I find it odd that it’s multiple times reinforced that its a conspiracy theory, even unprompted. Like its happening, it’s just by what degree would we consider the internet “dead”.
That’s been the meta for awhile. Anyone with a stake in something vehemently tries to discredit anyone’s skepticism by calling them a conspiracy theorist. Manipulating high-traffic social media with bots likely pays well.
Internet is already full of bullshit SEO content. Sometimes written by humans, and quite often by bots. For years now. What’s coming is an arms race between different content generating AIs and search/answer AIs.
Probably the easiest way to avoid it is to simply rename it to something less scary sounding. Maybe something like Alive Enhanced Rich Content Internet Theory for Human People! See, not a problem now.
Also maybe we should reread Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. It has a storyline about a guy who finds out he is the only actual real person on earth. Everyone else are robots. And he wants to know why.
I have to say that I feel that currently the most consumed contents in the Internet are mostly human-written; and my proof is actually that it is now when the tendency is clearly changing. I have stumbled upon a few AI-generated articles already in the past few months, without looking for them specifically. You could tell because it sometimes focuses on weird details, or even I have seen l some kind of
as an AI, I do not have an opinion on the subject […]
which is so funny when you see it.
So, yeah, it is definitely starting to happen, and in the next few years I wouldn’t be surprised if 30 to 50 % of articles are just AI blorbs built for clicks.
How to avoid this? We can’t. The only way would be to shut down the Internet, forbid computers and go back to a simpler life. And that, for many reasons will not happen unless some world-class destruction event happens.
We actually can prevent it. We will go back to human-curated websites, and the links to those websites will also be maintained by humans.
This is how the early web used to work in the 90s and early 00s. We will see a resurgence of things like portals, directories (like the Mozilla Directory project — DMOZ), webrings, and last but not least actual journalism.
Unless Google manages to find a way to tell AI content from human they will become irrelevant overnight because Search is 90% of their revenue. This will kill other search engines too, but will also remove Google strangle-hold on browsers.
This also means we’ll finally get to use interesting technologies that Google currently suppresses by refusing to implement them, like micro-payments. MP are an alternative to ads that was proposed a long time ago but never allowed browser support.
MP are a way to pay very small sums (a cent or a fraction of a cent) when you visit a webpage, and to make it as painless as possible for both the visitor and the website. It adds up to the same earnings for websites but introduces human oversight (you decide if the page you want to visit is worth that fraction of a cent) and most importantly gets rid of the ad plague.
I find this very much like a dream that will… stay a dream. Who defines human-curated websites or true journalism if I don’t even really know you are an AI bot?
Also, who says people will not like AI content? Because the world will still be full of the same people who buy Apple products and piss on “green bubble” people.
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