Characters in Stephenson\u2019s novel deal with this problem by subscribing to \u201cedit streams\u201d \u2013 human-selected news and information that can be considered trustworthy.<\/p>\n
The drawback is that only the wealthy can afford such bespoke services, leaving most of humanity to consume low-quality, noncurated online content.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> on social media platforms like X and TikTok.<\/p>\n Stephenson\u2019s record as a prognosticator has been impressive \u2013 he anticipated the metaverse<\/a> in his 1992 novel \u201cSnow Crash<\/a>,\u201d and a key plot element of his \u201cDiamond Age<\/a>,\u201d released in 1995, is an interactive primer that functions much like a chatbot<\/a>.<\/p>\n On the surface, chatbots seem to provide a solution to the misinformation epidemic. By dispensing factual content, chatbots could supply alternative sources of high-quality information that aren\u2019t cordoned off by paywalls. <\/p>\n Ironically, however, the output of these chatbots may represent the greatest danger to the future of the web \u2013 one that was hinted at decades earlier by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges<\/a>.<\/p>\n The rise of the chatbots<\/p>\n Today, a significant fraction of the internet still consists of factual and ostensibly truthful content, such as articles and books that have been peer-reviewed, fact-checked or vetted in some way. <\/p>\n The developers of large language models, or LLMs \u2013 the engines that power bots like ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini \u2013 have taken advantage of this resource. <\/p>\n To perform their magic, however, these models must ingest immense quantities<\/a> of high-quality text for training purposes. A vast amount of verbiage has already been scraped from online sources and fed to the fledgling LLMs.<\/p>\n The problem is that the web, enormous as it is, is a finite resource. High-quality text that hasn\u2019t already been strip-mined is becoming scarce<\/a>, leading to what The New York Times called an \u201cemerging crisis in content<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n This has forced companies like OpenAI to enter into agreements<\/a> with publishers to obtain even more raw material for their ravenous bots. But according to one prediction, a shortage of additional high-quality training data may strike as early as 2026<\/a>.<\/p>\n As the output of chatbots ends up online, these second-generation texts \u2013 complete with made-up information called \u201challucinations<\/a>,\u201d as well as outright errors, such as suggestions to put glue on your pizza<\/a> \u2013 will further pollute the web.<\/p>\n And if a chatbot hangs out with the wrong sort of people online, it can pick up their repellent views. Microsoft discovered this the hard way in 2016, when it had to pull the plug on Tay<\/a>, a bot that started repeating racist and sexist content<\/a>.<\/p>\n Over time, all of these issues could make online content even less trustworthy<\/a> and less useful than it is today. In addition, LLMs that are fed a diet of low-calorie content may produce even more problematic output that also ends up on the web.<\/p>\n An infinite \u2212 and useless \u2212 library<\/p>\n It\u2019s not hard to imagine a feedback loop that results in a continuous process of degradation as the bots feed on their own imperfect output.<\/p>\n A July 2024 paper<\/a> published in Nature explored the consequences of training AI models on recursively generated data. It showed that \u201cirreversible defects\u201d can lead to \u201cmodel collapse<\/a>\u201d for systems trained in this way \u2013 much like an image\u2019s copy and a copy of that copy, and a copy of that copy, will lose fidelity to the original image.<\/p>\n How bad might this get?<\/p>\n Consider Borges\u2019 1941 short story \u201cThe Library of Babel<\/a>.\u201d Fifty years before computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee<\/a> created the architecture for the web, Borges had already imagined an analog equivalent.<\/p>\n In his 3,000-word story, the writer imagines a world consisting of an enormous and possibly infinite number of hexagonal rooms. The bookshelves in each room hold uniform volumes that must, its inhabitants intuit, contain every possible permutation of letters in their alphabet.<\/p>\n ![\"Illustration](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/file-20241113-17-oasuap.jpg\")
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