[boelboel]

A lot of low cost content generation would've come regardless with something like 50% of the developing world getting access to mobile internet between 2018-2026 and social media incentivizing certain types of content (monetizing). But AI certainly didn't help.

[whstl]

Yep. And there were previews of that 10+ years ago already with content farms and SEO-spam.

[throwaway85825]

There's significant overlap between the smartest bots and dumbest humans. Internet platforms have a negative incentive to encourage quality content. Google embraced the spam and scams decades ago.

[smith7018]

Cheap labor has always been a thing; a random country getting more access to the internet doesn't change that. What's truly changed is velocity, quality, and quantity. Framing the pure firehose of slop targeting scientific research, used for nefarious political purposes, flooding social media, scamming people, and much more as something that "would've come regardless" without LLMs is disingenuous imo

[boelboel]

You're right, I should've been more accurate and said a significant portion of the enshitification of the internet would've happened regardless. The effects on education is probably a lot worse.

I shouldn't have targeted the developing world as much as the incentives made by social media platforms needing to get growth in other ways than usercount.