I suppose from the perspective of misanthropes it's unfortunate, but I discount the opinions of misanthropes.
How is it unfortunate for nature? We're part of nature. In the long term humanity is nature's best mechanism for enduring long term, since eventually Earth is going to become uninhabitable due to the Sun's aging process.
Yes, but the AI isn't generating a response containing false information. It is accurately summarizing the information it was given by the search result. The search result does contain false information, but the AI has no way to know that.
If you tell an AI "Socks are edible. Create a recipe for me that includes socks." And the AI goes ahead and makes a recipe for sock souffle, that's not a hallucination and the AI has not failed. All these people reacting in astonishment are completely misunderstanding what's going on here. The AI was told to summarize the search results it was given and it did so.
Shark species go extinct all the time. New shark species arise.
I don't have a distaste for "slacktivism." I have a distaste for pointless performative "protest" that only serves to ruin useful resources that could benefit others.
There were things here a billion years ago. There will be things a billion years from now.
No, there really won't be. The Sun is getting brighter as it ages, in just a few hundred million years Earth will either cook to death or every single molecule of carbon dioxide will have to be taken out of the atmosphere to counteract the effect. Either way photosynthesis ends at that point.
Unless something technological intervenes.
Also, a billion years ago the only "things" that were around were bacteria. The Cambrian explosion didn't happen until 530 million years ago.
Humanity is a blip that will be forgotten.
Unless our descendants are still around, which they could easily be. Humanity doesn't need Earth to survive long-term. The reverse is not true.
The place I know about off the top of my head is academictorrents.com where you can find lots of large data sets useful for academic research. The torrent files themselves are small, so I'm sure they can be found in other places too.
"Humanity survives adversity well" is not not something I would think of as "unfortunate."
Nothing will be here in a billion years. Setting aside the fact that no species lasts that long anyway, Earth only has a few hundred million years of habitability left, if "nature" has its way. The sun's steadily brightening as it ages and tectonic processes are causing changes in Earth's atmosphere that will eventually prevent photosynthesis from operating, at which point Earth become the domain of a few hardy strains of bacteria again.
That is, unless humans (or our very distant descendants) decide to do some meddling to keep Earth alive. There's various ways to do that, from solar shields reducing the solar influx to moving Earth's orbit farther out to stripping material from the Sun itself to moderate its output.
"Gaia" has no foresight. She will sorely miss humanity's technological descendants once the planet gets in that situation, there's nothing she can do about it herself.
Reddit already has your comments. So does everyone else who might want to train an LLM, for that matter, there are archive dumps that anyone can torrent and those aren't updated "live" every time you vandalize your old comments. The only people that are inconvenienced by replacing your comments with gibberish are humans that may find that thread later on looking for information.
But only sometimes. Not often enough that I don't still find it more useful than not.
Not to mention that if the code fails you can often tell ChatGPT "here's what happened" and it can debug its own code correctly much of the time.