[nblgbg]

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]

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]

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

[api]

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.

[mmooss]

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]

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]

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.

[snarfy]

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]

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]

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.

[randomNumber7]

Actually most of the stuff on the internet I really enjoyed was non profit driven. What really destroyed it imo is the attention seeking attitude that results from earning money with advertisements.

[strawhatguy]

Possibly, but AIs might shift to more curated content, which has it's own dangers I suppose.

There are definitely challenges, but I've been around long enough now that we'll adapt, and muddle through.

The trouble will come from humans' reaction to the changes, less from the changes themselves

[TiredOfLife]

Places like microsoft support community forums predate llm and they are filled with wrong and useless information that drown out useful information due to sheer volume. Same with countless websites that scrape forums and other websites and republish the text. Same with auto generated youtube videos - those existed pre llm.

[stickynotememo]

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]

>> 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?