The Post-AI Internet Doesn't Look Great(jordangoodman.xyz) |
The Post-AI Internet Doesn't Look Great(jordangoodman.xyz) |
Every document I read at work has been AI generated at some capacity. It's becoming so annoying that I have to use AI to create a summary.
I don't know if anyone agrees, but AI generated documents are so verbose and explain things in an overcomplicated way that makes me exhausted after reading. Sometimes I don't even understand what AI is trying to explain
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.
wc .\ledger_reqs.md
1090 9347 68071 .\ledger_reqs.mdHowever, terse lists of bullets without any padding or phatic expressions are considered rude. Perhaps previously a long message indicated you'd put time and thought into it.
Maybe AI will invert the social signalling, and make conciseness polite. As it should be.
What is the point is a question to a whole lot of human practices outside of AI, well, that I should say that AI is pointing out.
Huge numbers of us have mostly useless jobs. That's not to say they are completely useless, but maybe like at most 50% of the job is useful. The rest just gets filled with busy work and worthless text generation and TPS reports.
We should probably put some more thought toward that part and what it will mean.
Also, it seems that writing encodes far more information about personality and mental state of the writer than it seems at first glance. A key problem is that machine-generated writing does not have this, it is obvious that it doesn’t have this, and there is no path towards fixing it.
The history of automation is filled with cases where the result has been lower quality goods at lower prices.
If AI forces people to re-weight their priorities (i.e. be less on the internet), perhaps that's a good thing?
NOW people start to complain. And it's quite transparent why. ;)
Not sure what else to say. Yeah, if you consume the "internet" like some firehose of information you spray at your face hoping for the best then, yeah, even today you're going to wind up gargling mostly shit.
The "internet" being a small group of well-minded people who largely shared a similar outlook on things was the anomaly, not what's going on now.
gemini://gem.sdf.org/
gemini://sdf.org/
gemini://gemi.dev/
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/wp.cgi/
gemini://cdg.thegonz.net/infrastructure/search/
gemini://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/~solderpunk/cia-world-factbook/
gemini://geminiprotocol.net/
gopher://sdf.org/1/
gopher://magical.fish/1/
gopher://gopherpedia.com/1/
gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/overbite
You can't have your cake and eat it too...
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.
The Internet of today is barely recognizable. The very thing that made it sustainable (commercialization) is also what led to its demise.
There are still sites (like HN!) that give me a taste of the old world. But they are few and far between.
Constraints tend to make you enjoy something more. I agree that a lot of the things that annoy me today weren't present back then. But a lot of other things that I take for granted these days also weren't present back then.
Was it better? No, I don't think so.
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.
Why can't the post-ai internet include personal agents that work for you or at least don't make you the product?
Yet you are the one that sounds miserable.
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?
Analog internet when?
That means either AI will become interesting, or people will figure out how to stop slop ruining their places.
Either of those options might bring their own problems, but the sloppification of the internet is not a stable equilibrium.
A more peaceful relationship with the internet does sound good, and most of us probably waste too much time with social media in some form (including here).
My "optimistic" take on this is that AI will ruin the Internet and cause us all to spend more time with people in real life. And maybe that's a good thing.
That's assuming that AI Internet slop is such a turn-off that most of us will decide to disengage from it, which is a big assumption. But I did say it was optimistic.
Twitter was human slop paradise before Elon's ex wife told him to buy it to quiet the liberals:
"Social media platforms are being bombarded with slop posts from bots. For that reason, I have deactivated most of my accounts, especially X."
It took you until "AI slop" to stop liking the dumpster fire of X to deactivate your account ?
Really?
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.
While social media may have ruined the internet, think of that as more of hitting the ground after falling off a cliff. It was the constant connection that really started changing everything. Instead of getting on the internet and disconnecting from the internet, we were always on. The algorithm that filled this new environment was inevitable.
Simply put there is no route back to those early days.
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"?
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.
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.
you might as well expect people to drink less water.
Most multimodal models could call into radio stations and pass the Turing test.
----
The only solutions I see thrown out are "Nothing can scale in the future". That seems, problematic.
The cost for text generation will trend toward zero.
The amount of models that will be able to generate text will keep expanding making what text is generated or not will become more difficult.
The way actual humans write will change because of influence by AI mushing up what is human and what is not human further increasing the impossibility of determining what is AI and what is not.
Freedom of speech laws in the US will shoot down any broad legal requirements to mark text as AI generated or not.
The consumer financial incentives to go to the 'better' and more expensive products are questionable at best. People consuming a lot of shitty shit because it's cheap is a pretty standard human behavior. It doesn't mean good products won't exist. It means good products will have to do a shit load of work to stand above and beyond the slop, and with systems like the US, these better products are apt to be bought by VC to exploit as much money out of the product by turning it into slop and getting rid of the human assets behind it.
Also..
You only notice 'slop', not necessarily things that are written by AI (or lazy humans).
Listen, very smart people are very enthusiastic about other very smart people using AI to help AI learn to fix AI. Pretty much open-and-shut, IMO.
Once you get richer and longer term multi-modal abilities out of AI shits going to be crazy. Just look at LLMs systems with voice to text and text to voice and plugins to play games. It really starts becoming a simulacra for another human playing.
Sure there is. Make another internet and keep the normies and capitalists away from it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49541705
This is no different than saying make a huge pitre dish and ensure no mold ever lands on it and grows. Aka: a completely unrealistic view on how systems work.
And if contamination is inevitable, just burn down the lab and start the experiment again elsewhere.
If I had any reason to I could pump out thousands of Gemini slop sites and turn the ratio of real sites to slop up to 1 to a million. Then publish article after article on how all Gemini is is junk and for the most part it will be true.
Yeah but you don't. It literally isn't worth the effort. We're talking about a few thousand people at most, less than the userbase of HN. And if you did, those sites would just go ignored. And no one would read those articles because no one outside of geminispace actually cares about geminispace. It would be like trying to kill a housefly with a cannon.
Even if we were talking about the fediverse, which provides a much bigger target, people just wouldn't federate with the slop. The decentralized architecture guarantees that the community splits and fractures as it grows, so you can have greater inclusivity across the board, but exclusivity within instances. Go ahead and pump out thousands of instances. No one has to care. So far self-limiting and opt-in architectures do work to hold back the tide.