Mom needs something very like a grocery store to get food from. LLM training does not need HTTP, HTTPS, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, hyperlinks, banner ads, cookies, and so on. Yes the web was a convenient source to find a lot of text but it's not the only source.
It's obviously not even close to the same logic. One obvious difference is that "mom" (who gets their dinner from "mom"? Not me) pays the grocery store for the food. If I get all my meals via DoorDash, the farmers still get paid. If I get all my news via LLMs rather than a subscription to the NYT, the NYT and its investigative reporters get no revenue from me.
Browsing "the web" has been painful for years thanks to SEO and ads. Most people already spend their time in walled gardens, selectively jumping out to specific linked sites. Does AI fundamentally change this, or is it just a better front-end for the search engine?
What makes you think ads and the equivalent to SEO aren't coming for the LLM products? These companies are going to have to turn a profit eventually...
I've been very reluctant to enter any queries into any LLM that might let on more than I'm willing to make public. I think about the people who poured their romantic energy into LLMs - beyond how dystopian that is on its face, the LLM vendors now have the ability to ad-target that person to within an inch of their life, and every incentive to exploit this to the max they can.
Precisely. Thus people will stop going there. Which leads to people not creating content there. Which kinda stops the very model genAI has used to grow.
The OP is claiming that no one is interested in his article, just the "information" that can be harvested in it. He has committed the rather obvious fallacy of equating the web with web search. There are real risks to information providers, but that's not all the web is.
That's your answer? We don't need the internet anymore because we have books?
My local library is great. But they don't have all books, like reference information about a particular manufacturer's product. And they're not open at 2am. And you have to go there.
Behold, this is the future. We've improved computers so much going to the library is the answer for getting information. Correction: getting correct information.
Imagine AI telling you its safe and proper to water bath can meat for food preservation, and what that actually means when you eat the canned meat following those directions. Same goes for mushrooms, or anything else that might literally kill you.
We've reached a point where AI is not accountable for harms, while being capable of killing people through selective curation of information it provides.
Need to add AI agents are also raising hosting web content costs. The freebie won’t last for too long before AI will have to pay something to crawl the web
Most people consume Reddit through, specifically, the iOS version of the app. The same is true of TikTok and Instagram. This is how most people get their news.
Google destroyed web discoverability and search. Platforms sucked up all of the value and monopolized distribution.
The indie web is pretty much dead for normal people. It's only us developer / hacker / enthusiasts that have websites and play around with CSS.
The news and content gets consumed by most people through apps and the walled-gardens.
The "AI" training robber barons still need the web. Otherwise, "AI" just induces web and computer fatigue. All these genius corporations will find that they are destroying perfectly working revenue streams with their collective "AI" cult. They don't seem to remember that they got filthy rich before 2023.
It already has, and it will destroy quite a lot more before all is said and done.
Fundamentally, it breaks the social and generational contracts needed for societal organization to operate. While these structures won't vanish overnight, the consequences are cascading failures that will produce dire outcomes the longer they are allowed to fester.
Expectation: If you work hard and build skills, society will reward you with wages, stability, and opportunities for advancement.
AI Tension: If AI automates large swaths of work, the link between effort and reward can collapse. For example, truck drivers, radiologists, or call center workers may find that their decades of skill-building are instantly devalued.
2. The Generational Contract
Expectation: Each generation contributes (through taxes, labor, innovation) to support the current elderly, while expecting the next generation to do the same for them.
AI Tension: If AI concentrates wealth among a small group of owners, younger generations may not have the income base to sustain pensions, healthcare systems, or the tax base that supports aging populations.
3. The Education Contract
Expectation: If you spend years in school, investing time and money, you’ll get access to meaningful employment.
AI Tension: If AI can do much of the work fresh graduates are trained for (law, programming, design, etc.), then the implicit “return on education” may vanish, undermining trust in the education system itself.
4. The Knowledge–Authority Contract
Expectation: Experts and institutions (teachers, journalists, researchers) hold authority because of their training, discipline, and credibility.
AI Tension: If AI can generate convincing text, images, or even research papers, people may not know who or what to trust. This erodes the social contract where institutions act as reliable custodians of knowledge.
5. The Effort–Dignity Contract
Expectation: Work, even if menial, provides dignity and identity.
AI Tension: If AI replaces not only high-skilled jobs but also low-skilled ones, people may lose both economic security and the sense of contributing meaningfully to society.
6. The Civic Contract
Expectation: Citizens deliberate and vote based on human judgment and human-driven discourse.
AI Tension: AI-generated propaganda, deepfakes, or bot-driven political campaigns could undermine democratic trust and participation.
7. The Interpersonal/Creative Contract
Expectation: Human creativity and relationships are uniquely valuable.
AI Tension: If AI-generated art, music, or companionship substitutes for human creation or connection, people may feel dispossessed of their role in culture and community.
The contracts that the founders of the US constitution based the constitution on.
You may want to start with Leviathan, then move on to John Locke, Hobbes and Descartes. No post I make will ever substitute for a reading of those authors.
instead of explaining yourself, you offer a pretentious reading list? those authors wrote a LOT and had many different topics. you couldn't even point to any specific writing?
give me a fucking break. you just want to sound smart. this website is filled with the most arrogant people anywhere on the Internet. if you want to comment about an idea, and then you intend to recommend several semesters' worth of reading instead of just explaining your comment when someone asks nicely, maybe kindly shut the fuck up instead?
you had no reason to post this comment, or the first one, besides making yourself feel superior
I know, there are these people that pipe in and are just so distorted in their own ignorance and lack of discipline, blaming everyone but the people responsible (themselves) and think everything should be handed to them on a golden spoon in a way that will somehow empower them without any effort, and when that doesn't happen throwing tantrums like an infantile child gaslighting about arrogance and other things that they hallucinate, falsely believing the world owes them something.
I am not required to explain, the material is out there for anyone to review on their own time. I point out a deficit, and material you can easily look up, those that want to elevate themselves and they can and do the research transforming themselves for the better but not without effort.
I had the very best reason to post this comment, a far better reason than you. I want the future to be livable for everyone, and by your sentiment and actions you seem to want destruction or death for all, at least by the outcomes you claim I should do. You see a car barreling towards a bystander, a good person would yell out in warning so the bystander gets clear and survives. You would instead have it so that they just shut the fuck up, no thought to the consequences.
People who have properly educated and taken their education upon themselves are superior to those that do not, they are capable of far more than they start with, and that only increases with time.
Anyone has the chance to elevate themselves, it only requires effort once given the right direction which is not much, and in the process you learn a great many things if you are open to the journey.
Those that aren't are more content to destroy, envious of those that can, seeking to silence and punish them.
---
Giving something of value up for nothing in exchange is charity, and this is always on the terms of the giver, never the receiver. Those that receive and then seek to compel or strongarm the giver are no different than any other thug, thief, looters, but are often worse because they pretend otherwise despite their vile character.
No person owes you a thing. The basic foundations are less than an 8 hour read; not 3 semesters.
The web is full of garbage but one can find sources of specific and detailed information, and also to contact friends directly. So, I choose to go to sites for information (product, “how-to”, or Wikipedia-like), to use aggregators like Hacker News to get a broad brush picture of what’s going on (because no “news” site can be so diverse) and to contact friends directly, and not via a “social” site with billions (?) of users.
Likewise, AI is biased, tries to be all things to all people, and is outright wrong in many cases. It is too easy to nudge in strange directions, and is NOT a nice companion. The lure of advertising is too big not to enshittify it.
However, in strict verticals, it can be helpful.
Since it is by structure non-social, it can’t be used to connect people.
It’s really a matter of choice, and people choose poorly.
“My Internet World” consists mainly of two aggregators, heavily moderated, sites that serve my interests directly, and communications with friends. The latter could be improved by “group forums” outside of the surveillance capitalism monster sites, but nobody seems to care, and should be part of operating systems, but Apple, Google and Microsoft, for example, will never agree on anything, so it’s left to third parties to crack a billion-device market. Fat chance.
As an example, I used to host Moodle on laptops and servers for docs, where people could comment, and it had built-in controls. Perhaps, some outside hosting? Small is beautiful.
People and information. They’ve been poisoned and probably always will as long as people use “big” sites.
Oh, and as for advertising. If I want information, I’ll just go get it. Anyone who pushes information on me is poisoning my cache. Out, damned slop.
> While the ecosystem in which the Web thrived had one colossal flaw, namely, Surveillance Capitalism,b it had a stable business model. That business model is now being threatened by GenAI
Good. If there is one silver lining to generative AI, then it is that programmatic advertising will become less viable as a source of income.
If the internet were to overnight become a place where it is impossible to make money via advertising revenue, it could very well save the internet, if not the world.
You ask Chat to add some tags to its output, via your prompt. You get your browser to filter output that is not tagged properly.
Counter measures will need another LLM "AI" to filter out efforts to filter out ads from my prompts. However, when openai's adversary is their customer, my money is on me!
That's a dumb way to do advertising. The "right" way is to shift all the weights a little, so that it's influencing you with everything it says but you don't even see it happening.
It would be really nice to get rid of one parasitic zero-sum "industry" without feeding all intellectual output into a slop machine which resells it without credit or compensation.
Not good. Have you considered the second order effects of a breakdown of communications?
Marketing and Advertising is about communicating a product to someone that may be interested in purchasing it.
If Communications is jammed because AI slop has dominated the web, no marketing happens, no hiring happens, no purchases are made because no jobs. In short order (relatively speaking), you get deflationary collapse of all human organization.
Should that collapse, population levels will be forced to make a deep correction in ecological terms. The planet is in ecological overshoot. What happens when 2/3 of people can suddenly no longer feed themselves, and technology allows one person to destroy everyone on the planet. Quite bad.
Also, the money in surveillance capitalism is almost straight from the money-printer. It may be laundered a bit, but overall the reason old marketing/advertising failed is because it was outcompeted by money-printing, and when that fails (as it always does), you have a barren soil where nothing will grow. Corporate business today has a tendency to burn their house down with themselves in it to save a few pennies.
> Marketing and Advertising is about communicating a product to someone that may be interested in purchasing it.
This is only what advertising is about for the advertisers.
For the other side of the coin, namely, the platforms that sell users to the advertisers, advertising is about capturing as much attention as possible in order to sell it. That means addiction, scams, sensationalism, lying, and preying on fear, greed, lust, and all the baser motives of a human being.
Web advertising goes away because communications platforms reach the Shannon limit driven by AI generated slop, and deceit. People can no longer communicate with each other, this spawns chaotic hallucinations and delusions that grow into a dragon-king event. Businesses make decisions based on the hallucinatory perceptions that are not sound resulting in losses. Money-printing increases to try to cope with losses by extending debt nationalizing the economy, inflationary pressures cause rapid devaluation of the dollar which in turn puts companies responsible for food production out of business. This culminates in one single company remaining in the food production sector that serves as inputs for other smaller companies, and then they too fail due to chaotic instability and devaluation of the currency, with no further food production thereafter citing regulatory and safety issues confounded by corruption. All the while advertising to everyone that food will be available in the future, but never actually taking the steps to make it happen given the desperate situation that cannot be resolved.
Three days later, most people start getting desperate to feed their families. Rioting breaks out. Some start resorting to cannibalism, looting, and ivolence. The electric grid fails. Production of everything ceases, and the remaining people kill each other using guns/other tools, or detonate nuclear bombs ending it for everyone.
The relation between each step of this is a small domino that by itself wouldn't break a resilient system, it would only break in a predisposed centralized system, a system that has been optimized for chaos to create profit.
You've got the cause and effect reversed that seems based in fallacy. Are you one of those people that would say, "This can't ever happen", sound in that false belief but through your actions then try to make it happen?
Cascade failures lag with time. If you juggle balls up in the air, eventually they will all come down at the same time, where you won't be able to react. This is why these failures are so serious and existential, and shouldn't be ignored by rational people. Those that ignore reality end up dying through their own choices given sufficient time.
The premise starts with Claude Shannon's well established work, and the demonstrated ability of GenAI to costlessly saturate communications channels.
What about Shannon's work do you find absolutely nuts? Keeping in mind, to overturn established science you need extraordinary proof for refutation, do you have any?
The inducement of delusion and hallucination of the mind, as well as the limits of human perception, are equally well documented and established under psychology like behavioral modification therapy, behavioral engineering, NCI, torture, hypnosis, and the like.
The economics are also well established that absent a market distribution of labor, corruption occurs regardless leading to positive feedback loops, and runaway money-printing is known to drive and distorts price floors with clear profit cutoffs that determine behavior (closing shop when its no longer possible to make a profit).
Under such adverse circumstances, its not unheard of that the imposed stress causes people to degrade in thought to an almost automaton level, incapable of reacting to their environment correctly, which naturally occurs and is aligned with many of the same things we see under fascism, and the nature of numerous underlying positive feedback systems is they easily run away out of control until conditions are met for catastrophic collapse.
Cascading failures, where everything slips through your hands because the incentives drive the outcome chaotically is expected in such environments.
Your statement amounts to survivorship bias, it hasn't happened yet so it can't ever happen; which is fallacy and easily refuted.
At a bare minimum there are many historical examples of societies that suddenly vanished in the historic record (i.e. suddenly died out). While we can't know the exact circumstances after-the-fact we can know it is a regular possibility.
Given that refutation, because it has happened. Approaching failures that result in no control, it would be appropriate to perform due-dilligence at a point of control where you can affect change, which is necessary to change course, and failure to do that favors extinction.
If you just take a wait and see approach, and you have all your eggs in one single basket, who survives when you are wrong and that hubris spirals consequences out of your control?
The vast majority of people have forgotten the inherent cruelty of natural law, and what it initially took to break past the Malthusian trap. It was the work of a larger part of our population sharing and communicating knowledge.
Distributed communication of useful information is largely what made this possible, and it elevated everyone with access to it. A coordinated effort of solving many problems in unity; and this isn't, or more appropriately can't happen anymore.
Communication won't be available when communication is jammed, and nothing can pass the noise floor due to channel capacity exhaustion. That necessarily means everyone falls to their base cognitive levels, which previously have been augmented through an intelligent minority that has been shrinking.
What chances would you give cavemen in averting a planet killer Impactor?
How about without our communications systems, and the built-up expertise (on the shoulder's of giants), what chance would you give modern man to do the same? Equal odds?
Hubris not tempered by reality is a very dangerous thing.
Society didn't used to be so brittle. There were redundancies to pick up slack, but these are gone now. Its been made that way in recent history through complicit insiders seeking profit, power, and control above all else.
Likely. The ecosystem it trains on now wont continue to be created. There is kind of no point in writing those anymore, if ai swallows it and wont direct to you.
But even more importantly, communities that created those wont form anymore.
If we can get dinner from mom, who needs a grocery store?
Seems like the same logic to me. Isn't the Web where the information came from?
Mom needs something very like a grocery store to get food from. LLM training does not need HTTP, HTTPS, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, hyperlinks, banner ads, cookies, and so on. Yes the web was a convenient source to find a lot of text but it's not the only source.
For as long as mom was feeding me, I never needed to shop at a grocery store.
But here the mom is a robot taking produce for free. Not a good business for grocery stores.
[dead]
It's obviously not even close to the same logic. One obvious difference is that "mom" (who gets their dinner from "mom"? Not me) pays the grocery store for the food. If I get all my meals via DoorDash, the farmers still get paid. If I get all my news via LLMs rather than a subscription to the NYT, the NYT and its investigative reporters get no revenue from me.
When I'm asking about a niche topic, LLM with web search enabled is infinitely better than without.
Browsing "the web" has been painful for years thanks to SEO and ads. Most people already spend their time in walled gardens, selectively jumping out to specific linked sites. Does AI fundamentally change this, or is it just a better front-end for the search engine?
What makes you think ads and the equivalent to SEO aren't coming for the LLM products? These companies are going to have to turn a profit eventually...
It is just a question of time when we would need AdBlock for LLM…
I've been very reluctant to enter any queries into any LLM that might let on more than I'm willing to make public. I think about the people who poured their romantic energy into LLMs - beyond how dystopian that is on its face, the LLM vendors now have the ability to ad-target that person to within an inch of their life, and every incentive to exploit this to the max they can.
SEO already killed the www.
Is it the web that SEO killed or search engines?
Only out-deceited, not outcompeted.
Precisely. Thus people will stop going there. Which leads to people not creating content there. Which kinda stops the very model genAI has used to grow.
The OP is claiming that no one is interested in his article, just the "information" that can be harvested in it. He has committed the rather obvious fallacy of equating the web with web search. There are real risks to information providers, but that's not all the web is.
I guess people that need to verify the correctness of their information still need the web.
We still have books, and libraries. And some libraries have books.
Sadly, most of the stuff most people want to verify is "breaking news" and "gossip".
Did the pope really wear a puffy white coat? Does it really matter?
That's your answer? We don't need the internet anymore because we have books?
My local library is great. But they don't have all books, like reference information about a particular manufacturer's product. And they're not open at 2am. And you have to go there.
Behold, this is the future. We've improved computers so much going to the library is the answer for getting information. Correction: getting correct information.
Is wrong right anymore?
Because soon the information you get with GenAI will contain ads in a way that you cannot distinguish it from real information.
You want the ability to look at 4-5 sources, vet them, and draw your own conclusions.
Well, on the web, you get 4-5 sources, all of which are ads, three of which are owned by the same company and the other two are generated SEO spam.
Imagine AI telling you its safe and proper to water bath can meat for food preservation, and what that actually means when you eat the canned meat following those directions. Same goes for mushrooms, or anything else that might literally kill you.
We've reached a point where AI is not accountable for harms, while being capable of killing people through selective curation of information it provides.
reductio ad absurdum.
there were a few months when a neighbor couldn't get the oil he needed to heat his home ...
another one fried a circuit and his solar cells were ... well ... powerless ... I mean they weren't, except they were, but you know what I mean.
I had a bicycle stolen once and a car got smashed on the rail tracks to my university ... it was horribly bloody and messy.
A friend broke his good arm once. His other arm was useless.
And we shouldn't touch the Gen part of your AI.
Need to add AI agents are also raising hosting web content costs. The freebie won’t last for too long before AI will have to pay something to crawl the web
Good news is AI needs the WWW but humans don’t need the WWW
No, web has new info to feed ai
The web has been replaced by walled garden apps.
Most people consume Reddit through, specifically, the iOS version of the app. The same is true of TikTok and Instagram. This is how most people get their news.
Google destroyed web discoverability and search. Platforms sucked up all of the value and monopolized distribution.
The indie web is pretty much dead for normal people. It's only us developer / hacker / enthusiasts that have websites and play around with CSS.
The news and content gets consumed by most people through apps and the walled-gardens.
LLM needs the web to harvest information so...
What new data will GenAI train on if there’s no Web?
a nothing burger article with no real ideas.
Generative AI is not a search engine.
The "AI" training robber barons still need the web. Otherwise, "AI" just induces web and computer fatigue. All these genius corporations will find that they are destroying perfectly working revenue streams with their collective "AI" cult. They don't seem to remember that they got filthy rich before 2023.
It already has, and it will destroy quite a lot more before all is said and done.
Fundamentally, it breaks the social and generational contracts needed for societal organization to operate. While these structures won't vanish overnight, the consequences are cascading failures that will produce dire outcomes the longer they are allowed to fester.
What contracts are those?
AI gave me this: 1. The Work–Reward Contract
Expectation: If you work hard and build skills, society will reward you with wages, stability, and opportunities for advancement.
AI Tension: If AI automates large swaths of work, the link between effort and reward can collapse. For example, truck drivers, radiologists, or call center workers may find that their decades of skill-building are instantly devalued.
2. The Generational Contract
Expectation: Each generation contributes (through taxes, labor, innovation) to support the current elderly, while expecting the next generation to do the same for them.
AI Tension: If AI concentrates wealth among a small group of owners, younger generations may not have the income base to sustain pensions, healthcare systems, or the tax base that supports aging populations.
3. The Education Contract
Expectation: If you spend years in school, investing time and money, you’ll get access to meaningful employment.
AI Tension: If AI can do much of the work fresh graduates are trained for (law, programming, design, etc.), then the implicit “return on education” may vanish, undermining trust in the education system itself.
4. The Knowledge–Authority Contract
Expectation: Experts and institutions (teachers, journalists, researchers) hold authority because of their training, discipline, and credibility.
AI Tension: If AI can generate convincing text, images, or even research papers, people may not know who or what to trust. This erodes the social contract where institutions act as reliable custodians of knowledge.
5. The Effort–Dignity Contract
Expectation: Work, even if menial, provides dignity and identity.
AI Tension: If AI replaces not only high-skilled jobs but also low-skilled ones, people may lose both economic security and the sense of contributing meaningfully to society.
6. The Civic Contract
Expectation: Citizens deliberate and vote based on human judgment and human-driven discourse.
AI Tension: AI-generated propaganda, deepfakes, or bot-driven political campaigns could undermine democratic trust and participation.
7. The Interpersonal/Creative Contract
Expectation: Human creativity and relationships are uniquely valuable.
AI Tension: If AI-generated art, music, or companionship substitutes for human creation or connection, people may feel dispossessed of their role in culture and community.
That effort over time = some reward (recognition, assets, or preferably both)
Credit where credit is due?
The contracts that the founders of the US constitution based the constitution on.
You may want to start with Leviathan, then move on to John Locke, Hobbes and Descartes. No post I make will ever substitute for a reading of those authors.
You know we've lost when even the people who warn us of the coming AI apocalypse are too lazy to do so.
this website is insufferable.
instead of explaining yourself, you offer a pretentious reading list? those authors wrote a LOT and had many different topics. you couldn't even point to any specific writing?
give me a fucking break. you just want to sound smart. this website is filled with the most arrogant people anywhere on the Internet. if you want to comment about an idea, and then you intend to recommend several semesters' worth of reading instead of just explaining your comment when someone asks nicely, maybe kindly shut the fuck up instead?
you had no reason to post this comment, or the first one, besides making yourself feel superior
I know, there are these people that pipe in and are just so distorted in their own ignorance and lack of discipline, blaming everyone but the people responsible (themselves) and think everything should be handed to them on a golden spoon in a way that will somehow empower them without any effort, and when that doesn't happen throwing tantrums like an infantile child gaslighting about arrogance and other things that they hallucinate, falsely believing the world owes them something.
I am not required to explain, the material is out there for anyone to review on their own time. I point out a deficit, and material you can easily look up, those that want to elevate themselves and they can and do the research transforming themselves for the better but not without effort.
I had the very best reason to post this comment, a far better reason than you. I want the future to be livable for everyone, and by your sentiment and actions you seem to want destruction or death for all, at least by the outcomes you claim I should do. You see a car barreling towards a bystander, a good person would yell out in warning so the bystander gets clear and survives. You would instead have it so that they just shut the fuck up, no thought to the consequences.
People who have properly educated and taken their education upon themselves are superior to those that do not, they are capable of far more than they start with, and that only increases with time.
Anyone has the chance to elevate themselves, it only requires effort once given the right direction which is not much, and in the process you learn a great many things if you are open to the journey.
Those that aren't are more content to destroy, envious of those that can, seeking to silence and punish them. --- Giving something of value up for nothing in exchange is charity, and this is always on the terms of the giver, never the receiver. Those that receive and then seek to compel or strongarm the giver are no different than any other thug, thief, looters, but are often worse because they pretend otherwise despite their vile character.
No person owes you a thing. The basic foundations are less than an 8 hour read; not 3 semesters.
The web is full of garbage but one can find sources of specific and detailed information, and also to contact friends directly. So, I choose to go to sites for information (product, “how-to”, or Wikipedia-like), to use aggregators like Hacker News to get a broad brush picture of what’s going on (because no “news” site can be so diverse) and to contact friends directly, and not via a “social” site with billions (?) of users.
Likewise, AI is biased, tries to be all things to all people, and is outright wrong in many cases. It is too easy to nudge in strange directions, and is NOT a nice companion. The lure of advertising is too big not to enshittify it.
However, in strict verticals, it can be helpful.
Since it is by structure non-social, it can’t be used to connect people.
It’s really a matter of choice, and people choose poorly.
“My Internet World” consists mainly of two aggregators, heavily moderated, sites that serve my interests directly, and communications with friends. The latter could be improved by “group forums” outside of the surveillance capitalism monster sites, but nobody seems to care, and should be part of operating systems, but Apple, Google and Microsoft, for example, will never agree on anything, so it’s left to third parties to crack a billion-device market. Fat chance.
As an example, I used to host Moodle on laptops and servers for docs, where people could comment, and it had built-in controls. Perhaps, some outside hosting? Small is beautiful.
People and information. They’ve been poisoned and probably always will as long as people use “big” sites.
Oh, and as for advertising. If I want information, I’ll just go get it. Anyone who pushes information on me is poisoning my cache. Out, damned slop.
> While the ecosystem in which the Web thrived had one colossal flaw, namely, Surveillance Capitalism,b it had a stable business model. That business model is now being threatened by GenAI
Good. If there is one silver lining to generative AI, then it is that programmatic advertising will become less viable as a source of income.
If the internet were to overnight become a place where it is impossible to make money via advertising revenue, it could very well save the internet, if not the world.
What happens when openai starts interjecting ads into chatgpt output?
You ask Chat to add some tags to its output, via your prompt. You get your browser to filter output that is not tagged properly.
Counter measures will need another LLM "AI" to filter out efforts to filter out ads from my prompts. However, when openai's adversary is their customer, my money is on me!
That's a dumb way to do advertising. The "right" way is to shift all the weights a little, so that it's influencing you with everything it says but you don't even see it happening.
who guarantees that this is not already happening?
Then the fools who continue to use it can enjoy their crappy little corner of the internet
Or... we could just make advertising illegal[0].
It would be really nice to get rid of one parasitic zero-sum "industry" without feeding all intellectual output into a slop machine which resells it without credit or compensation.
[0]: https://simone.org/advertising/
Not good. Have you considered the second order effects of a breakdown of communications?
Marketing and Advertising is about communicating a product to someone that may be interested in purchasing it.
If Communications is jammed because AI slop has dominated the web, no marketing happens, no hiring happens, no purchases are made because no jobs. In short order (relatively speaking), you get deflationary collapse of all human organization.
Should that collapse, population levels will be forced to make a deep correction in ecological terms. The planet is in ecological overshoot. What happens when 2/3 of people can suddenly no longer feed themselves, and technology allows one person to destroy everyone on the planet. Quite bad.
Also, the money in surveillance capitalism is almost straight from the money-printer. It may be laundered a bit, but overall the reason old marketing/advertising failed is because it was outcompeted by money-printing, and when that fails (as it always does), you have a barren soil where nothing will grow. Corporate business today has a tendency to burn their house down with themselves in it to save a few pennies.
> Marketing and Advertising is about communicating a product to someone that may be interested in purchasing it.
This is only what advertising is about for the advertisers.
For the other side of the coin, namely, the platforms that sell users to the advertisers, advertising is about capturing as much attention as possible in order to sell it. That means addiction, scams, sensationalism, lying, and preying on fear, greed, lust, and all the baser motives of a human being.
> In short order (relatively speaking), you get deflationary collapse of all human organization.
Lolol no, human organization would not collapse because web advertising went away.
Your wrong. Here's how it might go down.
Web advertising goes away because communications platforms reach the Shannon limit driven by AI generated slop, and deceit. People can no longer communicate with each other, this spawns chaotic hallucinations and delusions that grow into a dragon-king event. Businesses make decisions based on the hallucinatory perceptions that are not sound resulting in losses. Money-printing increases to try to cope with losses by extending debt nationalizing the economy, inflationary pressures cause rapid devaluation of the dollar which in turn puts companies responsible for food production out of business. This culminates in one single company remaining in the food production sector that serves as inputs for other smaller companies, and then they too fail due to chaotic instability and devaluation of the currency, with no further food production thereafter citing regulatory and safety issues confounded by corruption. All the while advertising to everyone that food will be available in the future, but never actually taking the steps to make it happen given the desperate situation that cannot be resolved.
Three days later, most people start getting desperate to feed their families. Rioting breaks out. Some start resorting to cannibalism, looting, and ivolence. The electric grid fails. Production of everything ceases, and the remaining people kill each other using guns/other tools, or detonate nuclear bombs ending it for everyone.
The relation between each step of this is a small domino that by itself wouldn't break a resilient system, it would only break in a predisposed centralized system, a system that has been optimized for chaos to create profit.
You've got the cause and effect reversed that seems based in fallacy. Are you one of those people that would say, "This can't ever happen", sound in that false belief but through your actions then try to make it happen?
Cascade failures lag with time. If you juggle balls up in the air, eventually they will all come down at the same time, where you won't be able to react. This is why these failures are so serious and existential, and shouldn't be ignored by rational people. Those that ignore reality end up dying through their own choices given sufficient time.
I think that story is absolutely nuts, both the premise and the outcome.
If society were as brittle as you describe we’d have collapsed under the first gust of wind.
The premise starts with Claude Shannon's well established work, and the demonstrated ability of GenAI to costlessly saturate communications channels.
What about Shannon's work do you find absolutely nuts? Keeping in mind, to overturn established science you need extraordinary proof for refutation, do you have any?
The inducement of delusion and hallucination of the mind, as well as the limits of human perception, are equally well documented and established under psychology like behavioral modification therapy, behavioral engineering, NCI, torture, hypnosis, and the like.
The economics are also well established that absent a market distribution of labor, corruption occurs regardless leading to positive feedback loops, and runaway money-printing is known to drive and distorts price floors with clear profit cutoffs that determine behavior (closing shop when its no longer possible to make a profit).
Under such adverse circumstances, its not unheard of that the imposed stress causes people to degrade in thought to an almost automaton level, incapable of reacting to their environment correctly, which naturally occurs and is aligned with many of the same things we see under fascism, and the nature of numerous underlying positive feedback systems is they easily run away out of control until conditions are met for catastrophic collapse.
Cascading failures, where everything slips through your hands because the incentives drive the outcome chaotically is expected in such environments.
Your statement amounts to survivorship bias, it hasn't happened yet so it can't ever happen; which is fallacy and easily refuted.
At a bare minimum there are many historical examples of societies that suddenly vanished in the historic record (i.e. suddenly died out). While we can't know the exact circumstances after-the-fact we can know it is a regular possibility.
Given that refutation, because it has happened. Approaching failures that result in no control, it would be appropriate to perform due-dilligence at a point of control where you can affect change, which is necessary to change course, and failure to do that favors extinction.
If you just take a wait and see approach, and you have all your eggs in one single basket, who survives when you are wrong and that hubris spirals consequences out of your control?
The vast majority of people have forgotten the inherent cruelty of natural law, and what it initially took to break past the Malthusian trap. It was the work of a larger part of our population sharing and communicating knowledge.
Distributed communication of useful information is largely what made this possible, and it elevated everyone with access to it. A coordinated effort of solving many problems in unity; and this isn't, or more appropriately can't happen anymore.
Communication won't be available when communication is jammed, and nothing can pass the noise floor due to channel capacity exhaustion. That necessarily means everyone falls to their base cognitive levels, which previously have been augmented through an intelligent minority that has been shrinking.
What chances would you give cavemen in averting a planet killer Impactor? How about without our communications systems, and the built-up expertise (on the shoulder's of giants), what chance would you give modern man to do the same? Equal odds?
Hubris not tempered by reality is a very dangerous thing.
Society didn't used to be so brittle. There were redundancies to pick up slack, but these are gone now. Its been made that way in recent history through complicit insiders seeking profit, power, and control above all else.
> If Communications is jammed because AI slop has dominated the web, no marketing happens
Don't threaten ME with a good time!
GenAi accomplishes what Tim Berners-Lee’s oddball and impractical semantic web project (2000s) set out to do but never could deliver on.
Likely. The ecosystem it trains on now wont continue to be created. There is kind of no point in writing those anymore, if ai swallows it and wont direct to you.
But even more importantly, communities that created those wont form anymore.
GenAI will make shit up. You need to be able to verify the information it gives you. Or not, do what you want. I don’t give a shit.
The underlying articles can and often do make stuff up, usually in the form of silly opinions while trying to pass it as the objective truth.