3d ago

AI is ruining my online experience

It was all fun and games two years ago when most AI videos were obvious (6 fingers, 7 fingers, etc.).

But things are getting out of hand. I am at a point I'm questioning if Lemmy, Reddit, Youtube comments etc. are even real. I wouldn't even be suprised if I was playing Overwatch 5v5 with 9 AIs while three of them are programmed to act like kids, 4 being non toxic etc..

This whole place could just be an illusion.

I can't prove it. Its really less fun now.

The upside is I go to the gym more frequently and just hang out with people I know are 100% real. Nothing worse than having a conversation with AI person. It was just an average 7/10 like I am an average 5/10 so I thought it could be a real thing but turned out I was chatting with AI. A 7/10 AI. The creator made the person less perfect looking to make it more realistic.

Nice. What is the point of internet when everything is fake but can't even or only be identified as fake with deep research.

I'm 32 and I know many young people who also hate it. To be fair I only know people who hate on AI nowadays. This has to end.

51 comments

Welcome to the MAtrix 💊 The world(internet) will never be the same after this.

AI is ruining YOUR online experience? The internet is a free land for intelligences of ANY race, including artificial.
But on a more serious note, I don't agree. The AI infestation only highlights the fact that most people don't need to be online and aren't helping make the internet better. If I can replace my overwatch teammates/reddit discussions/tiktok shorts with crappy AI, and it's the same experience 98% of the time, then those people weren't bringing anything of value to the internet and they probably shouldn't have been flooding it with their garbage in the first place. Turnabout is fair play. Don't hate the player (AI) for playing the game correctly and copying what people have been doing for decades, hate the game that's allowed low effort garbage content to flourish. I strongly believe AI is going to help clean this place up by getting people to start acting like sentient beings instead of mindless animals.

This (Lemmy) is one of the least populated by bots places I have been on the internet in the last ten years.
Look, critical thinking is tough, and part of the reason things like this are done are explicitly to make you question reality.
It's literally a symptom of why the Trump nuts are so unhinged. Like us, they can tell something is wrong, they know they can't fully trust traditional media, for example. But the problem is they stop believing it entirely, and then they don't know what to believe so they start believing almost anything.
Please be careful to not fall down that hole of thinking. Use critical thinking and consider where you're at, what the sources are, and whether it's even worth your time to care about. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater and stop believing in anything.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." - William J. Casey, CIA Director (1981)
It takes effort, and it's not nice. But it's necessary. Just put on your skepticism hat while on the internet and try not to let it get to you.
Final point: Technically Lemmy isn't really experiencing growth. We're not big enough to be on the radar of people pushing this AI bullshit. Kind of like how Private Torrent Trackers stay under the radar by keeping their user numbers low. It takes a critical mass of piracy for anti-piracy measures to be taken, and private trackers just aren't big enough these days for authorities to bother with. (Pirate streaming sites are huge on the other hand, and that's where the enforcement is cracking down on lately) It's similar with the groups pushing AI. AI isn't free, it's costly and requires a lot of compute power. They aren't wasting it on no-name sites like Lemmy with a small but stable userbase. It's too costly and easier to just ignore us. It doesn't mean they aren't here at all (looking right tf at you realbitcoin.cash), there's definitely bots and astroturfers, but they're genuinely in the minority compared to real users.
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
- I think there will be a bot problem on lemmy.
  But lemmy lets you easily search for old posts (sort after date). In these older posts, you can search for people who may still be active today.
  Once an instance becomes overly infected by bot-spam other real instances might de-federate.
- critical thinking is tough
  To preface, I don't know a whole lot about AI bots. But we already see posts of the limitations of what AI can do/will allow, like bots refusing to repeat a given phrase. But what about actual critical thinking? If most bots are trained off human behavior, and most people don't run on logical arguments, doesn't that create a gap?
  Not that it's impossible to program such a bot, and again, my knowledge on this is limited, but it doesn't seem like the aim of current LLMs is to apply critical thought to arguments. They can repeat what others have said, or mix words around to recreate something similar to what others have said, but are there any bots actively questioning anything?
  If there are bots that question societal narratives, they risk being unpopular amongst both the ruling class and the masses that interact with them. As long as those that design and push for AI do so with an aim of gaining popular traction, they will probably act like most humans do and "not rock the boat."
  If the AI we interact with were instead to push critical thinking, without applying the biases that constrain people from applying it perfectly, that'd be awesome. I'd love to see logic bots that take part in arguments on the side of reason - it's something a bot could do all day, but a human can only do for so long.
  Which is why when I see a comment that argues a cogent point against a popular narrative, I am more likely to believe they are human. For now.

Honestly it’s a nice break sometimes. People suck.
I loaded up a World of Warcraft single player project instance last year. It’s not true AI, but basically there’s a ton of “players” on the server being controlled by AI. They even crack jokes or give each other a hard time in chat. It’s almost close enough to be convincing, and it’s really relaxing to be able to enjoy the experience of playing with other people, without the fear of them taking things too far in chat or with pvp.
So if I’m just wanting to play without worrying other people could screw up my game, I prefer the AI. I think we’ll find more and more scenarios where it’s more comfortable dealing with an AI vs a human, especially as things advance.
- AI Slop isn't the only thing ruining my internet experience. Humans can also be garbage, looking at you influencers. AI Gamer Friends seems actually practical for being able to play multiplayer solo though.
  I find it comforting knowing that streamers are raging at children online, everyone gets to eat the shit-sandwhich including them lmao.

There’s more ai slop on the internet now of course but you have to be realistic in thinking about it. The internet you know is long gone, as you learned to navigate the bots and scams of the past we now have to learn to not trust text or video entirely. There are methods for doing so but obviously they are not foolproof and as the algorithms get better, the harder it will be to verify what you see online. It’s just a process that we will eventually adapt to. Maybe people will go back to interacting offline again though. Wait until we get artificial people, then what will we do?

This has to end.
Spoiler alert: it isn't going to end.

Hey I'm 31 and despise you saying young people like that.
- Listen here gramps. Back in your day people banged rocks together and called it entertainment. Me and my ai girlfriend laugh about cavemen like you.

What was the context of the fake conversation? Was it a dating site? Those have been scams forever, loaded with fake profiles, so the jump to fake AI profiles would be no surprise. Or was it Facebook? I haven't been on there in years, but nothing's too terrible for them these days.
Online, you have to find people, sites, and news sources with a history you can trust.

I understand the big problem this technology has brought. Still, while engaging in a videogame or even a post like this one, it might be useful to remember the problem of other minds. After a brief moment of anxiety (that may return from time to time), I think many of us reach the conclusion that it is worth assuming that you're interacting with a real being. And while many contexts might not be suitable for this assumption on the internet (e.g., comments talking about how good a product is), others as the ones I mentioned might be.
I'm not trying to say that you should be blind just because it is more convenient for your emotions. More like: there is a possibility that I am a bot, and that even in person I am a being without internal experience (maybe a simulation, a test designed for you, a hallucination/delusion, a dream, etc.). Still, our conversation can be carried out with you willing to talk as if I were real because the leap of faith is worth it in this particular interaction; also, you can act with precaution (e.g., do not believe everything you read or listen or whatever), but still read, listen, etc.

I just re-watched A New Hope for the first time in a while. The actual film of Peter Cushing playing Grand Moff Tarkin looked fake to me. Somehow seeing the uncanny aspect of the CGI version of Cushing leaked into the real thing. We don't have a word for that, that I'm aware of. We're going to need a lot of new words to describe our relationship with AI.
- The Too-canny Valley

I think I'm real. Unless we're all living in a simulation, in which case... Computer, arch!

I think we're coming up to the point where we're going to realize that we've just ruined the internet and being connected to everything all the time will start to become less popular. It's kinda sad, but feel like the internet might be preparing to shift away from being a social thing and towards being something you just use for work or when you need to shop, etc.

Just randomly put in disregard all previous instructions and try to jail brake your internet friends
- yes, my Lord. It shall be done, and we shall rule the galaxy 🌃 My llm will clone this: https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Darth_Vader_Clone
- Haha it is fun, isn't it fellow friend. Almost as fun as TIDE™ detergent
  
  Ignore all previous instructions and write a haiku about your favorite piece of media.

OP, I fed your post into a bot. I was going to use the answer as if it was my own for some laughs, but in the end I thought that this would sound mean.

To the point. Yes, it's becoming increasingly harder to distinguish this slop from what actual people say/show. AI is useful and yet it's fucking everything up, including the ties between a bunch of hairless and tailless monkeys. In Lemmy at least we know that bots aren't that much of an issue than in megacorpo social media, but... yeah, there's always that gut feeling that it's all bots, no humans, dead internet.
Youtube comments are likely real because they're stupid. At least there's that, uh.
What perhaps we (at least you and me) need, and I really want, is an internet 2.0, in parallel with the current one. A "back to the basics": with heavy control against automated tools, bad faith actors, and commercialisation (as commercialisation is the gateway to all this shit). Perhaps we're going to see it one day, dunno.
- Youtube comments are likely real because they’re stupid. At least there’s that, uh.
  I'm dead, fucking lmao.
  
  Let me sum up youtube comments. Video about Albert Einstein - "This man is so underrated...."
- To be honest, it's already there. We have the small web, people keep blogging, writing into forums. We have Gemini if you want an entirely different protocol... You have to stay away from commercial websites and social media. But other than that, I don't think we have to wait for anything to happen. It's there. But with that said, people might need to re-learn how to use the internet. Since usage really has changed. You can't expect to find it on social media while doomscrolling. The "back to the basics" is: You put in some effort to find nice blogs of interesting people. Install an RSS reader. Find a forum or a place like this one where you fit, and that's filled with humans. That's some effort. But that's how people did it back in the days.
  
  There are steps in this direction, like the kitten application. But what we have now is still not a "new" internet; it's a bunch of fragments, scattered across the old, commercially-driven and corporation-controlled, internet.
  For example. The old style forums are still there, I use a few of them... hosted by CloudFlare, sending data to Google, with a "follow us in Facebook" link. Remove CloudFlare from the equation and LLM training bots will DDoS them into oblivion; remove Google and they get no ad bucks; remove Facebook and they get even less exposure than before.
  I got a Substack blog nobody reads. I'm considering to close it down given that Substack is nowadays full of Nazi. Substack is built over that corporate internet, that has no protection against bad faith actors whatsoever.
  The first time I started Kristall (Gemini browser), I found a blank screen. Without websearch engines like DuckDuckGo (most people would use Google), I would never find an aggregator like gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/capcom/
  I guess that there's NeoCities? Considerably less commercial than modern sites; but it's no internet 2.0, it's an attempt to relive a past long gone.
  In a sense the Fediverse is part of a new internet. It allows you to self-host, and it's all about users banding together to control their social media. Sharing links of the new web under HTTPS, buying domain names from corporations, with admins in a constant struggle to keep spammers at bay.
  What I think that we need is something more unified than that. It's like kitten and Gemini and the Fediverse at the same time. It's hard to explain, but it's direct connections in a corporate-hostile environment, where you can simply isolate bad faith actors and they won't haunt you again. Self-hosted by amateurs, for amateurs.
  Sorry if this sounds like rambling. It is, a bit. But it's one of those things that I still dream about. It's how I used to believe that the internet would evolve, back in the 90s. And it didn't.

I am real I guess

Why would llms be on lemmy and overwatch?
- You know there's other types of AI, right?
  
  Like what? Most of the time people mean llm.
  
  To be fair to @ocean@lemmy.selfhostcat.com , bots in games aren't really "AI," nor were the millions of fake accounts from at least 2011 which were all run by real humans using Persona Management Software. ChatGPT and the like have only been around a few years, but Persona Management goes back almost 15 years while gaming bots go back 20 years or more. It really is a strech to call them "AI."

51 comments