Disenchantment with the Post-AI Internet | Hacker News Reader

Disenchantment with the Post-AI Internet

lukesmith.xyz

40 pointsspeckx7 comments

So, I see the point the author makes but something of his style is really offputting, maybe its my weak grasp on a foreign language

> The AI hoax is the new COVID hoax.

Does the guy imply that he does not believe in a pandemic?

His words about wikipedia and enforced thinking strike me as very absolute, as far as I know, depending on language, the wikipedia editors and admins sometimes have peculiar style choices and stright-ish guidelines, buts its a far cry from idological enforcement.

On the other hand, his point about all the LLMs basically having taken a snapshot of 2023-ish Internet think and soldifying it seems somewhat valid. I remember some reports about a hiring AI-based help that prefered non-colored non-woman humans because that is where the history had its bias.

And as the author I feel kinda sad when I see an AGENT.md or CLAUDE.md in a repo..but reality is rarely that black&white.

It does not matter if SAR-CoV-2 was a real disease or a rebranded flu. Whether the Scamdemic was real or not is irrelevant. The authoritarian measures, the loss of all essential liberty, the forced medication on the least tested drug in modern regulatory history .. all for an alleged disease with a 99.9% survival rate for those under 60. That's combined with a population that cannot even acknowledge the massive rise in blood clots, aggressive cancers and things people attribute to "long COVID" even though it doesn't affect anybody who avoided all the unnecessary drugs.

Larry Sanger has talked about how bad Wikipedia is. They have money to sustain themselves for 20 years, yet keep begging for donations for political causes. Their editors are insane and their ban on 1-party sources ensure Wikipedia can literally never be anything but a propaganda horn.

Thanks for reminding me how awesome Luke Smith is and how far Orange Reddit has fallen. I'm glad his website isn't shadowbanned on here like so many I know.

> Nearly every page you see in the results of a very specific query might have never been seen by another human.

While that may be true, it doesn't happen _that_ often, unless you spend most of your day googling random phone numbers...

> I think nearly exclusively in terms of what can be done in reality

This is the only sane approach.

> This is the dangerous thing that Wikipedia has already done in part, but instead of being on one particular site that any informed person knows should not be trusted on certain issues, it will be the background narrative for the entire internet and all people who rely on it for their thoughtless decisions.

The neat thing about Wikipedia is that you can, actually, edit it. And pages do change over time to reflect new sources and new consensus, after discussion and, sometimes, debate. Wikipedia also strongly grounds its content in citations and secondary sources, while AI slop generally does not.

This is spoken like someone who has never actually tried editing Wikipedia. I always look at the talk page FIRST, and then the page from 10 years ago, before reading the current page. For any controversial topics, it's incredible to see the radical bias and also how anyone who attempts to fix it gets shot down.

It might still _look_ like anyone can edit it, but that's far from the reality. I gave up trying to improve articles ~15 years ago.

> I feel like the cult around AI, and it is very much a cult, is a kind of religious experiment to which attempts to offset the stultification and degradation AI has caused in the internet with some vague optimistic belief that it is something wonderful or futuristic.

I used to like Luke's style, but I think he's spent a bit too much time in the woods. It's a pretty weak comparison to call LLMs a religious experiment.

There aren't too many interesting ideas in this piece, just rambling and complaining. Oh well.

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