Here lies the internet, murdered by generative AI | Corruption everywhere, even in YouTube’s kids content::Corruption everywhere, even in YouTube’s kids content
tbf, kids content on youtube has been a shitshow for awhile. Here’s a short Folding Ideas piece on it, that’s equal parts surreal, sad and scary:
love that guy, good video
What do people mean when they say “the internet” in this context? The social internet of the 2000s?
I say this it feels unimaginative to me to say that the internet is dead. Social media? For the major platforms, sure. But the Fediverse feels alive and novel, and the Internet itself is certainly not going anywhere - could you imagine if email went away?
I don’t know, I am in large agreement that the internet has gotten worse, with that accelerating with generative AI. But I also feel like being driven away from Big Tech platforms has led me to learn more about how the Internet actually works and to discover topics and communities that I hadn’t before. Maybe the internet isn’t wholesale dead, just changing
I think we have to try harder to find good content these days. AI, whilst continuing this, did not start it. The masses becoming ‘online’ started this. More nonsense got posted because everybody thought that every one else should hear their voice, and what they had for breakfast, and how their little toe bends slightly differently to their fourth toe.
It’s just become over populated.
The fediverse feels quite nice to me because it isn’t so populated yet. People don’t seem to be screaming over eachother so much.
Believe it or not, this is what the internet felt like for the most part prior to 2005 or so. I just don’t think there are chat rooms anymore.
There are, but they’re hosted on Discord now. It’s pretty much entirely taken over that niche.
I miss IRC.
Corporate greed and clout chasing ruined the internet long before AI.
Ai just ruined it more
Nah. AI-generated content doesn’t “ruin” the internet any more than Disney can “ruin” Star Wars.
The good stuff is still there. Always has been. Low effort Sora vids don’t reduce the entertainment value of - say - Tom Scott’s oeuvre.
What AI spam does its the same thing all spam has ever done - increases the amount of noise we have to filter.
Noise is always cheaper to manufacture than signal so it always appears to dominate. … but any given noise has no lasting commercial value, while high quality signal always does. That’s why the old newspaper companies are still around even when you can just read Twitter to get the gist of world events.
Intelligence and thoughtful design matter.
We’re gonna see a lot of AI spam for a couple years. But I promise you someone is already working hard to figure out how to identify it.
When I first joined the internet it was considered virtually impossible to detect and block spam reliably. Now, email spam is a rare annoyance that only impacts us occasionally.
Someone will crack AI-detection, or better yet, solve “this is noise” detection once and for all.
What AI spam does its the same thing all spam has ever done - increases the amount of noise we have to filter.
Sure which is exactly why it sucks. Fully automated AI spam bots produce content worse than or equivalent to content mills, and they require very little manpower which means they’re going to churn out more.
Generative AI is basically a machine gun for spammers.
Yeah I hope this actually encourages the development of tools for finding good content, maybe community driven efforts
The problem is not the machine generation technologies. The problem is advertisers - unless you kick advertisers out of an environment, they’ll either ruin it themselves, or encourage other people to do so.
I regularly have YouTube channels on in the background as I work. After a few auto play recommendations that I wasn’t paying attention to, I ran into a couple about astronomy and I got excited for a second, because it was talking about the discovery of Planet X and other stuff… But as I paid attention to it, I recognised some blatant falsehoods, and it began to repeat itself with different verbage. It was really weird stuff too because I enjoy watching/listening to conspiracy and paranormal stuff.
I looked at the channel description and found out it was an entirely AI content generated account/channel. I was flabbergasted.
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Yeah, the difference is it’s expanding exponentially, and will continue to do so.
The real thing that ruined the internet, though, is the walled garden approach. The monetization. They took what was wild and free, creative and equal, and turned into something…gross. Generative AI is just the next step of that. It’s the continuation of a trend. And the acceleration of it. That’s a problem, even if the scaremongering around AI may be a bit overblown.
And while that also may be the case, it also might—this time—not be unfounded. Capitalism has strengthened its stranglehold on everything. Every new leap in tech has worked us harder, increasing profits, while we increase productivity. And that increase in profits, led to richer guys, which means they’re more powerful, and their grip gets tighter. It’s not just the tech that’s happening in a vacuum. At what point is the stranglehold too tight, the demand of people to produce too great, the power and control of business too great? Why not now. Because it’s already unwieldy and inhumane. Where once there were creative artists trying to get their work out there, we now have everyone flooding those spaces with AI generated bullshit.
Again, it’s not just the new tech. It’s this tech’s ability to make things worse than they’ve already been getting, to worsen the massive imbalance between a space for people and a space for business. It’s all business. And we’re now way in the margins. This will make that worse.
I keep hearing people repeat this idea that “they” destroyed the free internet. but isn’t the internet still free and wild? can’t I just create a website by myself and be as creative as I want just like the olden days?
to me, the biggest shift has been in the people, who let themselves simmer in the capitalist pan frog-style as companies took over. we stopped looking at the internet as a place to roam and explore and now expect content to be spoon-fed to us like we didn’t have a choice… we just turned from brave explorers into lazy customers (and products) by our own will (though whether free will even exists is a whole other conversation hehe)
another interesting aspect here is the capitalist mindset that things are not worth if they aren’t productive. in the internet this translates as reach and engagement. there have been absurdly long debates here about the “success” of lemmy/fediverse based solely on quantitative metrics. there’s still internet beyond big techs and content aggregators but we simply don’t think of them as relevant
I think the brave explorers are still here, they’re now just vastly outnumbered. The early Internet was full of those explorer types because they in particular tended to have enough interest to overcome the hurdles of getting on the Internet: namely computers being expensive and somewhat difficult to use. The early Internet was more accessible to intelligent, innovative users, and it reflected its user base. Many got online to explore and continued to explore and innovate once there.
Now millions have a user-friendly computer in their pocket, so practically anyone, even flat earthers, is capable and intelligent enough to use the Internet. Most are attracted not by exploration but by access to specific services that have been advertised to them, especially social media. The Internet continues to reflect its user base, but the user base’s composition has… changed. Let’s just call it changed.
I think the difference is that generative AI is allowing the spammy bullshit to outpace the anti-bullshit measures faster than before. I don’t think it’s demonization to point out that it’s a problem.
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