Not a super well thought out article. Example: lots of speculative complaints that ChatGPT will lead to an explosion of low quality and biased editorial material, without a single mention of what that problem looks like today (hint: it was already a huge problem before ChatGPT).<p>Ditto with the “ChatGPT gave me wrong info for a query” complaint. Well, how does that compare to traditional search? I’m willing to believe a Google search produced better results, but it seems like something one should check for an article like this.<p>IMO we’re not facing a paradigm change where the web was great before and now ChatGPT has ruined it. We may be facing a tipping point where ChatGPT pushes already-failing models to the breaking point, accelerating creation of new tools that we already needed.<p>Even if I’m wrong about that, I’m very confident that low quality, biased, and flat out incorrect web content was already a problem before LLMs.
I agree with the headline and am glad that someone finally said it.<p>Web 1.0 was great: designed by academics, it popularized idempotence, declarative programming, scalability and ushered in the Long Now so every year since has basically been 1995 repeated.<p>Web 2.0 never happened: it ended up being a trap that swallowed the best minds of a generation to web (ad) agencies with countless millions of hours lost fighting CSS rules and Javascript build tools to replicate functionality that was readily available in 1980s MS Word and desktop publishing apps. It should have been something like single-threaded blocking logic distributed on Paxos/Raft with an event database like Firebase/RethinkDB and layout rules inspired by iOS's auto layout constraint solver with progressive enhancement via HTMX, finally making #nocode a reality. Oh well.<p>Web 3.0 is kind of like the final sequel of a trilogy: just when everyone gets onboard, the original premise gets lost to merchandizing and people start to wish it would just go away. Entering the knee of the curve of the Singularity, it will be difficult to spot the boundary between the objective reality of reason and the subjective reality of meaning. We'll be inundated by never-ending streams of infotainment wedged between vast swaths of increasingly pointless work.<p>Looking forward: the luddites will come out after the 2024 election and we'll see vast effort aimed at stomping out any whiff of rebel resistance. Huge propaganda against UBI, even more austerity measures to keep the rabble in line, the first trillionaire this decade. Meanwhile the real work of automating the drudgery to restore some semblance of disposable income and leisure time will fall on teenagers living in their parents' basement.<p>Thankfully Gen X and Millenials are transitioning into positions of political power. There is still hope, however faint, that we can avoid falling to tech illiteracy. But currently most indicators point to calamity after 2040 and environmental collapse between 2050 and 2100. Somewhat ironically, AI working with humans may be the only thing that can save civilization and the planet. Or destroy them. Hard to say at this point really!
Too late, ChatGPT isn't going to be the driving force behind inaccurate content on the web, we were there long ago. Google search is almost useless now for anything outside of "places to eat near me" and the blogosphere died long ago and was replaced by ad-rent-seeking recipe sites. All the value has moved on from web pages to small forum enclaves and video.<p>There is a bright future though in direct real time communication. There's also a new search and indexing revolution waiting in the wings for whoever wants to lead the charge on distilling or better facilitating those conversations. LLMs will play a part in that if they can get the data of the quality question response interactions and use them to fine tune the models.
I moderate a forum and a user recently started answer questions with links to his blog, where he made AI-generated pages of generated answers on the topics.<p>The posts don't offer anything novel or personal to conversation, as they only repeat the most common talking points on the topic. Ugh.
Imagine a world where the only content you see is from publishers that you trust, and that your friends trust, and their friends, to maybe 4 or 5 hops or so, and the feed was weighted by how much they are trusted by your particular social graph.<p>If you start seeing spammy content, you downvote it, and your trust level from that part of your social graph drops, and they are less likely to be able to publish things that you see. If you discover some high quality content, and you promote it, then your trust level will improve in your part of the social graph.<p>I'd say that the <i>actual</i> web3 (they crypto kind) is largely about reclaiming identity from centralized identity providers. Any time you publish anything, you're signing that publication with a key that only you hold. Once all content on the internet is signed, these trust graphs for delivering quality content and filtering out spam become trivial to build.<p>In this world, it doesn't matter if content is generated with ChatGPT, or content farms, or spammers. If the content is good, you'll see it, and if it's not, then you won't.
Not to be a grumpy old man, but I will say, my known original definition of Web 3.0 was the Semantic Web [1] but I have no idea if that definition came before the one in TFA about those selling javascript webpage controls marketing their latest spinner product spinning it as web 3.0 > web 2.0.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web</a>
I think that his diagnosis of Adtech is not quite grim enough. Knowing that advertisers can uniquely identify most users, pretty reliably, not only will the chat bots be able to produce responsive texts, they will be continually training on each individual’s unique psychology and vulnerabilities.<p>It’s gonna be a gas!
We will need something similar to the Biblical flood to flush everything away. And restart from local trust islands similar to what we had in 80's-90's with BBSs and possibly Fidonet. I don't know how it's going to work but I just don't see any future in Internet in its current commercial form.
Re: An electronic version of Tom Riddle's diary<p>>“Ginny!" said Mr. Weasley, flabbergasted. "Haven't I taught you anything? What have I always told you? Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain?”<p>― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Online dating is going to be a nightmare with chatbots flooding the dating sites catfishing everyone. User contrib sites like Reddit will be flooded with bots that keep the conversation going, but drop in sponsored mentions into things for revenue. I think a push for real, verifiable identities and digitally signing content may happen so people can attempt to wade through what is real and what is fake.
All the criticisms I see directed at ChatGPT are met with "the web already sucks". So what revolution awaits us? I just think we're getting closer and closer to a boring dystopia.
Although ChatGPT is going to worsen the problem of garbage information online, I don't think it affects anyone who is willing to learn slowly and deeply.<p>We are already at the point that only certain books and videos are good references and their golden status is not going to wear down by time.
The current web is already 90% worthless garbage. Everything I've heard from the Web 3 crowd makes me think that Web 3 will be 99% worthless garbage. So I guess Chat GPT will make that 100%?<p>I already think the web is, if not dead, then doomed in terms of the value it used to provide. My fear about things like Chat GPT is that it will have a similar effect on things outside the web as well.<p>But we'll see. I really wish I felt more optimistic about all this, but the trendlines don't encourage that.
I now cringe when I hear "Web 3.0"<p>I wrote a book a decade ago with Web 3.0 in the title (semantic web, linked data, etc.). "Web 3.0" has been used in so many contexts and meanings, that we need something more description in a name.
I've been predicting since GPT-2 that AI text generators will mean the end of the open web and open social media. It will be destroyed by a Biblical tidal wave of unfilterable spam to the point that it becomes useless.
I thought the fun part was going to be that Chat GPT would condense those bloated SEO preambles into neat paragraphs.<p>I can picture a Chat GPT browser that transforms those pages into their essential meaning, if they have any.<p>I think too there should be standards and rules regarding affiliate content. For example, affiliate review sites. If the reviewer cannot prove they actually purchased the product and used it, their reviews are filtered out, SEO rankings be damned.<p>For now I'm mostly excited about Chat GPT going into role playing game engines and NPCs, and as a sort of dynamic encyclopedia to aid my research and learning.
> “Early in the Reticulum-thousands of years ago-it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said.<p>> “Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him.<p>> “Yes-a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.”<p>> “What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone.<p>> “Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors-swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.”<p>> “As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,” Osa said. “This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-First Millennium A.R.”<p>> “Exactly!” Sammann said. “Artificial Inanity systems of enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that there was a sort of Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita forerunners were able to bring matters in hand.”<p>-- Anathem, by Neal Stephenson
> The best I can hope for is that some hacker collective manages to make an open source version of it, that can be more trustworthy than the current one.<p>It's always interesting to me when someone makes an assert like this for a Big Data technology.<p>If this were tractable, we'd have an open-source Google alternative right now that someone would have built for the sheer joy of being the folks that took on Google. But open source doesn't work that way because code is download-once, use-forever, but data is continuously changing and costs perpetual money to update and maintain. "Open source data" looks like Wikipedia, and the world won't sustain more than a few of those; Wikipedia has about 100,000 active editors.<p>So instead of some hacker-alternative-to-Google techno-utopia idea, we've got plenty of open-source crawlers and a handful of <i>services</i> paying the bills via rent-seeking their database and, often, advertising. No reason to think a ChatGPT-heavy future will be different.
My biggest concern is the rise of the drag & drop content grifters — Zero-knowledge individuals that can pollute the Web at scale that was previously only possible for a much smaller group.
E.g. Look at the amount of TikTok how-tos for creating & selling generated children's books on Amazon.
PoW mining is about validation of transactions and getting paid by the network and the users for performing this service. As a miner, you're doing work, that you are paid for, and you don't even know your customers or any details about them. This is a novel concept.<p>I see web3, from the business point of view, as being that whole concept. It won't just be PoW mining, but there will be cases where protocols are developed, that anyone can participate in, and incentives are developed to encourage that participation.<p>web3 will morph into many things. It will be painful to watch and there will be many mistakes along the way, but I'm glad it is happening. I like to be positive about people experimenting with new ways of doing things.
I don’t care much about what happens to the modern web at this point, I just long for those days of the early web and wish there was some sort of alternative web I could still browse that was by design forced to be that way forever.
Each webpage should express a piece of metadata that is content-quality.<p>* primary - The content on this page is a primary source<p>* secondary - The content on this page is high quality, but which is primarily research based and may thus be tainted by unknown sources<p>* bot - The content on this page is mostly automatically generated by one or more ML models with some human curated improvements<p>HTML elements can also have data-content-quality to override the page level metadata. So if you have a primarily sourced paragraph.<p>Search engines can index this signal. Sites that claim primary, but which frequently are provably wrong or bot generated can be penalized.<p>(edited for formatting)
emperor has no clothes but this forum is full of people who wasted their money investing it and/or get paid to work on it.<p>today "AI is just spicy autocomplete" gets flagged off front page.<p>For MONTHS, front page has been full of sub-script-kiddie level "AI" tools that are just `curl "{static_prompt} + {user_input}" <a href="http://chatgptapi" rel="nofollow">http://chatgptapi</a>`<p>or mediocre examples of things that would have been impressive a computer could do in 1960, but are absolutely easier to do since 2010 with google or other tools.
"The Web 2.0 changed the way we related to that information by making it interactive."<p>Web 2.0 was about users generating content on shared platforms (social networks). It wasn't about making it interactive — that is just a feature. The benefit of 2.0 was scaling-up businesses was easier than ever with new web tech. This spiralled directly into the start-up boom of the last decade.<p>Not sure I can take an article seriously that doesn't even understand its basic premises.
>it's not going to be fun<p>Depends on how you define "fun". Just a few days ago this russian guy defended GPT written diploma and now we have a shitshow going on. Really fun to watch.<p><a href="https://twitter.com/biblikz/status/1620451262822252544" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/biblikz/status/1620451262822252544</a><p>PS: well, the diploma was not written entirely by GPT, but nevertheless...
It could unlock a better web without overlapping, basic and repetitive content spread throughout millions of websites, optimised for search engine indexing. I see it as an interactive knowledge aggregator for basic fact checking on any subject. This creates an opportunity for the web to thrive with genuine, original and thought-provoking authored content.
I'm so excited about ChatGPT making it much easier to spot people who went through an education system oriented toward learning versus the sit-in-class types. Bring on the fall of the bullshit tower coated in ivory! Hello, schools that help people learn about the Omniverse by playing with the Omniverse!<p>This is the return of discipline.
This is a case of a solution inventing the problem it was meant to solve.<p>AI generated content is going to make search engine results effectively useless. The only reasonable conclusion to that end is that AI will be needed to answer the questions we used to rely on Google Search for.<p>Has there ever been a situation like this before?
> The regular web is going to get worse<p>Author implies that web = Google (or search engines in general). But web is not search, and Google doesn't own it, although it seems so. There are other methods of content discovery on the web, and we are at the beginning of exploring them.
The solution for Google is to filter generated content, period. That will lead to an arms race of sorts, similar to the SEO keyword arms race. The SEO arms race resulted in keyword relevant, but unoriginal minimally useful content.<p>The problem for Google is that their advertisers love generated content.
Well, this means that content curators and good content producers will gain in value.<p>The hard part will be to stand out, and to create things that AI can't easily reproduce, such as linking content to a service.<p>I think it's a good news for actual high quality original creator: they will rise to the sun.
I think it will be fun! We're seeing a paradigm shift right before our very eyes. Just think, you can tell your grandkids that you lived through the AI revolution.<p>I'm excited to see what happens next, because nobody knows and certainly whoever wrote this article has no clue, either.
I’ve only had time for a cursory glance at this writing, but let me thank you for sounding the horn on the on Web 3.0. It was bad enough adding Ajax calls to websites and calling it Web 2.0. At least that had something to do with http, ECMA script, html, and web-related tech.
This might just push users to more narrower content options. ”ChatGPT FREE Verified”, anyone? Has its ups and downs I guess, but already before ChatGPT I had grown quite a filter for estimating the trustworthiness of a site. I guess the BLOCK -rules just keep on piling..
Definitely has a Fahrenheit 451 vibe going on. Wonder if we’ll have a generation of people who’ll be running off into the metaphorical woods with the old books and websites, away from society and modern culture.
Surprised that such a poorly written article as this gets so much attention on HN. Trite thoughts, misspelled words, poorly defined concepts and pessimism that can't back itself up.
Microsoft and others clearly created Chat A.I. because they can't trust journalists or there employee's to continue lying for them. This is all about information control.
I say fantastic, bring it on. This might be the final nail in the coffin of automated gatekeepers like Google and social networks, and back to person-powered indexes.
LOVE It! Turning out pages of JS, SQL, Python code for me.<p>Plus very detailed explanations. And know, it may disappoint some folks, but it ALL works.<p>:-)
Chat GPT + Blockchain is the birth of the real Web 3.0 and it's going to be wild and weird but ultimately it's going to be an improvement.<p>AI is the use case blockchain didn't know it was looking for.<p>The exaflod of content and deep fakes, etc. that's coming towards everyone soon will require some sort of trust protocol, blockchain is great for that.
This is ridiculous. Why does everyone try to claim "Web 3.0" for over a decade?<p>Tim Berners-Lee said Web 3.0 was the semantic web, and allowing others to query data with SPARQL etc.<p>The Ethereum community said Web 3.0 involved signing transactions with private keys and storing data on blockchains rather than centralized servers.<p>Now someone is claiming that ChatGPT is the birth of the "real" Web 3.0 -- okay, first of all, chat has NOTHING to do with web. Web means hyperlinks and at the very least letting a user move between domains that serve content, and hopefully increasing interoperability using standard approaches like REST and JSON-LD, as opposed to a centralized provider that is owned by a tiny number of people, and relies on with Big Tech cloud providers (Microsoft). This isn't even a web, let alone open.<p>And secondly, why not already move on to Web 4.0? It's been a decade or more. Everyone is "denying" the last thing was Web 3.0 It's ridiculous. We <i>have</i> a semantic web now (Open Graph, for instance, or schema.org, and more). We <i>have</i> significant adoption also of "Web3"... crypto has co-opted the word cryptography, and Web 3... we just have to accept it <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/nov/18/crypto-cryptocurrency-cryptographers" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/nov/18/crypto-cr...</a> ... many people on HN hate crypto so much that they think the Web3 term hasn't already been solidified, whereas somehow they <i>do</i> think that the word <i>crypto</i> has solidified to mean cryptocurrency rather than cryptography.<p>Jack Dorsey is using the new OPEN technologies from Microsoft / Sidetree protocol / DID standards to build "Web5", and he thankfully gave up his ideas of trademarking it: <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/30/jack-dorseys-tbd-is-looking-to-trademark-web5-to-deter-its-misuse/" rel="nofollow">https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/30/jack-dorseys-tb...</a><p>It's time to move on. Build applications that combine all these different tools. The Web has come a long way now. It can do PaymentRequest. It can do WebRTC. It can do Web Push. Just use the tools.<p>But definitely ChatGPT currently is everything that is OPPOSITE of what "The Web" was supposed to be. <i>Maybe</i> if an open source version comes out, and obliterates all current systems of content and reputation on the current web, then we can talk about "a new (dystopian) web", a kind of dark forest with chatbot swarms descending to shout down / annoy / destroy reputations of individuals and forums who espouse an inconvenient point of view. There is obviously going to be an arms race of bullshit drowning out actual thoughtful posting. But right now it's not even web.
I'm pretty happy with Chat GPT. There was yet-another thread about the degradation of Google Search results a few weeks ago and folks here talked about the uselessness of it's results. I remember when my mom taught me to "search like a pro" back in the 90s. She was a librarian and she taught me valuable things before those search parameters were known as "Google hacks". I remember how powerful it felt to be able to find anything related to what I wanted to know. Google still provides useful results - buried in all the crap. There's so much valuable info to find, and so much more crap in 2023. The signal to noise ratio is worse.<p>So I tried Chat GPT recently and I asked it about something I've never quite understood. "How is an antenna designed to prevent the feedline emanating radio waves?" and it gave me a very focused explanation of how impedance is matched between the feedline and antenna to reduce standing waves and power being reflected back to the transmitter. I was so happy with this, because although i could find countless resources on antenna design they were much too dry for my understanding. I was always lost navigating the text because I didn't have the formal education to piece together 'what they're saying over here relates to what is being said over here'. You have to have a certain level of comprehension with the subject material to locate information.<p>I think Chat GPT and things like it represent the search engines of tomorrow. There's a DEFINITE risk of creating recycled, incorrect content and prompting it circularly into the same dumpster of misinformation. However, I spent 15-20 minutes re-articulating my question about antennas and "what part of the antenna prevents this?" and I came away very happy with my new understanding.<p>I'm looking forward to AI-assisted learning, and it feels as magical as Google Search did in the 90s.<p>In another instance, I asked it how to run a Powershell script on a remote computer with psexec and it produced the correct commands but did not warn me the script had to first be copied over to the remote machine. All good explanations / demonstrations should come with clarifying questions. I'm very happy I can ask technical things like this, embarrassing things, very abstract/broad things, and have an AI that will guide me into new understanding.<p>Take it all with a grain of salt. Looks like I'll be doing the $20/month for ChatGPT Pro though. It's more valuable and entertaining to my day-to-day curiosities than something like Netflix.
An endless loop of AI generated content that gets posted to the web as original human generated content, with LLMs getting re-trained on this content and spitting out more content that also gets re-posted, resulting in a cesspool of BS masquerading as organic knowledge. I'm old enough to remember when Google provided meaningful search results rather than just SEO spam, the problem is about to get an order of magnitude worse.
Unlimited 24/7 AI streamers on Twitch.<p>Unlimited 24/7 AI TV shows and movies (RIP Netflix, Hollywood).<p>Unlimited AI opinions about any topics.<p>Unlimited AI “grassroots” campaigns.<p>Unlimited AI propaganda from every country and military (perfectly chosen each time).<p>Unlimited AI comments, “friends”, and engagements on every social media platform for your posts.<p>The bigger struggle will be for discovering authenticity and filtering the content down.<p>Suddenly everyone’s frustration with their AI generated newsfeed and social feeds will become necessary filter tools to communicate and digest information.<p>Just my opinion. Fun to think about. Will watch “Her” this weekend again.
I made this comment on a post that got flagged for reasons I don't understand. I don't want to feel like I wasted my time so I'm re-commenting here:<p>I was watching "HyperNormalisation" by Adam Curtis for the second time. In his segment on Eliza, an early example of a chat bot, I realized that Curtis makes a mistake in his interpretation of Eliza. For Curtis it's narcissism that makes Eliza attractive. Curtis levels the charge that Westerners are individualistic and self-centered often.<p>But when an interview with the creator Joseph Weizenbaum is shown starting at 01hr:22min, he never says that. He relates how his secretary took to it, and even though she knew it was a primitive computer program, she wanted some privacy while she used it. Weizenbaum was puzzled by that, but then the secretary (or possibly another woman) says Eliza doesn't judge me and it doesn't try to have sex with me.<p>What jumped out at me was that Weizenbaum's secretary was using Eliza as a thinking tool to clarify her thoughts. Most high school graduates in America don't learn critical thinking skills as far as I can tell. Eliza is a useful tool because it encourages critical thinking and second order thinking by asking questions and reflecting back answers and asking questions in another way. The secretary didn't want to use Eliza because she was a narcissist, she wanted to talk through some sensitive issues with what she knew was a dumb program so she could try and resolve them.<p>That's how I feel about ChatGPT so far. It's a great thinking tool. Someone to bounce ideas around with. Of course, I know it's a dumb computer program and it makes mistakes, but it's still a cool new tool to have in the toolbox.<p>HyperNormalisation by Adam Curtis<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS_c2qqA-6Y">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS_c2qqA-6Y</a><p>Eliza<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA</a>
Ugh, "Web 3.0". The years of "Web 2.0" stupidity were bad enough. People want to revive this ignorance? Then again, they keep churning out the asinine labels for "generations" of people.<p>In other news: Are we supposed to know what an "onsen" is?
All AI projects need to be immediately nationalized. None of the people in Tech have shown themselves responsible enough for it and it will only be used against people.<p>That's a red line.
Stop guys, stop.<p>Be young in your mind. Be young.<p>How are young people interpreting this?<p>"Oh wow, I can get it to write or help edit essays"<p>"I can use it as something to bounce ideas off of"<p>"I can use it to take ideas from my head into the digital realm."<p>Stop being old people.
Really wish people would stop conflating "Web 3.0" and "Web3" they're entirely different concepts that just have similar names, and don't get me started on "Web5" (but if they are achieving anything it's killing the "Web [version]" naming convention forever)<p>More about Web3 ≠ Web 3.0 for the uninformed / curious: <a href="https://www.nexxworks.com/blog/web3-and-web-3-0-are-not-the-same-thing-heres-why" rel="nofollow">https://www.nexxworks.com/blog/web3-and-web-3-0-are-not-the-...</a>