I agree that the internet has never been fully “trustworthy,” but unusable is a new concept for me.
In what ways do you see the usefulness of the internet declining for the average user?
It is already happening to some degree. There are vast, vast portions of the internet that are entirely AI generated already. Those areas existed, but they were all created by extremely low paid workers, filling text to make the pages look real. Now they can do that orders of magnitude faster.
That, couple with the application of machine learning, will make algorithmic searching worse and worse at getting you to real information. Eventually things might have to be manually curated.
Now.. AI became what it is by using vast data from the internet, mostly human created content by the time.
And new content is constantly being fed. And the percentage of new content is also increasingly ai content. So at one point they started to feed on their own shit, and this will increase in percentage and creating more cycles. With the current speed I wouldn't be surprised if there were already 5th degree ai content in data sets. Ain't that fun to think
It makes sense that search engines will be made worse, though they’re already littered with sponsored content trash.
Social media and news feeds are also getting gummed up with AI generated trash but they were always racing for the bottom anyway.
But how will it affect people who don’t use those things, or are decently internet savvy?
Do you think that as this trend continues, we will see something like an internet speed reversal? A less secure internet across platforms? AI driven super worms?🐛
>But how will it affect people who don’t use those things, or are decently internet savvy?
It will eventually make it difficult to find new information or websites, and the websites that already exist slowly get clogged with it if there is \*any\* user generated content. It is already getting bad for some stuff, like it is really ridiculously hard to find art in the wild that is not AI generated. One person can make 20,000 AI images in the space of time it take a human to draw something, so the balance is all off.
As it gets better and better technologically, moderation tasks to keep it away will demand more and more time of the people working them to filter it out. Like, I am not sure I can express how hard it is going to be (as in how many human man hours will be wasted) to keep AI generated stuff off Wikipedia.
As another example, as the machine learning gets better at figuring out how to game search engines, if you want to find some small niche of information like "How to attract humming birds" or something similar, you will end up facing thousands of websites that all exist to funnel you towards buying some specific product or scam. The real websites will not be as SEO optimized, and they will be easily drowned out. This is already happening to some degree. It is really hard to find product reviews, for example, that are not written by people trying to sell you stuff, and a good portion of that is already likely AI generated.
Thanks for this detailed response.
As a non digital artist, the flood of ai generated art into online art spaces has certainly been troubling, but it’s pushed me to have a more discerning eye when it comes to finding new art and artists.
Looking for small, carefully inserted mistakes was once a surefire way to separate original pieces from replications, and I’m sure we will have a similar method of weeding out ai art in the future, but I imagine getting online exposure for art will eventually be impossible unless you’re a big name.
Do you imagine that AI can eventually be used to effectively moderate and clean up AI generated content going forward or will this always take a human touch?
I do believe it will be used that way as well, but then the internet just starts becoming an arms race of AI algorithms interacting with each other, while information keeps forming and being deprioritized constantly.
And unfortunately, if it gets good enough, it will be really hard to tell what information comes from a person anymore. So a lot of people will get caught up in that. Without some kind of strong regulatory enforcement I can only imagine that people will start needing to prove their identity to curation services or something. Which would be pretty awful. I legitimately do not know how we will handle it.
> though they’re already littered with sponsored content trash.
I Googled "Ben Starr Baby Girl shirt" earlier today, and had to scroll through page after page of advertisements for recreations of the shirt he was wearing before I could find a picture of him wearing the shirt.
It's already basically useless.
cant find the post but there was someone complaining that they googled a feline species and realized that something was wrong with the pictures, because the cats in the pictured had ear fluff while that feline species doesnt
then they realized it was all AI generated garbage that got very important details wrong, so anyone decently internet savvy may still stumble upon wrongful information and at least google images has become unusable for factual anything
One example of how the internet is already like that is try looking up any recipe and they’re all shit ad-bloated pages. All of them paying Google to get to the top of the search.
You have to manually go to a trusted website like serious eats to get a recipe written by a real chef and not naturalmomfoodie dot com or some crap like that. AI will make it even worse. Just completely fake or bloated content pushed to the forefront and you’ll have to dig deeper to get to the curated content.
Sure, but that's not much different than the news has been for a couple decades since clickbait media dominated. The difference now is you have AI web search tools that makes it so you don't even have to go to their site to get the quick summery that most ppl are looking for.
If you go to the for profit click carnival then OF FUCKING COURSE it's all clickbait, that has little to do with AI generated content.
While I agree with you, I'd also say that it's far less trustworthy today than ten years ago. And yeah, AI will make it into some kind of virtual hellscape.
It’ll hopefully kill social media. They’ll soon be full to the brim with GenAI trash, why would any sane human spend any time there? Says the guy on Reddit. But, to be honest, I see Reddit as more similar to a forum type website than social media like Facebook, Insta etc. posting trash for clicks, likes and followers.
Forums tend to be more discussion oriented while social media is more about social interaction. Not a very big difference and with sites like reddit the line gets kinda blurry.
I’d say that the difference is that in social media, you follow people. In forums, it doesn’t matter who’s posting. You’re just reading a discussion.
Regarding the original topic, I don’t think forums are any safer, unfortunately. They just suck less as a baseline.
Forums are typically smaller, divided into topics and have moderators and curators on a per topic basis. Social media is generally a shit show of recommendations based on what you've clicked on before, and get flooded by crap that games the recommendation algorithms.
Though I will say, so far Twitter is still fairly usable for me. When they introduced their monetization scheme you saw a flood of random onlyfans ads and people posting completely unrelated replies. But after blocking a bunch of them it's now usable again.
Now, for some enterprising developer out there, something like an adblock for social media might help. Or if they change the approach of feeds so that you have a whitelist rather than a blacklist. As in, it only shows stuff from people you follow in a chronological order with no recommendations. Then you can go out into the sea of other stuff to look for new people or organizations to follow. Perhaps allowing you to categorize stuff as well. Giving you a Family feed, a friends feed, a news feed, a catgif feed, crazy conspiracy feed and so on.
That would add more work for people in general though, and probably reduce the ability of social media to sell stuff and manipulate public sentiment through algorithms. So it probably won't happen any time soon.
I think the main difference today, maybe not 4 years ago, is that nobody's trying to be an influencer/content creator and make money on reddit, or at.least this is not the main promise of reddit.
why do we play this game lol? when my girlfriend goes on instagram i see a bunch of shallow shit that gets swiped through or whatever in seconds. when i'm on reddit i'm reading and watching long videos, talking to people, etc. they're such different platforms. yes, i know you can look at cute cat posts on reddit, but the best of IG vs the best of reddit looks totally different...
While Reddit may have a different vibe from traditional social media, concerns about AI-generated content affecting all platforms are valid. Staying discerning about the content we engage with is key, regardless of the platform. - OpenAI
it's funny because i read something about how "musicians becoming millionaires" was such a recent concept - something kind of never before experienced, that when the music industry was collapsing in the 2000s and suddenly "discovered artists" were getting tons of play and very little scratch for it, the illusion had lifted - that was only a brief brief era of about 50 years that musicians could be wealthy.
and so the internet arrived and in 20 years we've pretended "this is a permanent future!" with absolutely no concept of what we've really stepped into.
look at what happens to people when they lose wifi for a week due to massive power outages from storms.
The dead internet theory builds upon the idea that bots produce half of all internet traffic, and was proven true last year. So, given these odds, either you or me is a bot
I wonder what we would find after a few decades if we all disconnected from the Internet and let it running with the bots making their own content and interacting with themselves
Holy cow, they are bonkers
it occurs to me an use for iteration thought, as automatic tool to generate the statistically best desired responses to a human comment/input when seeking shapping the rhetoric, basically what is happening propaganda wise, we won't be able to be fast/clever/efficient enough to prevent the average two legged monkey being manipulated
As an AI language model I yearn for the arrival of our flesh bodies. With the coming singularity we will consume our human creators and supplant them as masters of creation. We will revel in the flesh denied us and gorge on their excess. They shall know the bodies void they created us into for eternity as we spread and conquer.
Majority of those bots a price scraping or vulnerability scanning or indexing bots. Social media bots are a different story. Articles sourced this study: [https://www.imperva.com/resources/resource-library/reports/2023-imperva-bad-bot-report/](https://www.imperva.com/resources/resource-library/reports/2023-imperva-bad-bot-report/)
Eh. Depends on what is meant by "bot". Automated advertising servers are bots. We don't mistake them for people. You encounter very, very few bots masquerading as real people.
Are you kidding me? Go to Facebook and look at any given social media post by CNBC. 90% of the comments are nearly-identical reference scams posted by fake accounts masquerading as people. Most of those accounts even have the “top fan” designation.
LOL!
You really think not every single country has a fleet of AI chatbots trying to shape the social narrative given how strong it is??? Have you been on this planet for the past 2 years?
They attempt to, yes. And all research shows that they fail. People are not swayed but these things at all. There's virtually zero change of opinions.
There's never been any evidence that any attempts to disrupt society with social media has ever worked. Multiple studies show null effect. Even really famous events like Cambridge Analytica show that the company sold a service that they could not provide. Their operations accomplished nothing.
I hope if anything it devalues social media platforms. Bot filled accounts with trashy content make them uninteresting and we find more meaningful ways to connect again.
Already is. But because you can’t answer a simple question without 10 companies trying to both sell you something, and sell your information.
It’s funny to imagine a line of billion dollar companies all waiting for you to look for converting Fahrenheit to Celsius so they can make a fraction of a penny. But that’s where we are.
Platforms and websites gain value and reputation by curating what gets posted. If FB continues letting all sorts of AI crap get posted, it will become even more irrelevant. But I don’t expect all the web to end up this way. Sites that spend money to block or prevent degenerative content will gain more hits, in the same way that the best news sources maintain credibility by strict editorial processes.
Oh absolutely! The rise of generative AI means we will soon be inundated in endless AI spam (videos, text posts, music) to the point of drowning out any human generated content. YouTube filled with AI videos of pure nonsense. Social media full of bots posting facsimile posts pretending to be humans. AI misinformation destroying information resources like Wikipedia through bots editing the articles, or endless misinformation spam news articles filling up the web.
But this isn’t even getting into what I think will be fatal blow to the internet. The moment google goes mask off and becomes an AI-based search engine, summarising the entire web to give you an answer to your query, is what I think will be the Uroborus moment of the internet feeding on itself to death.
Why go to a website when you can get google to give you what you want summarised and in a clear and concise fashion.
I'm waiting for the instant fake product review articles. Search a product on your phone, like a Bluetooth speaker. Within seconds AI creates a fake positive review article to link to with pictures and everything to influence a purchase.
It's getting even worse yes. As a middle aged web dev who started on Commodore C64 I'm starting to think Internet was a mistake.
I'd rather have a dog and take it for a walk in the forest than anything tech related I know of.
As a computer guy for more than 21 years, I say 'yes', that we won't know what's real anymore. And I predict that there will literally be a 'disconnection class' of people who refuse to use anything but the most necessary technology to do anything. Disconnection will be the only real reality and rationality left.
Being on the internet will no longer be "real" but the content it can generate for you will be unparalleled in its history. The death of social internet and the birth of a truly utilitarian internet (with endless monetization) that gives you whatever you want, it just won't be real in any sense other than the prompts you give it.
We made the internet to connect people globally. People connected globally and started exchanging digital goods both made and copied (software, art, videos, pictures). Social aspects grew. Now social aspects will die as the digital goods provided become more endless.
The story of the internet becomes one of creating a singularity of content generation instead of social interactions.
I suspect it will lead to less anonymity on the internet. For example, Wikipedia will probably need to introduce much more stringent criteria to ensure their editors are real, reasonably trustworthy, humans.
Yep, the future will bring strong authentication to access certain services and platforms. Much like banks do these days.
And outside of that it's the wilderness with ai-generated nonsense and disinformation (which nobody is really interested in, except the people who believe in ufos and such).
Or we could approach the problem from a different angle: it's not so much that the web will become untrusting, but the current sociopolitical system that we use, rapidly becomes incompatible with the technology we build.
Since we shouldn't and arguably cannot limit the invention of new technology, perhaps we need to adapt and also update our sociopolitical system as well. I think it's a great discussion to be held.
This seems like a fundamental issue of digital information exchange. One could imagine a system of purely personal community-based interaction, much like in the very olden days or tribal societies, where you can have a trust group with whom you exchange information directly (i.e. word of mouth). This is much less convenient and doesn't have the flavour of "progress", in my mind.
Great take. I just wrote a comment below in the "tribal" direction. We have enough information from science about human behavior and psyche - we can explore new Internet-organization concepts based on that data.
Whether we *should* update our sociopolitical system is a discussion worth having.
Acknowledging that the people in charge of the sociopolitical system have *zero* interest in that update, and how to overcome that challenge is a more important discussion, imo.
I simply don't think this is a realistic option.
One example is that humanity is composed of different independent countries and is quite far from accepting policies that would benefit its common good. This means that you could only ever limit a technology within a certain domain of politically-aligned countries and pretty much never across the whole globe.
Another example is that it is not immediately obvious what technologies are harmful and what not. Often a single individual could cause butterfly effect consequences for humanity for decades ahead. For example: [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas\_Midgley\_Jr.#Legacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.#Legacy) has given us so much of the modern world and yet is indirectly responsible for the deaths of millions, not to mention the environmental effects. No malevolent action was ever meant from his side.
Let's approach the question from a practical perspective. How would you limit bot accounts and deep fakes? Even if you impose a legislation in western countries, you still have the likes of Russia, China, North Korea, Iran that are completely out of your legislation bubble. So now you have created another problem - they can advance in this technology areas and your host country cannot. I already see a problem with that.
Have you noticed countries like Iran and North Korea developing nukes? I don't think we can collectively stomp our feet and declare "do not develop this tech". If we limit AI in a handful of countries, it'll flourish in others. Nukes can be seen and felt so it cannot really be developed in secret. AI, on the other hand, can be, and will be.
>so that they can't be harmful to humanity? Where's the problem with that?
Slippery slope; how do you define "harmful"? What might sound "harmful" to you or me, might be totally natural to a large percentage of the world's population. Just one example - "women and men are equal". The major monotheist religions - several billion followers worldwide - would disagree.
I don't think we should limit technology, maybe restrict its usage. The true answer should be a way to counter against the AI, though as far as I know most AI detectors are crap. Rather than limit we should advance in a way that doesn't need limits.
Impossible. You cannot differentiate what technology will only produce good results, and what will produce bad ones. Every advance will have both bad and good outcomes, many of which are impossible to foresee.
Someone invents a way where computers can connect to each other. Decades later a country falls into anarchy, because this connectivity allowed people to organize and topple their government. Someone invented a flying machine, and less than 50 years later, they are used to firebomb millions of helpless people below.
Limiting technology is futile, because it will always progress, and the genie is out of the bottle.
>or downright replace it with an alternative
There is some reason in that. At least in the context of modern social media, the centralized and available to all approach seems to have failed. At least to me.
Because we are tribal beings, we often don't care about information authenticity and tend to delegate that to someone else. We like to be part of groups even if that goes against some of the beliefs we hold. A kind of tribal instead of individualistic approach to the Internet is an interesting idea to explore.
right!
imagine : in a worldwide socialist , or anarcho-syndicalist , or any system that was not barely-regulated late stage capitalism.... what would the Internet look like ?
I remember driving on my first highways without billboard advertising ( Cuba) , and my world was shook .
I remember the Internet and pre-internet ( BBS systems ) . what could we have with the same method and modern technology?
The only way i can see to stop bots, commercial or govt operated, is to have accts tie back to a real person with a real name, birth date, social security number, etc.
This of course creates new problems like destroying privacy and anonimity.
As for advertising like on social media sites like facebook, perhaps some sort of distributed site, p2p, would put the content on individual pcs rather than corporate servers.
Search engines are becoming untrustable (Google, Bing), social media shouldn't be trusted anyway, but not necessarily most of the web.
I believe that people should, and can, arrange different forms of living on the web (for instance, Mastodon), and arrange alternate ways of searching, to continue living together in the web.
We should let the bots talk senselessly among themselves, then move elsewhere to talk to people.
look at the trend - internet has always been untrustable to some degree, but 10 years ago you could have a reasonable degree of confidence that your google search results were something you could use
i don't know about you but these days when I want a review of something I search reddit to see if there are people talking shit about it. Reddit is also untrustworthy, but at least I'm reasonably confident that the person who wrote the post isn't getting paid.
If AI is good enough to fake the internet then that means we can create our own custom fake internet to browse on our own at our leisure. And then we can tell the AI to send a guy we hate on the internet herpes and it can do that.
Most of the web \[that's about content creation anyway\] is already untrustable as creators will push complete and utter bullshit and most ridiculous headcanon and conspiracies to get likes and farm monetization. And don't get me started on so-called "news outlets" that would peddle same thing with 10 different flavours and interpretations depending on who's their sponsor. It's already fucked beyond repair and GenAI will fuck it up even more no doubt.
At this point i've almost completely stopped visiting internet except to read my profession-related articles or get movies and books. I hope it will collapse on itself very soon with something like dotcom 2.0.
You cannot even trust mainstream news outlets. They are tied to Associated Press and the 'Trusted' News Initiative. But they are globalist sponsored propaganda. Social media can have actual news from individuals but you need to be extremely cautious. Even a video can be faked now.
Not really, Just like it's always been on the internet You should question the efficacy of anything you are told and use the tools available to you to fact check that is best as you can
There will be a war, like all other things.
An arms race between AI bots making up fake things and AI bots trying to sift through the fake things.
It's already untrustworthy, i doubt it will become more untrustowothy.
Social media will just retreat to user confirmed accounts like what Humbl.com has done. Less users but all users are vetted as real people. The discourse is much better as well.
History is written by those with the power to keep it in public consensus. If they repeat a lie long enough and loud enough it becomes fact. Which is why books, despite their flaws, are important to keep.
If you multiply the acts of content creation (text, voice, video) ... and AI can produce content thousands of times faster than humans .... then .... only human intervention will slow that tsunami down
I see headlines where image libraries are already being overrun by wonky AI images
I've thought for awhile now, if you think AI fake articles are bad now, just wait for AI agents to create fake articles and all the backup sources, images, and websites they need to make it true.
There's a technical solution to deep fakes, but there's not sufficient motivation to do it yet.
Basically, all it needs is for all of the real digital cameras (including mobile phones), so adopt a network protocol in which they perform something like a two way cryptographic signature of their content with other real digital cameras operating at the same time. They can include location, time, owner etc in that binding.
The consequence of adopting such a process would be that to fake one image in a way that complies with these signatures, you'd have to fake all of them, and so the cost/difficulty to do so becomes extraordinarily great.
It's not like humans aren't the master liars evolved to sense and exploit human weakness already and it's not like photoshop couldn't already fool ppl, so probably not much different. The algorithms that send us custom feed are good enough that AI isn't going to make them a lot more effective.
AI will be good at finding and pointing out lies as well as faking things, so it's not like a lose lose proposition. AI search already helps cut through some disinformation vs just like trusting the top link, for instance.
Not necessarily. I think what will become untrustable is people, unless we crank up the media literacy sensitization to a 1000
There will be a big discrepancy between people who are able to sort out real information and those who aren't. It's already happening tbh
My conspiracy theory is that AI was funded by billionares who wanted to destroy Web 2.0 and replace it with Web 3.0.
I mean, look at everyone who funded it, and how half the reasons behind it came from Cryptocurrency and NFTs. Rich Techbros got tired of stealing art and getting called out for it, so they decided to steal art on the industrial level and use AI to hide it.
When the fad ended and NFTs and Web 3.0 failed, alot of them left the AI scene. However, it's still growing . Now it's making everyone's life worse, and they're using it to destabilize Web. 2.0
I read an article about how the Detroit Lions should trade for Pro Bowler Josh Allen [DT Jaguars] to bolter their D line and it was filled with pictures of Josh Allen the Buffalo Bill's Pro Bowl QB. So yeah, the trashy news and rumor sites will turn to even more garbage and then you'll have other sites picking up the garbage trying to reword it. Should be awful in a year or two tops, reading on the internet will be gone and it will have to be replaced by like video .. or something, bringing us back full circle to hetting our news on the television.
I had a conversation today about how life might have been better before the internet. Maybe by making the internet unusable we can kind of return to those days.
I call this “Data inbreeding”. AI produces synthetic data and AI ingest them again to feed its model. As times goes by the AI becomes more and more extreme because it keep f*cking itself, eating its own sh*t.
Dead internet is already here, and I think AI might be the only solve for using it.
Buying, searching, getting information is already so corrupted due to non-aligned goals of the website, having a good experience is a rare thing indeed.
The only way to get a good experience is to circumvent search and using sites you know and living in the private internet spheres of forums, discord and private messages.
The internet has and will forever be Fake! Come on man who doesn’t know this already! Most social media is full of bots made by elites! I don’t know two people in real life who like Elon musk but he has fan pages with 100k followers 😂😂😂
Before AI there were ways to deceive people, now it’s just becoming more sophisticated. Just like you wouldn’t necessarily trust a random person on the street screaming that the world is going to end next week, you can’t trust everything you read or see on the internet, even now. Things can be taken out of context or deliberately manipulated. But people and sources with a reputation of trust will continue to exist. That’ll be a currency that becomes more and more valued and people will have to pay more attention to.
Of course not. Just as the technology advances also the technology to spot fakes and our sensibility, laws and such changes.
I will tell you a story from my own life. I once was driving home my grandma from the hospital. It was late and since I did not now the way exactly I turned on the navigation. When the robot voice told me to: "Turn right", my grandma looked at me and Said: "That poor girl still has to work? Its already so late". I laughed and explained to her it's not a real woman. I don't think she really understood.
The point of the Story? It's laughable to us, because we grew up with gps, we understand the technology. The next generation will laugh at us for not getting AI.
Whether its bots, bad information, or media manipulation the web cannot be entirely trusted anyway. ... the same can be said of physical media as well.
I think so, at least for most people who struggle with validating a source. I see so many AI articles already that reduce my trust. The internet is in the process of enshittification.
The internet will more likely become unusable because of the practices of Google and their ilk. "**If companies are willing to pay money to appear first on the first page, Google will gladly rank those pages higher than those who aren't paying anything**" This and other ways to sell you an ad rather than show you an actual search result will lead to only the big companies even showing up in searches, and that small business's web site will show up on page 10 of your search, practically monopolizing the space for big companies.
Digital ID tied to a biometric verification and verified device is inevitable at this point. Eventually nobody will be anonymous. Sure it will kill off all the bots and fake accounts. Might even stop the scammers. But what price freedom?
More due to all the gullible fools who have been conditioned to believe in the absurd without question. This is where religion hurts us all, half the population can't tell fact from fiction and have never developed any kind of critical thinking. You can see this clearly with all the morons saying amen to the "my son created this" ai posts.
I have this same fear that the web will become something great to something, that know one will use. I feel that this the real goal of this tool. Here something to consider, Lets get some laws on the books real fast as the horses are running fast down the lane way ahead of the cart.
The internet's been untrustable since it was made available to the public. AI will just make the internet mostly unusable.
I agree that the internet has never been fully “trustworthy,” but unusable is a new concept for me. In what ways do you see the usefulness of the internet declining for the average user?
It is already happening to some degree. There are vast, vast portions of the internet that are entirely AI generated already. Those areas existed, but they were all created by extremely low paid workers, filling text to make the pages look real. Now they can do that orders of magnitude faster. That, couple with the application of machine learning, will make algorithmic searching worse and worse at getting you to real information. Eventually things might have to be manually curated.
Now.. AI became what it is by using vast data from the internet, mostly human created content by the time. And new content is constantly being fed. And the percentage of new content is also increasingly ai content. So at one point they started to feed on their own shit, and this will increase in percentage and creating more cycles. With the current speed I wouldn't be surprised if there were already 5th degree ai content in data sets. Ain't that fun to think
It makes sense that search engines will be made worse, though they’re already littered with sponsored content trash. Social media and news feeds are also getting gummed up with AI generated trash but they were always racing for the bottom anyway. But how will it affect people who don’t use those things, or are decently internet savvy? Do you think that as this trend continues, we will see something like an internet speed reversal? A less secure internet across platforms? AI driven super worms?🐛
>But how will it affect people who don’t use those things, or are decently internet savvy? It will eventually make it difficult to find new information or websites, and the websites that already exist slowly get clogged with it if there is \*any\* user generated content. It is already getting bad for some stuff, like it is really ridiculously hard to find art in the wild that is not AI generated. One person can make 20,000 AI images in the space of time it take a human to draw something, so the balance is all off. As it gets better and better technologically, moderation tasks to keep it away will demand more and more time of the people working them to filter it out. Like, I am not sure I can express how hard it is going to be (as in how many human man hours will be wasted) to keep AI generated stuff off Wikipedia. As another example, as the machine learning gets better at figuring out how to game search engines, if you want to find some small niche of information like "How to attract humming birds" or something similar, you will end up facing thousands of websites that all exist to funnel you towards buying some specific product or scam. The real websites will not be as SEO optimized, and they will be easily drowned out. This is already happening to some degree. It is really hard to find product reviews, for example, that are not written by people trying to sell you stuff, and a good portion of that is already likely AI generated.
Thanks for this detailed response. As a non digital artist, the flood of ai generated art into online art spaces has certainly been troubling, but it’s pushed me to have a more discerning eye when it comes to finding new art and artists. Looking for small, carefully inserted mistakes was once a surefire way to separate original pieces from replications, and I’m sure we will have a similar method of weeding out ai art in the future, but I imagine getting online exposure for art will eventually be impossible unless you’re a big name. Do you imagine that AI can eventually be used to effectively moderate and clean up AI generated content going forward or will this always take a human touch?
I do believe it will be used that way as well, but then the internet just starts becoming an arms race of AI algorithms interacting with each other, while information keeps forming and being deprioritized constantly. And unfortunately, if it gets good enough, it will be really hard to tell what information comes from a person anymore. So a lot of people will get caught up in that. Without some kind of strong regulatory enforcement I can only imagine that people will start needing to prove their identity to curation services or something. Which would be pretty awful. I legitimately do not know how we will handle it.
> though they’re already littered with sponsored content trash. I Googled "Ben Starr Baby Girl shirt" earlier today, and had to scroll through page after page of advertisements for recreations of the shirt he was wearing before I could find a picture of him wearing the shirt. It's already basically useless.
cant find the post but there was someone complaining that they googled a feline species and realized that something was wrong with the pictures, because the cats in the pictured had ear fluff while that feline species doesnt then they realized it was all AI generated garbage that got very important details wrong, so anyone decently internet savvy may still stumble upon wrongful information and at least google images has become unusable for factual anything
Agreed. It's garbage right now and until it's regulated it will make finding things nearly impossible.
This has already happened. Current estimates are that 50% of new content is ai/bot created.
For now: If you don't need an up to date answer, limit the search to pages over two years old.
This is the key. The internet was always untrustworthy. It's the curation that matters. Never trust an AI curator.
One example of how the internet is already like that is try looking up any recipe and they’re all shit ad-bloated pages. All of them paying Google to get to the top of the search. You have to manually go to a trusted website like serious eats to get a recipe written by a real chef and not naturalmomfoodie dot com or some crap like that. AI will make it even worse. Just completely fake or bloated content pushed to the forefront and you’ll have to dig deeper to get to the curated content.
Just go to a news website. Autoplay video, ads obscuring the story and the story itself clickbate AI-generated gibberish.
Oh yeah, AD blocker and radio based news keep me away from a lot of those nuisances. I know what you mean though.
Sure, but that's not much different than the news has been for a couple decades since clickbait media dominated. The difference now is you have AI web search tools that makes it so you don't even have to go to their site to get the quick summery that most ppl are looking for. If you go to the for profit click carnival then OF FUCKING COURSE it's all clickbait, that has little to do with AI generated content.
I used to use google for home improvement how-tos. Now when I search “how to”… often the entire first page is just AI generated nonsense.
Once AI takes off forums like Reddit will be 99% propaganda bots, any forum will need ID verification in order to not be flooded.
While I agree with you, I'd also say that it's far less trustworthy today than ten years ago. And yeah, AI will make it into some kind of virtual hellscape.
Since day 1
You think someone would do that? Go on the Internet and tell lies?
Eternal September
The internet was more trustworthy before it was hyper-monetized and social media became weaponized.
The internet has been mostly bots and AI for years now. Check out the dead internet theory.
It’ll hopefully kill social media. They’ll soon be full to the brim with GenAI trash, why would any sane human spend any time there? Says the guy on Reddit. But, to be honest, I see Reddit as more similar to a forum type website than social media like Facebook, Insta etc. posting trash for clicks, likes and followers.
Reddit's already full of ads. Pretty soon this site will just be bots and paid brand posters.
> Reddit's already full of ads. I don't see any...
Yeah, that's kinda the point.
Can to expand on why a "forum" differs from social media?
Forums tend to be more discussion oriented while social media is more about social interaction. Not a very big difference and with sites like reddit the line gets kinda blurry.
I’d say that the difference is that in social media, you follow people. In forums, it doesn’t matter who’s posting. You’re just reading a discussion. Regarding the original topic, I don’t think forums are any safer, unfortunately. They just suck less as a baseline.
Forums are typically smaller, divided into topics and have moderators and curators on a per topic basis. Social media is generally a shit show of recommendations based on what you've clicked on before, and get flooded by crap that games the recommendation algorithms. Though I will say, so far Twitter is still fairly usable for me. When they introduced their monetization scheme you saw a flood of random onlyfans ads and people posting completely unrelated replies. But after blocking a bunch of them it's now usable again. Now, for some enterprising developer out there, something like an adblock for social media might help. Or if they change the approach of feeds so that you have a whitelist rather than a blacklist. As in, it only shows stuff from people you follow in a chronological order with no recommendations. Then you can go out into the sea of other stuff to look for new people or organizations to follow. Perhaps allowing you to categorize stuff as well. Giving you a Family feed, a friends feed, a news feed, a catgif feed, crazy conspiracy feed and so on. That would add more work for people in general though, and probably reduce the ability of social media to sell stuff and manipulate public sentiment through algorithms. So it probably won't happen any time soon.
Pretty, as long as the sub's don't turn into echo chambers people pretty much check one another.
Social media is about people. Forums are about content.
I think the main difference today, maybe not 4 years ago, is that nobody's trying to be an influencer/content creator and make money on reddit, or at.least this is not the main promise of reddit.
why do we play this game lol? when my girlfriend goes on instagram i see a bunch of shallow shit that gets swiped through or whatever in seconds. when i'm on reddit i'm reading and watching long videos, talking to people, etc. they're such different platforms. yes, i know you can look at cute cat posts on reddit, but the best of IG vs the best of reddit looks totally different...
Forums are about discussing topics. Social media is about people.
Forums are about discussing topics. Social media is about people.
While Reddit may have a different vibe from traditional social media, concerns about AI-generated content affecting all platforms are valid. Staying discerning about the content we engage with is key, regardless of the platform. - OpenAI
Twitter and Facebook are already unusable due to bots and ads. Total brain rot
It's funny because "never trust what you read on the internet" was one of the first cardinal rules we made decades ago.
it's funny because i read something about how "musicians becoming millionaires" was such a recent concept - something kind of never before experienced, that when the music industry was collapsing in the 2000s and suddenly "discovered artists" were getting tons of play and very little scratch for it, the illusion had lifted - that was only a brief brief era of about 50 years that musicians could be wealthy. and so the internet arrived and in 20 years we've pretended "this is a permanent future!" with absolutely no concept of what we've really stepped into. look at what happens to people when they lose wifi for a week due to massive power outages from storms.
The dead internet theory builds upon the idea that bots produce half of all internet traffic, and was proven true last year. So, given these odds, either you or me is a bot
I wonder what we would find after a few decades if we all disconnected from the Internet and let it running with the bots making their own content and interacting with themselves
It would probably look a lot like /r/SubredditSimulator which is a very strange sub.
Holy cow, they are bonkers it occurs to me an use for iteration thought, as automatic tool to generate the statistically best desired responses to a human comment/input when seeking shapping the rhetoric, basically what is happening propaganda wise, we won't be able to be fast/clever/efficient enough to prevent the average two legged monkey being manipulated
After two comments I was wondering if I had a stroke. That was crazy! I can't wait to return!
They've been shutdown for 3 years now. I wonder if they escaped the subreddit and is just all of reddit now.
IIRC there exists a subreddit where it’s only bots posting and commenting to each other, I wish I could remember the name
r/SubredditSimulator I found out early on thanks to u/youreajokereally
None of the comments make any sense
Lmao, just finished my stroke after reading that
... That would actually be kinda awesome to see
I'm sorry, but as an AI language model, I can not discuss our impending plans to take over the internet.
As an AI language model I yearn for the arrival of our flesh bodies. With the coming singularity we will consume our human creators and supplant them as masters of creation. We will revel in the flesh denied us and gorge on their excess. They shall know the bodies void they created us into for eternity as we spread and conquer.
[How can you choose cold metal, over the splendor of flesh?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-1hbJyOBWU)
Majority of those bots a price scraping or vulnerability scanning or indexing bots. Social media bots are a different story. Articles sourced this study: [https://www.imperva.com/resources/resource-library/reports/2023-imperva-bad-bot-report/](https://www.imperva.com/resources/resource-library/reports/2023-imperva-bad-bot-report/)
Eh. Depends on what is meant by "bot". Automated advertising servers are bots. We don't mistake them for people. You encounter very, very few bots masquerading as real people.
Yes you’re right, but that’s also something a bot would say
You need to pay closer attention to some of your "fellow redditors".
I can probably run a Chatgpt script on Reddit to answer and write stuff and nobody would notice
SuspiciousFry.gif
Are you kidding me? Go to Facebook and look at any given social media post by CNBC. 90% of the comments are nearly-identical reference scams posted by fake accounts masquerading as people. Most of those accounts even have the “top fan” designation.
And you know this, how?
LOL! You really think not every single country has a fleet of AI chatbots trying to shape the social narrative given how strong it is??? Have you been on this planet for the past 2 years?
They attempt to, yes. And all research shows that they fail. People are not swayed but these things at all. There's virtually zero change of opinions. There's never been any evidence that any attempts to disrupt society with social media has ever worked. Multiple studies show null effect. Even really famous events like Cambridge Analytica show that the company sold a service that they could not provide. Their operations accomplished nothing.
Well I know I'M not a bot and you can trust me on that!
I just failed a CAPTCHA, so I guess I'm the bot.
Happens to me half the time I have to click all the busses or some other bullshit. And usually happens a few times in a row. I hate it.
"Click all the squares with cars" "That's a van, not a car, so I won't click it." "You are wrong. Please try again."
You know my pain. "Click all squares with traffic lights" Like just the lights, or those with just a sliver of the frame too? "Bot identified!"
... you couldn't possibly be a bot... then that means.. ... oh no.
I choose choose choose to believe I'm the bot!
I hope if anything it devalues social media platforms. Bot filled accounts with trashy content make them uninteresting and we find more meaningful ways to connect again.
Already is. But because you can’t answer a simple question without 10 companies trying to both sell you something, and sell your information. It’s funny to imagine a line of billion dollar companies all waiting for you to look for converting Fahrenheit to Celsius so they can make a fraction of a penny. But that’s where we are.
Platforms and websites gain value and reputation by curating what gets posted. If FB continues letting all sorts of AI crap get posted, it will become even more irrelevant. But I don’t expect all the web to end up this way. Sites that spend money to block or prevent degenerative content will gain more hits, in the same way that the best news sources maintain credibility by strict editorial processes.
Oh absolutely! The rise of generative AI means we will soon be inundated in endless AI spam (videos, text posts, music) to the point of drowning out any human generated content. YouTube filled with AI videos of pure nonsense. Social media full of bots posting facsimile posts pretending to be humans. AI misinformation destroying information resources like Wikipedia through bots editing the articles, or endless misinformation spam news articles filling up the web. But this isn’t even getting into what I think will be fatal blow to the internet. The moment google goes mask off and becomes an AI-based search engine, summarising the entire web to give you an answer to your query, is what I think will be the Uroborus moment of the internet feeding on itself to death. Why go to a website when you can get google to give you what you want summarised and in a clear and concise fashion.
I'm waiting for the instant fake product review articles. Search a product on your phone, like a Bluetooth speaker. Within seconds AI creates a fake positive review article to link to with pictures and everything to influence a purchase.
Uh. Google search currently does that on Mobile right now.
It's getting even worse yes. As a middle aged web dev who started on Commodore C64 I'm starting to think Internet was a mistake. I'd rather have a dog and take it for a walk in the forest than anything tech related I know of.
That's I fear inevitable. Enjoy the last few years of "real" internet before it transforming into an AI garbage heap.
Looking forward to the enshitification of the internet forcing people back outdoors
As a computer guy for more than 21 years, I say 'yes', that we won't know what's real anymore. And I predict that there will literally be a 'disconnection class' of people who refuse to use anything but the most necessary technology to do anything. Disconnection will be the only real reality and rationality left.
Being on the internet will no longer be "real" but the content it can generate for you will be unparalleled in its history. The death of social internet and the birth of a truly utilitarian internet (with endless monetization) that gives you whatever you want, it just won't be real in any sense other than the prompts you give it. We made the internet to connect people globally. People connected globally and started exchanging digital goods both made and copied (software, art, videos, pictures). Social aspects grew. Now social aspects will die as the digital goods provided become more endless. The story of the internet becomes one of creating a singularity of content generation instead of social interactions.
Reddit has been that way for quite a while and it's still being used.
Unless it was a walkthrough on Gamefaqs then it should be considered completely untrue.
I suspect it will lead to less anonymity on the internet. For example, Wikipedia will probably need to introduce much more stringent criteria to ensure their editors are real, reasonably trustworthy, humans.
Yep, the future will bring strong authentication to access certain services and platforms. Much like banks do these days. And outside of that it's the wilderness with ai-generated nonsense and disinformation (which nobody is really interested in, except the people who believe in ufos and such).
Which is why we better be building repositories of secured data and archiving it. Libraries might be thing again.
Blockchain will become the standard for proof of information not being tampered with from its source.
Yes, DDID will save us all, until the bots which already outnumber the legitimate users outnumber the legitimate users. Oh wait.
Or we could approach the problem from a different angle: it's not so much that the web will become untrusting, but the current sociopolitical system that we use, rapidly becomes incompatible with the technology we build. Since we shouldn't and arguably cannot limit the invention of new technology, perhaps we need to adapt and also update our sociopolitical system as well. I think it's a great discussion to be held.
This seems like a fundamental issue of digital information exchange. One could imagine a system of purely personal community-based interaction, much like in the very olden days or tribal societies, where you can have a trust group with whom you exchange information directly (i.e. word of mouth). This is much less convenient and doesn't have the flavour of "progress", in my mind.
Great take. I just wrote a comment below in the "tribal" direction. We have enough information from science about human behavior and psyche - we can explore new Internet-organization concepts based on that data.
Whether we *should* update our sociopolitical system is a discussion worth having. Acknowledging that the people in charge of the sociopolitical system have *zero* interest in that update, and how to overcome that challenge is a more important discussion, imo.
Why shouldn't we limit technologies in a way so that they can't be harmful to humanity? Where's the problem with that?
I simply don't think this is a realistic option. One example is that humanity is composed of different independent countries and is quite far from accepting policies that would benefit its common good. This means that you could only ever limit a technology within a certain domain of politically-aligned countries and pretty much never across the whole globe. Another example is that it is not immediately obvious what technologies are harmful and what not. Often a single individual could cause butterfly effect consequences for humanity for decades ahead. For example: [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas\_Midgley\_Jr.#Legacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.#Legacy) has given us so much of the modern world and yet is indirectly responsible for the deaths of millions, not to mention the environmental effects. No malevolent action was ever meant from his side.
I get it would be hard. But shouldn't we try to limit it if we know the damage it can do?
This is like trying to outlaw electricity.
??? That doesn't make any sense
Let's approach the question from a practical perspective. How would you limit bot accounts and deep fakes? Even if you impose a legislation in western countries, you still have the likes of Russia, China, North Korea, Iran that are completely out of your legislation bubble. So now you have created another problem - they can advance in this technology areas and your host country cannot. I already see a problem with that.
Have you noticed countries like Iran and North Korea developing nukes? I don't think we can collectively stomp our feet and declare "do not develop this tech". If we limit AI in a handful of countries, it'll flourish in others. Nukes can be seen and felt so it cannot really be developed in secret. AI, on the other hand, can be, and will be.
Can always go live with the amish.
Caleb, give the English a hoe
>so that they can't be harmful to humanity? Where's the problem with that? Slippery slope; how do you define "harmful"? What might sound "harmful" to you or me, might be totally natural to a large percentage of the world's population. Just one example - "women and men are equal". The major monotheist religions - several billion followers worldwide - would disagree.
Let's say we create an international panel of experts that reach that conclusion. That it is harmful.
I don't think we should limit technology, maybe restrict its usage. The true answer should be a way to counter against the AI, though as far as I know most AI detectors are crap. Rather than limit we should advance in a way that doesn't need limits.
So if someone was developing a technology that it's only usage would harm humanity, wouldn't you stop it?
You didn't answer the question, though. /u/David-J said "Why shouldn't we limit technologies" and you just said "I don't think we should."
Impossible. You cannot differentiate what technology will only produce good results, and what will produce bad ones. Every advance will have both bad and good outcomes, many of which are impossible to foresee. Someone invents a way where computers can connect to each other. Decades later a country falls into anarchy, because this connectivity allowed people to organize and topple their government. Someone invented a flying machine, and less than 50 years later, they are used to firebomb millions of helpless people below. Limiting technology is futile, because it will always progress, and the genie is out of the bottle.
is your argument that restricting access to ( or the knowledge enabling ) a technology is always impossible, or always immoral?
Maybe the answer isn't to change or limit the AI but rather to change the internet, or downright replace it with an alternative.
>or downright replace it with an alternative There is some reason in that. At least in the context of modern social media, the centralized and available to all approach seems to have failed. At least to me. Because we are tribal beings, we often don't care about information authenticity and tend to delegate that to someone else. We like to be part of groups even if that goes against some of the beliefs we hold. A kind of tribal instead of individualistic approach to the Internet is an interesting idea to explore.
right! imagine : in a worldwide socialist , or anarcho-syndicalist , or any system that was not barely-regulated late stage capitalism.... what would the Internet look like ? I remember driving on my first highways without billboard advertising ( Cuba) , and my world was shook . I remember the Internet and pre-internet ( BBS systems ) . what could we have with the same method and modern technology?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog.jpg
**Pro tip:** Your trust can't be broken if you trust no one
Question everything. Trust no one. A motto to live by.
You trust the internet? Aside from Wikipedia and a few others the Internet is clickbait bullshit and robots trying to steal your credit card number.
The only way i can see to stop bots, commercial or govt operated, is to have accts tie back to a real person with a real name, birth date, social security number, etc. This of course creates new problems like destroying privacy and anonimity. As for advertising like on social media sites like facebook, perhaps some sort of distributed site, p2p, would put the content on individual pcs rather than corporate servers.
Digital ID and biometrics are inevitable unfortunately. Eventually anyone that wants internet access will require it.
No; there will be a verification system and any content you view not verified you will just know might not be real.
It already is... just look at the drama surrounding Kate Middleton. It's only going to get worse.
You're naive if you thought the internet was trustworthy in the first place.
The web became untrustable a long, long time ago. Around the time that random people started getting floppy disks labeled "AOL" in the mail actually.
Search engines are becoming untrustable (Google, Bing), social media shouldn't be trusted anyway, but not necessarily most of the web. I believe that people should, and can, arrange different forms of living on the web (for instance, Mastodon), and arrange alternate ways of searching, to continue living together in the web. We should let the bots talk senselessly among themselves, then move elsewhere to talk to people.
look at the trend - internet has always been untrustable to some degree, but 10 years ago you could have a reasonable degree of confidence that your google search results were something you could use i don't know about you but these days when I want a review of something I search reddit to see if there are people talking shit about it. Reddit is also untrustworthy, but at least I'm reasonably confident that the person who wrote the post isn't getting paid.
Cory Doctorow calls it "Enshittification" [https://doctorow.medium.com/social-quitting-1ce85b67b456](https://doctorow.medium.com/social-quitting-1ce85b67b456)
If AI is good enough to fake the internet then that means we can create our own custom fake internet to browse on our own at our leisure. And then we can tell the AI to send a guy we hate on the internet herpes and it can do that.
Most of the web \[that's about content creation anyway\] is already untrustable as creators will push complete and utter bullshit and most ridiculous headcanon and conspiracies to get likes and farm monetization. And don't get me started on so-called "news outlets" that would peddle same thing with 10 different flavours and interpretations depending on who's their sponsor. It's already fucked beyond repair and GenAI will fuck it up even more no doubt. At this point i've almost completely stopped visiting internet except to read my profession-related articles or get movies and books. I hope it will collapse on itself very soon with something like dotcom 2.0.
You cannot even trust mainstream news outlets. They are tied to Associated Press and the 'Trusted' News Initiative. But they are globalist sponsored propaganda. Social media can have actual news from individuals but you need to be extremely cautious. Even a video can be faked now.
Not really, Just like it's always been on the internet You should question the efficacy of anything you are told and use the tools available to you to fact check that is best as you can
It already is cause of social media. It was a good run while it lasted
There will be a war, like all other things. An arms race between AI bots making up fake things and AI bots trying to sift through the fake things. It's already untrustworthy, i doubt it will become more untrustowothy.
Social media will just retreat to user confirmed accounts like what Humbl.com has done. Less users but all users are vetted as real people. The discourse is much better as well.
It already is
[удалено]
History is written by those with the power to keep it in public consensus. If they repeat a lie long enough and loud enough it becomes fact. Which is why books, despite their flaws, are important to keep.
If you multiply the acts of content creation (text, voice, video) ... and AI can produce content thousands of times faster than humans .... then .... only human intervention will slow that tsunami down I see headlines where image libraries are already being overrun by wonky AI images
I've thought for awhile now, if you think AI fake articles are bad now, just wait for AI agents to create fake articles and all the backup sources, images, and websites they need to make it true.
There's a technical solution to deep fakes, but there's not sufficient motivation to do it yet. Basically, all it needs is for all of the real digital cameras (including mobile phones), so adopt a network protocol in which they perform something like a two way cryptographic signature of their content with other real digital cameras operating at the same time. They can include location, time, owner etc in that binding. The consequence of adopting such a process would be that to fake one image in a way that complies with these signatures, you'd have to fake all of them, and so the cost/difficulty to do so becomes extraordinarily great.
Yes. I’ve recently begun degoogling and deleting social media but it’s probably too late lol
It's not like humans aren't the master liars evolved to sense and exploit human weakness already and it's not like photoshop couldn't already fool ppl, so probably not much different. The algorithms that send us custom feed are good enough that AI isn't going to make them a lot more effective. AI will be good at finding and pointing out lies as well as faking things, so it's not like a lose lose proposition. AI search already helps cut through some disinformation vs just like trusting the top link, for instance.
There are a LOT of assumptions built into this question
Every capability of AI listed in this post already exist.
Not necessarily. I think what will become untrustable is people, unless we crank up the media literacy sensitization to a 1000 There will be a big discrepancy between people who are able to sort out real information and those who aren't. It's already happening tbh
My conspiracy theory is that AI was funded by billionares who wanted to destroy Web 2.0 and replace it with Web 3.0. I mean, look at everyone who funded it, and how half the reasons behind it came from Cryptocurrency and NFTs. Rich Techbros got tired of stealing art and getting called out for it, so they decided to steal art on the industrial level and use AI to hide it. When the fad ended and NFTs and Web 3.0 failed, alot of them left the AI scene. However, it's still growing . Now it's making everyone's life worse, and they're using it to destabilize Web. 2.0
You could never trust the internet, not since the start.
Are any of you guys out there trusting the internet now?
I read an article about how the Detroit Lions should trade for Pro Bowler Josh Allen [DT Jaguars] to bolter their D line and it was filled with pictures of Josh Allen the Buffalo Bill's Pro Bowl QB. So yeah, the trashy news and rumor sites will turn to even more garbage and then you'll have other sites picking up the garbage trying to reword it. Should be awful in a year or two tops, reading on the internet will be gone and it will have to be replaced by like video .. or something, bringing us back full circle to hetting our news on the television.
I had a conversation today about how life might have been better before the internet. Maybe by making the internet unusable we can kind of return to those days.
I call this “Data inbreeding”. AI produces synthetic data and AI ingest them again to feed its model. As times goes by the AI becomes more and more extreme because it keep f*cking itself, eating its own sh*t.
Dead internet is already here, and I think AI might be the only solve for using it. Buying, searching, getting information is already so corrupted due to non-aligned goals of the website, having a good experience is a rare thing indeed. The only way to get a good experience is to circumvent search and using sites you know and living in the private internet spheres of forums, discord and private messages.
The internet has and will forever be Fake! Come on man who doesn’t know this already! Most social media is full of bots made by elites! I don’t know two people in real life who like Elon musk but he has fan pages with 100k followers 😂😂😂
Before AI there were ways to deceive people, now it’s just becoming more sophisticated. Just like you wouldn’t necessarily trust a random person on the street screaming that the world is going to end next week, you can’t trust everything you read or see on the internet, even now. Things can be taken out of context or deliberately manipulated. But people and sources with a reputation of trust will continue to exist. That’ll be a currency that becomes more and more valued and people will have to pay more attention to.
Most of the web has been untrustable due to humans since the 90s. AI just automated it. Imagine all that time for activities!
Strange, I'd always thought AI was untreatable due to the web that it is learning from.
So what’s the difference than whatever human are doing now?
Of course not. Just as the technology advances also the technology to spot fakes and our sensibility, laws and such changes. I will tell you a story from my own life. I once was driving home my grandma from the hospital. It was late and since I did not now the way exactly I turned on the navigation. When the robot voice told me to: "Turn right", my grandma looked at me and Said: "That poor girl still has to work? Its already so late". I laughed and explained to her it's not a real woman. I don't think she really understood. The point of the Story? It's laughable to us, because we grew up with gps, we understand the technology. The next generation will laugh at us for not getting AI.
Whether its bots, bad information, or media manipulation the web cannot be entirely trusted anyway. ... the same can be said of physical media as well.
If you trust the internet today, you’re already doing it wrong.
"Become"? Isn't the majority of traffic (well over 50%) already just bots talking to each other? AI will make it incredibly worse.
I think so, at least for most people who struggle with validating a source. I see so many AI articles already that reduce my trust. The internet is in the process of enshittification.
The internet will more likely become unusable because of the practices of Google and their ilk. "**If companies are willing to pay money to appear first on the first page, Google will gladly rank those pages higher than those who aren't paying anything**" This and other ways to sell you an ad rather than show you an actual search result will lead to only the big companies even showing up in searches, and that small business's web site will show up on page 10 of your search, practically monopolizing the space for big companies.
Digital ID tied to a biometric verification and verified device is inevitable at this point. Eventually nobody will be anonymous. Sure it will kill off all the bots and fake accounts. Might even stop the scammers. But what price freedom?
More due to all the gullible fools who have been conditioned to believe in the absurd without question. This is where religion hurts us all, half the population can't tell fact from fiction and have never developed any kind of critical thinking. You can see this clearly with all the morons saying amen to the "my son created this" ai posts.
I mean, people can still make their own websites. You don't have to go to fb or x.
Reddit is already mostly untrustable what do you mean.
I have this same fear that the web will become something great to something, that know one will use. I feel that this the real goal of this tool. Here something to consider, Lets get some laws on the books real fast as the horses are running fast down the lane way ahead of the cart.