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.

Yes, but the sheer volume of trash these AIs can generate will be an even bigger problem that needs addressing.

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.

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}

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.

Yeah agreed on that you can’t Google thing anymore. People were speaking of enshitification, I was thinking they were exaggerating, but seing the results around palworld that crazy. Try to find a site with egg combination base don parents. Good luck I got a good one in page 4-5.

Even before the big AI thing this was a common thing for trendy games. Frustrating is it would be websites that arent even gaming focused that would get “top 10 x” or “how to get x in popular game” or “console commands for game x!” . And of course since the top result isnt a game website it was just trying to grab clicks it was a not great or complete article.

The irony of some of the articles being clearly written by AI while also being about “Palword because someone said AI” is rich.

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.

What’s really annoying is I’ll search for something in DDG, Google, bing, etc, like palworld for example, and I’ll see the top 10 results be different web pages with almost identical wording that don’t even answer my questions. I hate the Internet these days. SEO and advertising is cancer that kills off anything good.

A web crawler is not comparable to an e-mail inbox.

Seems like there are more minuses than adds

Bots and AI aren’t the same thing. Bots are just automations, not necessarily making use of machine learning.

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.

That’s a pretty obscure reference, at least in English. For those wondering, I found this in a bibliography of Stanisław Lem:

Bomba megabitowa (The Megabit Bomb, 1999) – Collection of essays about the potential downside of technology, including terrorism and artificial intelligence.