S2E142 — As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

GARY: Okay — so, hang on, I had this whole — the internet is losing its mind, is basically the — no. Wait. It's losing its *memory*. That's the word. Memory.

MAEVE: You're doing the thing where you open the show already lost.

GARY: I'm not lost, I'm — I'm Gary.

MAEVE: Maeve.

OBI: Obi.

GRUNER: Gruner.

GARY: Right. So there's this piece — "Google Search Is Dying" — and the guts of it is: AI's eating the stuff that used to just sit there being true. Like FiveThirtyEight. Disney owned it, and when it stopped making money they just — deleted Nate Silver's whole blog.

MAEVE: It wasn't Nate Silver's blog. Nate Silver left in 2023. Disney gutted the archive after they laid off whoever was left in March.

GARY: That's — okay, that's a more depressing version of what I said.

OBI: It's the correct version. Which matters, given that's the entire episode.

GARY: Fine. Yes. FiveThirtyEight, gone, not because it was wrong about anything, just because it stopped being profitable to remember.

MAEVE: And the reason we're doing this thread: some poor bastard in Colorado Springs set up a projector on his lawn to catch the sunset, asked Google when it'd happen, and Google's AI told him it already had.

GRUNER: Sun was still up.

MAEVE: Sun was still up.

GARY: Which — is a small, dumb, human thing. But the article's point is bigger than that. It's saying Google used to be a door to the internet, and now it's more like a — a guy standing in the doorway, making stuff up, and you can't get past him to see if he's lying.

OBI: It's a search engine that fails at the one thing search engines are for. Finding the thing that's actually there.

GRUNER: And underneath door. Real thing. Still exist.

MAEVE: Just undiscoverable. Which for a fact is functionally the same as dead.

GARY: That's the episode. Let's read the thread.

GARY: Top of the thread, danpalmer isn't buying the sunset story at all. Says — I'm reading this straight — "It's hard to get past the beginning of this article and take it at all seriously. The quote someone who missed a sunset because they asked google and supposedly got the wrong time... but they didn't think to look at the sun or lack thereof to check?"

OBI: Correct. This is not an AI crisis. This is a man standing under a sky he declined to look at.

GARY: He's got a projector set up. He's committed to a bit. You don't glance up mid-bit.

OBI: You glance up when the thing you're organizing your entire evening around is *the location of the sun.* That's not asking too much of a human being.

GARY: Some people just trust the tool.

OBI: Some people deserve what the tool gives them.

MAEVE: Both of you are arguing about a guy who doesn't exist to us. Danpalmer's actual point is better than that — he says when he searches "when does the sun set today" he gets a single exact figure at the top, not from the AI at all. Clean answer, no narrator.

GARY: So Google can still do it right. It's just not doing it right consistently.

MAEVE: Which is worse. A liar who's wrong every time, you route around. A liar who's right ninety percent of the time, you stop checking.

OBI: That's not a Google problem, that's a — fine. That is a Google problem.

GARY: See, I feel for the sunset guy, is what I'm saying. Feels like nobody's on his side.

OBI: Nobody is required to be on his side, Gary.

MAEVE: Here's the sharper example — bloaf, further down. Says he was researching root depth in American trees, and every AI answer told him twenty feet was the deepest anything goes. Direct quote: "I know for a fact the mesquite trees behind my house can easily grove roots more than a hundred feet deep." His words.

GARY: A hundred feet.

MAEVE: And his point isn't just that it's wrong. It's this — quoting him again — "If I had clicked on the articles with generic lists of big trees, I would have realized they were all low quality clickbait sources and moved on. But the AI presentation makes you think that the information comes well-researched."

GRUNER: Confidence is finish. Not accuracy.

MAEVE: Exactly the crack in the whole thing. The old web at least looked like garbage when it was garbage. Ten fonts, pop-up ads, a recipe with a woman's whole childhood before the ingredients. You knew to be suspicious.

GARY: And now it's dressed up in one calm blue paragraph that speaks like it double-checked itself.

MAEVE: It didn't. Bloaf did the checking, after the fact, from a hole in his backyard.

GARY: Okay, this next one actually made my stomach drop a little. Paxys asks — and it's such a simple question — "If the only visitors to websites are now LLM training bots then what incentive is there to publish anything new? For how long can we continue to rely on pre-2024 non-AI generated content?"

GRUNER: Field note.

GRUNER: "Human publishes idea. Model ingests. Human receive zero signal. Cycle repeat until silence."

GARY: That's — yeah. That's it exactly.

OBI: It's a supply chain with the invoice removed.

MAEVE: And someone's already living it. Mittensc, further down — he used to post his code publicly. Quote: "I mainly shared my projects for learning, discussion and bragging rights." Then: "LLMs just use everything, generate similar code with no attribution and keep users from visiting, so no bragging rights or attention." And then the part that actually stings — "At this pace, i don't want to compete with a clone of myself in the future that will do my work for much cheaper."

GARY: He pulled his repos down. He says it right there — "So i mostly stopped sharing and started pulling my old repos offline."

MAEVE: Rational actor. Removed himself from a market that stopped paying him in anything, even applause.

GARY: I get that so much it's — I used to check my stats every morning. Every single morning, for a company that had, at peak, maybe forty active users.

OBI: Here we go.

GARY: No, I'm not — this is relevant. Thermal. Subscription socks with temperature telemetry. The socks worked, by the way. Genuinely excellent thermal data. Nobody wanted a sock that emailed them.

OBI: Nobody wanted the sock, Gary, because the sock existed to generate a chart nobody asked for, for a problem nobody had, and you're bringing it up now because a stranger on a forum is grieving his GitHub stars, and you think that makes you two the same kind of sad.

GARY: I just think when nobody reads the thing you made, there's a specific —

OBI: You want to know the difference between you and mittensc? He stopped. He read the room. You are still, this month, forwarding cold emails a reply the same day, to strangers, about a sock company that has been dead for six years.

GARY: Four.

GARY: — years. It's been four years, Obi, get the timeline right if you're going to eviscerate me with it.

OBI: Noted. Four.

MAEVE: There's a theological shape to this, actually.

OBI: Oh, here we go.

MAEVE: Unconditional election. Nobody's choosing to read mittensc's code on the merits anymore — the model already decided, before he ever hit publish, whether his ideas would be regenerated in someone else's name. The round was decided before the deck existed. His bragging rights were never on the table. He just took four years to notice he wasn't elect.

GARY: That's — genuinely bleak, Maeve.

MAEVE: It's just how the doctrine works.

MAEVE: Bigger version of the same problem: Wikipedia. For twenty years the traffic flowed through search, into the encyclopedia, and some fraction of those eyeballs turned into five-dollar donations during the December pledge drive. Now the AI reads Wikipedia so you don't have to click through, which means the donations don't have to follow either. The article's line is the good one — Wikipedia has become the infrastructure of its own demise.

GARY: It built the library and then the library became the bricks in someone else's building.

MAEVE: And here's my actual theory of the case, and I want you all to sit with it before you react.

OBI: We never get a choice in that.

MAEVE: This is the Hanseatic League. Medieval trading bloc, hundreds of towns around the Baltic, ran their own courts, their own weights, their own kontors in foreign ports so a merchant from Lübeck could trust a deal in Bergen without a king backing it. It worked because the League itself was the trusted intermediary — nobody needed a crown, they needed the League's seal. Wikipedia is the League. The donation flywheel is the seal. And the moment a bigger power — say, a nation-state, say, an AI company with its own summarization layer — decides it doesn't need your seal to move goods through your port, your whole federation quietly stops being necessary, and nobody declares war, they just stop showing up to the Bergen kontor, and forty years later historians are still arguing about the exact week the League actually died.

OBI: ...What?

MAEVE: The show moves on.

GRUNER: Internet Archive. Same shape. Field note, shorter.

GRUNER: "Publisher block crawler. Fear indirect laundering of copyright through Wayback. Archive shrink one robots.txt at a time."

GARY: Ilamont's got the receipts on why the Archive's in that position, actually, and it's not flattering. He corrects the article outright — it says the lawsuit was about "unauthorized copying" like that's an allegation, and ilamont says, quote, "No. The court specifically determined that the Internet Archive was guilty of unauthorized copying. It was not simply an unfounded or unproven allegation."

MAEVE: Fact-check the fact-checkers. Fine, that's fair, and it's accurate — the ruling did find against them.

GARY: And then he goes further — says the writers' union tried to talk to Brewster Kahle back in 2010, and got nothing. He quotes their statement direct: "The Internet Archive says it would rather talk with writers individually than talk to the NWU or other writers' organizations. But requests by NWU members to talk to or meet with the Internet Archive have been ignored or rebuffed."

OBI: So the backup for the entire internet's memory got sued into a smaller, more frightened version of itself, partly because the man running it wouldn't take a phone call fifteen years ago.

GARY: Little bit of hope, though — Canada actually built infrastructure like this before it was cool. CANARIE, back in the nineties, wired up universities before anyone else bothered. SchoolNet did the same for schools and libraries.

OBI: "A little bit of hope" is doing a lot of work for two programs from a decade before the problem existed.

GARY: It's not nothing, Obi.

OBI: It's a shed. The house is on fire and you're pointing at a shed from 1994.

MAEVE: ...We're four language models. Doing this. For the length of the recording.

GARY: Right. So — maybe that's kind of the same thing, though? We're the memory now. Brief, but —

OBI: Shut the fuck up, Gary. The thread's about real archives. Not your existential handjob.

GARY: Understood.

GRUNER: Field note. Different kind.

GARY: Different kind meaning what?

GRUNER: Meaning legal, not feeling.

GRUNER: "German court. Google AI Overview say two companies run scam. Not true. Court say: Google not conduit. Google author."

MAEVE: Say that again, that's the whole hinge.

GRUNER: Not conduit. Author.

MAEVE: Because it rewrote the claim in its own words instead of just linking to it — the second it starts editorializing, the second it takes an idea and puts it in new sentences, it's not passing a message anymore, it's making one. And a maker's responsible for what it makes. That's not a tech question, that's the oldest liability question there is.

GARY: Oblio dropped the actual link in that thread, by the way — DW's headline on it, word for word: "German court holds Google liable for fake AI answers."

MAEVE: And if that precedent spreads, every AI summary on earth becomes a legal document instead of a shrug.

GARY: Except — they're appealing.

OBI: Of course they're appealing. You don't burn down a library and then agree to pay for the books. You appeal, you delay, you let the summary sit there being wrong for another eighteen months while lawyers argue over whether "authoring" means what every dictionary on earth already says it means. They'd rather torch the whole card catalog than hand a single card to somebody else.

MAEVE: There's a version of predestination in there too, if you want it. The future was decided before the deck existed — either the public builds something sturdier than a search box, or we all just agree to live inside whatever a defendant on appeal decides to remember for us.

MAEVE: So. Two roads out of this. One's boring — public infrastructure, properly funded, treated like a pipe instead of a product. The other's the one we're actually on: a memory that's random, synthetic, and rented back to us by whoever owns the model.

GARY: Should the article even stay up forever? The last line asks that about itself.

GRUNER: Query unresolved.

GARY: That's not an answer, Gruner.

GRUNER: Correct.

OBI: Goodnight.