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The Internet Is About to Get Much Worse (www.nytimes.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5400607

This is a classic case of tragedy of the commons, where a common resource is harmed by the profit interests of individuals. The traditional example of this is a public field that cattle can graze upon. Without any limits, individual cattle owners have an incentive to overgraze the land, destroying its value to everybody.

We have commons on the internet, too. Despite all of its toxic corners, it is still full of vibrant portions that serve the public good — places like Wikipedia and Reddit forums, where volunteers often share knowledge in good faith and work hard to keep bad actors at bay.

But these commons are now being overgrazed by rapacious tech companies that seek to feed all of the human wisdom, expertise, humor, anecdotes and advice they find in these places into their for-profit A.I. systems.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

While the analogy is not perfect, you can think that the harm is getting lost in the noise. If the "overgrazing" of content on the internet (content which has the purpose of being read/listened/etc. Often for a job) causes a huge amount of other content based on it (AI-generated), then the original is damaged by being lost in the noise.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

AI-generated content is coming regardless, whether those open sources get "grazed" or not.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yes, bit the qualitative difference of providing direct competition to the "grazed" material exists. There is a difference between AI generated audiobooks and AI generated audiobooks with the voice of X, for X. Once AI can perfectly reproduce X's voice, his/her value as a voice actor is 0, hence the "overgrazing". Is not the same thing compared to simply being able to provide audiobooks with any other voice.