The problem isn't that there are alternatives. The problem is that this sort of vapid human zoo has flourished and spread globally.
The only major culture that seems to have avoided it is China. And that's because they got addicted to even more vapid mobile livestreams.
At some point an instagram/tiktok/etc user could see nothing by real people and not even know what is promoted vs ad vs post.
A lot of them aren't actively seeking them out. They are pushed at them and they just try it.
Go on, just this once, you can stop if you don't like it…
> than wanting to talk to humans.
The disaffected just want to talk. I'm sure they'd prefer humans but once the chatbots seem to be good enough in their absence they get a bit trapped there because the bots are too sycophantic and they get conditioned to want that from humans too which will not happen.
I loved maps and geography as a child and still do. I've never met anyone in real life that likes it as much as me. But on the internet there are places were I can discuss it and other people share fascinating articles, pictures, etc.
Plenty of people have a reason why they can’t do it, but plenty do it and are happier for finding their community IRL.
I now live in an area with about 2.5 million people and there is far more to do and the people are more educated and open minded. I will never move back to a small town again.
I don't want to be limited to only the friends I can make who live near me
"Popular" reddit posts and subreddits are a good example of this.
How will they realize if AI content is indistinguishable?
Yeah, the “blast radius” for social media AI slop is 80%-99% of humanity. There’s many times even I cannot make out if something is slop.
Hell, AI slop is going to be even better than reality for a portion of humanity, so it’s More likely they will stay online.
In the same direction, if you can't cell the AI slop from the low-quality human output, does the source matter?
The problem is quantity. Has been for a while, the robots are only making it more obvious.
The direction matters. Yes Quantity is its own quality.
Communities are intended for human interaction - we encode far too much in the social affordances we use. Criticism, votes, lack of attention, all of it is feedback for people to learn and adapt from.
Bots are one way comms. Anyone trying to communicate with a bot is no longer having a conversation, they’re doing some interpretive dance.
Those of us who can distinguish the bots are sick of them and are leaving - the ones who can’t tell the difference and appreciate being pandered to stay. Instead of driving them away, bot posts drive them to engage.
No, it isn't anywhere near good. One doesn't throw out the baby to get rid of fouled-up bathwater. Online communities are just as valid as offline ones; it's just that many people a) don't want to be deceived, and b) don't want fakery (slop) all that entails. Easy.
No, it evidently isn't. Online communities connect people, and other communities, in ways that are impossible or undesirable to realize in meatspace. Bizarre to treat this as a zero-sum game.
> "Nothing, nothing substitutes for real human contact in the real world."
It all depends on your smell™. Et cetera.
It's a long drive for me to get to a local shop and things which I am actually interested in working on rarely show up in the classes and so forth which they offer, and scheduling is awkward --- when my second favourite author came up on rotation for the book discussion at the local Barnes & Noble, I wasn't able to attend due to a prior commitment w/ my kids.
These are professional skinner box designers; real people will remain on, even if the site themselves have to use chatbots to keep them there.
Maybe it's hard getting across what I mean so a more concrete example is there will be SO MUCH clickbait out there that serious outfits instead of being forced to do it will be able to successfully differentiate themselves by NOT doing it. (and many similar things in different arenas)
I'm trying to say that LLMs raising the noise floor will drown out a lot of the toxic noise that's been plaguing us.
I can hope.
I really want to believe this will be true. However, I also suspect there's some external driving force, that I cannot readily name, which is making people incapable of consuming anything except this low-effort content. I mean, obviously it's working to some extent. Perhaps AI will be the thing that accelerates its death, but part of me thinks something else needs to happen beyond just an increase in useless content.
It's the economy of everything being free but supported with advertising. That mechanic is what leads to the race to the bottom lowest common denominator human motivation hacking attention toxicity. (yes that's a bit of a ramble).
If people weren't getting paid for the smallest increment of attention they could grab, it wouldn't be promoted the way it is. I don't have a high opinion of the things which grab my attention, but they still manage to do it sometimes. I think many people are in that boat. If there were other mechanisms with which we rewarded people for doing things, something different would be optimized.
And people just wouldn't reward the 10-second-gratification in anywhere near the same way if it weren't for the advertising.
It's fine though. Low-effort people deserve low-effort content. Maybe the work of high-effort creators and the patrons that support their works will simply not be on the Internet in the future.
Now there's more pressure to have a stronger signal and hopefully rewards to match.