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”
Gen ai has been around for a while. It’s made things worse, but it’s not like there aren’t real users anymore. I don’t see why that would suddenly change now
Not talking “now”, but in the near future. When online AI content becomes indistinguishable from human-created content.
It will happen. My question is at what point will it have a real impact on how you use the internet?
Gen ai has been around for a while. It’s made things worse, but it’s not like there aren’t real users anymore. I don’t see why that would suddenly change now
For context, we went from AI generated images and videos (i.e. Will Smith eating spaghetti) being laughably bad and only good for memes, to essentially video content that is convincing in every way - in under two years!
The accessibility, scale, quality, and power of AI has changed things, and RAPIDLY be improved even further in a much shorter period of time.
That’s the difference. AI from 2023 couldn’t fool your grandma. AI from 2025 and beyond will fool entire populations.
I see more of a future with a parallel internet similar to the dark web and fragmented local mesh networks on one side, and the other side corporate slop internet.
We are heading back to the BBS model and as an old man now I am fuckin here for it. 🤝
Like the cyberpunk universe were the old internet (our current internet) is an AI infested hellscape.
There’s no quitting the internet for me. What I can do is take a break from the internet, as well as lower my usage time. But permanently quitting? No. I simply cannot.
So even if it was all just fake content, misinformation, bots, and ads that will never be able to filtered out, you’d continue using it the same?
For me, I’d have no incentive whatsoever to visit a site like Lemmy or check the news if there was a good chance it was just bots making stuff up to fill space. There would be no value at that point, so I’d at least quit that.
I don’t think we’ll ever fully quit the internet, as it’s connected to everything we touch. But the internet as it was will continue to be enshittified until it becomes unbearable to use.
We can always fight those bots and misinformation, just like how we can always protest in real life.
I think it would be impossible to fight back when there will come a time when you won’t even know what is real and what is not.
It would be impossible to filter through all the content that you’ll be exposed to in the future.
We can obviously try, but the vast majority of the population simply won’t have the skills to defend against this new reality.
Quitting is not an option! Nor should it be. New ways to flag and call out “A1” crap should be there. It could be just a phase a lot like societies trends.
No only is quitting not an option but people who don’t have access to broadband Internet at home or a smart phone or unlimited data are increasingly marginalized. What to read our menu, scan this QR code. Pay for parking? Use our app. Attend a public meeting? Click here to register for the Zoom
Maybe (?) thiat’s controversial but “human connection” is not the first thing that comes to my mind when I consider whay I’m currently online.
So losing the humanity of the internet sucks but I can find way to work around it.
Maybe (?) thiat’s controversial but “human connection” is not the first thing that comes to my mind when I consider whay I’m currently online.
What I mean by that is when you looked back at content from 5+ years ago, you know that a real person wrote, drew, recorded, thought of, put effort into it.
We had interconnectedness, and as human beings, we really should do what it takes to not lose that.
There will be no more looking at photography, artwork, music, or movies as a marvel of human effort, skill, and talent. To me, that’s a huge loss.
When you read a blog years ago, you were reading another person’s experience, and that had value.
Information from a resource was researched and had input from an expert human being, and/or a team of them. That had value.
So losing the humanity of the internet sucks but I can find way to work around it.
Online? If so, how long do you think you can sustain it? If the majority of the internet or digital content you see becomes AI generated, with no way of knowing, what then? Will you invest time to use a future Lemmy where your interactions are probably all with bots?
There will be no more looking at photography, artwork, music, or movies as a marvel of human effort, skill, and talent. To me, that’s a huge loss.
I’ve been consuming content from a detached rehashed business position long before AI were a thing.
I’ve never felt the “human touch” in, say, a Marvel movie.
And when I mentioned workarounds I meant offline, as one does.
I don’t want to say never, but probably never. Regardless of AI slop filling social media there will always be places where people congregate that are at least less-impacted by these trends than others. Personally I live in Texas and aside from a few family members everyone else I know lives elsewhere in the country/world and I would have no contact with them whatsoever if not for the internet, so that’s always going to be a draw for me no matter what else is going on. Also I don’t think it’s quite as apocalyptic as you make it out to be; before AI the big concern was ‘zomg the ads will be everywhere’, but then adblock came along and aside from walled-garden mobile apps I virtually never see ads. Dissatisfaction with AI slop will lead to tools meant to find, identify, and combat it, just like it has with everything else. The only danger is if we let companies wall us totally into their little app ecosystems where it’s illegal to modify them to block the stuff you don’t want to see.
As long as you can do messaging / video / voice chat, do work, taxes and groceries over cable, internet will be here. Everything else is called entertiment and it’s optional. You can as well play games or watch movies or read books or listen to music instad of watching news and nothing will hapen because it’s just another type of entertiment at this point.
If you’re scared of music or movies generated by AI listen to music and watch movies produced before year 2020. That’s it. You won’t have enough time in your life to experience all of content humanity created to this point no matter how much you will try.
Groceries over cable? Man, Ethernet has really come a long way
The moment I find that there’s not enough opportunity for self-growth on it for it to be worth 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.
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.
One development we may see imminently is the infiltration of any areas of the internet not currently dominated by AI slop. When AI systems are generally able to successfully mimic real users, the next step would be to flood anything like Lemmy with fake users, whose purpose is mainly to overwhelm the system while avoiding detection. At the same time they could deploy more obvious AI bots. Any crowdsourced attempt at identifying AI may find many of its contributors are infiltration bots who gain trust by identifying and removing the obvious bots. In this way any attempt at creating a space not dominated by AI and controlled disinformation can be undermined
I seriously don’t think that would be what happens.
Things that have gone shit with AI were things that were previously shit anyway. Unpaid intern, bot farms, AI… All the same. I don’t think it would be much of an issue. I’m more worry about the ending of free adless internet. That were I’ve been seeing more and more of a decline.
And probably some fuckers with the excuse of “AI threat” will start to put golden walls around some spaces.
My red line is that I don’t pay for things that should be free. If most of internet became paywalled I suppose I would have to live with all the data I’ve hoarded over the years.
Though I suspect there will always be a free internet.
I don’t think you can take for granted most things will be ai generated. Why are you? Old or something?
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Never.
I think this is a very doom and gloom way of thinking about it. If a particular place becomes too shit then I’ll quit going to that place. But quit the internet altogether? Doubtful. People are already putting ai free disclaimers on their sites and i expect that to continue. Perhaps there will even be a network of verified ai free sites.
Will things continue to get bad? Sure. But the fact that you are even asking this suggests that there are other people out there that want to see things differently.
