Comment by adjfasn47573
11 days ago
I see most people stating that the internet as we know it could be gone because of AI.
I’m asking you: Why not? The internet is not even a typical human lifespan old. It’s crazy young on a large scale. Why would anyone assume that it will (and has to) stay the way it is today?
There are so many downsides of the current web. Slob everywhere (even long before AI) because of all sorts of people trying to exploit it for money.
I welcome a change. An internet with less ads, more genuine information. If AI will lead to this next phase of the internet, so be it. And this phase won’t be the last either.
> all sorts of people trying to exploit it for money
Because they could. In AI-first web, people can't really do anything about anything - only those in control of training the handful of "big popular AI models" are the gatekeepers of all knowledge.
> with less ads, more genuine information
That's orthogonal to AI. Models are already being trained to favour certain products/services and they already (re)produce factually incorrect information with no way to verify or correct them.
> only those in control of training the handful of "big popular AI models" are the gatekeepers of all knowledge.
I think that's certainly the case now, and it will be for a while, but slowly we're getting closer to that "AI personal assistant" sci-fi inspired future, where everything runs on "your" infra and gathers data / answers questions locally. You'd still need "raw" data access for that. A way to micro-pay for that would certainly help, imo.
You're missing the bigger picture. It isn't free to put content on the Internet. At a bare minimum, you have infrastructure and bandwidth costs. In many cases, a goal someone may have is that if they publish content on the internet, they will attract people to return for more of the content they produce. Google acted as a broker, helping facilitate interactions between producers and consumers. Consumers would supply a query they want an answer to, and a producer would provide an answer or facilitate a space for the answers to be found (in the recent era, replace answer with product or store-front).
There was a mostly healthy interaction between the producers and consumers (I won't die on this hill; I understand the challenges of SEO optimization and an advertisement-laden internet). With AI, Google is taking on the roles of both broker and provider. It aims to collect everyone's data and use it as its own authoritative answer without any attribution to the source (or traffic back to the original source at all!).
In this new model, I am not incentivized to produce content on the internet, I am incentivized to simply sell my data to Google (or other centralized AI company) and that's it.
A clearer picture to help you understand what's going on: the internet of the past few decades was a bazaar marketplace. Every corner featured different shops with distinct artistic styles, showcasing a great deal of diversity. It was teeming with life. If you managed your storefront well, people would come back and you could grow. In this new era, we are moving to a centralized, top-down enterprise. Diversity of content and so many other important attributes (ethos, innovation, aestheticism) go out of the window.
> You're missing the bigger picture. It isn't free to put content on the Internet. At a bare minimum, you have infrastructure and bandwidth costs.
While it technically isn't free, the cost is virtually zero for text and low-volume images these days. I run a few different websites for literally $0.
(Video and high-volume images are another story of course)
> A clearer picture to help you understand what's going on: the internet of the past few decades was a bazaar marketplace.
That internet died almost two decades ago. Not sure what you're talking about.
The web died. The internet is still a functional global IP network. For now.
> An internet with less ads, more genuine information. If AI will lead to this next phase of the internet
How is AI supposed to create an internet "with more genuine information", based on what we have seen so far? These two statements appear to be mutually exclusive.
If I understand correctly, it will be not by creating a new iteration, but by destroying the current one.
We are in agreement that AI will destroy the current one. I don't see how the new iteration that AI would produce would have "more genuine information" seeing as how LLMs are just predicting what word follows the previous word. How is that genuine?
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I agree with the premise about impermanence. But moving in the direction of "less ads, more genuine" is comical if not tied to the userbase completely falling out and most never coming back.
They aren't assuming it'd never change. They're upset at it getting worse. Things getting worse is generally what makes people unhappy.
this. it's changed several times over its lifetime and every change until recently has made it a better thing for the average person to use. We're out of the discovery phase and into the encirclement and exploitation phase.