without better content - SEO.
That’s exactly what’s happening here, again. LLMs also don’t understand content (here’s some proof), but they’re really good to sort it. They work better than the pagerank algorithm, but they also open room for exploits that the text dubbed LLMO - ways to make your content more likely to be brought up by LLMs without improving it for human readers.
There’s a whole lot going towards ending the web as we know it.
Censorship, consolidation, AI, greed, to name a few.
Why, I couldn’t even get into the article before it faded into a paywall.
I get people want to be paid but splashing cash on every page is not the internet as I knew it.
Getting to this article from a social site(Lemmy) was also not how I knew it, that’s the consolidation part. After MySpace, in the era of Facebook pages it started. Less personal websites, less websites in general, just get everything from Facebook and Reddit.
And sure, AI is also going to water down content, with prompts written by cheap corporate lackeys that we will still have to pay subs for after a social site sends us there.
And then there’s also the censorship and laws coming out to restrict what’s available. First to protect the children while they are young, then more to “protect” them as they get older, and eventually they will know nothing but state approved media.
To quote the article,
It’s the End of the Web as We Know It.
And I’m old and bitter about it. It had good promise, but enshittification took hold as was inevitable.
Why, I couldn’t even get into the article before it faded into a paywall.
I get people want to be paid but splashing cash on every page is not the internet as I knew it.
Speaking solely about news, the Internet as you knew it was unsustainable. For the first decade or so of online news, the ad-supported newspaper publishing business subsidized free online news, because they couldn’t figure out payment.
Then Google and the other ad-tech companies took the advertising dollars, and the old publishing companies took on debt to try and switch to ad-supported online publications. And failed miserably.
Then the old publishing started running out of money, and slowly switched to online first.
The remaining published are a shadow of themselves, drowning in debt, and low readership.
There are alternative models that sort of work, maybe, but they haven’t gone mainstream. They’re held back by the belief that content should be free.
If platforms like flattr had taken off then the conversation would probably be different.
but enshittification took hold as was inevitable
That’s a given. Every medium of communication ends that way. Start with books, end with propaganda flyers and glossy magazines. Start with radio, end with pirate broadcasts and stations full of ads. TV is about 25% ads and the rest is reality TV. Internet was going to end up that way as soon as things went mainstream.
Absolutely. You can even throw the telephone in there. At the start it was a great way to reach Grandma across the country or the doctor across town. Now most of the traffic on it is robots and extortionists trying to fool Grammy into giving her money for some lie or another.
I don’t even answer my phone for numbers anymore…be on a short named contact list, leave a voicemail reminding me you are someone I should put on that list, or nothing doing. Sucks for anyone putting me down as an emergency contact though…
And I feel TV being 25% ads is being pretty conservative…oh, but streaming! Swap the ads and channels you don’t want for a higher per-channel price and no ads…oh, wait, now you get a higher price and the ads!
Why, I couldn’t even get into the article before it faded into a paywall.
To get past paywalls, add “http://archive.is/” to the front of the URL.
So
becomes
“http://archive.is/http://foo.bar/baz”
It works 99%+ of the time.
WayBackMachine copy just in case : https://web.archive.org/web/20240422222110/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/04/generative-ai-search-llmo/678154/
Archive.is link for good measure.
Imminent Death of the Net Predicted!!1!
You know a meme is old when it’s in the Jargon File instead of knowyourmeme. This one goes all the way back to 1983.
Eternal September
$ sdate Tue 11193 Sep 21:30:35 BST 1993
The dead internet theory. The “conspiracy theory” that’s now becoming an inevitable reality.
Eventually, people may stop writing, stop filming, stop composing—at least for the open, public web.
Strong statement by the writer. I guess that 1 of the things that may happen is that the firms behind large-language models will pay creators. I get that creators wanna link or interact with the human audience and that this payment model won’t accomplish that, but if it’ll be good cash, some creators will continue producing public works.
The fog of the future is thick. We dunno if large-language models will revolutionize the web long-term, or will fade in about 5 years. It’s an interesting time.
