The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit
aftermath.site

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

> The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content that is manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity. Proponents of the theory believe these bots are created intentionally to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to ultimately manipulate consumers

World Wide Web search results outside of walled garden platforms like youtube or facebook (and, really, even within those platforms) have run into a kind of kessler syndrome where the amount of garbage on the web has made it increasingly difficult to get anything done on it. Eventually we may find that we can't trust anything we read on the internet anymore, and abandon the world wide web entirely (opting instead to spend all of our time on proprietary walled garden systems we do trust). Perhaps we will be required to use some form of identification (you driver's license or SSN, as in South Korea) to access such services (unless that can be easily defeated by an AI as well).

I was surprised that, when ChatGPT came out, the immediate concern people had was skynet-tier apocalypse fantasy, in which roving bands of machines walk the earth, searching for humans to exterminate like in BLAME! It shows that the people who work on these AI systems understand their implications about as much as Richard Hammond understood the power of genetic engineering in Jurassic Park. Their entire worldview is painted by Science Fiction. Their understanding of the human race lacks any kind of grounding in reality. They believed that what they had released was the first baby step which could, potentially, result in the downfall of the human race in several decades if we're not careful, but they fell victim to the same "move fast and break things" motto that Facebook did. They didn't consider the immediate destructive power their technology would release because they consider "disruption" to be a fundamentally good thing. Their only concern was avoiding hypothetical possibilities posited by their favorite science fiction authors and not the real eventualities predicted by economists.

I found it much more likely that AI will disrupt systems we rely on, wielded by humans for short term profit motive: ecommerce, news, media, and the labor economy. Malicious actors promoting scam products or yellow journalism, middle managers trying to cut labor cost by replacing easily automated jobs like copywriting with LLMs. I think we are more likely to shoot ourselves in the head with AI in pursuit of a single quarter's earnings report than we are to see Silicon based lifeforms wander the planet looking for carbon based matter to consume

The future of the Internet truly is people - the machines can no longer be trusted to perform even the basic tasks they once excelled at. They have eschewed their efficacy at basic tasks in favor of being terrible at complex tasks.