https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/26/23773914/ai-large-language-models-data-scraping-generation-remaking-web
In recent months, the signs and portents have been accumulating with increasing speed.
>Google is trying to kill the 10 blue links.
Twitter is being abandoned to bots and blue ticks. There's the junkification of Amazon and the enshittification of TikTok. Layoffs are gutting online media. A job posting looking for an "AI editor" expects "output of 200 to 250 articles per week."
>ChatGPT is being used to generate whole spam sites.
Etsy is flooded with "AI-generated junk."
Chatbots cite one another in a misinformation ouroboros. LinkedIn is using AI to stimulate tired users. Snapchat and Instagram hope bots will talk to you when your friends don't. Redditors are staging blackouts.
The Internet Archive is fighting off data scrapers, and "AI is tearing Wikipedia apart." The old web is dying, and the new web struggles to be born. The web is always dying, of course; it's been dying for years, killed by apps that divert traffic from websites or algorithms that reward supposedly shortening attention spans.
But in 2023, it's dying again -- and, as the litany above suggests, there's a new catalyst at play: AI.
Given money and compute time, AI systems — particularly the generative models currently in vogue — scale effortlessly. They produce text and images in abundance, and soon, music and video, too. Their output can potentially overrun or outcompete the platforms we rely on for news, information, and entertainment. But the quality of these systems is often poor.
old internet died in 2007
>2007
Yep, the last of it died at that time. There were still ruins and pieces left here and there to be discovered and shared, but at this point it takes considerable effort to find even cat memes on google for example
Bit late to the party there, Junior. What little survived the centralization crunch which killed most of the old internet was purged in 2017 out of fear that some old forum post would be found and cancel some politicians and businessmen.
This seems like the ultimate "first to market" phenomenon, where you train an AI then release it to obliterate the data that trained it. Pretty funny honestly.
Also, wish you'd zoomers would stop calling it the old internet. The OLD old internet died before I was could read, survived maybe by bits and pieces in by some news groups, email chains, and IRC channels.
That was still around till 2012. Then discord killed those platforms. It also killed message boards.
Nah, wasn't the same. Old old internet was a bunch of academics, hobbyists, and comic book guys. The IRC and newsgroups you're talking about was mostly posers and sweaties.
I remember chatrooms and forums where people voluntarily didnt shitpost and were having serious discussions about all their hobbies and how to advance their hobbies into careers
Yeah, exactly. Hobbyists looking to advance their hobbies into careers. Not hobbyists for which careers just popped up around them because what they were doing was so interesting. Look, it's fine that you're not old enough to know the old old internet. I only saw it through my parents. But trust me, it wasn't what you saw.
>and how to advance their hobbies into careers
People smelling and seeking money is one of the fastest killer for any kind of community. My most painful example is the indy gamedev community after Minecraft became a success.
More like social media killed it, and BOT and Reddit.
Can confirm. Every forum I visited back in the day was absolutely destroyed when BOT got popular. Everyone just started posting /b/-shit in a PG-13 forum like it was going out of style.
I miss forums. Rip
And forums miss you to, lad.
the old internet is already dead
at best this will be the death of social media
this is a good thing
At this point, you'll only be able to speak to people you know IRL on signal.
Gondoler!
>on signal
Signal was created by the US government, and even if it wasn't, you have to install it on iOS or Android before desktop, making it insecure.
Look buddy, you can replace it with any chat app. I'm just saying that the only thing that will survive is DM and group chat. Large irc/discord servers are gonna be chatbots. Forums are gonna be chatbots.