AI can’t kill the World Wide Web, capitalism already did.
Again?
Laughable that as the article begins to talk about publishers the Atlantic paywall shows up. Definitely not another reason why the web is dying.
Is dead, already.
So freaking tone-deaf lol. I was just getting into the article and agreeing with them and then the paywall showed up. THATS THE PROBLEM YO
Well, for many publishers the choice is either ads or paywalls. The fact that people feel entitled to get everything for free is a part of why things are going to shit, because ads bring with them a whole slew of perverse incentives (eg. optimizing for ad views instead of content quality)
The paywalls restrict the flow of quality information, which happened before LLMs started scraping the web. If you don’t have money to spend on all of these news subscriptions you aren’t allowed to educate yourself. It’s class-based gatekeeping, plain and simple. They could tactfully include ads, but no one ever tactfully includes ads. They introduce pop-ups, fullscreen banners, interjections every 25 words, or the best is the articles that are just slide shows that take you through 30+ webpages.
Edit: I’d also like to point out that this article already has an ad at the beginning. So they are still making ad revenue even if they aren’t giving you complete access.
no one ever tactfully includes ads
This is pretty patently hyperbole; I’ve run into many sites, including news, with non-intrusive ads.
Whether it’s class-based gatekeeping is another matter entirely. For-profit media employees have to eat too, and in the current economic system most can’t just give people access to content for free without any sort of monetization mechanism and with a voluntary subscription, because that’ll very often lead to income dropping off a cliff. Unfortunately people are very loath to pay for online services except for some more niche cases like the Fediverse where instances run on voluntary donations – although I’ve seen a couple of moderately popular instances struggling with upkeep being higher than what people are willing to donate (and it’s not just services either; open source developers face similar issues.) In some countries we at least have public broadcasting companies, although eg. here in Finland the current extremist right-wing government is looking to reduce its funding by quite a bit and possibly even entirely dismantle it if they get their way.
While I definitely agree that news should be available for free, railing against a for-profit publisher’s paywall is, frankly, myopic; like it or not, in the current system even content producers have to make a living. None of us really has a choice in whether we want to live in this system or not
Advertising, by design, is intrusive. It’s fighting for space in your mind whether you want it to be there or not. We can shelve that topic because it’s a side item here.
The difference between making a big deal of nothing and being completely on-topic is that the article itself goes into the responsibilities of publishers and platforms, how they have a responsibility to make the internet a better connected, more human-friendly place. You don’t see massive sources of misinformation locking down their content, but you will definitely see potentially credible sources of information doing that. It’s counter to the premise of the article entirely.
I don’t believe it’s myopic at all to point out that it’s backwards to expect the internet to thrive when quality information isn’t readily available. Sure you can use a different search engine, seek out free content and resources, all of which require an in-depth dive to find anything worthwhile.
The topic of this post is why the internet is dying, and while I recognize people need to make money to eat I think these news media sites are more than capable of providing for their employees with or without a paywall. Megacorps like Google, Meta, and Microsoft having control over what gets the most clicks is definitely contributing to rapid enshittification. Especially when they’re sending most traffic to articles that either have a paywall or a steady feed of bullshit.
quality information
The question is how do you expect quality information to be produced if it isn’t paid for? I think it’s terrible we have to think in those terms but as the other person said, that is reality.
Linux is a prime example of quality that isn’t paid for. No one forces you to pay for Linux, you can of course support the maintainers and donate, but it’s not a for-profit endeavor.
- The largest code contributors to Linux are corporate contributions
- Regular people who contribute to OSS do so as a passion project, as a hobby, and have other unrelated jobs that pay the bills. Those people still have to make a living, they’re just not doing it from their software contributions. Journalism isn’t a hobby and you can’t work a day job and still be an effective journalist. News orgs don’t come together as hobby projects.
I’m not defending advertising. I hate it and think it’s ruined the web. I’m just addressing the analogy here wrt Linux.
Linux is the result of a massive number of people working at their own paces with no deadlines and no expenses other than time and the computer they already own, as well as foundations where people get paid and pay others do tasks. Lots of private companies are also involved, and they exist because of profits.
Quality, relevant journalism has hard costs associated with it and has to move very fast. I’m not even talking about the twitter blitz that leads to sloppiness. I’m saying any and all breaking news. How do you plan on getting any on the ground reporting in Gaza?
What you are suggesting would mean that only those who don’t need an income can participate in the endeavor. Which unfortunately is also the case with Linux - big contributors have to stop all the time, projects die regularly, because “life gets in the way.” It just shifts the problem.
Open source programming and journalism have some parallels I’m sure but this comparison just doesn’t work on many levels.
How do you propose these “open source journalists” make a living? Corporate grants or straight-up corporate jobs just like a huge chunk of Linux development, landing us right back at square one, if not even somewhat behind it. At least independent media exists nowadays, but if the assumption is that all news has to be freely available, like acastcandream said that’d just lead to journalism being very effectively locked out as a career path for anyone who’s not independently wealthy or somehow able to make people actually donate or pay for a subscription despite the content being available for free – and that hasn’t worked out too well for most publishers so far.
They could tactfully include ads, but no one ever tactfully includes ads.
Because they don’t work outside of basically podcasting. And even then many shows stretch “tactfully.”
Additionally, over 60% of American internet users use an adblocker. The Atlantic as a US publication relies heavily on US citizens. They didn’t create that situation, but they have to experience the ramifications.
So “tactful” ads are not an option. You don’t want obtrusive ads that unfortunately are the only ones that vaguely work. You don’t want to pay for it directly. If they went government funded or something it would be used as a cudgel against them forever (look at how NPR gets shit on it randomly, which basically gets a fraction of its funding from government grants and not even formally from the US budget). So functionally no ads, no selling, no subscriptions, no government funding.
They need to eat. What should they do?
I had the same laugh. So tone-deaf.
🎵 it’s the end of the web as we know it, and i feel fine 🎵
This reminds me a bit of this photo:
We thought the data was forever, but somehow not so.
The AI will become utter garbage, mark my words. It will destroy the internet though first. What will come after internet? Hard to say maybe we will exchange culture in VR? Probably at some point every kind of forum will be unreadable from automated marketing and propaganda. Reddit already is.
Kagi AI generated summary. (I had to do it)
The web has become an extraordinary public resource, but it is now at risk of being destroyed by the advent of AI. Generative AI models like large language models (LLMs) are disrupting the traditional relationship between writers/creators and their audiences. LLMs can synthesize answers to queries, cutting out the original creators and leading to the rise of “large language model optimization” (LLMO) - manipulating AI outputs to serve special interests. This threatens to degrade the quality of information on the open web, as creators may stop producing content for the public commons. To preserve the web, search engines need to act more like publishers, platforms need to nurture human creative communities, and AI developers must recognize the importance of maintaining a healthy web ecosystem for their own benefit.
Trying to decide if it’s too ironic to respond based on that summery.
As long as major search platforms are also in the AI business, they have little incentive to change pace.
The end of the web as I knew it happened 28 years ago, and 20 years ago, and 12 years ago.
The web is just a fad. We’ll go back to watching VHS tapes any day now
I legit have been considering buying a minidisc player, just for the sheer cool factor of them. Sometimes truly special form is lost as function evolves.
minidiscs should have been the standard CDs became. no one would have considered holding a 3.5" floppy disc gingerly by the edges and placing it into a tray to read. the case is critical.
however, the industry realized people were replacing their scratched cd’s, so they’d sell 2, 3 of the same disc to the same person. Source: worked at a record store in the hight of the CD age when mini discs were all but essentially snuffed out
There were several attempts to chain CDs to caddys, kind of like Laser Disc none stuck.
There were also Zip (250MB) and Jazz (1GB) Drives that were pretty amazing for their day. Unfortunately media was expensive. Jazz was pretty great for backups though.
money! just production costs I’d say. I took a 3D design class forever ago and they made us get Zip disks, and if you wanted to work on stuff at home that meant you needed a zip drive. My dad (RIP) bought me a drive and I’m somehow still touched as it was a reasonably big purchase at the time for a slacker 18 year old doing 3D design at a community college
Not a 3D designer now, finally went back to college for something else in my 20s… anyway, rip my dad and rip the zip drive, they were cool. 100mb wow
I mean, maybe not the mini disk specifically, but yah, a cartridge system for CDs would have been better.
Mini disks are super cool but they’re a lot more materially demanding than a CD, CDs being just aluminum and plastic, where as a minidisc has some truly wacky elements in it’s make up to get the magneto optical and curie point to work.
I mean you clearly know way more about it than me… but yeah some kind of carrier/cartridge protecting the disc and we’d probably still be using CD-W-RW’s
The mini disk was a truly weird system. Half way between a cassette and a CD. CD used a laser to to reflect off bumps(or dyes in some varieties) on the disk to get a signal, and a cassette would use a metal head to detect magnetization along the tape to get a signal.
The mini disk used a laser to read the magnetization around the disk. Essentially the magnetism would change the polarity of the light as it bounced off, and by measuring what the polarity of the reflected light is, the device got the signal.
Writing to the disk was also wild, as unlike the cassette, the magnetic field of the disk couldn’t just be changed by putting it next to a strong magnet like. Instead, it had to be heated up before the magnetism could be changed, this heating was done with the laser, and was very precise compared to a cassette’s method. This meaning way more information could be squeezed on to the disk than on a cassette.
no shit… thats wild, really. heh. I always presumed it was an optical disk in a little case
Don’t threaten me with a good time!
I wonder if the nft tech could be used to mark everything real with a proof of authenticity. Then those things that aren’t on the chain would be considered suspicious and you would have automated green border around any content that is authentic and red for the outside of the blockchain
that’s the point of Altman’s Worldcoin Orb. It makes a hash of the picture of your eyeball and stores the hash (not the image) so you can be authenticated as a human.
everyone seems to be utterly freaked out by this.
So again deleted my comment accidentally omg. I very like this idea. It’s burdensome but every phone already has simillar scanner. I wonder about privacy though. Can it be anonymised like monero?
I imagine it as an optional feature and then verified people can opt in to only show other verified humans in some kind of next gen web similar to fediverse. Then two layers form naturally one of verified humans and the good old internet Wild West.
Because it’s a centralized system owned by a sociopath billionaire gathering unchanging, personal details about swaths of the population using ye olde “for the greater good” adage as the justification. You’d have to be a special kind of fool to go along with it.
I guess blind people really aren’t human… (/s)
How could that help at all? Seeing as the blockchain would have no way of telling the difference between human and Ai text, and if you could find a way to automatically verify that in way way that was so efficient you could expect all the text uploaded to the internet you could just run that program locally and not be beholden to people paying a fee to post anything to the internet.
I think there needs to be a verification process to get on blockchain. Some kind of reputation system maybe
Akin to certificates. Problem is poisoning though or other manipulation. It will be really fun problem to solve
I can’t imagine any sort of verification system not being completely overrun by bots/people on fiver/ mechanical turk immediately unless you tied it to meatspace IDs in an know your customer sort of way, in which case you would definitely need a central organization to do said verification, which eliminates any possible need for a blockchain as said organization can just use a faster, far cheaper, and most importantly for this application editable database.
More to the point, no one doubts that an article published by one organization was secretly published by another, but rather that they secretly used AI in the writing process, which also negates the system because that organization is never going to tell you which articles are done by AI, and any sort of reporting system for the entire organization or a specific author is just going to be immediately and constantly used to review bomb.
Yeah it is very difficult problem, fun stuff
I’d give a lot to reap the fame of the one who solves it but haha I am well below the skill level
Well, whatever the solution to this problem is, I’m fairly sure “put a blockchain on it” isn’t going to be it. Distributed ledgers do potentially have some uses, but using them to carry “proof of humanity” information doesn’t make much sense
If everyone can sign their content, who verifies them as “real”?
