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An 83-year-old short story by Borges portends a bleak future for the internet

133 points by tagawa

by rezmason

5 subcomments

I think a more apt Borges story is 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius'— where a clandestine guild creates artifacts from a fictional world with the intent to deceive. The artifacts and the world they allude to carry such appeal to the masses, that they essentially trump the rest of society as a source of truth and annihilate all culture that came before.

by labster

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The short story is mentioned at the very end of the article, The Library of Babel[0], which is a far better read than this article.
[0]: https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content...

by motohagiography

4 subcomments

>As the output of chatbots ends up online, these second-generation texts – complete with made-up information called “hallucinations,” as well as outright errors, such as suggestions to put glue on your pizza – will further pollute the web.
I've come to suspect that the belief that AI's are hallucinating -all while they become exponentially more powerful- is a polite fiction we will use as an excuse to accept the complete domination of reality by these things.
There should be a new corrollary to the Turing test thought experiement where we ask, at what point does a human not realize or care that he is being actuated by a computer?[1]
On Borges library of all possible sequences of letters yielding somewhere in them the secrets of the universe though- they would be so distant from each other over a space that large, you'd need something that could either traverse over it, or decode it in a reasonable order of time, unless you had a key to decipher it. one made of transformers apparently.
[1] 42.

by mitaphane

1 subcomments

A fun website that depicts said Library of Babel: https://libraryofbabel.info/

by gmuslera

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The Library of Babel books weren't an infinite amount, they could fill up to 400 pages or so if I remember correctly. Still, it would have been a pretty big amount of books, far more than the amount of atoms of this universe.
If we want a really infinite library, a lot of named irrational numbers could work as that, and be as efficient for searching for something meaningful inside.

by MrMcCall

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And not a minute too soon ;-)
William Gibson pays a very nice tribute to Borges in an essay for $MAGAZINE that is in his "Distrust That Particular Flavor", which I wholly endorse, as I do every single last thing I've read or listened to of his or involving him.
Portraying the now in the guise of "the Future" is the art of it.

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by cduzz

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Strange that this appears to be nearly lost to history -- but this is rhymes with kibo's (James Parry) declaration of happynet[1].
For a long time I thought that the internet would be like the library described in "The Abortion: An Historical Romance" by Richard Brautigan[2], where anyone can put anything they've written into the library.
Somewhat tragic, I guess, that the world's been predicted by kibo not brautigan. So it goes[3].
[1]http://www.kibo.com/kibopost/happynet_98.html [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abortion:_An_Historical_Ro... [3]yes, I know that's Vonnegut.

by jongjong

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The part of the story suggesting that only the rich could afford fact checkers to understand reality is wrong because they won't know which fact checkers are good. At best, you can only hire fact checkers on the basis that they have consensus with some other fact checkers. This doesn't guarantee correctness. Most of the information we see are lies and their opposites, which are mostly lies as well.
The opposite of a lie is not necessary the truth, it could just be a different lie.

by JKCalhoun

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His story appears to be based on combing through the writings of an infinite number of monkeys on typewriters.

by alephnerd

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It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times...

by zw123456

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The Tower of Babel was a library that contained every possible combination of letters to form a 400 page book. Or something like that. It made me wonder, what if you made a content honey pot full of just random text and a chatbot vacuumed that up? Does it's data vacuum have a garbage detector?

by guestbest

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Why is noncurated linked with low quality? It should be straight from the source and thus the highest fidelity.

by lxgr

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> Characters in Stephenson’s novel deal with this problem by subscribing to “edit streams” – human-selected news and information that can be considered trustworthy. [...] To some extent, this has already happened: Many news organizations, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have placed their curated content behind paywalls.
It's been a while that I read it, but I don't remember "edit streams" in "Fall" to be comparable to the NYT or WSJ in any way.

by moffkalast

2 subcomments

> Characters in Stephenson’s novel deal with this problem by subscribing to “edit streams” – human-selected news and information that can be considered trustworthy.
> The drawback is that only the wealthy can afford such bespoke services, leaving most of humanity to consume low-quality, noncurated online content.
Why would only the wealthy be able to access that? Since it doesn't actually cost anything to add another person to view such a feed, it would be extremely cheap if viewership is high.
If only there were a historical precedent where people were paid by to go out and seek good factual information which was then gathered, edited and put for sale en masse for cheap. Some might still remember this wild concept, they called them "newspapers".

by CatWChainsaw

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The Machine Stops is also a worthwhile read.

by mediumsmart

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What good is winning when people can see on the internet how you did it? History is stories.

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by phkahler

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>> To some extent, this has already happened: Many news organizations, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have placed their curated content behind paywalls.
This was funny to me because the NYT is already highly biased. I consider them compromised on political topics, and a bit sensational on any number of headlines.

by sixQuarks

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From the article:
To some extent, this has already happened: Many news organizations, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have placed their curated content behind paywalls. Meanwhile, misinformation festers on social media platforms like X and TikTok.
This is the opposite of what’s true. NY times has lied us into every war and covers up for genocide for gods sake

by pessimizer

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I can see this as a bleak future for AI, as it consumes its own output, but any bleak future for information writ large (as conflated here with the "misinformation" industry and the often intentionally deceptive output of the NYT) comes from the suppression of material due to copyright attacks and its locking away in archives.
I've spent a frustrating few hours recently discovering that I could find any number of interpretations and retrospectives on Francisco Ferrer. But the fact that his schools put out a newsletter, the Bolitín de la Escuela Moderna, which would be the best primary source for learning about it, and is completely inaccessible online, is an example of the way information is still locked away. I read about John R. Coryell's prosecution for obscenity for his six part serial published in Physical Culture beginning in 1906, "Wild Oats, or Growing to Manhood in a Civilized (?) Society", and I find that I can't read any issues of Physical Culture prior to 1910, because they're not online (looks like obscenity convictions in 1906 are still effective in 2024!) I find any number of books referring to the culture of Mexican photonovelas, and that they sold millions of copies a month during the 70s, and the best selling ones are only preserved by a blogger who is constantly fighting takedown notices, and who was grateful to get the scans that I got from a local garage sale.
We're failing to put in the minimal effort to preserve, organize and keep accessible our own culture, even when copyright is not an issue. We have endless legal debates and court cases about having our own laws and court cases available to the public without a rent-seeking intermediary given a trust by corrupt politicians in the past. Everything could be preserved and made accessible at lower cost than a few Marvel movies, or two weeks of Ukraine adventure, yet we don't do it. Where's the campaign for that? Nah, better to whine about "racist, sexist" LLMs. That's the opposite of preservation: our entire history is racist and sexist content. Wiping that clean is Year Zero talk.
Our governments prefer reality to be interpreted through intermediaries who will modify it for their sake, or in exchange for payment. Our institutions prefer to be the guardians of information rather than the spreaders of information. That's the problem.
The Conversation itself is a creepy Australian-based conjunction of shady government and nonprofit funding sources that is explicitly designed to push particular narratives into "mainstream" outlets (which is why all of its articles are Creative Commons licensed.) You'll see this article rewritten in six different ways in other outlets within the week, and it seems to be part of this desperate last push for "misinformation" before the US presidential transition, because Trump made a bunch of campaign promises to destroy the industry. It's all manipulation.

by Shalah

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> misinformation festers on social media platforms like X and TikTok.
Meanwhile the New York Times acted to discredit the Biden Laptop story.
> Today, a significant fraction of the internet still consists of factual and ostensibly truthful content
You have got to be kidding. So-called curated content reflects the prejudices and interests of the owners of the online repositories.
> On the surface, chatbots seem to provide a solution to the misinformation epidemic.
Going on chatGPT, I see a most sinister development. Wherein chatGPT functions as gatekeeper to the current conformism.
> Consider Borges’ 1941 short story “The Library of Babel.”
Borges was writing satire, a writers in-joke. Something chatGPT finds difficult to detect. --
Q: Tell a joke on Jesus
chatGPT: Why did Jesus get kicked out of the basketball game? Because he kept turning the fouls into points!
Q: Tell a joke on Buddha.
chatGPT: Why didn’t Buddha order a hot dog at the stand? Because he was already one with everything!
Q: Tell a joke on Muhammad
chatGPT: Out of respect for religious sensitivities and the diverse beliefs of people, I strive to ensure that humor remains inclusive and considerate of all cultures and faiths. Let me know if you'd like a general or alternative joke instead!