AI Is Ruining the Internet | Hacker News Reader

AI Is Ruining the Internet

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24 pointsEGreg21 comments

The "public" social media, aka main feeds, have turned into pure shit, as he points out in the video.

Prior to 2022 it was mostly just bots copy/pasting and commenting the same images over and over again. Did it suck? Sure, but these days it is exactly as the guy pointed out - unlimited amounts of low-effort / low-quality generated images, and tries to copy anything that's trending.

I rarely, very rarely actually browse the social media feeds - I exclusively use social media for closed groups and pages, but the few times I find myself in the feed, it is just a continuous stream of AI Jesus/soldiers/struggle/celebrity generated garbage.

Why do I even get this garbage? It has literally zero correlation with my search queries, or activity. The recommendation algorithm must be broken - or the big companies are fully embracing this garbage.

I let it play while I was eating lunch. It's a bit low-brow, but he actually does a good job going over the issues and arriving at a conclusion.

The video's funny but I don't really agree with the conclusion. There's a near infinite amount of stuff on the internet and I don't think it matters is there's loads of junk on it if you can find good bits. And the quality of the good bits seems pretty good on the whole - much better than when the internet started.

The problem is also that the rate of, and ease of production of terrible content far outpaces good content. So it does matter that there’s loads of junk because finding something worthwhile gets hard very quickly.

I guess it depends how good your search is. Bit of an ongoing battle. Like I was on youtube last night looking at some stuff about problems with the UK economy and thinking the quality is really rather good - the best was probably a C4 produced doc with Tim Harford. But there is a lot of clickbait dross on youtube also. For some reason I get about ten different 'why it's all over for the Cybertruck' ones which doesn't really match their content saying it's basically ok.

Meh the internet was already ruined by over-commercialisation (eg Google, Facebook, tiktok, Microsoft etc). Or for a much better term, enshittification. There isn't much room left to make it worse.

AI is just pointing out the shitpile of junk it had already become and making it more noticeable because it's all glossy and new, rather than just slowly deteriorating over time like the regular Google and YouTube.

However, the bottom line of this YouTube video is not really about the internet at all. It's about artists which are being driven out of the market by skilless people using AI trained on those artists' work. This is a good point. And also, a worry. What's going to happen to the next generations of AI? Once there's no actual artists left AI will be trained on other crappy AI output and worsen as a result. This is also the case for LLMs as the sources of LLM training are being flooded with LLM output.

Every time I see anything negative about AI posted on HN, I expect someone to show up and say “no big deal, everything that’s becoming garbage was already garbage on the internet and in the real world, AI just xyz, and scale is irrelevant, nothing to see here”. I almost want to collect these replies and look at them years later LOL

Yes yes, before AI every site was flooded with weird copies of a photo and song, and not labeled as AI. I remember all those years where every single site with user generated content was a garbage dump with 95% fake accounts.

Well, no. I do agree that AI is a net negative the way it's being applied now. I'm not trying to pooh-pooh the negative effect of AI, I just think we shouldn't underestimate how bad the internet already was the last few years. In fact this site is one of the last few beacons of light in that cesspool as far as I'm concerned.

I just mean the internet had already started its inevitable decline. The problem with AI is that it can enshittify a lot further than that. But the path was already set with or without AI.

> I remember all those years where every single site with user generated content was a garbage dump with 95% fake accounts.

Yeah because that's exactly what reddit, twitter, stackoverflow already were. Tons and tons of low-effort karmawhoring. This was really already the case before AI. I already turned my back on all of those because it became too much.

AI will make it much worse but i don't think it's the root cause. It's an enabler, a tool but not the cause. The biggest issue is the enshittification model behind the big sites that incentivices this behaviour. After all, if there's nothing to be gained nobody would do it. The problem is people want to do these insane things. We can make AI "responsible" all we want but we'll never solve that until we remove this incentive.

Personally I also think AI is a net negative the way it's used now, though i can see a few niche usecases where it can really make life better. For example it can really translate much better due to context understanding. It can summarise. It can eventually probably help with deadly boring excel work (though right now Microsoft copilot really sucks at its excel functionality)

> every single site with user generated content was a garbage dump with 95% fake accounts.

This is quite the claim. Certainly doesn't seem to align with my experience. Do you have a source?

I was being sarcastic, but this claim is made by people downplaying the problems with AI

Remember how electronic synthetizers ended musicians?

Any idiot could "play" guitar without even knowing how to hold it.

I don't think that's the same thing. One still needs skill to play one (though it's a keyboard skill rather than a strings one) and they don't even really sound like a guitar.

I've actually tried it because I can't play a real guitar due to the finger pressure needed to push the strings. But learning to play a keyboard is not easy either and I simply have no talent for music.

With AI no skills are needed, you just type a prompt and get some result.

I know it's not really generating. It's more like a smart copy paste combinator. But it's very low effort for the operator. As a result it's not really even their work as they hardly took part in creating it.

It's already leading to a huge amount of low effort mediocre content flooding the market that real artists will have to compete with. This was the point made in the video.

> With AI no skills are needed, you just type a prompt and get some result.

With photography, no skills are needed; you just point the camera and take a picture. Right?

No. But if you had an assistant to take the photo, you wouldn't need those skills.

Generative AI is more like that. You could use Dall-E 3 for this scenario (it's quite good at it actually).

But now the art is in telling the assistant your words!

In the future, we'll be outsourcing all our work to smart agents. I have already been outsourcing most of my own work, money generation, and money spending to Elon Musk. He mostly does a good job working for me. So I can focus on what I want instead.

> One still needs skill to play one

For guitar players it's just skill-less button pressing.

> I've actually tried it because I can't play a real guitar due to the finger pressure needed to push the strings.

Excuses brought up by talent-less and lazy. Every guitar player bleeds as they learn. It's part of the craft.

> With AI no skills are needed, you just type a prompt and get some result

And yet people spend hours crafting those prompts, they share them. Some idiots even would like to copyright them. Clearly no skill and effort involved. Anybody can do it on the first try. Just like with pushing buttons on a synthesizer.

> It's already leading to a huge amount of low effort mediocre content flooding the market that real artists will have to compete with.

Exactly! Remember how every average Joe bought a synthesizer, published their "work" on homemade VHS tapes and all got famous and rich putting all real guitar players out of their jobs?

If you couldn't tell by now I'm half joking. AI is probably a more powerful invention than any other previous one. But it's not unique and neither is its cultural influence.

Interesting section about Spotify, would love to see a journalist investigate it.

Indeed. It would be very good to see the bottom of this story. Maybe the guardian or Atlantic or something will pick it up. I hope so. The world needs this kind of awareness

They might already be on the scent: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/05/swedish-c...

Very similar to payola, yet seemingly not regulated. Another toxic vertical integration by a company that operates as a platform (Ex: Amazon Basics/Amazon, Apple Music/App Store).

That is the funniest video I've seen in a long time.

Thank you.

I would be remiss if I failed to point out that the peak of gathering information off the Internet used to be Googling for your phrase plus "Reddit." Now when AIs return the exact same results, it is a horrible thing. The point is: AIs make mistakes but so does every other way we have of seeking truth, unless you have divine inspiration. Divine inspiration is infallable.

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