Blogger Matt Webb point out that nations have begun to need a strategic fact reserve, in light of the problem arising from LLMs and other AI models starting to consume and re-process the slop which they themselves have produced.
The future needs trusted, uncontaminated, complete training data.
From the point of view of national interests, each country (or each trading bloc) will need its own training data, as a reserve, and a hedge against the interests of others.
Probably the best way to start is to take a snapshot of the internet and keep it somewhere really safe. We can sift through it later; the world's data will never be more available or less contaminated than it is today. Like when GitHub stored all public code in an Arctic vault (02/02/2020): a very-long-term archival facility 250 meters deep in the permafrost of an Arctic mountain. Or the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
But actually I think this is a job for librarians and archivists.
What we need is a long-term national programme to slowly, carefully accept digital data into a read-only archive. We need the expertise of librarians, archivists and museums in the careful and deliberate process of acquisition and accessioning (PDF).
(Look and if this is an excuse for governments to funnel money to the cultural sector then so much the better.)
It should start today.
Already, AI slop is filling the WWW and starting to drown out legitimate, authoritative sources through sheer volume.
Previously
(2025) Meta's AI Profiles Are Already Polluting Instagram and Facebook With Slop
(2024) Thousands Turned Out For Nonexistent Halloween Parade Promoted By AI Listing
(2024) Annoyed Redditors Tanking Google Search Results Illustrates Perils of AI Scrapers
« U.S. Satellites Reveal China's Solar Dominance | Spacecraft Captures Spectacularly Detailed Images Of Mercury's Hidden Surface »
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"Spreading misinformation suddenly becomes a noble goal," Redditor says:
A trend on Reddit that sees Londoners giving false restaurant recommendations in order to keep their favorites clear of tourists and social media influencers highlights the inherent flaws of Google Search's reliance on Reddit and Google's AI Overview.
In May, Google launched AI Overviews in the US, an experimental feature that populates the top of Google Search results with a summarized answer based on an AI model built into Google's web rankings. When Google first debuted AI Overview, it quickly became apparent that the feature needed work with accuracy and its ability to properly summarize information from online sources. AI Overviews are "built to only show information that is backed up by top web results," Liz Reid, VP and head of Google Search, wrote in a May blog post. But as my colleague Benj Edwards pointed out at the time, that setup could contribute to inaccurate, misleading, or even dangerous results: "The design is based on the false assumption that Google's page-ranking algorithm favors accurate results and not SEO-gamed garbage."
As Edwards alluded to, many have complained about Google Search results' quality declining in recent years, as SEO spam and, more recently, AI slop float to the top of searches. As a result, people often turn to the Reddit hack to make Google results more helpful. By adding "site:reddit.com" to search results, users can hone their search to more easily find answers from real people. Google seems to understand the value of Reddit and signed an AI training deal with the company that's reportedly worth $60 million per year.
But disgruntled foodies in London are reminding us of the inherent dangers of relying on the scraping of user-generated content to provide what's supposed to be factual, helpful information.
Apparently, some London residents are getting fed up with social media influencers whose reviews make long lines of tourists at their favorite restaurants, sometimes just for the likes. Christian Calgie, a reporter for London-based news publication Daily Express, pointed out this trend on X yesterday, noting the boom of Redditors referring people to Angus Steakhouse, a chain restaurant, to combat it.
Thousands Turn Out For Nonexistent Halloween Parade Promoted By AI Listing:
Thousands of Dubliners showed up for the city's much-anticipated Halloween parade on Thursday evening. They lined the streets from Parnell Street to Christchurch Cathedral, waiting for the promised three-hour parade that would "[transform] Dublin into a lively tapestry of costumes, artistic performances, and cultural festivities." A likely story. There was no parade, and never was one.
Would-be revelers started getting suspicious about an hour after the parade was supposed to begin, according to one attendee. The Gardaí, Ireland's national police service, tried to disperse the crowds and put out the message on social media that "contrary to information being circulated online, no Halloween parade is scheduled to take place in Dublin city centre this evening or tonight."
Over the remainder of the night, sleuths gradually teased out the culprit: a website based in Pakistan that consists solely of listings for Halloween events, some real and some totally made-up. Possibly the first clue that the Dublin parade was in the latter category was the listing's implication that Cristiano Ronaldo and MrBeast might appear. But in the days before the non-event, hype started trickling down via social media posts from actual people, which makes it harder to claim Dubliners should have known—if you see a friend posting about a Halloween parade, why wouldn't you believe there was going to be a Halloween parade?
The patient zero of this farce, however, appears to be a combination of classic SEO bait tactics and newfangled AI slop content. Every autumn, lots of people search for Halloween events nearby, and a site entirely devoted to cataloguing them will naturally rise in the Google rankings, which incentivize lots of things that are not necessarily "quality" or "accuracy." You click on the site, which looks professional enough, and they get some money for the ads you're served.
[...] That a fake listing for a Halloween parade would even be a thing anyone would want to create and promote is a product of all sorts of fucked-up incentives baked into our various tech platforms to produce authoritative-seeming garbage at scale. This is only a problem if you are a human who would like to attend a Halloween parade. But don't worry, our tech barons have promised that the slop faucets will not stop running until we've all drowned.
Update 1/03/24: After the publication of this article, Meta told 404 Media that it had begun to delete the AI-generated accounts and that many had been managed by humans. Since then, Meta has deleted the accounts. Our original story follows below.
As I stared into the dead-eyed visage of "Carter," one of Meta's new AI posters, I remembered a line from Dawn of the Dead. "When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth."
Something about George Romero's 1978 film about doomed survivors riding out the zombie apocalypse in a shopping mall feels resonant today as I look across Meta's suite of AI-created profiles. The movie's blue-skinned corpses don't know they're dead. They just wander through the shopping center on autopilot, looking for something new to consume.
That's how many of our social media spaces feel now. Digital town squares populated by undead posters, zombies spouting lines they learned from an LLM, the digested material from decades of the internet spewed back at the audience. That's what Meta is selling now.
Meta's various sites have over 3 billion users, an incredible percentage of the world's population. But businesses demand constant growth and, not content with almost half of the living people on the planet, Meta has decided to cut out the middle-man. It is flooding Facebook and Instagram with AI-generated posters of its own creation.
A December 27, 2024 article in Financial Times laid out the vision. "We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do," Connor Hayes, vice president of generative AI at Meta, told the outlet. "They'll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform . . . that's where we see all of this going."
[...] The AIs don't seem to be faring well on Instagram. They have low engagement numbers and people are calling them out as AI slop. It's different on Facebook, where the norm has been AI-powered slop for a year now. The post has 13 likes and 2 comments on Instagram and 192 likes, 112 comments, and 33 shares on Facebook. Many of the comments are spam, links to other profiles, or phishing bait of one kind or another.
But it's all interaction and, on a spreadsheet, that's all that matters.
[...] The AI apocalypse is here and it's far stupider and more depressing than we were promised. Instead of being hunted down by a gleaming metal skeleton in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, we are surrounded by zombies endlessly repeating our own posts back to us.
And the worst is yet to come. Remember that to power these nightmares Big Tech is going to revive the nuclear power industry. That's our future. A barren mall kept alight with nuclear power, filled with the dead and the never-born.
(Score: 4, Informative) by canopic jug on Tuesday January 21, @09:45AM (18 children)
One of the problems with AI Slop is that by obscuring authoritative sources, people begin to distrust everything because they have to.
A better link for the last paragraph is Radical disbelief and its causes [cybershow.uk] from the same site. That one speaks to the need for a strategic fact reserve in much more detail. AI slop will only get worse as it becomes even more common plus you get AI LLMs feeding on the growing pool of AI slop as it displaces legitimate material. Having one or more strategic fact reserves will at least allow for future models to train on actual information.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Unixnut on Tuesday January 21, @10:51AM (15 children)
The problem is that I don't think a "strategic fact reserve" will help the situation. Unlike a strategic reserve of a commodity (such as oil) which is fungible and apolitical, what qualifies as a "fact" is very much open to interpretation.
As a result there is no doubt such fact reserves will be "tweaked" to represent whatever the politicians in power prefer, meaning people would automatically distrust such fact reserves, and by extension any LLMs that make use of it.
So your choice would be between "Government approved" LLMs that most likely will be censored and tweaked to say what those in power want to say, or non-government approved LLMs (assuming they don't get banned) that may well be uncensored and free, but could end up producing nonsense due to consuming nonsense as part of their training.
I believe the freedom and decentralisation is one of the great things about the internet, yet everywhere I look people are pushing to centralisation and control, now of what actually constitutes approved "facts" which would feed LLMs people would use for their source of information. It sounds like a serious risk of tyranny by those who control the "facts".
From my side, one potential solution came to me when I read "But actually I think this is a job for librarians and archivists." in TFA. A potential decentralised network of global libraries individually curating and offering information in a standard format for LLMs to subscribe to for training seems like a better solution than one big central "fact reserve" per country (or economic/military/political block).
For one thing it would allow information to be distributed across the globe, secondly it would allow differing viewpoints to be expressed, and LLMs can pick and choose which sources they want to train on. Plus libraries have been dying out due to fewer people reading physical books (or reading in general to be honest), so this may well be a way of allowing them to survive in their local community by giving them a second use beyond a physical repository of knowledge.
(Score: 5, Informative) by canopic jug on Tuesday January 21, @11:10AM (10 children)
Plus libraries have been dying out due to fewer people reading physical books (or reading in general to be honest), [...]
Can't speak for around your country, but around here libraries are required to cull a double-digit portion of their collections annually to make room for "new" acquisitions. However, the selection criteria are neither quality nor relevance but instead only newness. Thus the best of breed and, sometimes, irreplaceable artifacts are sent off to the incinerator. (A few years ago, the region's schools sent students to the libraries for what 10 years ago would have been an easy assignment regarding history. However, almost all the relevant books and other historical materials had already been burned forcing cancellation of the lessons which had to be replaced with other activities. It is a slow-burn (pardon the pun) cultural revolution with the fires being lit by corporations rather than politicians.) Increasingly, the new acquisitions are further restricted to what particular companies are willing to supply.
Also around here, the library heads and one layer of managers below them too have been replaced years ago with political representatives who are their to represent local political interests inside the library rather than vice versa. The result is that nothing related to traditional library activities is happening or is going to happen for the foreseeable future. However, there are a lot of long term friends of local politicians drooling over the real estate which the libraries are occupying (for now).
Kiss those PISA scores goodbye.
tldr; libraries are not dying, they are being killed and those doing so have names and addresses
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 4, Informative) by looorg on Tuesday January 21, @11:28AM (5 children)
They do something similar here, it's a process -- On shelf, in archive, sold, burned. So it takes a while before the book burning starts. But there is a process to replace old with new. That said I do visit the library, either at the university or city a few times per month. What is noticeable for several decades now is how they are changing. It's not so much about the book and knowledge anymore. The library is about entertainment.
Both libraries I visit now now has a cafe/sallad bar attached to it. They do have an excellent cookie-buffet at the local library.
There is free internet service, multiple computers. Free to borrow.
There is a large selection of music and movie dvd available to borrow. There is also a large selection of computer and console games, I suspect that this one will dwindle tho as they are all physical copies so they can't have things that actually tie to an account on Steam or anything. So that is probably a short lived thing that will get removed "soon".
I mostly go there to either pick up some book or to read papers or magazines. But it would seem like old books are going away, getting replaced by new. There is a large focus on books, comics and graphical novels for children. Even tho most of the visitors are older, or seniors.
Anyway I think it was a long time since the library was actually some kind of eternal repository for knowledge. There are no stern librarians around anymore to shush you if you talk. Which I find odd and annoying, if I sit and read I don't want to hear other idiots talk on their phones.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Unixnut on Tuesday January 21, @12:19PM (1 child)
Round these parts (UK/Europe) I have never heard of books being burned. Generally books go through a cycle. When new books/stock is delivered if there is no space than the old books are split into two:
1. Rare books are kept
2. Common books are disposed of
Then the next step (when another new stock of books come) is the process above is repeated, except the last generation "rare books" get sent to the central library to be archived (and nowadays digitised).
As for the disposal itself, first thing the library will do is offer the books for free to the public, as well as charities and local bookshops. The local bookshops will try to resell the old books, and if they run out of space due to new stock arriving, they will offer them for free (usually they place them in front of the book shop on the public way, you just pick whatever takes your fancy and walk off with it). Finally any books that are not even taken for free are sent to the paper recycling mill, where they get turned into more paper.
The Charities will do similar, either sell them to raise money for their cause, or in some cases provide books to their cause directly (e.g. old peoples homes or hospital wards).
Problem is the libraries round here are stuck in a doom loop of degradation. I don't think my local library has had new stock delivered in 10 years at least. Its a cycle of funding cuts because "nobody reads books anymore and library visits are down on last year" resulting in no funding to buy new stock, resulting in nothing much new for people to read, causing fewer people to visit, which then starts another round of funding cuts.
My local library looks really neglected and the above is the reason the librarians gave, until the libraries are shut down and the buildings sold to property developers for more expensive housing projects (the cynic in me would say this might well be the real reason their funding was cut in the first place).
Having the libraries as a repository of knowledge for LLMs would give them a reason to get more funding, so not only can they store, digitise and curate information, the increased funding could well improve the experience, bring in new stock and entice people to visit, thereby regenerating them and breaking the cycle of stagnation.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pTamok on Tuesday January 21, @01:19PM
Perhaps the data hoarders will help/save some future generation.
It's important to document what is happening now so that future generations (if they come to exist) have the opportunity to avoid making the same mistakes as us.
(Score: 4, Informative) by pTamok on Tuesday January 21, @02:39PM (2 children)
Fahrenheit 451 [wikipedia.org] (published in 1953).
If you have not read it, or at least seen the film, then maybe you should.
I also recommend The Pedestrian [wikipedia.org] (published in 1951).
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday January 21, @05:04PM
That some people outright refuse to read Fahrenheit 451 demonstrates some of the major themes of the story.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Wednesday January 22, @02:05AM
And see if Seashells remind you of anything today.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Wednesday January 22, @01:30PM (3 children)
A significant portion of libraries don't buy most of their new release titles. The books are leased from the publisher and go back at the end of the lease. The library controls the lease length based on popularity. These books can often be identified by a sticker with the name of the publisher on the top or bottom of the spine on the dust jacket, below the protective plastic dust jacket cover.
If you want to hear sad librarian noises, ask how many books never get checked out, even once.
Near the Florida/Georgia line there's a bookstore that sells off-lease books. I make a point to stop there whenever we drive through.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Wednesday January 22, @03:43PM (2 children)
That's pretty much inevitable. They're buying on an estimation of what will be popular. It's probably worse now with fewer people coming in to look and collections that are much larger than they used to be. And the ease of buying ebooks probably not helping.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Wednesday January 22, @05:20PM (1 child)
The ease of buying ebooks, particularly audiobooks, has indeed reduced my library visits.
That said, I'm more likely to purchase a physical book now than I used to be. Maybe it's old-fart syndrome, but it's easier for me to sit down and read a physical book than an eBook. That wasn't the case previously, but I've gone headlong into the dopamine addiction trap of notification checking and doomscrolling. Paper seems to help break that loop.
We're not going to talk about the unread **pile**. :| Nope, nothing to see there. :D
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Wednesday January 22, @05:32PM
It's kind of unfortunate as around here the libraries have been converted into community centers more than libraries. People do check out tons of books and the library system is one of the most used systems in the country, but it's so incredibly inaccessible for me than back when I was a kid due to just how loud it is. But, in theory, the fact that it's more of a community center probably does bring in people and allow the librarians to guide people to books that are less loved but the book for whatever it is that that patron is looking for.
That being said, the local library does have a ton of downloadable books and videos, so it's not like they're taking this lying down and to a large extent any reading that people do is probably a good thing.
(Score: 4, Funny) by c0lo on Tuesday January 21, @01:30PM
True. You see, there's... hang on, TikTok is back, up and running again, talk to you later :large-grin:
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 21, @05:04PM
One of the worst funded/supported fields of endeavor.
The Internet Archive as an example
Do they even have an endowment?
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Wednesday January 22, @05:37PM (1 child)
That's more or less it, even under the most benevolent and well-intended system with checks and balances that are completely effective at keeping bias out, a lot of things that we view as being facts have changed over the previous few decades in particular. It's not always due to bad actors, a lot of it is because people have pushed the boundaries of research and learned that we were previously wrong. The things that are really and truly incontrovertible tend to be pretty infrequent. I'm not sure what disputing the atomic number of an atom would be, but it tends to be things like that where having a fact reserve is possible, it's also so basic as to be completely pointless as it's the stuff made of atoms that people dispute when it comes to fluoride in the drinking water and various stuff in vaccines.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 23, @05:35AM
Bro they put fluorine in the toothpaste now. DON'T BRUSH. It'll make your kids gay.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Freeman on Tuesday January 21, @02:57PM
I mean AI slop isn't necessarily worse than normal Internet slop. The only real problem is that with AI slop, you have an automated generation of said slop. Thus, you don't need a horde of Chinese/North Korean/Russian keyboard warriors. The problem is that the barrier to entry is massively cheaper. Which is really the biggest problem we face with regards to Privacy concerns in the USA as well. It used to cost real money to tail a bunch of mobsters. Now, they just need invade the privacy of a hundred other citizens and yoink all that juicy data using a spoofed cell tower or the like.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday January 22, @10:45AM
> people begin to distrust everything because they have to.
I see this as an absolute win, although I don't see how the latter half of that statement changed in the past million years.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 21, @11:00AM
The US population has already taken action! It's insight is remarkable including the following points:
1. It cushions against impacts from most sides (except the top).
2. It make one look more like their president.
3. Synthetic oil can be produced from fat, which can be drilled.
4. ...
5. Profit!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday January 21, @11:48AM (6 children)
This fundamentally misunderstands the motives and determination of those that want to live in a fact-free environment.
1. If you establish a location where facts are being stored for the world to access, and the world knows where it is, then those opposed to those facts because they are inconvenient for their ideology will make it a target for some kind of violent action and destroy it. Ditto if you distribute it.
2. To maintain any such effort, you need funding. The people with enough money to fund it effectively for the long term are benefiting from ignorance, so they won't want to.
3. No matter how reliable your sources for any kind of information, it is very easy for somebody to come along and say "lol WRONG!"
As for librarians and archivists, I won't be surprised in the least if they are declared obsolete [youtube.com].
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Tuesday January 21, @01:21PM (2 children)
FTFY - not all nations have the same propensity of living in alt-realities... ummmm... yet.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday January 21, @01:34PM
There's lots of fact-free stuff happening in China, Russia, Europe, etc too. It's not just a USAian thing.
Facts are inconvenient to incompetent but powerful people. Therefor, these incompetent-but-powerful people conclude, they must be destroyed at all costs.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 21, @05:18PM
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Wednesday January 22, @03:11AM (2 children)
Destruction is actually relatively innocuous since one can always copy or recreate it. Rather they would seek to control it. Who controls the past controls the future.
It's an attack surface for society.
And the premise is junk. It's not that hard to find good sources.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday January 22, @01:19PM (1 child)
Sure, I was assuming that "fact" had some kind of definition independent of politics. Stuff like "An atom of uranium has 92 protons", which could very easily be lost if Internet scrapers and LLMs are stupid enough and humans are stupid enough to believe them.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 22, @06:36PM
These aren't facts, they're strategic facts and inherently political as a result.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Tuesday January 21, @12:31PM (5 children)
What we need are more books. Written by actual people who know a topic.
It used to if you wanted to know about something, you bought a book or went to the library. Not so much any more.
These days you're lucky if you can find a web site that contains some incomplete half assed one-page description of a topic.
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Tuesday January 21, @01:24PM
Easy-peasy... self-publishing on Amazon and with an audiobook format too - AI can help with the latter :large-grin:
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday January 21, @03:00PM (2 children)
Libraries still exist. Now, most US Public libraries may be glorified Internet Cafes with popular novels. However, there are still quite a number of legitimately good Public libraries and for better or worse Academic libraries have an entirely different agenda.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Tuesday January 21, @05:37PM (1 child)
At least the academic libraries I've perused have had lots of really excellent bits of writing just sitting in the stacks not bothering anybody, often from a wide variety of eras. For the most part, the librarians are content to let those books stay right where they are.
The idea that librarians are rubbing their hands together in glee having successfully pushed some kind of agenda is just plain silly conspiracy theorizing, mostly by people who are pursuing a political agenda by trying to ban books that express ideas they don't like. I will also mention that the people trying to ban books often haven't even read them, they've just seen some list go by on the Internet and decided that nobody should be able to read them.
If your ideology is capable of being completely destroyed by its adherents reading or hearing about competing ideologies, then there's a good chance that your ideology is incorrect or immoral and deserves to go away.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 3, Informative) by Freeman on Tuesday January 21, @06:09PM
I've worked in an academic library for nearly 20 years. Perhaps the biggest issue we've faced, essentially the entire time has been the perception that people can just Google stuff. Why does the Library even exist? The running gag is "Do you think our budget will be the same as it has been for the last 20 years?" The budget for our Library has essentially not changed in over 20 years. Yet database vendors want an extra 3% or more, every year. Looking at the state of Universities in general in the USA. We're not doing so great.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday January 21, @06:31PM
I'm not entirely disagreeing with you, but it's worth considering that perhaps books USED to be sold as 'the curriculum' for a topic whereas IRL the curriculum was usually instructor or self-learner driven but books tried to pretend to be a curriculum, and sometimes were successful-ish.
I think the "new online curriculum" is the online video series. Ranging from free uni open-courseware videos to subsidized free-ish videos (udemy is free at my public library if you pay property taxes in my community, more or less) to outright pay to watch and online credit and non-credit classes. Not books anymore.
Probably, the days of "buy a book" to blink a LED on an arduino or replace a power window motor on a van are simply gone; that's going to be some mix of website, blog, AI slop, and youtube video.
I've noticed I won't buy shovelware physical books anymore. There's a publisher well known to basically shovel lightly edited manpages and howto docs that is pretty much dead to me. On the other hand I'm keeping classic "curriculum" type books. Will I ever get rid of my Strang's Linear Algebra or my copies of Knuth or even Feynman's lecture series? Probably not.
I am keeping the REALLY long form howtos. "Modern C" or some of Holm's books are kind of like an entire fan website collection of well edited todo that flow into each other and I'm keeping those kind of books but not really buying more. What if you had a LISP howto doc that was 300+ pages long and really well written, or at least interesting as heck; well that's some of Holm's books, good stuff. Nobody is releasing that for free online; not yet anyway, maybe someday.
I think you might see a rise in almost vanity press type ebooks assisted by AI. I don't have time IRL to write a book titled "CoAP and LwM2M on ESP32" although in theory I could write a tolerable decent one; I could ask a suitably advanced LLM to shovel out some slop that I could insert real working code into and then thoroughly edit it and someone into that protocol on that platform might actually enjoy reading it.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday January 21, @01:14PM
I'm thinking more of a video archive, with timestamps and stuff. Way too much data, and most of it useless [youtu.be], but more effort to fake en masse.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DadaDoofy on Tuesday January 21, @02:26PM (3 children)
"trusted, uncontaminated, complete training data."
And just how would this be accomplished? Anything done by humans is inherently biased. Why would the curation of AI training data be any different?
AI is being sold as some kind of impartial arbiter of knowledge, but that couldn't be further from the truth. The sooner people catch on, the sooner this bubble will pop and we can move on.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/ai-systems-reflect-the-ideology-of-their-creators-say-scientists [discovermagazine.com]
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Freeman on Tuesday January 21, @03:02PM
That's okay, they'll just train the AI that holds the keys to the Nuclear Launch Codes on the likes of "A Modest Proposal" and "Mein Kampf".
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Disagree) by VLM on Tuesday January 21, @06:43PM (1 child)
Its the classic echo-chamber subculture problem where a weird small group (perhaps a LLM) feeds upon its own output until its space alien time, unable to interact with the rest of reality.
For a human-ish example, look how weird Reddit posters are, or at least can be, compared to functioning humans IRL. The TDS salt there has been hilarious in recent days LOL.
Real human generated data costing nothing, and AI slop output costing near nothing, the usual people will try to cut corners by feeding the output back into the input and it's not going to turn out very well.
At some point a disconnected groupthink subculture becomes useless to the larger culture that's theoretically funding it based on the idea that it'll be useful. For example, could a LLM trained on itself until it's indistinguishable from 4chan complete with n-word stacks and rule 34 memeposting write useful text for ... anything else? Probably not.
Then too there are other philosophical arguments like social communities always go right wing without massive centralized censorship and control, so a LLM feeding back on itself will inevitably go full Mein Kampf. Now if that's actually bad or not is open for debate, if its the natural inevitable evolution of thought, but some folks, mostly from the left, don't like that factual interpretation of reality.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday January 21, @06:47PM
... Real human generated data costing much more than nothing, and AI slop output costing near nothing...
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 21, @02:56PM
We can't allow control of distribution any more than the content itself
(Score: 3, Funny) by khallow on Tuesday January 21, @05:01PM
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by VLM on Tuesday January 21, @06:15PM (1 child)
Eventually kids will be taught that they can't use anything post 2020 copyright as a primary source and people will seek out pre-2020 sources.
Life is going to be REALLY difficult for technical stuff like post 2025 engineering data sheets or technical manuals.
Really non-fiction is not going to be much harder than what we're already doing with boycotting post 2010 woke-era fiction. There might be some parallels in that post-AI non-fiction sales might collapse just like post-woke fiction sales and viewership collapsed. Looking at what happened when fiction became enshitified, we may very well be in the last days of technical books (think Manning, Oreilly, and friends... not so much Packt which is already, um...)
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday January 21, @10:23PM
Define "woke."
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 21, @10:11PM
What LLMs do with training data has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of the statements therein.
If you train some LLM on existing slop, they'll produce slop. But if you train them on Euclid's Elements, they also produce slop.
Everybody, just stop it already. What LLMs do is produce sentences that are grammatically plausible, with an occasional added glaze of the unwarranted confident tone of a hungover Eton alumn. End of story. If you believe that correct grammar equates to intelligence, there is no hope for you.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Wednesday January 22, @01:43PM (2 children)
I'm deeply skeptical of an organization that would designate themselves as both an arbiter and warehouse of truth. I love the idea of a library like this, ideally with provisions to make it forever free and open to all. That said, I don't trust my government to fill that role, nor do I trust the community to do it like e.g. Wikipedia.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 23, @05:47AM (1 child)
How about a Strong Leader?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday January 23, @10:47PM
Nope, not that either. Leaders are like diapers. They change regularly, and eventually you'll get one that really stinks.