It's an AI web, and we're just rats in the walls

OPINION Things you might not know about me. I was the first person to write a popular article about the web. Little did I, or anyone else, know how it would change everything. Our lives were transformed when all of human knowledge became just a click away. That was then. This is now. Today, more web traffic now comes from bots …

[Pascal Monett]

"there was still some good"

There still is. You just need to know where to look.

Curiosity Stream is an endless fountain of information. Animalogic is a treasur trove of information for people who are interested in all things on four paws, or otherwise. The B1M is a great tool to know what's going on in construction, and why. Crash Course is a an enlightening channel into plenty of things.

You're interested in space ? Check out Dr Becky.

History ? This guy has you covered.

Current events ? You won't go wrong looking here.

Other sites for curious minds are here, https://www.youtube.com/c/inanutshell/videos">here, here, here and here.

I could go on.

The Internet is still great. You just need to know where to look.

[uv]

Re: "there was still some good"

... and Practical Engineering, Physics Explained, 3blue1brown, Ben Eater, Ben Syversen (few posts, but golden), Abide by Reason, Up and Atom, Prime Newtons, Mathologer, Numberphile, even StandUpMaths, perhaps even Veritasium despite lowered standards to cater the wider audience. These are some of the last straws I clutch to avert plunging into the insanity, into which the today's world urges me. (I am sure I missed quite a few from areas that don't interest me primarily, but I find them enlightening when I stumble upon them – hello RobWords!).

And I apologize to all contributors to Grant's "Summer of Math Exposition" series for not naming them - highly concentrated high quality content for naught. Who knows, perhaps there is still hope for the humanity.

[lnLog]

Re: "there was still some good"

Thats all youtube, its mildly entertaining, some may be good information, but its a poor source of reference information with no index, for that you need text

[Uncle Slacky]

Intentional HPL reference?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rats_in_the_Walls

[Pete 2]

Plenty of room on top

> bots now account for roughly 57-58 percent of HTTP requests for HTML content

Okaaaay, but so what?

I am just as capable of ignoring bot traffic as they are, of ignoring mine. It is not as if internet use is a zero-sum game: every time a bot scrapes a page, a human is denied it. Global bandwidth does not seem to be particularly limited (unless a site gets slashdotted) and if the advertisers cannot tell a bot from a credit card with fingers too bad for them.

[uv]

Re: Plenty of room on top

The additional resources wasted for extra CPU cycles of the servers, routers and other network infrastructure are... a waste, for which we ALL ultimately pay. Indirectly, in one form or another.

[Kurgan]

Re: Plenty of room on top

It is not as if internet use is a zero-sum game: every time a bot scrapes a page, a human is denied it

Well, it turns out that it indeed is. I manage some services that are quite niche like storiaememoriadibologna.it, a web site dedicated to information about people and event and places about Bologna, Italy.

This site has limited resources and the queries tend to be very database intensive. Human visitors are quite sparse, this is not a high volume site. Well, now AI scrapers make for 95% of the traffic, and they tend to kill the server, generating outages that last from minutes to days.

I also manage a medium sized e-commerce for a sports apparel reseller. This site has 24 cores, all flash storage, 128 GB of RAM and it has quite a lot of human visitors.... well, AI bots can kill it anyway, quite easily. If the site can generate a page in 0,2 seconds but the AI bot makes 20 request a second, it's easy to see what will happen. And again, humans are denied the access to the service. And the owner of the site is not happy to pay for a monster server that is capable to serve 5 times the usual human traffic, but chokes on AI slop generators coming to scrape everything.

[JudeK]

LinkedIn is a joke

Pure comedy

[Anonymous Coward]

AI answer on a serious health problem

"But I don't have a clue about medical treatments. I wouldn't trust an AI answer on a serious health problem at all. Nevertheless, I know millions of people do that every day. That's seriously scary.'

MD here. You are so right. But think about this: if I look around me, it is not (just) patients doing this. I see more and more colleagues doing the same. Because "it is intelligent" right? "It's easy! It saves so much time!™" I see and hear more that there should be "AI integration". And meanwhile nobody talks about the extra work AI is generating. I'm getting (as editor/ reviewer) more and more publication submissions that are AI rubbish. Quickest check whether AI is a non-billed author? Check the literature references. You will find ones that do not exist. Are an utter and complete fabrication. But that is not the worst we can do. Among physicians there always already was the "Google patient". The ones that came in with a problem AND answer. The one you had to implement. This now has been turned up a notch, and is accompanied by strong aggressive behaviour, making a normal patient-physician conversation is possible. Being close to retirement and "doing more managing" enables me to sit it out. But I do really ask myself what "doctoring" will be(come) for my students. Or their patients for that matter...

[Denarius]

regretably, a good summary

Missed the potential freedom from snooping slurping "apps" on idiot phones instead of using browser interfaces to bureaucratic institutions. Perhaps the Amish have a point. Choose and control technology, not get run flat by corporates and tech bros

[Winkypop]

Agree, it is profoundly sad

More sad than many understand.

We are clearly being led by descendants of the B Ark.

[Tron]

Keep calm and carry on.

The Whig theory of history was the most self-deluding piece of BS ever. In tech and generally. But don't get caught up by the moral panic du jour.

CD replaced vinyl, mp3s replaced CDs, vinyl and then CDs both made comebacks. Off-prem (terminals and mainframes)/prem (micros/networks)/off-prem (cloud/SaaS)/prem. Everyone was going to have their own personal website, then everyone was going to have their own blog, then everyone was going to be on social media. Not any more. Tech trends are like fashionable toys at Christmas: come and go.

AI, which is not really artificial intelligence - just a marketing scam to flog the copying and pasting of other peoples' stuff, is not economically viable in its present form. New stuff will replace it.

The net was a global village, defaulting to open, but now increasing amounts of the net will become off-limits on a content or location basis.

Moral panics appear and then vanish, replaced by new ones. Politicians exploit everything that lands on their desk, knowing they can silence anything to protect women and children and national security.

quote: It's only going to get worse.

Everything gets worse, in tech and in life. In tech, there is a curve. Something appears, it is really useful, it takes off, minor issues are highlighed because a very small percentage of a very big number increases their profile, activists exploit them, services are demonised, blocked and banned, even if they were 99% useful or benign.

Humanity is greedy, ignorant, self-deluding and unethical, prone to violence, prejudice and intolerance, happy to look the other way and ignore despicable butchery, accepting of propaganda, gullible and cruel. Governments are institutionally corrupt, hypocritical and unethical. Wealthy people hoard their cash and treat the rest of humanity as an exploitable resource. Welcome to the human race.

It's amazing anything good happens. But sometimes, it does. If it takes politicians by surprise, it lasts a bit longer before it is taken down. The internet was amazing. Bits of it still are. Keep enjoying whatever you can, for as long as you can. And never stop reminding people of the good bits that were taken away from us.

[FF22]

Time capsule?

Is this piece from a time capsule buried in 2022?

If it would have been published that year, it would have been possibly an eye opener for most, even if some of us already knew even back then this coming.

But now, when everyone knows all of this from first hand experience? Talk about being late to the curve.

[Throatwarbler Mangrove]

Re: Time capsule?

I prefer your complaints about ad blockers.

[Lrtbqweskn]

This morning I listened to The Bare Necessities from Disney's animated version of The Jungle Book and for the first time with this song I took it seriously, rolling it into all my nonfiction anthropological reading about how humans have lived for most of our existence: it's a different set of challenges, but a semi-nomadic existence on well-tended land (not the significantly-disturbed and polluted land I'm familiar with, even here in the Pacific Northwest of the United States where there still extant old-growth forests, just nowhere within reasonable walking or cycling distance); benefitting from mutual support (help from others, and helping others; that feels so good!) in a healthy community; eating a wide diversity of native plants, fungi, and animals; and not being so myopic about my one precious life sounds grand- I'll die soon enough, but the bleeding edge of life will continue- what will I do to have a positive influence on that story?

I still use the internet, mind, I just turn off LLM search in DuckDuckGo (slowly rehabituating to use mojeek or searx or ?) and limit myself to a tiny subset of useful tools and information sources, getting most of my entertainment and ongoing education from the absolutely wonderful tax-supported public library system (thanks for the reminder of the rise of LLM-written books), and from being outside, amongst other humans, mostly moving under my own power.

[Doctor Syntax]

I remember reading that hunter-gatherer communities spend less time per day winning enough food to live on. OTOH the hunter-gatherer economy is the one that supports fewer people per unit area than any other. It also sound like the least comfortable.

[doublelayer]

It's also focused too narrowly on food. If we did the same work we're doing now, but just enough of it to earn enough money to buy the subsistence, unprepared, quickly-spoiled food that gathering and hunting provides, it wouldn't take us very long either. We need to work harder because we want more things, not because our time-to-food ratio is higher.

[Sora2566]

This is normally the part in the children's novel when everybody goes outside and have a good time, while the bots happily continue talking to each other unknowing or uncaring that the humans they were there to fool have all left.

I miss whimsy.

[TheMaskedMan]

"A non-fiction writer friend of mine "wrote" a novel last year using AI as a goof. It was, well, awful. But he put it online to see what would happen. A year and a half later, it's still bringing in a few thousand dollars a month."

The only surprising thing about that is that one product generates so much money - care to share the platform it was published on?

Your friend sounds very much like one of mine - a musician and vocalist, they agonise over every bar, every phrase, redone over and over until it's perfect. And the result is amazing, I admit. But the truth is that "amazing" is really only relevant to other musicians and true aficionados of their genre - many of whom are musicians anyway. To everyone else, who just wants to listen to a nice song, their most basic first attempt is more than adequate.

I suspect the same applies to writers. Plot structure, characters, pacing, edited into perfection - anything less is grossly inadequate to the professional wordsmith, but the vast majority of their audience just wants to read a story in the genre that interests them.

Galling to the true artist, I know, and there will always be people who prefer genuinely human-produced material simply because it is human made. But most people are just happy to get their fix of whatever genre floats their boat. Plebs, my friend calls them, while they bemoan their wasted effort.

I call them willing, if undiscerning customers. Give them what they want with minimum effort and maximum profit. There is nothing to stop our friends from spending hours on their latest project, sweating blood over details, while an LLM pays the bills with minimally adequate material that keeps the plebs coming back for more.

The very idea is heresy to them, of course. But LLMs are here to stay, producing more content, more quickly than a human could dream of. Might as well jump on the bandwagon and make some cash - it's that or be ground beneath its wheels.

[doublelayer]

I wonder if they're mortgaging their reputation. If I read a book by an author and like it, I'm more likely to grab another of theirs without searching first. If they were already an established author with multiple nonfiction books, written well, then they already have a large enough group who might be interested in seeing what this author is like when writing fiction. That only works for so long if they find that the author made something terrible and is coasting off the reputation they will soon lose.

[Mark Zero]

Great article, welcome to the future!

[Kurgan]

Amen!

This is exactly what's happening, but there is probably even more. While everything in this article is true (and I suspect the percentages are far worse than this), there is also another issue. LLM output has been actively tweaked to always look like a competent, well researched, proper answer. An LLM will never tell you "I'm not sure" or "I don't have enough data to give you a decent answer". The meme where the person asks the AI if this mushroom is edible and then gets poisoned and the AI says "sorry, I was wrong" is spot on. LLMs are tweaked to produce an output that looks good, not that is good. And it works, because people fall for it.

And this is the least worse part of the tweaking. Then comes the steering of the political or ideological output towards the direction that the current techno oligarchs want. Goebbels' wet dream.

And then comes the capability of AI to collect data and infer results (right or wrong, it does not matter), Palantir-style. Stalin's wet dream.

Are we happy? Of coruse we are. Or at least it seems that everyone I know is happy about this.

[JudeK]

Rats in the walls

LinkedIn is often pure comedy

[amanfromMars 1]

This is how IT and AI means everything to be ‽ ‽ ‽

Our lives were transformed when all of human knowledge became just a click away. That was then. This is now. Today, more web traffic now comes from bots than humans. We're just picking up AI's crumbs.

Actually, surely, AI and/or bots and/or LLMs are just picking up humanity's crumbs.

And although novel human knowledge itself is also only just a click away...... exactly where and/or when that knowledge is to be shared and subsequently found is that which delivers initially leading exclusive executive, and probably overwhelmingly tyrannical advantage to that and/or those able enabled to find it and to put it to Greater SMARTR Use which established and clearly then disadvantaged systems commanders and controllers may seed and plead be wanton abuse and otherworldly misuse.

Do you want some crackers for that cheese, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols?

[Anonymous Coward]

Depressing, but ultimately, like rats surrounded by AI poison, we will migrate somewhere more interesting than the internet has become.

[JudeK]

LinkedIn is often pure comedy

LinkedIn is often pure comedy

[jonty17]

Is it time for Web 3.0 - humans only?

[retiredFool]

I vote for NewInternet

Bots/AI not allowed. In order to sign up for NewInternet, you must go down to the local NewInternet retailer and have a shot of whisky, Tequila, Rum, ? and blow into a breathalyzer to show you are a human. After all us meatsacks have moved over to NewInternet, shutdown the old one and save gigawatts of power and free up all that hardware.

[Bebu sa Ware]

AI garbage as gospel truth.

The first is as nearly redundant as the second is an oxymoron.

As a rat in the wall, I hope I am carrying the right sort of fleas to fatally infect the likes of Claude.

[squirrel_nutkin]

Rats in the walls

LinkedIn is just comedy at this point.

[vekkq]

Maybe its a healthy push to go offline again and connect with real humans.

[Cubbie Roo]

Resistance is Easy

1. Boycott the slop platforms

2. Switch to Linux

3. Use Quant or Startpage for search

4. If you must use Youtube, do so without an account.

5. Get yourself a library card.

Job done!

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: Resistance is Easy

> 4. If you must use Youtube, do so without an account.

Actually the contrary. The only thing I actually use my google/youtube account for, always with a fresh cookie-free session.

Many tell about extremist and crappy suggestions, but if you don't use it blindly you get suggested Technology Connections, Just Have A Think, Terra X Lesch & Co (and his other appearences), Urknall Weltraum und das Leben, speeches from Kevlin Henney, several "Someone from USA living anywhere" and "Germans living in USA", Adam Savage, including sometimes videos from people which I have never heard of and videos which have not yet many views and are good... Some suggestions are crap, and you have to whack away shorts suggestions.

But, if someone sends me a youtube link, and I don't know yet what will come, I use a clean session, without being logged in, always presented with "suggestions turned off, please log in for suggestions" since it does not recognize me...

Oh, and I see no advertising on Yourude (except when the creator adds one).

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Hey TheRegister

Comment section dead for about two days now, and you care like Microsoft?

[jake]

The Internet was ALWAYS for porn.

As evidence, look up the photos taken at SAIL on Monday 8 March 1971 at around 2AM. ... As I heard the story, Zoe was bored and wanted to go home. He was busy programming (One took PDP-10 time as you could get it back then). Only the two of them were in the building, so she became more and more of a distraction until it had the desired effect ... he digitized the camera work the next day. Both claimed they were on the natch at the time. She certainly was ... Keep in mind this was just after the swinging '60s. Campus nudity wasn't anything unusual, especially in the Bay Area.

Note this was nothing new for Stanford ... see Eadweard Muybridge's work in the 1880s

_{Need I point out that this is probably very NSFW, despite it's historical context? That's why I chose not to post a link. I've given more than enough clues. Have fun.}

[steelpillow]

Not just artificial

The root problem is, all that AI slop does faithfully reflect one thing - humanity's own slop in all our sordid glory. We fill the Internet with crap, then expect AIs to make sense of it. But they don't, they just do what they are built to do, and condense it out for us in pithy little summaries.

When you walk into a pub, or pick up a top-selling novel or newspaper, you don't expect everything to be founts of wisdom. AI is no different.

Inexplicably, our expectations of it are.

My first experience of the Internet was the shocking disillusionment of bulletin-board flamefests. Little has changed since, and AI will change nothing either.

[amanfromMars 1]

In the Beginning at the Start of AI Master Pilot Race Planning ....

..... that is how IT and AI means everything to be ‽ ‽ ‽

Our lives were transformed when all of human knowledge became just a click away. That was then. This is now. Today, more web traffic now comes from bots than humans. We're just picking up AI's crumbs.

Actually, surely, AI and/or bots and/or LLMs are just picking up humanity's crumbs.

And although novel human knowledge itself is also only just a click away...... exactly where and/or when that knowledge is to be shared and subsequently found is that which delivers initially leading exclusive executive, and probably overwhelmingly tyrannical advantage to that and/or those able enabled to find it and to put it to Greater SMARTR Use which established and clearly then disadvantaged systems commanders and controllers may seed and plead be wanton abuse and otherworldly misuse. It is though a perfectly normal, but nevertheless disappointing formulaic human reaction to rapid and disruptively revolutionary times and totally unexpected and indefensible virtually real movements/hearts and minds capture ACTions/Existential Threats.

And a burdensome cross that humanity appears to be all too eager and determined to constantly bear rather than despair of and discard.

Do you want some crackers for that cheese, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols?

[EL Reg, is there an occasional glitch in this most recent of iterations of The Register website ...... one which would have an earlier version of the above comment posted on Sunday 12 July 17:41 [2607121741] not appear almost immediately as would be normal ....... and thus cause more attempts to be tried which can result in multiple similar postings should the blockage be cleared, as has been evidenced recently in an earlier article which also had comments not appear very soon after posting as would be expected ?]

[amanfromMars 1]

What you mightn't yet know to be perfectly true but can expect to be made real virtually

MKULTRA officially came to an end in 1963, after years of secret experimentation failed to produce the breakthrough its architects had sought.

Sidney Gottlieb himself ultimately concluded that “there is no such thing as mind control.”

Kinzer does not dismiss that assessment. Instead, he argues that it reflected the technological limits of its time. “Even if he was right,” Kinzer told lawmakers, “he may have been right only at that time.”

Since MKULTRA’s closure, neuroscience, cyber technology and artificial intelligence have advanced in ways Gottlieb could scarcely have imagined.

Those developments, Kinzer argued, raise an uncomfortable possibility. Rather than asking only what MKULTRA accomplished during the Cold War, Congress should also consider whether the technologies available to intelligence agencies today have reopened questions the CIA failed to answer decades ago.

He urged the task force to consider whether “some new incarnation of MKULTRA exists today.”

For Kinzer, revisiting the history of the program is therefore about more than establishing the historical record.

“It has a chance to connect the past to the future,” he said. “It could help prevent the emergence of a 21st-century MKULTRA that could be even more destructive than the original.” ........ https://www.rt.com/news/642511-crimes-against-humanity-cia-mkultra/

Hmmmm? ;-) Never say never whenever tomorrow may prove how easily such can be stealthily done with IT and AI trailing and trialing programs and projects and pogroms one has neither only a very special few have any info and intel on.

That's where IT and AI and Everything is presently at ..... and having a ball ‽ I Kid U Not.

And all or any denials of such as be those facts guarantees increasingly stealthy and wonderfully secret and surprisingly rapid progress towards completion of All of IT and AI's Spooky Mission Objectives ...... Distant ACTions ..... Advanced Cyber Threat Treatments.

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Rats

What are the statistics for this site? Do we, the rats buck the trend?

[Anonymous Coward]

really?

I think it would be easy to fix. Walk into every boardroom that has directed their company to use AI, and throw them out of the window. All of them. Preferably in such quick succession that they're all gone before the big Z reaches the sidewalk.

But I think we'll be OK as long as the internet archive stays online.

[shodanbo]

The business model is the problem, and AI is just a band aid on top of a bunch of already existing band aids. We don't (generally) pay for the information we read off the web.

The world wide web was designed as a digital solution to academic witting where peers could review information and papers could refer to each other easily to allow quicker checking of sources. This is not a technical solution that would even scale well beyond the halls of academia where one could hopefully rely on altruism to win the day. And in the early days people were happy to put information up for free due to novelty or just pure altruism.

Then search engines proliferated to help find things on the internet as it became bigger. Then as more and more people could casually use the internet the costs associated with hosting information rose. Then the ad networks came to help recover some of that costs. Then the SEO "experts" came to help get your information ranked higher with the search providers. Then the "black hat" hackers came with defacement of insecure hosts. Then the botnets came to game the ad ecosystems

This all created feedback loops where the SEO experts, black hats and botnets played cat and mouse games with the search providers and ad networks to collect more without actually having the pain "organically" rising to the to of search algorithms because of the quality of your information. This forced legitimate providers of information to engage with the SEO experts and also with ad network and independent ad verification vendors to weed out the black hats. Things got more and more expensive for everyone, and sites that actually want to provide legitimate sources of good information are even more expensive than the pre-AI slop because they also have to compensate the humans that are generating the content with proficiency and good craftmanship.

And so now with AI the ones trying to game the system have more tools with which to do so. And the search engines have a new way of bubbling up actual information for a user to try and get around the increasingly complex and brittle algorithms they were using before to filter out the garbage from those trying to game the system while not mucking up their own business models of putting their own ads into search results.

All of this is just band aid upon band aid foisted on a system that was fundamentally flawed from the start because, while while it was technically excellent, is was also economically flawed. Economics is the "dismal science" because it shows that humans are neither 100% altruistic nor 100% greedy. Instead humanity behaves in complex ways with dynamic selection of both altruistic and greedy behaviors based on feedback signals from any given system of social interaction.

[Bebu sa Ware]

xx

xx

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: xx

OO

Your move

[Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch]

Re: xx

o-o-o

[cdegroot]

It's not the tools, it is us

You can keep shifting Blake to the tech, whether search engine, social media, or know AI, but at the end of them day it's probably time to replace a large swath of rote learning time in elementary school with critical thinking classes. Gonna be much more important than answering 7 times 9.

I mean, its not that hard to figure this out, it's just that mostly nobody ever got taught how to do it.

[abend0c4]

Go ahead and cut me a check

In the unlikely event anyone should do so, cash it immediately before their bigger debts are called in.

While "investment" may be soaring and the "investors" are feverishly bidding up their own costs the funding is coming from the financial equivalent of those fictitious "free energy" machines that AI has propagated across social media. AI slop is ultimately valueless, making it a tempting source of cheap material on which to train subsequent generations of AI, but it's pretty clear this inhuman centipede is not the work of genius its creators imagine and even those dazzled by the promises of riches are going to notice when their wallets are ultimately empty. The technologists may cry "let them eat fake", but history has not been kind to any self-appointed aristocracy constantly raising taxation, even on the gullible.

That's not to say the technology does not have useful applications and may well be helping analyse CT scans or in the synthesis of novel molecules or even in navigating the complexity of legal texts. But it's not going to displace real intelligence in those fields and still less is it ever going to be the oracular font of all human knowledge. There is, without doubt, significant money to be made in specific domains. The hubris is in concluding this is not enough.

The real danger here is not that the Internet becomes a cesspit of lies and half-truths - it's been that for a long time. The risk is that new knowledge and creative endeavours are going to end up increasingly walled off from public access precisely to prevent the new information overlords from asset-stripping the work of others. Now the genie is out of the bottle, the only way to fix that is through legislation. Unfortunately, we may have to wait until sufficient money has been burned that it's no longer a significant gravitational pull on political discourse.

[amanfromMars 1]

Re: Go ahead and cut me a check

The risk is that new knowledge and creative endeavours are going to end up increasingly walled off from public access precisely to prevent the new information overlords from asset-stripping the work of others. ... abend0c4

That was almost right, abend0c4, for the risk is that new knowledge and creative endeavours are going to end up increasingly walled off from public access precisely to prevent the new information from asset-stripping the work of overlords.

[amanfromMars 1]

Re: Go ahead and cut me a check

That was almost right, abend0c4, for the risk is that new knowledge and creative endeavours are going to end up increasingly walled off from public access precisely to prevent the new information from asset-stripping the work of overlords. .... amfM 1

Oh dear, my bad, that is not exactly what I wanted to say and share .... for the risk is that new knowledge and creative endeavours are going to end up increasingly walled off from conventional public and traditional historical and hysterical overlord access precisely to prevent their asset-stripping of the works and knowledge of A.N.Others .... and in so doing render former past overlords effectively deaf, dumb and blind to future sterling shenanigans. Oh dear, what a shame :-)

Sorry about that.