RE: https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/116604745957981805
"links will become an afterthought" is not even coded language for "the rest of the internet is merely training data and we will own the entire means of accessing information online"
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@jonny We're another step closer to monopoly platforms like Google and Meta providing what look like links, but they aren't static resources, they're entirely synthetic pages and even entire sites created on-the-fly using all the surveillance data they have on you to hyper-personalize an engagement machine.
"The web" for most people will be an illusion, an LLM-generated maze of mirrors designed to goose some PM's quarterly KPIs.
@jonny This also "obsoletes" the whole bases of scholarly discourse, i.e. citation of original sources. Cannot stand.
@joeblowenarbol
Indeed, "other people" as a whole are legacy
@jonny When you break your end of the bargain, people tend to take their business elsewhere.
Google used to get information for free, because it provided a return for that. But it no longer does, so the incentive to provide it information for free is also gone.
People haven’t left yet, but they will. On to new forms of the internet that maybe haven’t been built yet. But there’s no point staying to feed a robot factory that doesn’t give you anything back and kills the planet.
@gimulnautti
One would hope. The strategy is daunting beyond just the search engine results page and the AI products - they do own the browser, the web standards process, the operating system used on 70% of phones, and they along with the rest of tech are lobbying hard for legislation that makes it difficult if not illegal to host a web service while not oligarch. The smooth path for them does hinge on normalization and acceptance of the category of product, but if that fails they of course have contingency plans across the rest of the stack.
I'm not saying we should do nothing, definitely the opposite, counterbuild harder. And our senior colleagues who are increasingly enamored with the God Obelisk have to pick a side - will they cheer on corporate ownership of reality, or use their accumulated expertise and resources to help us dig out of this fucking trap.
as Dr. Bender says upthread, the Rethinking Search paper just says this explicitly, also AMP, etc. I only mildly edited their figure here
The shift to "search journeys" is just another way of referring to "whole life immersive surveillance" where the intention is to slowly train you to expect more and more of your personal information to be visibly injected into search results as a surface for "personalization" and eventually move towards "zero-query search" where advertisements-i-mean-helpful-information are proactively volunteered to you.
this language appears in full form as early as 2018 and was chilling even then:
The zero-query search paradigm can be expressed with the slogan “the query is the user.” In practice, the context of the user is used to infer information needs. (Entity Oriented Search)
![The most obvious power grab from pushing KG-LLMs in place of search is illustrated neatly by a handful of Google researchers in a figure from their “Rethinking Search” paper [184]
[Recreation of Figure 1 from [184] with additional annotation (colored boxes, labels, and question marks). The left (a) “Retrieve-then-rank” model is the traditional search engine paradigm: A query causes a retrieval service to access pages within a reverse index, rank them, and serve them as results. The proposed (b) “Unified retrieve-and-rank” model on the right directly returns results generated by a model. Notably missing in (b) is the existence of the rest of the internet.]
That gigantic sucking sound is KG-LLM powered search enclosing the act of accessing information entirely within the search platform. It gives echoes of AMP, Apple News, and Facebook Instant Articles [212, 213], where platforms preferentially serve their own versions of pages (that also happen to contain their own telemetry embedded) combined with the strategy of moving ever more web content into the search results page through eg. factboxes and answer boxes91.](https://media.neuromatch.social/media_attachments/files/116/605/361/511/223/029/original/b294be92df38c178.png)
Surveillance Graphs
Vulgarity and Cloud Orthodoxy in Linked Data Infrastructures - A critical history of the semantic web and linked data, grappling with the next generation of surveillance capitalism, where grand corporate knowledge graphs devour the planet and sell it back to us as a glassy-eyed LLM personal assistants, will we remain stuck in the ideology of the cloud, or can we have better dreams?
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jonny (nonvenomous)
Who gives a single shit how good the "AI" can code when the purpose of "AI" is and always has been enclosure of all information in an ad-driven surveillance platform. If you love LLMs, this is the future you, yes you, are actively helping create.
@jonny I know the average person doesn't care that much, but for those of us that do, I feel like the boosters are severely underestimating the extent to which "were you a 'get on board or get left behind' guy in 2023-2027" is going to be a moral litmus test for decades to come
@jonny No one could have seen this coming, am I right!?
It has just been developing over the...*check notes* last ~15 years!
@janriemer
Who knows where the good place to draw the line is. Was it tensor2tensor, tensorflow, and keras in 2015-2017? Was it social media and the news feed in 2009-11? Was it capturing the semantic web project and surrounding web standards, The last offramp from a search-driven web in the mid 2000s? DNS? DARPANET?
People get to be brand new to the fuckery as long as they don't get on board with it, there's plenty of room aboard the fuck the tech oligarchs ship.
@jonny i rather see the same problem used and used over again which is called capitalisme.
any invention is at the end used for economic gain, capitalisme and power.
LLM is not the problem, what "we" do with, mostly for own profit and control is the problem.
@chisop
Except that its entire design, technological lineage, and deployment is inextricably bound to its nature as a product developed for this purpose. As far as you can reach in the tech stack and prior art that leads to LLMs you will find information companies whose business model is informational enclosure dumping oceans of money into research on how to better enclose information.
Not every tool is a hammer, there are in fact tools to which analogies that apply to one category of tool do not apply. It's not some magical bush out there in the woods that we would have inevitably come across. It's not a byproduct of physical law. It was made for profit and control. You can imagine any number of different directions that information automation could have gone if not designed as a product given this particular web platform landscape (that was itself designed and built, rather than natural). I don't know, spend even one billion dollars on a p2p information system where people can better co-curate information and social spaces so it can be found, conversationally, on demand, through the magic of other people. Spend even one billion dollars on foundational coding tools and frameworks that avoid the need for generating boilerplate altogether. The idea that technologies are morally neutral and it is only their use gives them moral valence is only coherent if ignoring their history, and maybe more importantly, the many alternate futures their existence foreclosed.
@jonny It is very difficult to think outside the capitalist system. If our economic model were structured differently, would we have developed AI?
Or maybe more interesting question, how would we use it and how would it be designed?
Besides this, at the moment AI is mainly open for everybody, isn't that a bit controversial on the capitalist system?
Is it really that straightforward?
Research and design at universities—even though many also depend partly or largely on industrial "incentives", i.e., personal gain—are they also part of this capitalist model?
Additionally, what is the responsibility of employees, foremen, department heads, and so on in this AI chain of support and availability...
@chisop @jonny I disagree with your statement that "at the moment AI is mainly open for everybody".
At the moment, the dealers are getting the future addicts hooked via free product, preparatory to ratcheting up the cost once they can't function without it.
Given the LLM companies' histories, I'm guessing they won't stop with "what the market will bear" in their pricing models and will instead reach for "if we turn the screws a little more, new revenue sources will magically appear".
That seems very much like what capitalism evolves into if not adequately regulated (by legal or social means): monopoly and captured market tactics.
There IS NO LLM USE not associated with the project to seize all information as a product. That is the WHOLE gamble being made that is driving all those billions into getting as many people as possible dependent on the most preposterously expensive and inefficient model of computing ever devised. It is only worth it if the upside is owning the whole economy.
Every step you take towards building LLMs into your daily habits and work ratchets the spring tighter on the mousetrap until, surprise! It clamps shut while your whole ass is wrapped around the cheese. Don't make me laugh with local models nonsense, if you think that those don't get deprecated the moment they pose the slightest whiff of a threat to the profit model - meta isn't releasing weights to be nice, it's to capture labor and control the tooling space. Don't be a sucker.
@jonny I've noticed that some version of "local models would be the future of programming even if they stopped releasing new ones today" seems to a common talking point now. I'd really like to see these people try to code using an LLM that's never seen any libraries, frameworks or APIs newer than about the year 2010
Thanks - it's so obvious that every priority of the rich is to disintermediate us all from any direct access to trustworthy evidence, information and knowledge and along the way to erode the possibility of interpersonal communication and democratic progress. LLMs are the front line.
@jonny I think you have very valid points there, but I got very distracted from them by the pictures in my mind of someone trying to snatch a piece of cheese with their ass. And then getting it clamped.
@jonny Meta is not releasing weights any more... the last "good" models they released were a couple of years ago. I don't understand the comment about controlling the tooling space, could you elaborate?
@jonny I don't think I follow what you're saying about local models. Isn't the horse kind of well out of the barn at this point re: local models? It's not like some entity can take them away, and the best open models don't even come from Meta etc.
Don't reach for the easy dismissals - sure there are other tools in the category that aren't chatbots, there are assistive applications that are genuinely miraculous, and the rest. But the purpose of these technologies and their reality as products and mountains of capital doesn't have a nuanced "both sides" placation at the bottom of a thinkpiece: they are designed and built to own informational reality.
@jonny i've lost a lot of faith in humanity due to this and also all the other incidents that happend like edward snowden, epstin, cumex and all other stuff i don't want to get into detail. But this showed me the public is not interessted in what happens to them and who controlls their lifes and yet i have no clue how to tackle this problem besides better education. But this is also rigged :/. Cyberpunk here we come
@jonny
What does this phrase, "links will become an afterthought," mean?
Are the thoughts I have previously thought afterthoughts?
