That would make an excellent new shower thought! I suppose some of that would be due to obsolescence, and some from the physical degradation of digital media. We seriously need to get back into the stone tablet game or there will be nothing left to mark our civilization in a millennium than a whole bunch of porcelain toilets scattered around in the rubble.

It's more like the librarian has taken it upon themself (for some reason) to write a book that is the mathematical average of every other book in the library. Then when any patron comes looking for a specific book, the librarian just hands them this slag instead hoping they won't notice the difference.

Honestly, best description of LLMs for search I’ve seen so far.

Ah, so you're saying it's more of an enshitification thing that killed the search engines? I can believe that to an extent.

But as the amount of content on the Internet has increased, it's also become more difficult to narrow the queries to get what you're really looking for. The main thing for me with AI is it allows you to refine the search without discarding the context of what you have already tried.

If the content were more organized to begin with, though, I suspect you could drill a bit deeper into the knowledge tree and then apply your conventional (non-AI) search over a more relevant branch?

Then when they needed an excuse to justify ludicrous spending on AI, they shoehorned AI into web search where it is very much the wrong tool for the job if you want accurate, high relevance results.

AI is very much the right tool for sorting through the high volume of garbage search results looking for nuggets of relevance. Google built it into search because if they didn't, they would be cut out of search other than as an MCP provider. I'm sure they'd rather not spend compute running an AI summary of every single query, but they would be out of business the moment someone else provided that service.

Now is it perfect? Of course not. Verify from sources, but you get to those relevant sources faster and easier with AI doing the sifting because Google search has grown so fucking worthless.

AI isn't better than Google was, but it's better than Google is.

Google is not at fault for search becoming so terrible. Everyone who engaged in SEO is. The internet would have sloppified much sooner if Google and other search engines had not relentlessly pushed back against SEO and continuously modified their algorithms. Lots of people definitely underestimate the extreme negative impact of SEO, and the lengths that search engine operators have to go to to have their service be at least somewhat useful. As soon as you have a search algorithm, people will attempt to manipulate it.

It's gotta be partly to do with content though, right? Are there any search engines that effectively sort through the slop?

yep

Search engines were, at one point, pretty fuckin good at finding what you needed, and would put it at the top of the first page of results

but then some companies coughgooglecough realized that users would be okay going to page 2 or 3 for their results, so they intentionally undid a decade+ of search engine improvements, and started forcefully putting relevant shit 2-3-4 pages in, so they could harvest more clicks and shove more ads in your face.

and thus enshitification began.

It seems like this problem stands to get worse too, as researchers see a need to protect their work before an LLM comes along and makes the big discovery on their backs.

The universe/nature does always tend to higher entropy, yes - that's the 2nd law of thermodynamics. "In an isolated system, entropy can only increase".

I posit that the "purpose" of life is to fight back against this inevitable increase - every alive thing is a self-sustaining island of low entropy after all - by processing and creating more low entropy states - "information" in a broad sense.

You are also right in the resilience aspect - by definition, a low-entropy system has a vast number of ways to increase its entropy and "decay", while self-improvement is so statistically unlikely to be virtually impossible.

Unless the library gets bought by some oil company and they force the librarian to add a lot of pro-oil books.

Not anyone can come to the library, put books around, and game/pay the book finding process to make sure their books come first.

Well, as I recall, things weren't quite idyllic in the conventional library scene either. People were always moving books around, making librarians furious. Every field trip to the library always began with that lecture. "For the love of all that is holy, do not put books back on the shelf. Let us librarians take care of that." And once I got to universities with their reference collections, I found that people were purposefully hiding texts in other sections so that they would have exclusive access when they returned. Fun stuff.

Yes, the internet is decentralised in every way, not only its infrastructure. Even unorganised.

What's intriguing to me about the fediverse is it's trying to layer some order over a decentralized physical infrastructure. I think that's so cool and really want this sort of idea to work!

Not all of humanity uses the DD system.

Yeah that's fair. I think even my university was using a different system, and of course there's a lot more out there than book knowledge.

Indexing the internet is a big job. We had data centers even before A-not-I. And people were complaining about how much energy they use. Had we known then how much worse this is going to get very soon….

Artificial Unintelligence does not do that job better btw. It doesn’t do the indexing at all. It just wastes energy. And, as another commenter pointed out, it actively makes the situation you describe worse.

I may not be quite as cynical about AI in its present state, as I feel it has helped me find solutions that had been evading me. I do think it is massively overhyped, however, and am concerned about the directions it's heading. Concerned a lot, actually.

There are different theories around model collapse, so there might be a way to avoid it even if most of your training data is AI generated. The jury is still out though

The thing is, AI companies are terrified of model collapse because if they train AI systems on AI output, the model becomes useless.

That's actually not a fact, more of a possibility. As far as am I aware, reinforcement learning from AI feedback (RLAIF) is currently employed by some of the most capable frontier AI companies; Anthropic openly admits to it, and their models are arguably the best.

A term that is often thrown around nowadays is recursive self-improvement (RSI), and it seems that there are at this time more knowledgeable proponents of RSI for intelligence development than opponents who raise the risk of model collapse.

But yes, training on today's sloppified public internet would probably only have downsides.

That is just so depressing. It's eating its own garbage to create more content. Like some image that's been run through multiple passes of lossy compression with different algorithms.