this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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the splash damage this stuff is causing to the cultural commons is going to be extremely hard to quantify, and undo
I've been pondering it for a little while now and even just spitballing on axes of bitrot/vc-exhaustion/etc, we're going to have all this useless space-filling shit on our collective doorsteps for 5~15y
there appears to be some amount of hope ito things that auto-blacklist sites, etc. but since we don't have real transclusion (and other source-strong models of hosting/serving), provenance problems are going to remain at a nasty prominence for quite a while too
and the fucking shitheads that push this may never be brought to account -_-
It’s already too late for a lot of places, imo. DeviantArt for example is overrun by LLM-generated sludge and no amount of cleanup will undo that; and that site has been a staple of amateur and upcoming artists for decades. The same seems to be happening to Pixiv (which is big in Japan), too. Search engines are also full of generated SEO spam and it’s getting worse, with image search being close to useless unless you do implement some sort of blocklist. Which, for that use case, luckily already exist and aren’t bad (shameless self-plug), but it’s still a manual step you have to take and won’t help my grandma who’s looking for cookie recipes.
The silver lining might be that a growing number of people are willing to try decentralized solutions. I’ve seen more non-techies come over to Lemmy, Mastodon and Misskey as a result, but it’s still sad to see, especially because this will ultimately lead to tons of older content becoming either lost or needles in a shitstack you can’t ever hope to recover.
There are a few art sites that swiftly banned AI art before they got flooded (with Newgrounds and FurAffinity the most well-known).
Alongide the decentralised solutions you mentioned earlier, those sites should also come out okay once the dust settles.
nice. I've got one of the others after I found it a while back, but it looks like yours has a narrower scope?
for places like deviantart... yeah. I don't really know how you reverse that. containment by clearly marking all the profiles/uploaders (after some way it was detected)? community maintained lists which help defend?
it's such a fucking mess. and we have no choice but to deal with it, otherwise it will just make things even worse. that's the thing that really fucks me off about this stuff. all the undue extra work created for many, many people by the inconsiderate actions of far fewer that nonetheless don't care about their actions.
Yeah, that one actually includes mine and covers more bases. When I started my list, I think they only had a uBlock-based blocker, which was too aggressive for me (and does not work properly on mobile), and there were many small uBlacklist lists which I just combined into one.
I think these days most of them are similar anyway.
and on that topic, some actual numbers (posting without reading - that'll happen as soon as my delivery gets here)
something I don't really understand is why wikipedia doesn't have an archiving policy for links. actually I don't really understand why wikipedia isn't effectively building a second wayback machine
it does! Every reference link gets submitted to the IA
Is that a recent change? I feel like I've seen a fair number of dead links on Wikipedia, mainly on older unpopular articles
The archives aren't automatically added to the reference text in the articles. There's an IABot you can feed particular articles to that will add it to reference templates. Also, if the IA archiving fails to work, too bad. (e.g. how it can't even archive Twitter any more.)
yeah it is rather a strange shortcoming/oversight
Because it was done with and for money. And the criminals that are supposed to legislate about this can't wrap their brains about anything other than the money involved with it.