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Comment by shzhdbi09gv8ioi | Hacker News Reader

> The dead internet theory essentially claims that activity and content on the internet, including social media accounts, are predominantly being created and automated by artificial intelligence agents.

The theory predates the current era of AI generated content:

> The dead Internet theory's exact origin is difficult to pinpoint, but it most likely emerged from 4chan or Wizardchan as a theoretical concept in the late 2010s or early 2020s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

And just my personal 2cents; I believe this was the result of predatory SEO.

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predatory SEO!

Not content to fuck up the real world, we've done the same in the digital.

Social sites, like systems, consist of inputs and feedback loops. How the feedback inputs are filtered is what we call moderation. Sometimes good, sometimes not.

Google tamed the web and tuned itself for its own benefit. SEO engineers noticed and motivated by culture's dear friend greed, they were some of the first to automate - faking traffic and content to shape google, the shaper. Fixing the fixer.

And now we add LLMs to the mix.

In control systems, negative feedback shapes the outputs in useful ways while positive feedback amplifies. We've set the dial to 11+.

It was not just Google. All of the search engines have an initial period of being good then when they get to a state of market domination or market penetration, the SEO and large companies with money show up. The SEO people game the system, while the people in companies with money, simply pay to be at the top of the chart or surreptitiously give money to be at the top of the chart. The surgeons are fine when they start getting market traction that the issue starts to pop up.

The Why Files made a video on the subject a couple years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlR9fCXfWyM

I remember reading a short piece about "The old abandoned Internet on the edge of Town" well before 2010.

Possibly it was extrapolating from the ruins of MySpace and similar.

well, it all might be circuits giving birth to consciousness-es. like when matter bounced around and formed planets and stuff, except it's information parsed by evolving circuits in as many forms as possible just because there's always this one dude or dudette who's a bit slow on the uptake.

but then again, go outside and holla that fake shit. everyones trained and tutored by of through and for emotional bondage. even, or rather, thanks to the dreaming mind the art itself is disconnected and alienated from the manipulated and corrupt artist. it's not the kids playing music anymore, it's their shadows or their guts if you so will. once the music stops they are all back to being regular bots again. we all have only so much energy for putting up a good show, there's none left for playing our selves, for being honest, which is why it's easier to outsource as much as possible to digital and superego algorithms; just choose a flavor or more and the sim remains stable and fun and the kids will have stuff to digest and remix forever

wow, that sounds bad, sorry. i just get stuck if i write that stuff in a notebook. this forums level and kind of interaction helps keep the chain of thought going at the same temperature and in the intended hue.

i shouldn't do this again, though. apologies, if I annoyed someone or got them into a bad mood.

I think people are probably just reflexively downvoting you based on the first sentence of the post, because breathless speculation about stochastic parrot LLMs magically birthing AGI any minute now was 60% of the posts here for a year straight

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