AI Enters the Dark Ages

"AI enters the Dark Ages" two of the top stories on HN today are related to UGC co's (Reddit, Stackoverflow) shuttering their data pipes. Red carpet to give us your data, but pay us if you want it back. Unless you are googlebot ofc. I keep thinking about something @jefrankle said to us on our pod – after Google, the information retrieval research essentially stopped. Why publish anything when you can go make millions at Google and keep it secret? Same thing is happening with UGC companies and data today. It's not like they are suddenly realizing their data is valuable, they've known it all along. They've just switched from a default-open mindset to default-closed, from infinite pie to fixed pie. The next stage of the open web closing behind walled gardens (including, of course, this very website), unless we mass migrate to decentralized protocols. Archive Your Reddit Data Before It's Too Late The Stack Overflow Creative Commons Data Dump has been turned off

The image is a screenshot of a Hacker News post titled “AI enters the Dark Ages,” discussing Reddit and Stack Overflow restricting access to their user-generated data. The joke is that the open web is becoming a set of paywalled walled gardens, while AI companies and Google retain privileged access; the Hacker News headlines reinforce the impending data shutdown. It is used as a reaction to internet centralization, closed platforms, and the loss of freely accessible training data.

• @gentoomemes / 4932 2023-06-14