Here is an expert saying there is a problem and how it killed its research effort, and yet you say that things are the same as ever and nothing was killed.

1. I am not discrediting the expert in any way, if anything, I think their decision to quit is understandable - there is now a challenge that arose during his research that is not in their interest to pursue (information pollution is not research in corpus linguistics / NLP).

2. I never said that things are the same as ever, quite the opposite actually. I am saying the world evolves constantly. It's naive to say company X/Y/Z killed something or made something unusable, when there is constant inevitable change. We should focus on how to move forward giving this constraint, and not dwell on times where the web was so much 'cleaner' and 'nicer', more manageable etc.

I'm not so optimistic. The most basic requirements are:

1. Prove the human-ness of an author... 2. ...without grossly encroaching on their privacy. 3. Ensure that the author isn't passing off AI-generated material as their own.

We'll leave out the "don't let AI models train on my data" part for now.

Whatever solution we come up with, if any, will necessarily be mired in the politics of privacy, anonymity, and/or DRM. In any case, it's hard to conceive of a world where the human web returns as we once knew it.

The good news—such as it is—is that the Web never really became what we assumed it surely would in its early days.

If it was never really the case that you’d be better off for serious or improving reading having only the Web versus only access to a decent library, then we haven’t lost something so precious.

I mean, the most valuable site on the Web is probably a book & research paper piracy website. That’s its crowning achievement. Faster interlibrary loan, basically, but illegal.

T H A N K S