Post #2545754

2025-10-07 11:49 UTC

Periodic self-repetition: As a data librarian I can say that &quot;AI&quot; is not a matter of personal preference -- whether you like it or not, or whether you have found some use that you think is useful. It actively destroys organized knowledge, and therefore it actively destroys civilization. Whenever someone looks for a human written text and can&#39;t find it because statistical near variants have been created and indexed, whenever &quot;AI&quot; &quot;hallucinates&quot; a reference, knowledge has been destroyed.

Replies (10)

@urlyman@mastodon.social 2025-10-07 14:39

@richpuchalsky@mastodon.social bookmarked 🫡 @julesbl@mastodon.me.uk

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@Steve@social.coop 2025-10-07 14:50

@richpuchalsky@mastodon.social I think about this more and more. On the one hand, we have vastly more information now than has ever existed before. On the other hand, it's increasingly corrupted, and therefore useless. History may end up being vague on just what happened over the last 30 or 40 years.

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@kawentzmann@fairmove.net 2025-10-08 10:12

@richpuchalsky@mastodon.social Shouldn‘t this bring about a trend towards vintage, or pre 2022, books?

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@bebadefabo@mastodon.social 2025-10-10 03:13

@richpuchalsky@mastodon.social the library of Alexandria is burning

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@oof@mastodon.sdf.org 2025-10-10 16:13

@richpuchalsky@mastodon.social AIs write bad books (and texts, etc.) -- incoherent mash-ups of existing human works, and eventually worse mash-ups of human and AI works. But how does the existence of a bad book destroy knowledge? The good books still exist. The problem in my view is less bad AI books, and more bad indexes and catalogs, (i.e. search pages made by foolish search engine corporations), and the ignorant public's very much misplaced trust in those bad indexes.

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@wyliecoyoteuk@mastodon.org.uk 2025-10-12 11:21

@richpuchalsky@mastodon.social Infinite monkey cage.

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@zengabor@mastodon.social 2025-10-12 20:45

@richpuchalsky@mastodon.social So, in effect, it leads to a situation like in a totalitarian system, on which Hannah Arendt writes: “A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies.”

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@ireneista@adhd.irenes.space 2025-10-12 20:55

@richpuchalsky@mastodon.social we feel this SO HARD this week. it is no longer possible to find answers to trivial technical questions with a web search. we're very grateful we have a curated personal library of authoritative reference material, but a lot of key Unix ideas are socially-defined and not formally documented anywhere.... (for example, just now we were trying to remember the semantics of when chown is allowed, and the rationale for it)

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@rothko@beige.party 2025-10-13 22:45

@richpuchalsky@mastodon.social THANK YOU

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@HydrePrever@mathstodon.xyz 2025-10-14 04:57

@richpuchalsky@mastodon.social El universo (que otros llaman la Biblioteca)...

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