The AI will become utter garbage, mark my words. It will complete the downfall of 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. Lemmy is too small… yet but it will crash even harder if it is noticed by the wrong people. 2 years tops to enjoy this medium
Though I admit I am somewhat of a doomer inclined so maybe there is a way to create alternative that cannot be poisoned
This reminds me a bit of this photo:
We thought the data was forever, but somehow not so.
Laughable that as the article begins to talk about publishers the Atlantic paywall shows up. Definitely not another reason why the web is dying.
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
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
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.
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.
