This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The web was already flooded with human generated spam, adding AI spam to the mix hasn't really changed anything meaningful - you still can't find useful content on the vast majority of webpages.
What we really need is a better search engine, one that doesn't include low quality content... that might be something AI can help with.
That used to be Google, when they were interested in providing quality results and showing ads alongside those results, instead of just.. being an ad company.
Before that, it was Yahoo, when they were interested in providing quality results, and showing ads, instead of just being an ad company.
Before that, it was AltaVista, when they were...
...Ask Jeeves...
We'll see who's next.
Don't forget Lycos!
And HotBot.
And WebCrawler!
Mid late nineties, WC was my favorite. Felt like it had the best results.
I've been hearing Kagi is very good but i don't know if I'm ready to start paying for a search engine. Given the direction things are headed through, it could be worth considering
Time to bring back web rings lmao
web rings
We've come, uh, full circle indeed
I've switched to perplexity.ai. yes it's AI, but it gives me the answer I was looking for in a short snippet of information. I can then go scour the sources if I want too. It's completely replaced Google for me.
Yes, but the sheer volume of trash these AIs can generate will be an even bigger problem that needs addressing.
Plausable sounding trash, specifically. More plausable than what extremely low paid humans can put out.
Ugh i used stable diffusion for a few weeks and even with better prompt engineering it still felt like generative trash. Guess i wasn't creative enough in prompting because I've seen some great stuff from others.
The web was already flooded with human generated spam, adding AI spam to the mix hasn't really changed anything meaningful - you still can't find useful content on the vast majority of webpages.
"The river was already flooded with human generated pollution, adding truckloads of nuclear waste to the mix hasn't really changed anything meaningful - you still can't go swimming or eat the fish in the majority of waterways."
that might be something AI can help with.
No it can't.
And also it's already a solved problem. Once again - web rings, web directories, communities and acquaintances. The Web is not deus ex machina. It's a system to be used to make your hands longer, your memory bigger, your eyes sharper etc.
right - time to just focus on some news that have been vetted by some trustworthy organization. or a ministry - that focusses on truth or something.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
Been a known issue for a long time
Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content that is manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity. Proponents of the theory believe these bots are created intentionally to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to ultimately manipulate consumers. Furthermore, some proponents of the theory accuse government agencies of using bots to manipulate public perception, stating: "The U. S. government is engaging in an artificial intelligence powered gaslighting of the entire world population.
^to^ ^opt^ ^out^^,^ ^pm^ ^me^ ^'optout'.^ ^article^ ^|^ ^about^
How ironic, but i still love this bot
I think that some bots are like, exceptions that prove the rule in a way. Like when we find one that's convenient and useful and facilitates human understanding and communication, it sticks out.
Yeah like this. Bots talking to bots. Some of them use llms, but it's not necessary.
I'm here for the human element.
Only fair that AI gets a turn now we've been ruining it for so long.
"starting"? The net was ruined when yahoo directory failed and Google with their stupid algorithm and SEO and AdSense and monetisation came along
Google had to happen, manually updating a registry of all site was unsustainable with the growth of the internet.
And the concept of SEO is actually older than the internet, "AAA Plumbing" from yellow pages was also optimized for the algorithm of the the telephone registry, which was simply alphabetical order. Just different algorithm and different scale.
Ppphhht.
The internet ended the day AOL threw open its doors and allowed their users out of the walled garden.
I know, I was there.
Me too!
(if you know, you know)
I remember there used to be Octobers.
The Eternal September.
Lately I've been seeing more ai articles and videos on youtube. Sometimes, I look up tech issues and there's a video, I check it out and some of these videos are just forum posts uploaded text on the screen. There are whole channels taking popular online forum posts and gathering views that way.
Yes, so annoying. You read an article and later find the (steam) forum, reddit post or tweet that was turned into a whole article, just with more words.
Don't even get me started on having to watch a 10 minute video on YouTube that could have been a 3 sentence forum post.
Or something that could have been explained in 3 paragraphs becoming a 20 minute, overproduced video complete with someone making a stupid face in the thumbnail, and SOMETHING ALLCAPS in the title.
Meh. Email was going to implode before someone came up with baysean filters and Gmail became a thing. Last time I checked (once in a blue moon), email still works.
Certainly 99.999% of SMTP traffic is garbage but my inbox is still usable.
A web crawler is not comparable to an e-mail inbox.
Who knew the black wall from cyberpunk would end up being real but with adds!
How long until we get internet 2.0 walled garden for humans?
The irony of that this post is done by @L4s@lemmy.world
Bots and AI aren't the same thing. Bots are just automations, not necessarily making use of machine learning.
I saw someone unironically last month call Excel spreadsheet formulas "AI".
The term is rapidly approaching meaninglessness when used by anyone remotely non-technical. I'm probably going to miss an edge case here, but basically:
Classic AI = mostly search algorithms (Dijkstra, A*, etc), simple neural nets (e.g. perceptron) and prolog (to trivialise logic languages)
Modern AI = Machine Learning and the utilisation of those models trained by it. (Tensorflow, LLMs, etc)
Everything else = not AI, just technology.
I would include "video game AI" since semantically it is pretty well-accepted, even though it's not really AI. Things like goal-based behaviour as well as the pathfinding algos you mentioned.
There's the edge case haha, yeah I agree, game AI is a pretty accepted and understood concept
So, someone can look at this festering putrid hellscape we call the internet in the past 5 years and still see a way down?
Well sure. Only an optimist goes "Wow, this is as bad as it can get."
The pessimistic crowd is of the opinion it can ALWAYS get worse. We may not know how, but it can get worse.
I think it is obvious where I am on the spectrum when I say I don't think we've begun to see how bad it can get.
Starting?
Finalizing its death*
Right?? Haha it's been a sespool of ads and trackers for ads for years now
