Is stuff online worth saving?

The rise of LLM’s has really devalued saving stuff online. What is the point of saving an article if I could just ask ChatGPT to created it and would probably do a pretty good job? It’s still worth keeping notes and stuff that may be hard to find but the majority of things online can easily be reproduced and are not worth saving.

I think you are right. But I think the answer goes deeper: we have encouraged a culture where the most supported information is also the most superficial. The essence of individual experience itself has long been discouraged on the web in favour of SEO and the trashy news and the trivial.

So the fact that ChatGPT can replace much of the web actually says less about the marvel of ChatGPT and more about the lack of anything really worthwhile because the profound just happens to be the least economically valuable.

I just asked ChatGPT where I could find info about a specific tabletop game that was heavily discussed online some years back and had multiple fan sites with house rules, forum, mailing list, etc.

It couldn't help me except to reference a few sites that no longer exist, one that's HTTP only so now causes browser warnings and was mostly only links to more sites that also no longer exist, and an old general gaming forum that doesn't even have a search function.

It didn't mention the mailing list archive site which has 21 years of discussion, indexed and searchable, still available. Or the still-active site where some fans archived all that they could from the old sites some years back, along with emulators, binaries, and instructions to get some of the old fan-made software running again on modern systems.

Neither of those sites are new since ChatGPT was trained, they have been around much longer than ChatGPT. But it knows nothing about them or their content.

I then asked it what it could tell me about the topic of a blog that ran for 10 years, with 314 posts, most of which had around 100+ comments, and the site it most often linked to. ChatGPT's answer was simply: "It seems like I can’t do more browsing right now. Please try again later."

So no, you can't "just ask ChatGPT." Contrary to popular belief, it doesn't know much about what is or was on the internet, even at the time it was trained, nor about many topics.

Given the way the web has developed over time, it seems quite likely to have huge gaps on anything related to the small web, any niche hobbies or interests, etc. All that non-commercial stuff that you can't easily find in modern search engines, ChatGPT doesn't know about it either.

Those big chunks of content that wink out of existence whenever a hosting company goes under or someone just stops paying the bill for a site that they used to love but haven't actively maintained in awhile? It doesn't know any of that either.

Entire online communities rose, developed, created a great deal of stuff, then slowly atrophied, and eventually disappeared. ChatGPT knows nothing of them.