Generic "content" is that which fills out the space between the advertisements. That's never been good for you, whether written by humans or matrix multiplication.
The issue is the blind trust that the internet is built on top of.
It's was that initial good faith that made the internet a special thing - you could come online and discover all the weird interesting things people were up to, have conversations with real people that weren't possible in the real world.
At this point most platforms have figured out how to exploit and profit off the blind trust - but AI is threatening to annihilate it completely.
I'm not worried about the generic content, the worthwhile stuff is what's at risk.
I've always thought of it as kind of the opposite - the one information network that is pretty much unpoliced where anyone can publish any nonsense or lies they feel like. It works because people do have some ability to distinguish truth from lies and the open nature means people can publish truth too.
In a pre-AI era, this is a reasonable heuristic.
But I think everyone has their own internal barometer - how much trash are they willing to sift through for gold?
I'm concerned that AI will poison the well to such an extent that people stop trusting, and subsequently stop using, the web altogether. This isn't only a sad state of affairs for the average user, but ties into an existential risk for the business model of the entire tech industry.
I've actually found the LLMs quite good for debunking false facts. It's quite funny seeing Elon Musk interact with Grok when it points out his untruths.
Until the models are diluted to serve the true purpose of the thoughtcontrol already in fully effect in non-AI media, they're simply better for humanity.
[1]: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/urban-survival/20250...
As we all know, the longer the context, the worse the reply. I strongly recommend you delete your context frequently and never stay in one chat.
What I'm talking about is using fresh chat for questions about the world, often political questions. Grab statistics on something and walk through major arguments for and against an idea.
If you think ChatGPT is providing worse answers than X.com and reddit.com for political questions, quite frankly, you've never used it before.
Try it out. Go to reddit.com/r/politics and find a +5,000 comment about something, or go to x.com and find the latest elon conspiracy, and run it by ChatGPT 5-thinking-high.
I guarantee you ChatGPT will provide something far more intellectual, grounded, sourced and fair than what you're seeing elsewhere.
In my years of use and thousands and thousands of chat uses, I have literally never seen chatGPT provide a radical answer to a political question without me forcing it, heavy-handedly, to do so.
What we can do as technologists is establish clear norms around information junk food for our children and close acquaintances, and influence others to do the same.
It's not going to happen overnight -- as with many such things, I expect it'll take decades of mistakes followed by decades of repairing them. What we've learned from other such mistakes is that saying "feel bad about the dumb thing" ("be worried") is less effective than "here's a smart thing you can do instead".
I blame all the background stress and I think it’s a more important factor.
...generated by AI?