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Tom Walker (tomw@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 05-Feb-2023 15:46:32 JST Tom Walker

People worry a lot about losing knowledge — about "burned-down libraries".
Comparatively few people seem to worry about what happens if you take a billion books full of auto-generated, often-untrue junk text and *add* them all to the library.
In theory, nothing is lost. In reality, everything is lost, because nothing useful can now be found.
In conversation Sunday, 05-Feb-2023 15:46:32 JST from mastodon.social permalink
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  Howard Chu @ Symas (hyc@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 16-Aug-2023 22:49:57 JST Howard Chu @ Symas
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  @tomw
  A Colombian judge used chatGPT in a ruling.
  So chatGPT makes up answers out of thin air, those answers become part of public record, search engines index them, then you're done: no longer able to search for factual answers to questions.
  https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/03/colombia-judge-chatgpt-ruling
  In conversation Wednesday, 16-Aug-2023 22:49:57 JST permalink
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  Howard Chu @ Symas (hyc@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 16-Aug-2023 22:49:57 JST Howard Chu @ Symas
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  And there we go - google search has torpedoed itself https://mastodon.social/@rodhilton/110894818243613681
  In conversation Wednesday, 16-Aug-2023 22:49:57 JST permalink
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    Rod Hilton (@rodhilton@mastodon.social)
    
    from Rod Hilton
    
    Attached: 2 images Right now if you search for "country in Africa that starts with the letter K": - DuckDuckGo will link to an alphabetical list of countries in Africa which includes Kenya. - Google, as the first hit, links to a ChatGPT transcript where it claims that there are none, and summarizes to say the same. This is because ChatGPT at some point ingested this popular joke: "There are no countries in Africa that start with K." "What about Kenya?" "Kenya suck deez nuts?" Google Search is over.
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  Christian Hujer (christianhujer@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 05-Feb-2024 11:42:08 JST Christian Hujer
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  @tomw I don't know if this makes you feel better or worse: I do worry about that. I am watching in horror as the quality of Google search results is in constant decline, favoring ad-ridden low quality secondary sources over high-quality primary sources, and a glorified ChatGPT tells blatant lies about almost anything with utmost confidence.
  
  In conversation Monday, 05-Feb-2024 11:42:08 JST permalink
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  Howard Chu @ Symas (hyc@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Jan-2025 14:54:53 JST Howard Chu @ Symas
  in reply to
  
  who could possibly have seen this coming - oh right...
  https://mastodon.social/@carrideen@c18.masto.host/113907291381069419
  
  In conversation about a year ago permalink
  
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  Howard Chu @ Symas (hyc@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 08-Sep-2025 00:48:35 JST Howard Chu @ Symas
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  who could possibly have seen this coming...
  https://geeknews.chat/@theregister/115162888476951985
  In conversation about 7 months ago permalink
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    The Register (@theregister@geeknews.chat)
    
    from The Register
    
    Snake eating tail: Google’s AI Overviews cites web pages written by AI, study says Researchers also found that more than half of citations didn’t rank in top 100 for term Welcome to the age of ouroboros. Google’s AI Overviews (AIOs), which now often appear at the top of organic search results, are drawing around 10 percent of their sources from documents written by ... other AIs, acc… #theregister #IT https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2025/09/07/googles_ai_cites_written_by_ai/
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  Howard Chu @ Symas (hyc@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 17-Oct-2025 19:54:57 JST Howard Chu @ Symas
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  More people are having the same realization: the use of AI is destroying our ability to retrieve actual information. https://mastodon.social/@richpuchalsky/115332726924394162
  In conversation about 6 months ago permalink
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    Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝ (@richpuchalsky@mastodon.social)
    
    from Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝
    
    Periodic self-repetition: As a data librarian I can say that "AI" is not a matter of personal preference -- whether you like it or not, or whether you have found some use that you think is useful. It actively destroys organized knowledge, and therefore it actively destroys civilization. Whenever someone looks for a human written text and can't find it because statistical near variants have been created and indexed, whenever "AI" "hallucinates" a reference, knowledge has been destroyed.
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  Howard Chu @ Symas (hyc@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 17-Oct-2025 19:54:57 JST Howard Chu @ Symas
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  More on AI's destruction of knowledge https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/115387473218466349
  In conversation about 6 months ago permalink
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    nixCraft 🐧 (@nixCraft@mastodon.social)
    
    from nixCraft 🐧
    
    Attached: 1 image the irony of this is that Perplexity is posting this one 🤣
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  Howard Chu @ Symas (hyc@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Apr-2026 06:26:21 JST Howard Chu @ Symas
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  Destruction of knowledge - this was always the inevitable end of the AI road https://scholar.social/@Iris/115020211902735145
  In conversation about 2 days ago permalink
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    Iris van Rooij 💭 (@Iris@scholar.social)
    
    from Iris van Rooij 💭
    
    "I thought, Huh?! This is definitely not how we — cognitive scientists — use that term. Then I saw the last sentence, “AI-generated definition”, and I realised what went wrong. This was AI slop. Not only that. It was AI slop on ScienceDirect, a “premier platform for scientific, health and technical literature” (...)" https://irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2025/08/12/ai-slop-and-the-destruction-of-knowledge/
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