People say that #LLM s are ruining the "free web". I don't see it. My favourite blogs are fine. #Wikipedia is fine. IMDB, Goodreads, the Swedish #ttrpg forum -- all fine. My own blog is still the same skinny bald guy typing on an actual keyboard in a Stockholm suburb. What's being lost?
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Martin Rundkvist (mrundkvist@archaeo.social)'s status on Thursday, 11-Sep-2025 00:00:40 JST
Martin Rundkvist
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Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 11-Sep-2025 00:00:38 JST
Rich Felker
@mrundkvist They may not be lost to you because you already have them bookmarked. They're buried in search results. People who don't already know don't have any basis for distinguishing legitimate information from information-shaped slop. AI-slop fans are attempting to launder their slop onto the sites you trust. Even if they don't directly do that, it can happen through polluted sources. Now anyone contributing to, or vetting contributions to, Wikipedia has to check whether the cited source is legitimate or slop. Etc. etc. etc.
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Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 11-Sep-2025 00:18:09 JST
Rich Felker
@mrundkvist I seem to recall one story where, prior to "AI" slop, SEO spammers had invented a history behind some antique (?) that got picked up in lots of articles and possibly WP. I don't doubt the same will happen again. Being obscure is not a shield. When making information-shaped slop costs almost nothing and can be leveraged in creative ways to manipulate an obscure market nobody else has tapped, it will be done. This stuff is a threat to every domain of knowledge.
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Martin Rundkvist (mrundkvist@archaeo.social)'s status on Thursday, 11-Sep-2025 00:18:10 JST
Martin Rundkvist
@dalias
Yeah, I vet a lot of Wikipedia edits, but so far I haven't caught a reference to a fake source. This of course is much more difficult if someone's writing about a current global celebrity rather than a forgotten Swedish archaeologist.
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