Clive ThompsonDec 18, 2023

Man, the "dead internet" is arriving

@bhawthorne describes his recent experience searching for basic info online -- he looked for the temperature to roast hazelnuts, and got nothing but stochastic-parrot garbage: https://infosec.exchange/@bhawthorne/111601578642616056

He concludes:

"I think it may be time to download an archive copy of the 2022 Wikipedia before we lose all of our reference material. It was nice having all the world’s knowledge at my fingertips for a couple of decades, but that time seems to be past."

Brian Hawthorne (@[email protected])

How bad are the thousands of new stochastically-generated websites? Last night I wanted to roast some hazelnuts, and I could not remember the temperature I used last time. So I searched on DuckDuckGo. Every website that I could find was machine-generated with different temps listed. One site had three separate methods listed that were essentially differently worded versions of the same thing. With different temperatures. So I pulled my copy of Rodale’s Basic Natural Foods Cookbook off the shelf and looked it up there. I think it may be time to download an archive copy of the 2022 Wikipedia before we lose all of our reference material. It was nice having all the world’s knowledge at my fingertips for a couple of decades, but that time seems to be past.

Infosec Exchange
Show threadJay 🆘Dec 18, 2023

@clive I think this is grossly overstated.

The first result for "how to roast hazelnuts" on DDG is Wikihow. The second is culinaryhill.com, whose hazelnut roasting page has been up since (at least) 2019 according to Wayback.

The 8th and 9th results are Martha Stewart and Epicurious, two well-known brands whose pages I would trust.

Three of these pages say 350deg; Martha Stewart says 375.

I'm frustrated by #AI consuming the web, too, but the AI doomsaying on Mastodon is off the charts.

Show threadhalcy​ 
@jsit @clive also, recipe websites have had paragraphs of shallow nonsense on them for years, because of - as far as I understand - search engine as well as Engagement(tm) optimization, and so that the sites can run more ads. That „content“ sounds like it dropped out of an LLM, but the practice predates chatgpt and friends by a fair amount of time ( https://katherineluck.medium.com/why-recipe-blog-posts-are-so-long-2f1725cfbbf )
Dec 18, 2023 at 10:17pmWeb
Show threadAcetophelesDec 18, 2023

@halcy @jsit @clive I know it too well, searching for recipes and you get to a website 99% of it a story about the food in the recipe and the tiny 1% is the recipe

Obviously I am being pedantic and over exaggerating to make a point.