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Showroom7561 @lemmy.ca

When will you "quit" the internet?

AI generated content, which now includes incredibly convincing videos of people, will grow exponentially over the next weeks, months, and years.

At some point, the majority of the content you see will be fake, and any usefulness or connection to humans will be lost.

Even information that you might have previously been able to confirm from a trusted source can (and will) be manipulated in some way, making verification impossible.

This lack of verification, along with the speed at which fake content can now be generated, will make it impossible to defend against.

Even the world of art and communication has been tainted, serving no connection to real people through this digital hellscape.

To that end, when will the internet be so untrustworthy, “soulless”, and useless to you that it crosses the tipping point?

EDIT: Ok, holy fuck. There's actually a term for what I'm describing: "The Dead Internet Theory"

80 comments

  • I think there are going to be tools to identify networks of people and content you don't want to interact with. This website is pushed by that social media account, which is boosted by these 2000 account that all exhibit bot-like behavior? Well let's block the website, of course, but also let's see who else those 2000 bots promote; let's see who else promotes that website.

    The people identified as part of that web will either be bots, disingenuous actors (trolls, state-sponsored propaganda, etc), or gullible people pushing bullshit they have given no thought to understanding.

    I think the internet might just get better in the future, rather than worse. But we'll see.

    • I think there are going to be tools to identify networks of people and content you don’t want to interact with. This website is pushed by that social media account, which is boosted by these 2000 account that all exhibit bot-like behavior? Well let’s block the website, of course, but also let’s see who else those 2000 bots promote; let’s see who else promotes that website.

      In an ethical, human-first world, that would be the case.

      Do you think that social media platforms, who run on stealing attention from users so they can steal their private data and behaviour history, would want to block content that's doing exactly that? No way. Not ever.

      And the incentive to make easy money drives users, who otherwise wouldn't have the skill or talent to be able to create and present content, to type in a prompt and send it as a post... over and over, automated so no effort at all needs to be made. Do this a million times over, and there's no way to avoid it.

      And once we get to the point where AI content can be generated on-the-fly for each doom-scrolling user based on their behaviour on the platform, it's game over. It'll be like digital meth, but disguised to look funny/sexy/informant/cute/trustworthy.

      I'm using tools to blacklist AI sites in search, but the lists aren't keeping up, and they don't extend beyond search.

      There will come a point, probably very soon, where companies will figure out how to deliver ads and AI content as if it were from the original source content, which will make it impossible to block or filter out. It's a horrific thought, TBH.

      • And once we get to the point where AI content can be generated on-the-fly for each doom-scrolling user based on their behaviour on the platform, it's game over.

        Only if people want what AI is making. I've been using LLMs for about 5 years. I've been integrating them into a project for about 3. And I don't think anyone is going to find AI generated slop entertaining. I have played with generating text, images, music, and once you get over the novelty it wears thin really quickly.

        If you fill someone's feed with that stuff, they are going to leave over time. But I mean AI isn't even that concerning to me. I've been thinking about this social trust graph tool for a decade. Social media has been overwhelmingly garbage at least that long.

        I'm using tools to blacklist AI sites in search, but the lists aren't keeping up, and they don't extend beyond search.

        Crowd source that. Plug a blocklist into a pi-hole and open it up for contribution.

        There will come a point, probably very soon, where companies will figure out how to deliver ads and AI content as if it were from the original source content, which will make it impossible to block or filter out.

        If they do, it will also be impossible for them to track and thus get paid for.

        The internet is largely self-healing. I mean I might have preferred it 35 years ago, and I'm not saying things are great, but you sound like you're spiraling a bit and I just want you to know things will be alright. I'm way more worried about Trump then AI on the internet.

  • We just collectively need to improve vetting sources. It's something we can do individually, or collectively through moderation.

    I mainly just share pics here, but I do try to give a decent chunk of educational content as well. I take what I share seriously, because I want it treated seriously at times. I'm honest I'm not an expert, just a hobbyist. I always include sources or share if it's something from my personal limited experience. I try to verify things from at least 2 sources before sharing things if it's a new source. I always try to be clear if I'm hypothesizing about something and I'm not certain of it.

    It's probably taking my content more seriously than necessary, but I take pride in what I post and I want to be seen as a trusted person in the community.

    I think the last few years have made it clear to anyone capable of understanding that we can no longer just take people at their word without some process of establishing trust. Like anything else, we can wait for someone else to fix it, or we can up our own games, on both providing and receiving information.

    • It’s probably taking my content more seriously than necessary, but I take pride in what I post and I want to be seen as a trusted person in the community.

      Plot twist: How do I know you aren't a bot? /s

      As information multiplies, and people have less time to apply critical thinking or skepticism to what they see, we'll have an extremely hard time sorting through it all.

      Even if we had a crowdsourced system that generates a whitelist of trusted sites, bots could easily overwhelm such a system, skewing the results. If Wikipedia, for example, had bots tampering with the data at a million times the rate that it does now, would anyone still want to use it?

      One option might be an invite-only system, and even that would create new problems with fragmentation and exploitation.

      Trust is almost becoming a thing of the past because of unprecedented digital threats.

      • Work does suck the life out of me, but I'd hope I can still pass a Turing test! 😜

        There's always going to be people that value facts and knowledge and they will always find each other for their own sanity.

        With a focus on animal stuff, there is a lot of AI that I come across to try to win cuteness karma. I do see some convincing looking things that make me do a double take, because animals can do some weird things after all, but some stuff is never going to be physically possible. Some color combos just don't exist. It may take a more trained eye to spot things, but there's still going to be people calling stuff out and there will be forums where things will get pulled down if they're not real.

        In that regard, I worry about some real things being lost, at least to view to some of the general public, where real things that can't be verified get downvoted/taken down/etc. But those with real interest will still work to conclusively verify or disprove things of questionable value.

        People just want truth to get out. Whether you're interested in education or conspiracy, from whichever direction most of us approach things, we just want to know the truth to the best of our abilities. That does bring inherent troubles and creates avenues to poison the well, but as hard as the bad actors will work, the good actors will be working to clean it just as hard.

        ETA:

        Trust is almost becoming a thing of the past because of unprecedented digital threats.

        I also encourage people to question me. I'm happy to be able to confirm things, because I want you to also learn what I have learned, because I found it cool enough to study and share with you already. Questioning what I present to you also leads me to learn about more things, exploring subject matter I wouldn't have thought to pursue on my own, or to finally learn about something I've been meaning to get to. Someone questioning my knowledge is both an opportunity for me to teach and to learn. And if I was wrong, hopefully afterwards I will know what is correct, and that has strengthened me as a whole if I accept I was wrong and have learned from the experience and not acted immaturely about it.

  • I don't imagine quitting the internet, but I can picture the internet fracturing into smaller sites with resistance to AI through obscurity - sort of similar to how we DO get occasional spam bots on Lemmy, but it largely isn't worth bad actors' time to target this platform.

    Either that, or larger platforms with some sort of verification process, but that seems like a losing battle in the long run.

  • Honestly, while I can still get information (of any kind) I won't quit, just use it less. At the very least, I'll use it to download DRM free music, movies, books, and TV shows and consume them offline locally.

  • There's a lot to unpack here.

    Lets start with the attempt to define "usefulness" as the degree to which connection to humans happens. Human connection on the internet has always been illusory. Yet we still find utility in it.

    "Trusted sources" have always been 100% biased in favor of whoever owns them. We all have equal free speech rights, but some of us are more free than others because the ability to purchase a bigger megaphone scales with access to capital.

    Organized, capitalized propaganda farms existed before LLMs and have been engaged in the same kind of destructive information warfare. LLMs seem to be more persuasive than the wage-slave humans employed by troll farms and other mass media outlets, but that's not necessarily a bad thing if it manufactures a more rational public opinion.

    LLMs lower the capital requirement to begin competing in the propaganda war. The biggest players who could afford to buy enormous media empires and fund human-generated influence operations are going to have to compete against the rest of us.

    This planet has been a soulless hellscape longer than any of us have been alive, and LLMs are more likely to improve the situation than make it worse.

    • This planet has been a soulless hellscape longer than any of us have been alive

      This right here is an important realization. It's how reading a lot of history and anthropology helps me feel better about the world and how we're doing a lot better than the people who came before us.

      It pains us because we focus on and hope for what could be, but it's important to also realize how things were for most of our existence.

    • I appreciate the thoughtfulness of your answer.

      To expand on a few points:

      Lets start with the attempt to define “usefulness” as the degree to which connection to humans happens. Human connection on the internet has always been illusory. Yet we still find utility in it.

      While "usefulness" and human connection can be linked, you can also separate them.

      For instance, if the majority of websites become content farms, with information that (likely) isn't accurate because an LLM hallucinated it. Can you find it useful compared to when an expert wrote the content?

      This could even apply to how-to content, where now you might have someone with actual experience showing you how to fix something or work something. But with AI content farms, you might get a mishmash of information, that may not be right, and you'd never be able to ask for clarity from a real person.

      What about a travel site that fakes photos, generates convincing videos of your destination, and features stories from other travellers (AI bots) without you knowing the difference? This might have been hard to pull off five years ago, but you can generate 1000 such websites in a few days. When does the usefulness of using such a site become diminished?

      As for human connection. I disagree that it has always been illusory. When you chatted with strangers online 10 years ago, you knew for a fact that they were a real person. Sure, they could have been deceptive or have an "online personality", but they were real.

      A step up from that would be people using a fake identity, but there was still a person on the other end.

      But in the near future, every stranger you connect with online might end up being a bot. You'd never know. At what point would you consider not spending time or energy interacting on a platform?

      This planet has been a soulless hellscape longer than any of us have been alive, and LLMs are more likely to improve the situation than make it worse.

      I've been around long enough to say that's not true in the slightest. Being online and consuming content online was very, very different 10+ years ago as it will be in the next 10 years.

      The internet of old was mostly a force for good. The internet of tomorrow will be weaponized, monetized, and made to be unrecognizable from what we've had.

  • AI generated content, which now includes incredibly convincing videos of people, will grow exponentially over the next weeks, months, and years.

    At some point, the majority of the content you see will be fake, and any usefulness or connection to humans will be lost.

    (...)

    To that end, when will the internet be so untrustworthy, “soulless”, and useless to you that it crosses the tipping point?

    Depends what you read. Blogs are still a thing and on many there is not the slightest hint of AI and in some there is even not even a single ad to be seen. It's still people talking about what they truly care. Not people trying to farm likes or views by spreading some low-effort shit content, be it videos, pictures or text.

    The corporate/marketing-owned Web is filled to the brim with utter crap but that's not new, and it has been so well before AI became a thing. I've quit bothering about its existence a decade ago or so. So, I would not even notice it that corporate-owned Web was to suddenly vanish back into the nothingness it never should have left.

    But the human-made web is still a thing. It's just not promoted as much as it once was and certainly it's not promoted where nowadays crowds gather to get spoon-fed content. Aka, in those handful of places that are all owned by corporations, corporations that don't want people to go see elsewhere. But corporations not wanting to promote human-made web doesn't make that human-web go away.

    It's there for anyone to taste and, if they're willing to, to participate in. But it's up to those people to move their ass and change their habits. If they don't do that effort to try to go see elsewhere, well, they'll the only one losing out on a potentially more interesting (and less faked) content.

    It's out there. One just needs to open the door or jump the fence to get the fuck out of their walled garden and start exploring the World Wide Web.

    edit: clarifications.

    • Depends what you read. Blogs are still a thing and on many there is not the slightest hint of AI and in some there is even not even a single ad to be seen. It’s still people talking about what they truly care. Not people trying to farm likes or views by spreading some low-effort shit content, be it videos, pictures or text.

      To illustrate my point: Say, five years from now, you come across a "blog". It's got photos of a friendly person, she shares images and video of her and her family, and talks about homesteading.

      What if that entire "person" was just AI generated, and the "blog" was just fake AI stories? How would you even know? Would you want to spend time even reading blogs, knowing that it may not even be written by an actual person?

      We will be at that point very soon. You will never know who's real and who's fake (online), because their entire life can be faked.

      The corporate/marketing-owned Web is filled to the brim with utter crap but that’s not new, and it has been so well before AI became a thing.

      While true, and I agree, at least it was people being evil/greedy. And the speed at which they could be evil/greedy was capped.

      With AI, you could generate a lifetime of greedy/evil corporate/marketing-owned web in a matter of hours, and just flood every corner of the internet with it.

      It's a very different threat.

      But the human-made web is still a thing. It’s just not promoted as much as it once was and certainly it’s not promoted where nowadays crowds gather to get spoon-fed content.

      Per my point above, you'll never know what's human-made in the very near future. At some point, bots with human identities will flood websites, then what?

      • What if that entire “person” was just AI generated, and the “blog” was just fake AI stories?

        I don't live in the future so that I could not tell.

        What I can tell is that AI of today smells very much like AI (which is to say, by grossly over-simplifying, that AI 'creates' content that is a severely neutered content and that shows) and, seeing how people are asking for more of that shit content, it doesn't look like they will need to invest that much more to make AI better to make it an economical success. So I doubt it will ever reach a point where we can't tell teh difference. But if it was to get to that there would still be:

        • real people, to meet and talk with and do stuff with.
        • a bazillion books published waiting to be read. Printed books I mean, not ebooks as those can too easily be altered (here again, to please the crowd... or maybe one day to be 'AI-optimized'). There are more books waiting to be read than I would be able to read even if I was to live for a thousand years. So, I don't need to Web to access fascinating content, I just need (my own or any public) Library. And what about younger people that have not been taught to enjoy reading books and can only consume videos or look at pictures instead? Well, imho the first thing they should do is ask their parents why they failed so badly at giving them such a basic education as enjoying reading. Then, and that's the good news, it's never too late to start reading. Those younger people still can decide to switch gear and start opening a book from time to time ;)

        So, if that ugly AI-Web was to take over what I call the human-made Web, I would simply quit using the Web.

        Exactly like we quit owning (and watching) a TV in the early 00s my spouse and I, when we realized we had had enough of being asked to pay money in order to watch unskipable fucking ads and what we considered always shittier content (read: 'politically correct' content a bit like that AI-crap of today, as we both prefer to be challenged by what we watch and what we read, not so much being nursed or feeling validated by it).

        With AI, you could generate a lifetime of greedy/evil corporate/marketing-owned web in a matter of hours, and just flood every corner of the internet with it.

        They could flood the Web they own with that shit and, imho, that's 100% what they will do and so will do Hollywood and Netflix (it will be much cheaper/quicker to produce and there will be less risk of getting lynched for offending this or that part of the population). That they will do, I'm willing to bet. But they still won't be able to flood my part of the Web (I pay for it, I own it, I decide what's (not) published on it), as well as on many other small parts of the Web owned by other people like me. To get rid of us they first would need to make it illegal (or too costly) for mere individuals like us to own a domain and publish content. If that was to happen (and it could very well) it would take them a lot of work to achieve, and that would give us, the mere people willing to keep our freedom of expression (and willing to remain not-owned in any way) the opportunity to search for some other place... including moving back to analog media and IRL/in-person meetings.

        I mean, humanity has shared stories for thousands of years. The Internet? It's approx 40 years old. So, yeah, we should be able to find some alternatives ways to express ourselves without relying on such a shitty web if things were to become that bad.

        Per my point above, you’ll never know what’s human-made in the very near future. At some point, bots with human identities will flood websites, then what?

        See what I just said.

        Sure, there will most certainly be a web like the one you're describing and realizing how lazy most people are it will most certainly be a huge hit. But no matter how successful it is it will still be 100% of no interest to me and to people like me. So me and those other people we would focus our time (and money) on a man-made Web without worrying how machines monkey humans. And if one day they make it so that it's not possible to access any man-made content online, well, we will fall back on IRL-meeting, with real people. Like going to church, or to a book club, go to concerts or make some music in a band, go listen to poetry, go places to play board-games, whatever.

        We don't need our lives to be online at all time. As a matter of fact, we used to not spend it online at all up until very recently ;)

  • I don't think you can take for granted most things will be ai generated. Why are you? Old or something?

  • It sounds more like you are referring to the web: I'll probably keep visiting until there's nothing worth visiting anymore. Then I guess I'll find other stuff to read.

  • I'm an out of work web developer, so in theory if I starve to death then I'll have to quit the internet.

  • when it quits bring entertaining.

    It's utility for the original purpose, communication without limits, (or checking for coffee) is being diminished, and at some point, ill stop using it for that. But as long as there are jokes and titties, it will still be a source of entertainment.

  • I grew up on the intent, I live on the internet, I die on the internet. Every website eventually dies or enshits and gets replaced. Same old song, new fully automated singer.

    Outside is not a world of hope, happiness, and belonging.

80 comments