Submitted 1 year ago by 2tone@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
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 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.
2000 or 2010 maybe (too young to know) but I’m not sure I see any difference between now and 2016. The only major new thing I can think of is tiktok but it didn’t ruin the internet.
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.
They already can’t. They just rely on the assumption that most of the data they collect is correct. Which is generally true, there is more correct than incorrect content on the internet. The inability of the bots to discern incorrect data coupled with their ability to make it sound authoritative is what makes them dangerous.
Reminds me of an iconic film....
oh god, human centipede??
Who wants to be the powers that be will make a CAPTCHA that you have to decide if the text is written by human or AI.
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
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.
Just as bad, if not worse, than the blockchain craze that came before it.
No, greedy people and their companies are ruining it
Even if AI isn’t further “abused” in similar ways to those described in the article, it’s going to ruin the Internet anyway. There’s very little motive to publish a web page when some robot is going to copy its content and regurgitate a bastardized version of it to someone who’d otherwise have used a search engine to find it.
What’s left of the web are inevitably going to be marketers trying to game the results (think thousands of websites claiming Acme Widgets are the best, now that there’s actually an incentive to do so because while no human would read such sites, bots have no such qualms) and the occasional ecommerce website. Maybe some social media. And the rest will be a paper thin construction resembling the pre-2000 Internet built by the same types of people who built Lemmy and Mastodon - missing search engines and public visibility because nobody wants their system to be eaten by the LLMs. Such constructions will never attract the large audiences, those audiences happy to have every question solved by asking a computer programmer designed to produce things that look like answers. And, in the unlikely event they do, they’ll get the unwanted visibility that results in them being sucked into the LLM databases.
It was a nice run, but I’m not seeing a happy outcome. We started this all, the public bit, the bit with hypertext and images and so on, in the early 1990s, and by the mid-2000s created something truly great. The LG Prada clones (iPhone and Android) seemed to take us in the wrong direction, as did social media, but I never expected something to happen so fundamentally dumb and damaging to the Internet, as this.
So are all the humans.
Google made the recipy for the shitty internet cake and put it in the oven. AI is the icing.
So be it. Humanity got along just fine without it for milleneia. Its clear at this point that the public internet isn’t going to be used to improve out 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.
I think that functionality will contunue just fine. It's surfing that dying. They're trying to put up billboards up wherever are eyes are looking and we can't even see what we're looking for anymore. AI is just a "smarter" billboard. Eventually we're just going to stop looking.
Speak for yourself. The internet has been a great place imo, at least partly.
We got a along without antibiotics for millennia, too, but I wouldn’t want to lose access to them.
Ha! Joke‘s on them, the Intenet is already runied.
This stuff is only economical at scale, it makes no sense to set up an AI spambot farm on startrek.website because you’ll just get banned and you’ll have to do all the ban evasion stuff you have to do on, say, Facebook but for a site with a hundredth of the daily active users
For now.
Right now, there can be value in using a bot net to create 10000 AI driven bots that look like humans but have a coordinated agenda on Reddit. As that value drops, I expect that smaller and smaller forums will get inundated with these bot networks.
ron@programming.dev 1 year ago
ubermeisters@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Everything that is exposed to consumer information will be this way soon. It’s an eventuality at this point, not a maybe.
ChocoboRocket@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Only thing I heard about zoom is their back to office?
ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world 1 year ago
They changed their TOS to allow themselves to license everyone’s videos for A.I. training (or anything else). One of the execs tried to say they weren’t doing that but unless they change their TOS, they can and no doubt will.
For some people, that’s a personal privacy issue but for people who have Zoom calls about, for instance, health records, it makes Zoom illegal. And even if it’s not illegal, companies use video calls for discussing proprietary information they don’t want licenses to competitors.
ICastFist@programming.dev 1 year ago
They also gave an opt-in to allow all your data to be used to train AI models. You auto opt-in if you use any of their AI assisted services
Mlemm@lemm.ee 1 year ago
What did zoom change? Other than their workers being forced back to offices