- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
And I (don’t) feel fine
Leonard Bernstein!
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.
Would you expand on how LLMs are not the threat as posed in the article?
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.
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.
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.
The dead internet theory. The “conspiracy theory” that’s now becoming an inevitable reality.
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.