Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web

https://www.theverge.com/podcast/814552/tim-berners-lee-world-wide-web-ai-future-interview

The inventor of the World Wide Web still believes in the internet as a force for good.

26 points · 11 comments · view on lemmy.world

11 Comments

BertramDitore@lemmy.zip · 22 pts · 317d (8 replies)

Just because he invented the WWW doesn’t mean he’s always right. In fact, he’s already wrong about this. The internet as a whole has gotten noticeably worse over the last few years.

cadekat@pawb.social · 5 pts · 317d

I think a large part of that is enshittification and not necessarily because of AI (though AI certainly doesn't help...)

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ is a decent read.

jimmy90@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 316d

this web? the web i use all day? every day? is destroyed by AI already

damn

vermaterc@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 317d (4 replies)

Has it? If someone offered me access to the Internet from 20 years ago instead of access to today's one, I would certainly refuse.

No GitHub? With all open source software in existence presented in a standardized way? No StackOverflow? With giantic knowledge base presented ad-free? No Fediverse? No vod streaming? No interactive weather apps? Guys, c'mon.

capuccino@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 317d (1 reply)

We are in a social media app created exclusively to avoid the nowadays internet. That's how is going on.

artyom@piefed.social · 0 pts · 316d

I'm not in an app

Nelots@piefed.zip · 8 pts · 317d

They never said it deteriorated so much that we're back to square one. Would you still refuse if you were instead offered the internet of 5 years ago? I don't think I would.

BertramDitore@lemmy.zip · 5 pts · 317d

To me it definitely has gotten much worse, though everyone’s internet experience is radically different. 20 years is too far back, definitely not. But 5 or 10 years? Absolutely.

I don’t have accounts on and completely ignore all social media other than this, and have all my ads blocked everywhere. I don’t use streaming services, so no exposure to ads there either. That all makes my web experience (and I’m sure most other Lemmy folks) arguably way cleaner and content-focused than the vast majority of people who just use the mainstream internet as it is.

And yet it’s pretty difficult to find out basic things, and I think that’s a very recent development. It has always been nontrivial to figure out what’s true and what’s not and sometimes you had to dig a bit. SEO did a great job of poisoning things before LLMs. But now? I feel like 99% of what I find is unconvincing and just bad, and the sheer volume of rehashed bullshit makes it super hard to find something useful, let alone something real and truthful.

iloveDigit@piefed.social · 1 pts · 316d

Not destroyed yet though, and very simple to fix

snipingsnipe@piefed.social · 4 pts · 316d

It already has.

leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 4 pts · 317d

Of course it won't. It already did.

Can't kill it again once it's already dead.