No AI Content
eclecticlight.co
eclecticlight.co
I am reducing my engagements with the web and technology in general due to lack of quality. It due to AI content, AI hype seeping through everything non-stop. Throw in ads literally everywhere, hyper partisan politics, phony influencers, social media algorithms that live off of FOMO.
It’s all gross and has been sapping the joy from people for too long.
I'm curious because GenAI might actually help traditional media orgs that still hire humans to write. They just need to move away from hard or metered paywalls and move toward a token model (something less common but growing). Let people buy credits to unlock individual articles instead of forcing a full subscription. Some Substack newsletters are already trying pay-per-post.
(Note: I got downvoted for including a US newspaper as an example. I'm not from the US, it was just a random example. I've removed it to avoid unnecessary polarisation.)
This is not my idea. It's a concept that Rick Beato pointed out in his videos analyzing music production today and the direction it's going between the artists and the record labels. Everybody wants to be doing less work, and so the argument is really over who gets to control the technology and get paid.
- Original, quality content will still exist, and it'll still need to be paid for, either monthly or per article.
- Right now, articles are written by journalists. In the near future, a single article might be written by several people who aren't journalists at all, but still get paid. An AI will handle fact-checking and composition. The opinions, ideas, and knowledge will come from humans, AI will just verify and stitch it together.
I'm in my late 40s and I've been watching quality decrease in our discourse and media for decades. And I think AI is just another opportunity for them to find a way to further reduce costs. But the incentive to reduce costs is there and it's a result of market demand for convenience and low cost above all else, and it's there regardless of whether or not AI is involved.
And so I think you're asking probably the most salient question: if you're looking for high quality content, where do you go? For me, personally, I've found that people generally are not producing high-quality content for commercial gain. So I've just gotten a lot more community-focused in recent years.
That said, pay‑per‑post is becoming more popular, and platforms like Substack are already experimenting with it.
Why do you think those publishers are going to avoid using AI?
1. LLMs aren't like grammar checkers or translation tools, just like they're not calculators. They can handle far more complex tasks.
2. AI might be powerful, but it can't create anything original. It relies entirely on human-generated data. Without data, LLMs are completely useless.
Think about it, would you rather listen to a Spotify AI generated piano solo? Or Donna Summer's 1978 Album "On the Radio"?
AI content is slop, plain and simple and there's no way around it. I would expect a literal child to produce better content than even the most advanced AI models available.
That doesn't mean that AI is bad - it's very, very good at certain things. But media and art are uniquely human creations - if you remove the human part, what are you left with? Is it surprising that something Sora is producing isn't really comparable to The Devil Wears Prada?
Now, if you create content and then slightly edit it with an AI, that's fine. But if, say, the NYT shifted to all AI generated stuff, they would go out of business remarkably fast.
Okay, but it's not.
> And I've seen a couple of articles in the last several months where humans thought that AI-generated works of art were created by humans.
Yes, and there's also human created works of art that are three blue stripes on a white canvas.
Look, If I poll 1000 people, how many would rather listen to AI music rather than their favorite artist? 1, if I'm lucky?
After a certain point we have to acknowledge what is actually going on, here in real life where real humans lives, and put aside what we think might be going on. People, currently, do not like AI music or AI TV or whatever the fuck. They just don't.
But "wisdom", if we are going to aspire to that, would look for the ways these tools can be used to better our condition as creators and thinkers, rather than have our opinion be led by a reactive moral narrative not grounded in pragmatism or reality.
I think that 'stealing' is a loaded term that is often used by propagandists who want to drive outrage and anti-AI sentiment (and is readily consumed, as all other propaganda, by people looking to be 'outraged' at yet another example of the `other side` being bad.)
What are your thoughts on Aaron Swartz? Do you think he was justifiably prosecuted? We must do mental gymnastics to justify one and not the other. We either value the freedom of information to educate and inspire, or we make ourselves slave to an ossified culture and technological progress that is rented to us by large companies.
I propose that we find ourselves conflicted with reconciling the complete and utter myth of Intellectual Property to an era where the system that constructed copyright is no longer relevant.
I do not relish that creatives have seen their work evaporate. I do not envy the many who lived their lives forgetting how to learn while relying on a skill that would give them "job security".
But getting upset by "big corpo stealing" is not genuinely exploring the fundamental properties of information, the nature of copyright law, and the second and third order impacts of successfully twisting the copyright system to limit AI training.
Debate where the line is, if you think it’s worthwhile, but imagine it’s much further than “all AI bad, always.”
My advice: Subscribe to one or two sites or newsletters, and all your problems are solved.
Also, whilst I am sure the quality of payed online magazines is better, once you start reading the cheap/free online crap, it is impossible to switch to a higher quality, and I always start my day with the cheap crap.
Trying to create a fan base with the written word in 2025 is probably a bad idea.
Either some startup needs to come up with compensation for authors or the big players need to set up a system that still gets authors paid as Im guessing in five to ten years we are not visiting websites. Our soon to be AI friend (Facetime the "friend," or just talk or text it) seen on our lockscreens or in a hologram is visiting all sites to create visuals of the info and displaying/discussing it with us immediately upon request.
For example, maybe smaller local forums make a comeback and their communities decide to hide all threads behind auth. (I don't necessarily see that happening, just an example.)
And honestly given the stronger feelings people are developing against what I'll just call "creative use of generative AI", I'm starting to think maybe resistance isn't futile... Poisoning original digital art so it's less useful for image generators...social shaming of AI generated music being laundered on platforms...those things do feel like meaningful steps towards resistance.
We do need new protocols though.
As a social network the web is collapsing but it is entirely possible that a new kind of internet could emerge in its place. After all, routing around damage is part of the essence of the Internet.
A bunch of the torrent trackers are now behind Cloudflare so the pirate community has been maintaining many of these projects in order to enable their autodownloaders like Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr, etc.
https://docs.browserbase.com/features/stealth-mode#captcha-s...
Personally, I see this as ToS violation-as-a-service, but I guess ethics left the AI stack space a while ago.
This is so useless
Talking about how AI broke the web, while gating the content in a way that breaks the web, which they’ve been doing since before the AI/LLM threat came on the scene.
(According to <https://medium.com/whats-new-in-publishing/inside-the-econom...>, they always had a soft paywall, but they diminished their free article limits steadily until it reached zero and became a hard paywall in 2019.)
This is like Napster vs iTunes all over again. People started paying for media online as soon as it became convenient to do so. You make things inconvenient for people, you’ll lose out to whatever the more convenient option is.
I, and Im not alone, would very much prefer old google to new AI slop.
The free open web was economically dependent on reaching large audiences by search and social, and supported by advertising. Without that scale, you're looking at more paywalls and membership programs. The smaller the niche, the more expensive and tighter the program needs to be.
A lot of that gating went into effect after social media start suppressing links.
If you believe in making quality products available to mass audiences—information wants to be free and all that—this is a problem.
Feeding AI with new high quality content only add to the problem. We must stop feeding it.
Anubis is also viable and popular, but it lacks the legal threat to AI of being able to file a federal hacking claim against a scraper’s unauthorized intrusion if they code their scraper to transmit an empty/invalid/valid authentication header.
They are probably referring to the text in the basic auth "pop-up" which is usually set like
WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="my text"
I was discussing with my partner recently the fact that I believe this is all heading to a licensed, centralised internet. I can very easily foresee the path we are blindly wandering leading to an authoritarian space in which websites and hosting will only be available to a select few, for a hefty fee.
The justification will be ‘think of the children’ or ‘we need to control what your AI agents can connect to as there are bad actors whom will convince your AI agents to give them your funds and personal, private data’
Obviously just pure speculative hyperbole to be taken with a tbsp of salt, but, yeah, I can see the path quite clearly judging by how little friction governments get for their reckless and nefarious actions nowadays.
I think you might be overestiating how much patience humans have when browsing a site
What decade do you think it is? :) Depending on who you ask, captcha bots have become better at solving them than humans...
There's almost nothing you can do that "AI" can't while keeping it easy enough for your average joe that wants to login. Especially considering "the grandma test"...
ps. I learned assembly programming from my grandma. She would have loved to discuss this problem with me.
What matters isn't the box presenting the challenge but rather the nature of the challenge itself.
Well, that just seems like something where they will just fix the glitch. Do you really think that the devs of bots can't fix this instead of it just haven't fixed it yet?
I think we're rapidly approaching the point where no one will be able to make this claim anymore. AI summaries and answers are ubiquitous and our knowledge or beliefs are directly or indirectly informed by them. We can avoid 1st order AI use, but it is impossible to avoid 2nd order and further exposure.
The water supply has been poisoned and everyone needs to drink.