What's the fun in writing on the internet anymore? | Hacker News Reader

What's the fun in writing on the internet anymore?

jamesshelley.com

76 pointszdw60 comments

Sad to me that more and more money, time and resources are being poured into AI. Meanwhile, the real, non-artificial form seems more and more expendable.

What does it say about humanity in that we (or those in charge of allocating resources) are willing to invest billions in AI but not in education for naturally occurring intelligence?

Do we really want to live in a world where machines are more creative, intelligent and articulate? I thought machines were supposed to do the jobs no one wants to do, but that doesn’t really seem to be how this is all playing out.

This era is very reminiscent of early social media. While the majority was hoo-rah’ing it as this great thing, prescient technologists, including on HN, were warning how bad this was going to be.

Unfortunately AGI is orders of magnitude more impactful than Web 2.0 and social media.

> Unfortunately AGI is orders of magnitude more impactful than Web 2.0 and social media.

It's worth noting that this "impact" might appear as the production of conversation and discourse so unhelpful and unwanted it clogs the internet. I think comparison to the email spam explosion is probably the best available!

I don't know what kind of content will be most popular in 2025, but I know that the most popular content in 2026 will be written with a pen on a piece of paper.

Man, I haven't heard/thought of Web 2.0 in a long time. I miss Blogger and fail-whale era Twitter.

We've lost the plot, the point of it all, in the blind pursuit of transhumanism. The current seismic shifts are merely the most noticeable reverberations of the long march of technics and the fall of religiosity.

"Why isn’t AI doing the tedious shit for creative people instead of doing the creative shit for tedious people"

https://bsky.app/profile/eyesack.bsky.social/post/3klmto7zur...

Exactly

because most 'creatives' are scared of AI and taking away from their self-perceived worth.

I think the way things play out is: thoughtful people that want to do good worry about consequences, while others just grab any opportunity they can and run with it. In this context, any company that can replace one or two humans with an order-of-magnitude cheaper chatbot that's "on" all the time, will do that. The market is always looking for efficiencies and people just aren't that efficient.

Curiously the author excluded their site from archive.org, which in a kind of ironic way is one less avenue for future preservation of their authorship.

Not all things should be forever

To fully own these ideas, they should get rid of the copyright footer, also

Freudian slip with my choice of "own these ideas"... the whole point is we can't own these ideas :P

Rather I meant "to fully live the creed of the ideas they just submitted to the ether"

God forbid we want to stop people making money off our work right?

The author seems to be saying that copyright is currently futile? I'm not following your comment.

> The “moral rights” of the author. Copyright. Attribution. We have grown to assume these concepts as givens, but they are rapidly sliding into practical irrelevance in the age of AI and paywalls. To put any thoughtful labour into crafting words online today is to watch them get sucked up, repurposed, and often monetized by someone else.... Writers still write even when “authorship” functionally means nothing. And what they write still influences their world, with or without the universe dutifully paying homage to their bylines... So, what’s the fun of writing on the internet anymore? Well, if your aim is to be respected as an author, there’s probably not much fun to be had here at all. Don’t write online for fame and glory. Oblivion, obscurity and exploitation are all but guaranteed. Write here because ideas matter, not authorship.

its futile against AI, but not humans.

And the author didn't add ChatGPT Bot to their robots.txt either: https://jamesshelley.com/robots.txt

So they let the good bot out, and the evil one in

I was under the impression that archive.org doesn’t respect robots.txt, so in this case they’re the evil ones.

That's archive.is not .org which does that.

It does. Even retroactively it will remove things previously cached.

Trust and personal brand will have a bigger role to play in the future. That goes for businesses as well.

We humans are not really good at processing a lot of information - and that's what this is about. An overflow of information, choices and products. Everyone is trying to sell something.

So building a brand that people can trust and follow makes things easier. Apple is a great example of that.

AI has a style that is observable and I'm not a fan. Corporate speak comes close but AI writing is more obnoxious.

I am slowly disconnecting from all things internet. I remember reaching the end of the internet in 98. Less and less feels real and I've been working remote long enough that my coworkers could be AI for all I know.

I refuse to dawn the AR goggles as the reality I experience is real and the world that awaits may be desirable but ultimately empty of any lasting value.

Specific models have a style, ChatGPT has a style, Llama has a style, but there's nothing about the technique that has a style. If you run any of the vast variants emerging out there and tweak the sampling you can get absolutely wildly creative and divergent tones. Each model does seem to have a personality, but with fine tuning you can get one to write in any style you want.

Yes, but even the wildly creative ones sound way over the top, and detectable as AI too

You only detect the ones that are detectable, and that gives you a false sense of confidence that you can tell them apart.

There's a cadence that humans have that isn't matched. It's close at times until like a juke in basketball you can find a non human response. Go off script and computers can't compensate.

Nah, you can get pretty much every tone in the gradient between c-suite press release and schizophrenic.

Same with image models. So many fine-tuned models, LoRA’s, etc

Why '98? Just curious. It seemed pretty young then. Most people on the internet in 98 had 28.8 or 56k modems. I feel like things were getting better until 2010-ish.

> Various personal accounts and Google search results reveal that jokes about "the last page of the Internet" have been around since the late 90s, hosted on various personal / business / academic websites, discussion boards and e-mail. Tracing it through Google search shows that this phenomenon was firmly established by early 1998, making a 1997 origin plausible, although it is not certain. [0]

[0]: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-last-page-of-the-internet.

I worked with fast internet and worked the graveyard shift. Ten hours of internet for 50 hours a week is enough.

There is a plot point in the universe of the recent Cyberpunk game wherein the original version of the Internet becomes overrun with AIs. A giant firewall is constructed to keep them out of the “new Internet”, which is reconstructed only for humans.

I do wonder if something similar will eventually happen in real life. I’m imagining a device that somehow checks your humanity in order to use, but in a nontrivial way that can’t be faked.

Basically, a CAPTCHA that actually works?

Yeah but it would need to factor in a lot of other things, like copying and pasting, if the goal is to prevent the products of AI.

Nice take. One may also draw parallels with other forms of writing, like music. Sort of aligns with “the ability to speak does not make you intelligent”

It's fairly easy to establish priority for those who care and are willing to search. This could be as simple as posting to a social media account on a server where you don't have admin access and can't fake the date.

Or for your own web page, maybe use webarchive to archive it?

But the real thing you're fighting is reader indifference. Many people don't care who said it first, or even whether it's true.

Seems to me like there will be fewer and fewer humans generating content on the internet and more and more AI. What happens then? AI starts feeding off itself and generating content based on AI-generated content in the first place? Feels like small hallucinations will get amplified over time and eventually there will be nothing real or factual on the internet any more.

Yep, thats exactly what will happen. You get an echo chamber that slowly deteriorates.

Some original ideas will always exist, but the AI will be so hungry for new ideas that they will be sucked up and regurgitated immediately.

In the future there will only be 2 jobs. Creating primary "source of truth" data for training AI, and mining AI for interesting output.

Not just web sites, art, books, program code and, (coming to a website near you) videos.

Personally, it won't stop me writing books or articles, but they will be for my self-satisfaction, and I fully expect them to be sucked into some LLM in the future (regardless of copywrite) and spat out as something else.

I've never read generalist blogs written by people who just invent problems that don't exist.

My main interest is AI. There is a lot of free content and interesting ideas. AI doesn't invent itself.

Too long ago (~2004) I read a good article about something like deep-linking with micro-payments. That's the best I can remember. The idea was to use hypertext extensively as references within on-line writing and have some kind of system like $.001 for every time a link was used.

That doesn't feel entirely adequate as an explanation. Anyway, it was before blockchain or some other mechanism to implement it, but I thought it was an interesting direction to pursue.

Going to have an RSS feed of human writing I find on a webring. Smallweb blogs. Old hackers sitting around a campfire sharing GPG public keys they have memorized.

So we will have to think by ourselves and apply criticism to everything we read or see. Maybe it was always like this but AI made it accessible, faster and easier.

Ironically I already clicked my "Generate page summary" button, and GPT-4 was dutifully token-spewing in my sidebar, before I even got to "You could copy and paste this article into ChatGPT". Touché my friend.

Ah, yes the obligatory daily "the internet was so much better back in the old days" post.

Really though, the author is right when they say: "Write here because ideas matter, not authorship." because nothing is fundamentally changing with AI or any other big bad we imagine might be coming for our individuality and identity or whatever other intangible quality you feel is being lost because of [insert technology/trend here]

> "the internet was so much better back in the old days"

Nowhere in this blog post did the author make any such claims.

The author is not right about that. Authorship is not negated when someone plagiarizes you. Your stuff is still there. People who read you will still read you.

And if ideas matter, those ideas will be distorted anyway by the same processes he cites.

or people will stop reading online because of declining signal to noise ratio. Why should I bother to spend the time reading something that a person couldn’t bother to spend the time writing?

nihilistic spiraling from a creative

plenty of people do things fulfilling and engage in markets that don’t have remedies in the legal system

focusing on “plagiarism” was always the waste of time

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