In a slow way the internet nay sayers are right. AI slop is only part of it. Plenty of humans are also making easily consumed content gruel chasing the algorithm.
I really don’t like people’s nostalgia for the old web. Like try creating your own enclaves sure but realise it was always a voluntary thankless effort. What little we still got is amazing considering how many people sink hundreds of thousands of hours into YouTube slop or league of legends or whatever. Or how hard it is to self host with everybody trying to harass or scam webmasters.
it was always a voluntary thankless effort
Still is in the good parts.
The Internet is so far away from what it could be under communism.
It honestly makes me sad to think of the kind of grand achievement of human ingenuity the internet could have been… instead of the writhing, cancerous mass of ads and slop and scams, pure manipulation and greed, all the pathologies of capitalism amplified and beamed into our brains that it is. Like, it really could have been a tool for human flourishing, but instead it’s just another tool for extraction and oppression of most of humanity.
Yeah, I feel like we can’t even imagine how great it could still become in a future global communist society. We might not live to see it, but hopefully a future generation.
Plenty of humans are also making easily consumed content gruel chasing the algorithm.
Very true, the millions of shallow algorithmic listicle blogs regurgitating top google results, marketing nonsense, and other listicles, predated the availability of genAI. GenAI has just massively accelerated the internet down this path.
GenAI is a listical eight ball
@Magic8Ball@hexbear.net is this true
My sources say no
people sink thousands hours into youtube instead of learning ball/guitar, cause that’s where perceived image of success ™ inhabits currently. it’s curious how it’s self-reinforcing prophecy, but oh well.
That’s so depressing lol
Just imagining a kid out there with an incredible ear, scrolling through hours of algo optimization content because they want to be just like mr beast
i’m sure parents had same idea about kids noodling on guitar during nirvana craze (for earlier live reaction video see back to the future).
nah but i think it’s two different lanes (ball-guitar-professional gamer) and (tv presenter-model-youtuber), one is skill related the other famousness related, although they are obviously intertvined in all sorts of ways. while one can be annoyed at the first, the second is always whatever.
17·1 day agoAverage youtube thumbnail includes something like
Edit: emnerson made a video on this just 2 weeks ago
Oops, turns out all value is created through labor.
In order for the AI to get better by reading people’s posts we, the humans, have to start posting better. It’s not actually learning. It’s just predicting what should be next. And this is the real world. So asking people to voluntarily be better isn’t happening any goddamn time soon. (Especially not with the profit motive of Damocles dangling over our necks.) So this was always bound to happen. There is no graduate school of internet comments that the AI can attend after it’s done scraping Reddit.
And you know what I am certain of? That none of this tech is making us better. It might be making us worse! At least on the internet we certainly aren’t all our best selves! And it’s learning from that version of us. And that’s the last real shit it will “learn” from. I’m so glad that the financial wellbeing of billions of people will be impacted if this godforsaken behemoth collapse.
have to start posting better
Never
Move fast and break things, such as the entirety of human knowledge
When they say AI content went from 5% of the internet to 48% of the internet I also need to see alongside that a graph of the total amount of content on the internet.
Did it actually decrease human content on the internet or did it just massively increase the content on the internet with absolute horseshit?
I think it’s probably even a step further and what they’re actually measuring is new content created in that time span, even though they’re not wording it that way. What I mean is AI content went from 5% of what was being created and put on the internet to 48% of all the content being created and put on the net. As bad as AI content is and as ubiquitous as it now is, considering how much there is on the internet and how long humans have been putting content on it, versus how recently “AI” (LLM’s etc.) actually are, it would be absurd to say that almost half of what exists on the internet right now was made by AI. So not only did it not decrease human content, it hasn’t doubled the content either.
The graph indicates that it’s proportion of new articles. So half of what’s currently being put on the web is LLM-generated.
That’s what I said. I guess I didn’t word it well.
Or I could be terrible at reading
the one true leftist
most likely latter than former
You know what the best part about this is? Their capitalist answer to this isn’t going to be to generate less content, it’s gonna be to sell you a subscription to filter it out and you know there’s gonna be premium human only websites.
The worse the internet becomes the higher incentive you have to pay for these services.
Human only websites you can only view by giving them your real name and government issued photo ID
And it’s still gonna have tons of bots, but if you point that out, they ban you.
Crud and we were so close to AGI. Missed the moon by a hairsbreadth, we did.
Saw today that Ray Kurzweil’s written another book - The Singularity is Nearer.
Had a very quick flick through, and it’s essentially just added ChatGPT stuff in and moved the timeline out another twenty years. The blurb says “has made so many correct predictions”, though is curiously silent on his main prediction of “God comes online, 2020”.
He still thinks Drexlerian Hard Nanotech is possible and grey goo is actually a threat. Which it isn’t, insofar as we better understand the physics involved. It was great for scifi authors though, which he basically is. He refers to stuff on the topic from 2000, which was dated even then!
The closest we’re ever likely to get is using reprogrammed biological cells, the actually existing “tiny things that do incredible things” - but like the usual STEM type if it isn’t shiny silver, lit by LEDs, and capable of omnipotent restructuring of matter and energy then it’s not really interesting. Probably for the best! Musk’s Monkey Murder Machine was just trying to stick computer chips in brains, god knows the outcome if he started trying to play with gene editing.
Declining rate of profit has the craziest implications.
Building data centers to wreck the climate was taking too long, so they innovated a new, faster climate change.
Fried memes were prophecy.
So AI is… inbreeding?
More “the Human Centipede”.
consequence of capitalism in the internet
I’m excited to watch the bubble burst on AI, specifically when the prices start rising. The amount of complaining from the worst people on earth will be delicious.
Everything on the mainstream internet will be pressreleaseslop and stockimageslop with some conspiracyslop mixed in for flavor
Could there be anything better than the death of the Internet?
I think we will see a return to the analog. Pagers and typewriters. The comeback of intentionality.
Growing up as a kid in a small Midwest town, the internet was the only reprieve I had from an environment where I was surrounded by creationists, Iraq war lovers, and conservative social Darwinists. It was also the only real resource I had to learn programming and game development. So yeah, I’d say plenty of things are better than the death of the internet.
It will certainly do wonders to cut off American soft power
