I've been saying for years that generated content is an impending tsunami that's going to drown out all real human voices online. The internet may become effectively unusable as a result for anything other than entertainment.
This is interesting and i see some of this now. Even here on HN and other forums i thought were mostly "human". Even one of my group chats i can tell one of my friends is using ai responses, but one of the other members cant tell and replies earnestly.
I am grossed out by this. my instinct is to avoid ai slop. The interesting part to me is: What next? Where do we go? Will it be that "human" forums are pushed further into obscurity of the internet? Or will go so far as that we all start preferring meeting in person? Im clueless here
Vetting people into groups will become much more common, I think. Unless you can verify that person, ideally by knowing them irl, don't talk to them online.
worldcoin project solves a lot of this when combined with web of trust, however everyone's knee jerk reaction to worldcoin is pretty bad and so it's annoying to even mention it
US citizens still use paper Social Security Cards. The point where there is a "critical need" recognized by the relevant parties may be further off than you believe.
Humans will start to notice this shit. I used openai to help me edit my stories originally, but then when I started reading other stories it quickly became evident to me that people just generated them entirely with AI.
ChatGPT is way too happy to overuse the word cacophony.
My hot take is that we will have some small obscure forums with people, some social media flooded with AI content and other social media where you need to register with government ID and facescan.
Maybe that's a good thing. The internet never reached its potential as being the connective fabric of humanity. Mostly it's just marketing and spam. If the internet died and we all went back to smaller communities, that really wouldn't be the worst thing IMO. We're not really evolved for global communications at scale anyway.
Shrug. Maybe it's an argument to de-modernize more things in order to bring daily life back to the environments we're healthier and happier in.
Edit: In particular, I'm not convinced the internet was a net positive. Running water and sewage systems, sure. But what has 24/7 smartphone access actually done for our societies? Most people today don't seem any better off than they were in the 80s and 90s, and in many ways that actually matter, they seem worse off. Sure, they have access to way more information than our predecessors ever did... but it's not like we built a better world off it. Mostly the internet has accelerated the concentration of wealth towards the top, increased anxiety across the world, and significantly contributed to the global downfall of representative democracies, to name a few. Sometimes modernity can just be a collection of pathologies with a few beneficial side effects.
The Internet used to be a sort of hideaway for nerdy people to hang out and have fun. Ever since the invention of the smartphone, possibly before (see “Eternal September”) it’s gone to shit. These days I would rather spend time offline.
Are there any other Internet-based hideaways to retreat to? Somewhere where ads, clout chasing, and AI slop doesn’t exist?
I am grossed out by this. my instinct is to avoid ai slop. The interesting part to me is: What next? Where do we go? Will it be that "human" forums are pushed further into obscurity of the internet? Or will go so far as that we all start preferring meeting in person? Im clueless here