The Post-AI Internet Doesn't Look Great

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It's happening everywhere. We have people using AI to generate documents, then using the same AI to read/summarize them. What is the point? The writing itself, especially with recent Claude models, is often incredibly awkward.

Most likely outcome seems to be that this period will be over very quickly, and we will have better writing than ever before, forever.

We should probably put some more thought toward that part and what it will mean.

> in an overcomplicated way that makes me exhausted after reading

This. I can't even listen to youtube videos any more because of their chat-gpt generated scripts. LLMs will readily generate several pages of superfluous prose, rehashing the same idea with punchy witticisms for no reason. But it uses such compelling connecting words that you might be tricked into believing there will be a payoff long past the point of diminishing returns.

I have been enjoying reading literary classics for their poetic concision. Sometimes, a bit of context can allow a simple sentence to form a picture in your mind's eye that would take a few minutes to explain syllogistically. I wish to communicate more like that.

It's still very early days. I have no doubt that etiquette and norms will be established that alleviate these issues.

This can be improved. As AI grows it will be better at explaining. For sure people working on frontier models have identified this as a problem.

No kidding. I got a feature handed down (with links to 4 other markdown docs) for what was discussed in person as "api to record audit events". The result is <goes to AI for word count then gives up>

     wc .\ledger_reqs.md                             
     1090  9347 68071 .\ledger_reqs.md

For too long we have used length of document as a measure of quality.

I have had this thought quite a bit, that the silver lining of the slop-ification of the internet could lead people to spend less time online, which in my mind would be a positive development.

But unfortunately I just don't think that will happen. For some people it might, but I think the mass of people will accept the slop as it's given to them. Nothing in the history of communication technologies makes me think otherwise.

Perhaps I'm too cynical.

The problem is AI and the internet's leakage into everything else. Marketing copy, prose in public spaces, even books... I really hope that society as a whole accepts that human-written text is more valuable than AI-written.

You're describing the 2010s era of algorithmic social media, I think OP is referring to the earlier internet

> Don't romanticize the internet. The modern internet has torn society apart at the seams. It's made the world less tolerable and made civic discourse impossible.

Pretty much the same thing the printing press did. Breakthrough communication technologies force underlying societal problems to the surface. It will end up being a good thing long term as long as we survive it.

That's what happened to me and I'm happier than ever.

For the past five years I made an effort to seek out and finish long posts or videos that seem interesting at first in the name of exercising my attention span.

I'm now quick to bail on anything when I don't know the author, and bail on authors if their quality starts slipping. When the daily fire hose started running out, I realized I was mainly looking for distraction and spent more time being healthily bored.

be careful for what you wish for. if you take away our drug/escape/safety. The people will switch from #revolting to 1800-1900s revolting.

>be less on the internet

you might as well expect people to drink less water.

I don't understand why people talk about "the internet" as if it was a static thing. The internet when I grew up using it prior to the dotcom bust in the late nineties and early two thousands was a set of GeoCities websites where people made their own content. I remember reading the green "great websites" HTML book with examples of beautiful websites (with backgrounds that looked liked notebooks etc).

The modern internet has just become privacy scraping and adverts if you visit websites that do such things and serve such content, but that doesn't stop anyone setting up and running their own domain, which is what the old internet was? If anything, it's easier than ever to "be on the Internet" with your own VPS or Pi at home. Far easier than it ever was. Just stop putting all your content into someone else's locker.

The lack of discoverability has always been a problem on the internet, which is why Yahoo had their category pages and why search engines exist.

People keep talking as if "the internet" is a thing that came and suddenly disappeared. But it hasn't. The only thing that has appeared are apps that use specific domains, where the services behind those domains are colossal vacuums of data. A lot of people use those apps, but it doesn't mean I need to. And it doesn't mean I can't go and search for some specific website holding specific data about a given topic. People keep talking as if that was lost? Am I missing something?

As for it "tearing society apart", society has always been fractured. It just means more people can speak now, and more people can listen; if they're not choosing who they listen to or weighing concepts in their own mind, that isn't the "internet's" fault - that's their own, any more than someone writing a newspaper article in the 1980s would be held responsible for "tearing society apart"?

The real gemini has always been https://www.gemini.com/, the crypto exchange founded by Mark Zuckerberg's twin nemeses, the Winkelvii

I love Gemini but god their SEO is awful, it's very difficult to look for anything related to it. They should consider a new name

ZKPs (as well as C2PA and similar user attestation systems) are quite literally a DRM scheme for the web, fraught with all the usual control and accessibility issues while still being relatively easy to circumvent by a sufficiently motivated and funded actor. Given the huge number of shady companies that run "phone farms" for purposes ranging from social media spam to Spotify royalty farming, I doubt they would even put a dent on this kind of automated abuse. They would however be very effective at locking every Linux and GrapheneOS user out of the internet.

I'm beginning to wonder if one resolution to the Fermi Paradox is an Ouroboros loop of personalized content tailored to be exactly what one craves. No need for hunter killer robots, or global pandemic, just a gradual painless decline into virtual solipsism ought to get the job done. Brawndo for the mind.

Agreed.

Also, it is not a monolith. There are parts of the internet (arguably like HN) that are off the charts when it comes signal-to-noise ratio, for me personally.

I was there in the early days (90's, early 2000's)

It was categorically, undeniably better--that's where the nostalgia is coming from.

There are lots of reasons why this happened (and those are interesting questions.) But simply denying that it was better doesn't seem particularly reasonable to me.

If people are being honest, the nostalgia comes from a time where people only had to interact with other high-income, high-education, broadly-cosmopolitan technology enthusiasts similar to themselves. The moment the internet become used by everyone, including the riff-raff, it suddenly become "not fun".

> It really wears on me and makes me think that Most people just want life to be horrible.

Yet you are the one that sounds miserable.

>Most people just want life to be horrible.

I think you have a little bit of reverse causation going on here.

Pain, loss, failure are far stronger impulses in the human mind because we want to avoid them happening to us. The price for not predicting the tiger behind the bush is death as they say.

This leads to the next problem is that humans developed as smaller hunter gatherer tribes and did not travel far enough to see many new tigers. You could have entire generations dealing with the same old problems and not having to deal with categorically new problems.

You the modern man do not have that luxury. A misinterpreted signal could lead to the world flash frying. Instead of some new invention overturning your career once in your lifetime it could happen every year. The global economy means almost any problem in the world can cause problems for you locally.

The modern world is a catastrophe that violates anti-fragile design. Literately thousands of things have to keep running at any given moment for you not to dehydrate, starve, or catch disease.

As an individual I don't want that, but what do you do about it other than shrug and pay $6 more for a carton of eggs?

How would that even be possible? The internet is a digital creation, how do you plan on banning a digital entity from it?

Analog internet when?

I fear that slop will end up being hi quality ai videos that will hook the masses.

Directionally I think social media is going to be regarded like tetraethyl lead and asbestos. (So is a lot of the ways we use plastic, though maybe not actual e.g. polyethlyene itself)

In the short term, I think AI may do something like this, but in the longer term, I fear that its capacity for propaganda and surveillance will produce something even worse than social media.