Hot take
The internet was already ruined. It’s no longer the same place it was in 2016 or 2010 or 2000. It’s become a corporate hellhole where you can’t get away from tracking, monitoring and other shady practices no matter what you do. Almost nothing is free and open and everything is designed to milk as much money out of the product.
AI is just accelerating this. Makes me think of the “old net” in Cyberpunk2077. Infested with rouge AI that have turned it into a battleground.
Lukewarm counter-take: That non-commercial internet is still out there.
As long as there's nerds, there's going to be nerds building stuff for the fun of it. Building your Lemmys, your Fediverses, your Geminis etc..
There is definitely more legislation now, dissuading some percentage of nerds, but we also have a lot more nerds...
Even the non-commercial spaces are commercial. I’ve seen a bunch of thing disguised ads on here already. The fediverse is no different than the rest of the net. The big corps are still monitoring everything.
Every “nerd” I meet now wants out asap. The only ones who don’t seem to be pushing blockchain or AI. The tech sphere I loved is well and truly gone. The people are so profit driven nothing else can matter.
Even places like lemmy or mastodon aren't safe anymore. Everything that is public can be, and is, data mined by some corporation. There will be bot accounts or paid people pushing their agenda. And several other things.
It's not a technical problem. We can have places that are better than the average, but the corporations will still put their tentacles in.
It’s just the normal capitalist cycle.
- New thing invented
- Golden age of thing
- Corporations figure out how to engineer thing for maximum profit
- Thing sucks
TL;DR; - The internet is getting shittier at ludicrous speed, thanks to AI bots. Expect the next generation of AI to be even worse, as it's likely to be fed the shit the current AI is dropping everywhere.
It'd be funny if a lot of bots get discontinued just because the tools can no longer discern real and fake content and just become unusable.
capitalism and the rich** ftfy just like they're destroying the earth and space
The rich aren't making spam websites full of bot-generated content. Neither is capitalism, or communism or socialism.
What do you think is the purpose of bot-generated content?
To get clicks from people searching up things and happening to land on their page, who then read a little bit and see ads before leaving.
The internet is a place where people can connect from across the world, bringing them closer together and allowing the free exchange of information. It's unfortunate that it is being more and more locked down and controlled by business and government interests looking to isolate, control, and monetize people. AI isn't the only tool being used to ruin the internet, but it's damn effective.
"free exchange" is being capitalized by the rich.
there are countries going through brain drain, this is the internet/world going through a brain drain global recession/dark age
It's not "ai"...it's just a few billionaire assholes.
& it's not just the internet. It's the entire "reality".
What's interesting is this is also kind of a circle of tech moment too. At least for me, search has been sort of killed (or google search anyway), but it's just back to the Internet of 1997 again, where we have "sort of useful" "search engines", some walled gardens like AOL was, and maybe webrings or the original sort of Yahoo! curated link / subject sites / lists.
Oh no who could've possibly seen this coming? Literally everyone, it turns out.
That's two twitter clones from two tech billionaires in just six months. Capitalism truly breeds innovation.
What's the other Twitter clone (other than Threads)?
Bluesky!
Just as bad, if not worse, than the blockchain craze that came before it.
This is worse. Blockchains didn't do anything except extract money from suckers, which is bad but has a very limited impact. There were no valid applications, nothing they could do cheaper or better, so they just existed in their own separate world of scammers and grifters. AI is appropriating people's work to shit up the internet we all use with nonsense and will continue to be used because it has valid applications: creating bad art or vapid text without having to pay anyone.
I feel like with "cheap" AI we're entering a dark age of tech.
Eventually everything will, the tools and the tech will get more mature and sort itself out but for a couple of months/years we will be confronted with bad AI news , bad AI games, bad AI art, etc
I'm pretty confident a day will come were AI will be seen as a tool and that pure AI generated content will be seen the equivalent of a bad JavaScript game or a cheap knock clone.
So are all the humans.
Capitalism* ftfy
So be it. Humanity got along just fine without the internet for milleneia. Its clear at this point that the public internet isn't going to be used to improve our human existence. If there is anything to bemoan, its that the practical usefulness of the internet will only continue to get more and more narrow.
Right but how much of our daily existence is tied to the internet? Like all of our banking systems, our commerce, communications, infrastructure.
Google made the recipy for the shitty internet cake and put it in the oven. AI is the icing.
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