Opinion | The Internet Is About to Get Much Worse
www.nytimes.com
Why the development of artificial intelligence might result in greater pollution of our digital public spaces.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5400607

This is a classic case of tragedy of the commons, where a common resource is harmed by the profit interests of individuals. The traditional example of this is a public field that cattle can graze upon. Without any limits, individual cattle owners have an incentive to overgraze the land, destroying its value to everybody.

We have commons on the internet, too. Despite all of its toxic corners, it is still full of vibrant portions that serve the public good — places like Wikipedia and Reddit forums, where volunteers often share knowledge in good faith and work hard to keep bad actors at bay.

But these commons are now being overgrazed by rapacious tech companies that seek to feed all of the human wisdom, expertise, humor, anecdotes and advice they find in these places into their for-profit A.I. systems.

  • @lloram239
    14•9 months ago

    As far as I am concerned, the Internet has been in a downward spiral ever since smartphones got popular, with nothing in sight to stop that trend. The Web got crippled by content getting moved into proprietary apps and what’s left of the Web is filled with so many ads that an adblocker is pretty much mandatory.

    AI provides a way out of this darkness, as it can absorb raw information and regurgitate it in whatever form you desire. That’s huge, that’s like Adblocking, ReaderMode and a whole lot of other tools rolled into one, just even more flexible and controllable by natural language. You can finally separate the information from its (often malicious) presentation. Bots like AutoTL;DR are just the start of it, a lot more little helper like that will follow, especially once we get multi-modal models that can understand and navigate graphical elements.

    That would be a good step forward, since many A.I. systems do not fully disclose the data they were trained on.

    Neither do most journalists. Most of the articles out there are just copied from other blogs, lacking any originality or fact checking and not even providing links to those sources. Even this very article is just regurgitating the same tired old talking points that have been circulating for a year or so.

    • @StereoTypo@beehaw.org
      3•9 months ago

      While I admire your optimism I think that AI will snuff out journalists/writers/artists regardless of the merit of their work. While that is possibly beneficial when looking for some factual data I think we will face a crisis when it comes to creative, investigative and critical content. Like garden hose of original work spraying against a tsunami of undisclosed generative media.