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The fact that soon the internet will be so flooded with bots that you'll be floating eternally alone in a sea of imposters unless we create some draconian real

The fact that soon the internet will be so flooded with bots that you'll be floating eternally alone in a sea of imposters unless we create some draconian real person ID system is a tragedy so great it's crazy it has not dawned on people yet. I started out loving the net because of the feelings of connection and partly because of the honesty and discussions stemming from at least pseudo anonymity, both silly stuff and egghead discussions on history and tech - but i always felt a "human presence" and community out there behind the screens. Now anonymity is dying and the value of discussions will plummet because you'll be just be arguing, learning or getting inspired from a selection of corporate PR bots, state sponsored psyopping or "idiot with an assistant" that will try to twist your mind or steal your time 24/7. Christ this is going to be so incredibly boring, paranoid and lonely for everyone in a few years time! I'm honestly having an existential crisis, the internets is already filled with too much noise and people are already lonely enough. Back to local community and family i guess, it was amazing while it lasted..

bcherny 4y ago
Every major site is already pretty effective at blocking bots, and has been for years. I don’t see why that would suddenly start to become less effective, given their approaches largely focus on behavioral signals, not specific content.
keiferski 4y ago
This has a far easier and less dystopian solution: charge money to access communities, which are smaller and more focused. I find it very unlikely that corporate PR bots will be paying $5 a month each to spam Substack communities, for example.
- MollyRealized 4y ago
  ... Metafilter, since pre-2000. [1] [1] - www.metafilter.com
  - rglullis 4y ago
    Which is probably one of the best sources of good discussion on the internet.
- rglullis 4y ago
  It's doesn't even have to be $5/month. Make a $10 deposit required for creating an account, and for each offense against the guidelines, you get a "fine" that proportional for the severity of the infraction (uncivil discussion? $0.10 cents, participating in hell-threads? $0.50. Comparing HN with reddit? $1.337 Obvious spam? Your whole $10 is gone.) Repeat offenses get exponentially more expensive, and you only get to post with a positive balance.
  - joeldo 4y ago
    On the surface I like this idea, but this makes it harder for participants from poorer countries from, well, participating. For some countries this is more than a week of the average wage!
    - andsoitis 4y ago
      Price can vary by market. Many companies already do this both for products and services, as well as subscriptions.
      - midoridensha 4y ago
        I guess you haven't heard of a VPN?
        andsoitis 4y ago
        You can require address as part of credit card validation.
        midoridensha 4y ago
        So only people with credit cards are allowed to use the forum? That shuts out a lot of people, especially in places where credit cards aren't used.
        andsoitis 4y ago
- jsemrau 4y ago
  That's what I am doing with finclout. The noise on Stocktwits, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc is just way too high. Hence, offering a value adding app + the social component is where its at. IMHO.
rtkwe 4y ago
The thing is you could implement a real ID system that was still pseudonymous at the user level so that you only prove real personhood at account creation. Kind of like a Twitter blue check but just for human authenticity instead of notoriety. It could even be tied back to the real person account anonymously on the admin side so you could mass ban alts automatically if people started to create bad bots. It should all be doable with current encryption the biggest issue is we don’t have key to real person really setup at any level. Maybe something like keybase combined with the KYC tech used for banks and exchanges could bridge that gap.
- im3w1l 4y ago
  One issue with that is that you could approach poor people and get hundreds of thousands of real ids for very little. And because language models are so good, it would take ages to root them all out if it's even possible.
  - rtkwe 4y ago
    Modern KYC methods has liveness checks built into it so you'd need to get tons of people willing to create and hand over their unique accounts themselves. Same problem in theory exists for Coinbase or other crypto exchanges but they only get a scant number of scammers trying to use it to funnel funds out.
- catiopatio 4y ago
  No thank you. That would be a dystopian nightmare.
  - rtkwe 4y ago
    This doesn't preclude the use of non authenticated account(s) just a possible system of providing provisions for anonymous authentication of humanness. I don't want to slap my real name across every part either but nothing about this requires all sites to adopt it at all.
  - greesil 4y ago
dang 4y ago
Real person ID isn't a solution since real persons can always consort with bots on the side. I think anonymity and pseudo-anonymity still have a place and contribute a lot to discussion quality. So do people posting under their real names. We don't know how this is all going to play out yet.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- andsoitis 4y ago
  > We don't know how this is all going to play out yet One risk is that bot-generated contributions drown out human-generated content, both due to speed with which they can be crafted as well as “quality”. I put quality in quotes because in human debate there’s a learning process and so while an individual contribution might be “lower quality” than another, the overall discussion quality and learning quality (for both contributor and readers) can be high. Put differently, just because all the individual contributions are of high quality does not mean the “thread quality” is high.
- tuyiown 4y ago
  Real person ID only works with government issued auth, say webauthn with government backed ID verification. Heck, if that webauthn provider would also allowed third party anonymity (auth that just state a person is real, guaranteed, but you won't know who, and no records) I'd be thrilled. It'd to be optional though, just a flag attached to the account, but we're head on to have reputation systems attached to accounts anyway.
- neuronic 4y ago
  The real person ID will make the "real person" liable to whatever the bot says and does though. I know US Americans have a bit more relaxed setups when it comes to free speech but that doesn't absolve anyone of actual consequences once the real name is out in the open. Not that Uncle Sam might prosecute you, but Jonathan who lives two blocks away might be so triggered by your response that he will graffiti your front door.
  - 4y ago
jsemrau 4y ago
If I would be running Medium, I would be really worried. The platform already has the worst discovery. Now this will be even worse as content velocity will quickly increase.
jsemrau 4y ago
That's the time to get in the trenches and fight for the Internet to be weird again. I believe there is great value in the edges. I love Lunchclub for exactly that purpose. It creates a really intimate 1:! with someone who might not be in your network. Less velocity = Less Noise
zarzavat 4y ago
In the near term we will have to start Turing testing our conversation partners. You can about a current event, because these models have a training date cutoff. For example, ask them what the top story on the news was yesterday.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  Those of us who don't read the news daily, or live in a different country, won't know the answer to that question either.
  - noncoml 4y ago
    You can quickly google it
    - system2 4y ago
      Have you seen ChatGPT responses? It can easily find out yesterday's topics and write a 10 page essay.
      - goatlover 4y ago
        It's not connected to the internet (outside of being prompted), and the training data was from 2021 and before, so no it can't. ChatGPT will even tell you so, unless you fool it into hallucinating a fake answer. It would be simple to ask a human the result of recent sports score like a World Cup match.
        system2 4y ago
        It would take an update for openai to enable that feature in a few months.
- doliveira 4y ago
  The next step is live training, I wouldn't give it more than a year or so.
SoftTalker 4y ago
> Back to local community and family i guess, it was amazing while it lasted. I see that as a positive thing really. I have no desire to be entertained by generated content. Best bet is to start disengaging and learning to have civil interactions with real people again.
- OhioMan2943 4y ago
  Me too, I believe that it will make us put more faith in the real world and see things from a real world centric perspective once again, as well as not caring about what the outrage of the day is online because it could very well be synthetic.
oriolid 4y ago
> Back to local community and family i guess, it was amazing while it lasted.. Some local communities and families can be pretty dysfunctional or outright hostile. I'm old enough to remember the time before Internet and I think this is why the whole online community thing took off in the first place.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  Seriously, have people here not used Nextdoor? Local communities are absolutely full of toxicity.
  - sph 4y ago
    Nextdoor lives on the internet. People in real life tend to be less terrible when you talk with them face to face. Put them on the internet, it's easy being an inconsiderate imbecile.
    - midoridensha 4y ago
      Putting them on a pseudo-anonymous web forum like Nextdoor shows what these people really think of you.
      - sph 4y ago
        I disagree. While I subscribe to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, I do not believe the vast majority of people are awful. The current format of the internet fosters an unnatural way of behaving, but sit at a table with most people and they are able to disagree, or even get around to another viewpoint, pretty easily. Sadly, I do think this view of mine of the Internet will die soon, as only the people that grew halfway during the Internet age are able to know: older people lack the finesse and the capacity to empathise with someone through text, younger people lack the knowledge that real life humans are capable of being decent, as most of their socialising is done through a screen now.
        4y ago
seydor 4y ago
People won't be flooding the net unless there is an incentive. Right now it is google's ads that are driving content generation. If chatbots are used widely instead of google, there will be less incentive to making filler content. And if the web gets flooded with bot content, it will only hasten the demise of google. Either way the thing will balance out
- concordDance 4y ago
  Some people genuinely do want to watch the world burn. Either feelings of power, to get revenge on a community that rejected them or because they hate the topic that community formed around.
  - dspillett 4y ago
    Or just because they are enticed by the magic look of the flames. There is definitely an amount of amoral interest in amongst all the angry idiots with more specific reasons to be causing trouble.
- dotancohen 4y ago
  You're ignoring political incentive such as the anti-Israel drives. They will certainly flood discussions with by-the-way offhand mentions of "Israeli brutality" in otherwise seemingly innocuous comments on other subjects. There was a spate of this last year, then it subsided, and I would not be surprised to see another wave come, this time automated.
  - OhioMan2943 4y ago
    There are many people who have genuine concerns about Israeli issues, such as the election of leaders who prioritise those of one faith over another, the targeted striking of Al Jazeera offices in Palestine, and the eviction of Palestinian citizens from the West Bank https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-63660566 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-63660566. It would be false to assume that brutality of one site absolves the other of criticism for the same actions. Israel participates in state sponsored propaganda as well. https://www.smh.com.au/technology/israeli-propaganda-war-hits-social-media-20140717-ztvky.html https://www.smh.com.au/technology/israeli-propaganda-war-hit...
foolfoolz 4y ago
this is where the internet has gone over the last 10 years. it’s become less personal. you’re not on small community sites anymore with people you know. you’re on of a million looking at the same content reposted to the handful of large publishers. doesn’t matter which one you use, it’s all the same. doesn’t matter who the poster or commenter or anything about the people is, you don’t know them anyway
sph 4y ago
Fellow Internet human, I agree with you completely, there must be dozens of us. I wonder if I am just becoming a Luddite, or people have no idea whatsoever what will this unleash on already frail social fabric of the Internet. I wonder if we've reached a singularity point where you cannot be sure you are engaging with a human anymore and it's going to be instrumental in the demise of the net. First, it was the big corporations that created a soulless place, then it was the naive, reckless technologists that killed the little of humanity that remained. Thanks to them, we will soon have to present real IDs to access some websites. I am in the peak of my career as a software engineer at 35, as many Millenials I've grown during the best years of it, and now I'm considering a life away from what was once a bustling bazaar of human discourse, now it's a void of text, images, rage and little soul. If the "Dead Internet" is just a conspiracy theory, we're running towards it at breakneck speed.
- davzie 4y ago
  Same age, same feelings. Part of me wished I hadn't built my career on digital technology so that it would be easier to not have to even interact with it. But alas, I have!
- worldsayshi 4y ago
  Neither technology or luddism is inherently bad. Technology is bad when it causes bad outcomes. And the generous interpretation of luddism is that it's about working against bad outcomes of technology.
  - eliasdaler 4y ago
    Indeed. It's a shame that many people immediately call others "Luddites" as if technological progress always equates to "good things". The opposite has been shown to be true again and again.
- neuronic 4y ago
  > I am in the peak of my career as a software engineer at 35, as many Millenials I've grown during the best years of it In the past, it must have been 2003-2008, I was sharing self-drawn comics and ideas how to improve on them with fellow artists, actually meeting them in real life sometimes at conventions. I was also active in a gaming forum plainly for discussing the lore and surrounding theories. These communities had a real sense of community and weren't social just in name. I knew every day at 5pm a lot of new posts and threads would be starting to appear, from my forum friends and arch enemies alike. Nowadays, these places are dead as people have moved on to large platforms long ago. This already killed all feeling of community but at least I had some nice comment exchanges and the absolute amount of content increased. Then it got even worse. I cannot read a single post that isn't surrounded by trolling, astroturfing, psyops, advertisements and affiliate links or bot responses. Good example: as a German, it is very hard to ever discuss the topic of nuclear fission phase-out in a constructive and respectful manner. Especially on reddit, the canned and templated responses are really suspicious. But it doesn't matter anymore, if it is discussions or content. Communities will be flooded and killed by bots while content is flooded and killed by generated SEO garbage (a lot of threads on HN about this as well). Unless you're explicitly browsing some decent sites like Wikipedia the Internet is already FUBAR compared to pre-2010 or so. The Bot-trocity is happening and making it worse with every evolution of ChatGPT and so on. We cannot trust images or text anymore. Everything is a dream and nothing is real.
askvictor 4y ago
Reputation could hold this at bay for a little (in place of a real person ID), though you have the obvious problem of bootstrapping a real person's reputation who is only entering the forum.
- concordDance 4y ago
  How do you make a working reputation system? Reddit, for example, has bots populating the top karma levels.
  - ahmedtatum 4y ago
    Yeah I have a bot farm on reddit of 500-1000 accounts posting AI generated stuff to sell trending posts to brands, it's very easy to do and they've made little to no progress in stopping it
    - jacooper 4y ago
      Well, you are part of the problem then.
  - askvictor 4y ago
    Facebook and Google probably know if you're human as they process all of your browsing data (hence Google's latest captcha not requiring any interaction provided you're logged in). Definitely difficult on a small scale, and even on a large scale it's a constant arms race.
b112 4y ago
The fact that soon the internet will be so flooded with bots that you'll be floating eternally alone in a sea of imposters I wish I didn't have to see 5 posts about chatGPT, or 3, constantly on the front page of HN. If there's any flood, it's probably bots posting stories, and bots upvoting them.
asimpletune 4y ago
Yeah, I think this will actually do a lot to push people one day to spend more time in the real world, and that will be fine. A lot of people though may enjoy talking to bots, and that's also fine.
profstasiak 4y ago
>Christ this is going to be so incredibly boring, paranoid and lonely for everyone in a few years time! I think the opposite will be true. I hope we will spend more people talking to each other in real life, which actually makes me happy that dead internet is happening. I dont know if you buy this theory of social media causing loneliness. I intuitively feel that way and the more I talk with friends on chat, or comment here the more lonely I feel. Meanwhile meeting my friends or strangers in real life gives me a memory boost and makes me smile. The less everyone spends on Twitter arguing with bots, or here on HN arguing in the comments the happier we all are
- foepys 4y ago
  > I hope we will spend more people talking to each other in real life, which actually makes me happy that dead internet is happening. This is certainly true for the majority of people but will be very bad for people who don't fit in with their surroundings. It will hurt communities like LGBTQ+ quite a lot to not be able to talk to other like-minded/open real people.
  - Method-X 4y ago
    They will have to find each other offline and come together in healthier ways. The world has changed a lot in the past couple decades. They'll be fine.
    - eliasdaler 4y ago
      What about people with social anxiety? Speech disabilities? People who can't physically go out to an online meet? It's not just about acceptance, it's also about the comfort and safety of online communication.
      - freedude 4y ago
        There is only one way in which those of use that suffer from social anxiety may work through it. Face the fear.
      - 4y ago
inglor 4y ago
Giving up privacy is indeed a tragedy and inevitable and it's a consequence of many processes (including generated responses and bots but also the democratic process's reliance on news outlets and the fact spreading news got a lot easier with the internet and figured it out). However - once we do a ton of stuff (other than reliable news though that is a nice side effects) is unlocked. If you can verify who someone is easily - elections and government processes can be a lot more transparent and reach consensus a lot more easily. Medicine can gather a lot of reliable (opt-in) data and become better and more efficient, fraud is easier to detect etc. I am and have been for about 2-3 years sad for the upcoming loss of privacy and it is truly a tragedy and seems inevitable.
jacooper 4y ago
This is going to happen, unless OpenAI and other AI developers, create a hidden unique Cryptic signature inside AI responses. I've read somewhere that openAI is already working on this. If that doesn't work, I think effective discussions on the internet might plausibly shift gradually to other languages, since AI is currently only focused on English, and I doubt thats going to change any time soon. first towards European languages like German and French, but since these languages are well supported in tech, and use similar letters and writing style, I suspect they will be conquered quickly. A real challenge would be Eastern languages, like Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and others. These languages use a completely different writing style, grammer rules and have a wide field between being understood and being fluent, such that a basic Bot will be caught quickly by a native(this is why Google translate absolutely sucks in these languages, its immediately clear thats its automatically translated).
- neuronic 4y ago
  What about malicious entities that will simply not do this and publish ChatGPT without any such safety measures? It's happening with Stable Diffusion. The tech-cat is absolutely out of the box now.
  - jacooper 4y ago
    For english yes, but not other languages. I edited the comment to reflect the possibility of effective internet discussions shifting to other languages.
roflyear 4y ago
You're already floating in a sea of imposters. What's the difference if they are bots?
whiplash451 4y ago
I am entirely with you, having experienced the "early" years of the internet back in the 90s. That being said, I think "back to local communities and family" is a regression because the internet, at least at the beginning, promised genuine interactions between people across the world. There's got to be a way to fulfill that promise without falling into 1984.
politician 4y ago
The current situation with spam and AI is the backstory for Neal Stephenson's Anathem. Great story if you haven't read it.
0xmarcin 4y ago
Do you mean difficult to solve captchas? We already have those. Maybe FB social proof of an account will again gain popularity? [Disclaimer: I am not ChatGPT]
martin82 4y ago
My hopes are on decentralized identity systems via web5 and some kind of PGP-like web-of-trust system. https://developer.tbd.website/projects/web5/ https://developer.tbd.website/projects/web5/
xnx 4y ago
I'm hopeful that some pay AI/ML service (probably the next generation of Google search) might crop up to work as an export agent for me and my interests against the AI (or human) powered psyops operation that is sales and marketing. I don't think Google is forever married to advertising. If they could charge everyone $50+/month for Assistant, I think they'd do it.

bcherny 4y ago

Every major site is already pretty effective at blocking bots, and has been for years. I don’t see why that would suddenly start to become less effective, given their approaches largely focus on behavioral signals, not specific content.

keiferski 4y ago

This has a far easier and less dystopian solution: charge money to access communities, which are smaller and more focused. I find it very unlikely that corporate PR bots will be paying $5 a month each to spam Substack communities, for example.

MollyRealized 4y ago
... Metafilter, since pre-2000. [1] [1] - www.metafilter.com
- rglullis 4y ago
  Which is probably one of the best sources of good discussion on the internet.
rglullis 4y ago
It's doesn't even have to be $5/month. Make a $10 deposit required for creating an account, and for each offense against the guidelines, you get a "fine" that proportional for the severity of the infraction (uncivil discussion? $0.10 cents, participating in hell-threads? $0.50. Comparing HN with reddit? $1.337 Obvious spam? Your whole $10 is gone.) Repeat offenses get exponentially more expensive, and you only get to post with a positive balance.
- joeldo 4y ago
  On the surface I like this idea, but this makes it harder for participants from poorer countries from, well, participating. For some countries this is more than a week of the average wage!
  - andsoitis 4y ago
    Price can vary by market. Many companies already do this both for products and services, as well as subscriptions.
    - midoridensha 4y ago
      I guess you haven't heard of a VPN?
      - andsoitis 4y ago
        You can require address as part of credit card validation.
        midoridensha 4y ago
        So only people with credit cards are allowed to use the forum? That shuts out a lot of people, especially in places where credit cards aren't used.
        andsoitis 4y ago
jsemrau 4y ago
That's what I am doing with finclout. The noise on Stocktwits, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc is just way too high. Hence, offering a value adding app + the social component is where its at. IMHO.

rtkwe 4y ago

The thing is you could implement a real ID system that was still pseudonymous at the user level so that you only prove real personhood at account creation. Kind of like a Twitter blue check but just for human authenticity instead of notoriety. It could even be tied back to the real person account anonymously on the admin side so you could mass ban alts automatically if people started to create bad bots. It should all be doable with current encryption the biggest issue is we don’t have key to real person really setup at any level. Maybe something like keybase combined with the KYC tech used for banks and exchanges could bridge that gap.

im3w1l 4y ago
One issue with that is that you could approach poor people and get hundreds of thousands of real ids for very little. And because language models are so good, it would take ages to root them all out if it's even possible.
- rtkwe 4y ago
  Modern KYC methods has liveness checks built into it so you'd need to get tons of people willing to create and hand over their unique accounts themselves. Same problem in theory exists for Coinbase or other crypto exchanges but they only get a scant number of scammers trying to use it to funnel funds out.
catiopatio 4y ago
No thank you. That would be a dystopian nightmare.
- rtkwe 4y ago
  This doesn't preclude the use of non authenticated account(s) just a possible system of providing provisions for anonymous authentication of humanness. I don't want to slap my real name across every part either but nothing about this requires all sites to adopt it at all.
- greesil 4y ago

dang 4y ago

Real person ID isn't a solution since real persons can always consort with bots on the side. I think anonymity and pseudo-anonymity still have a place and contribute a lot to discussion quality. So do people posting under their real names. We don't know how this is all going to play out yet.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
andsoitis 4y ago
> We don't know how this is all going to play out yet One risk is that bot-generated contributions drown out human-generated content, both due to speed with which they can be crafted as well as “quality”. I put quality in quotes because in human debate there’s a learning process and so while an individual contribution might be “lower quality” than another, the overall discussion quality and learning quality (for both contributor and readers) can be high. Put differently, just because all the individual contributions are of high quality does not mean the “thread quality” is high.
tuyiown 4y ago
Real person ID only works with government issued auth, say webauthn with government backed ID verification. Heck, if that webauthn provider would also allowed third party anonymity (auth that just state a person is real, guaranteed, but you won't know who, and no records) I'd be thrilled. It'd to be optional though, just a flag attached to the account, but we're head on to have reputation systems attached to accounts anyway.
neuronic 4y ago
The real person ID will make the "real person" liable to whatever the bot says and does though. I know US Americans have a bit more relaxed setups when it comes to free speech but that doesn't absolve anyone of actual consequences once the real name is out in the open. Not that Uncle Sam might prosecute you, but Jonathan who lives two blocks away might be so triggered by your response that he will graffiti your front door.
- 4y ago

jsemrau 4y ago

If I would be running Medium, I would be really worried. The platform already has the worst discovery. Now this will be even worse as content velocity will quickly increase.

jsemrau 4y ago

That's the time to get in the trenches and fight for the Internet to be weird again. I believe there is great value in the edges. I love Lunchclub for exactly that purpose. It creates a really intimate 1:! with someone who might not be in your network. Less velocity = Less Noise

zarzavat 4y ago

In the near term we will have to start Turing testing our conversation partners. You can about a current event, because these models have a training date cutoff. For example, ask them what the top story on the news was yesterday.

midoridensha 4y ago
Those of us who don't read the news daily, or live in a different country, won't know the answer to that question either.
- noncoml 4y ago
  You can quickly google it
  - system2 4y ago
    Have you seen ChatGPT responses? It can easily find out yesterday's topics and write a 10 page essay.
    - goatlover 4y ago
      It's not connected to the internet (outside of being prompted), and the training data was from 2021 and before, so no it can't. ChatGPT will even tell you so, unless you fool it into hallucinating a fake answer. It would be simple to ask a human the result of recent sports score like a World Cup match.
      - system2 4y ago
        It would take an update for openai to enable that feature in a few months.
doliveira 4y ago
The next step is live training, I wouldn't give it more than a year or so.

SoftTalker 4y ago

> Back to local community and family i guess, it was amazing while it lasted. I see that as a positive thing really. I have no desire to be entertained by generated content. Best bet is to start disengaging and learning to have civil interactions with real people again.

OhioMan2943 4y ago
Me too, I believe that it will make us put more faith in the real world and see things from a real world centric perspective once again, as well as not caring about what the outrage of the day is online because it could very well be synthetic.

oriolid 4y ago

> Back to local community and family i guess, it was amazing while it lasted.. Some local communities and families can be pretty dysfunctional or outright hostile. I'm old enough to remember the time before Internet and I think this is why the whole online community thing took off in the first place.

midoridensha 4y ago
Seriously, have people here not used Nextdoor? Local communities are absolutely full of toxicity.
- sph 4y ago
  Nextdoor lives on the internet. People in real life tend to be less terrible when you talk with them face to face. Put them on the internet, it's easy being an inconsiderate imbecile.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    Putting them on a pseudo-anonymous web forum like Nextdoor shows what these people really think of you.
    - sph 4y ago
      I disagree. While I subscribe to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, I do not believe the vast majority of people are awful. The current format of the internet fosters an unnatural way of behaving, but sit at a table with most people and they are able to disagree, or even get around to another viewpoint, pretty easily. Sadly, I do think this view of mine of the Internet will die soon, as only the people that grew halfway during the Internet age are able to know: older people lack the finesse and the capacity to empathise with someone through text, younger people lack the knowledge that real life humans are capable of being decent, as most of their socialising is done through a screen now.
      - 4y ago

seydor 4y ago

People won't be flooding the net unless there is an incentive. Right now it is google's ads that are driving content generation. If chatbots are used widely instead of google, there will be less incentive to making filler content. And if the web gets flooded with bot content, it will only hasten the demise of google. Either way the thing will balance out

concordDance 4y ago
Some people genuinely do want to watch the world burn. Either feelings of power, to get revenge on a community that rejected them or because they hate the topic that community formed around.
- dspillett 4y ago
  Or just because they are enticed by the magic look of the flames. There is definitely an amount of amoral interest in amongst all the angry idiots with more specific reasons to be causing trouble.
dotancohen 4y ago
You're ignoring political incentive such as the anti-Israel drives. They will certainly flood discussions with by-the-way offhand mentions of "Israeli brutality" in otherwise seemingly innocuous comments on other subjects. There was a spate of this last year, then it subsided, and I would not be surprised to see another wave come, this time automated.
- OhioMan2943 4y ago
  There are many people who have genuine concerns about Israeli issues, such as the election of leaders who prioritise those of one faith over another, the targeted striking of Al Jazeera offices in Palestine, and the eviction of Palestinian citizens from the West Bank https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-63660566 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-63660566. It would be false to assume that brutality of one site absolves the other of criticism for the same actions. Israel participates in state sponsored propaganda as well. https://www.smh.com.au/technology/israeli-propaganda-war-hits-social-media-20140717-ztvky.html https://www.smh.com.au/technology/israeli-propaganda-war-hit...

foolfoolz 4y ago

this is where the internet has gone over the last 10 years. it’s become less personal. you’re not on small community sites anymore with people you know. you’re on of a million looking at the same content reposted to the handful of large publishers. doesn’t matter which one you use, it’s all the same. doesn’t matter who the poster or commenter or anything about the people is, you don’t know them anyway

sph 4y ago

Fellow Internet human, I agree with you completely, there must be dozens of us. I wonder if I am just becoming a Luddite, or people have no idea whatsoever what will this unleash on already frail social fabric of the Internet. I wonder if we've reached a singularity point where you cannot be sure you are engaging with a human anymore and it's going to be instrumental in the demise of the net. First, it was the big corporations that created a soulless place, then it was the naive, reckless technologists that killed the little of humanity that remained. Thanks to them, we will soon have to present real IDs to access some websites. I am in the peak of my career as a software engineer at 35, as many Millenials I've grown during the best years of it, and now I'm considering a life away from what was once a bustling bazaar of human discourse, now it's a void of text, images, rage and little soul. If the "Dead Internet" is just a conspiracy theory, we're running towards it at breakneck speed.

davzie 4y ago
Same age, same feelings. Part of me wished I hadn't built my career on digital technology so that it would be easier to not have to even interact with it. But alas, I have!
worldsayshi 4y ago
Neither technology or luddism is inherently bad. Technology is bad when it causes bad outcomes. And the generous interpretation of luddism is that it's about working against bad outcomes of technology.
- eliasdaler 4y ago
  Indeed. It's a shame that many people immediately call others "Luddites" as if technological progress always equates to "good things". The opposite has been shown to be true again and again.
neuronic 4y ago
> I am in the peak of my career as a software engineer at 35, as many Millenials I've grown during the best years of it In the past, it must have been 2003-2008, I was sharing self-drawn comics and ideas how to improve on them with fellow artists, actually meeting them in real life sometimes at conventions. I was also active in a gaming forum plainly for discussing the lore and surrounding theories. These communities had a real sense of community and weren't social just in name. I knew every day at 5pm a lot of new posts and threads would be starting to appear, from my forum friends and arch enemies alike. Nowadays, these places are dead as people have moved on to large platforms long ago. This already killed all feeling of community but at least I had some nice comment exchanges and the absolute amount of content increased. Then it got even worse. I cannot read a single post that isn't surrounded by trolling, astroturfing, psyops, advertisements and affiliate links or bot responses. Good example: as a German, it is very hard to ever discuss the topic of nuclear fission phase-out in a constructive and respectful manner. Especially on reddit, the canned and templated responses are really suspicious. But it doesn't matter anymore, if it is discussions or content. Communities will be flooded and killed by bots while content is flooded and killed by generated SEO garbage (a lot of threads on HN about this as well). Unless you're explicitly browsing some decent sites like Wikipedia the Internet is already FUBAR compared to pre-2010 or so. The Bot-trocity is happening and making it worse with every evolution of ChatGPT and so on. We cannot trust images or text anymore. Everything is a dream and nothing is real.

askvictor 4y ago

Reputation could hold this at bay for a little (in place of a real person ID), though you have the obvious problem of bootstrapping a real person's reputation who is only entering the forum.

concordDance 4y ago
How do you make a working reputation system? Reddit, for example, has bots populating the top karma levels.
- ahmedtatum 4y ago
  Yeah I have a bot farm on reddit of 500-1000 accounts posting AI generated stuff to sell trending posts to brands, it's very easy to do and they've made little to no progress in stopping it
  - jacooper 4y ago
    Well, you are part of the problem then.
- askvictor 4y ago
  Facebook and Google probably know if you're human as they process all of your browsing data (hence Google's latest captcha not requiring any interaction provided you're logged in). Definitely difficult on a small scale, and even on a large scale it's a constant arms race.

b112 4y ago

The fact that soon the internet will be so flooded with bots that you'll be floating eternally alone in a sea of imposters I wish I didn't have to see 5 posts about chatGPT, or 3, constantly on the front page of HN. If there's any flood, it's probably bots posting stories, and bots upvoting them.

asimpletune 4y ago

Yeah, I think this will actually do a lot to push people one day to spend more time in the real world, and that will be fine. A lot of people though may enjoy talking to bots, and that's also fine.

profstasiak 4y ago

>Christ this is going to be so incredibly boring, paranoid and lonely for everyone in a few years time! I think the opposite will be true. I hope we will spend more people talking to each other in real life, which actually makes me happy that dead internet is happening. I dont know if you buy this theory of social media causing loneliness. I intuitively feel that way and the more I talk with friends on chat, or comment here the more lonely I feel. Meanwhile meeting my friends or strangers in real life gives me a memory boost and makes me smile. The less everyone spends on Twitter arguing with bots, or here on HN arguing in the comments the happier we all are

foepys 4y ago
> I hope we will spend more people talking to each other in real life, which actually makes me happy that dead internet is happening. This is certainly true for the majority of people but will be very bad for people who don't fit in with their surroundings. It will hurt communities like LGBTQ+ quite a lot to not be able to talk to other like-minded/open real people.
- Method-X 4y ago
  They will have to find each other offline and come together in healthier ways. The world has changed a lot in the past couple decades. They'll be fine.
  - eliasdaler 4y ago
    What about people with social anxiety? Speech disabilities? People who can't physically go out to an online meet? It's not just about acceptance, it's also about the comfort and safety of online communication.
    - freedude 4y ago
      There is only one way in which those of use that suffer from social anxiety may work through it. Face the fear.
    - 4y ago

inglor 4y ago

Giving up privacy is indeed a tragedy and inevitable and it's a consequence of many processes (including generated responses and bots but also the democratic process's reliance on news outlets and the fact spreading news got a lot easier with the internet and figured it out). However - once we do a ton of stuff (other than reliable news though that is a nice side effects) is unlocked. If you can verify who someone is easily - elections and government processes can be a lot more transparent and reach consensus a lot more easily. Medicine can gather a lot of reliable (opt-in) data and become better and more efficient, fraud is easier to detect etc. I am and have been for about 2-3 years sad for the upcoming loss of privacy and it is truly a tragedy and seems inevitable.

jacooper 4y ago

This is going to happen, unless OpenAI and other AI developers, create a hidden unique Cryptic signature inside AI responses. I've read somewhere that openAI is already working on this. If that doesn't work, I think effective discussions on the internet might plausibly shift gradually to other languages, since AI is currently only focused on English, and I doubt thats going to change any time soon. first towards European languages like German and French, but since these languages are well supported in tech, and use similar letters and writing style, I suspect they will be conquered quickly. A real challenge would be Eastern languages, like Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and others. These languages use a completely different writing style, grammer rules and have a wide field between being understood and being fluent, such that a basic Bot will be caught quickly by a native(this is why Google translate absolutely sucks in these languages, its immediately clear thats its automatically translated).

neuronic 4y ago
What about malicious entities that will simply not do this and publish ChatGPT without any such safety measures? It's happening with Stable Diffusion. The tech-cat is absolutely out of the box now.
- jacooper 4y ago
  For english yes, but not other languages. I edited the comment to reflect the possibility of effective internet discussions shifting to other languages.

roflyear 4y ago

You're already floating in a sea of imposters. What's the difference if they are bots?

whiplash451 4y ago

I am entirely with you, having experienced the "early" years of the internet back in the 90s. That being said, I think "back to local communities and family" is a regression because the internet, at least at the beginning, promised genuine interactions between people across the world. There's got to be a way to fulfill that promise without falling into 1984.

politician 4y ago

The current situation with spam and AI is the backstory for Neal Stephenson's Anathem. Great story if you haven't read it.

0xmarcin 4y ago

Do you mean difficult to solve captchas? We already have those. Maybe FB social proof of an account will again gain popularity? [Disclaimer: I am not ChatGPT]

martin82 4y ago

My hopes are on decentralized identity systems via web5 and some kind of PGP-like web-of-trust system. https://developer.tbd.website/projects/web5/ https://developer.tbd.website/projects/web5/

xnx 4y ago

I'm hopeful that some pay AI/ML service (probably the next generation of Google search) might crop up to work as an export agent for me and my interests against the AI (or human) powered psyops operation that is sales and marketing. I don't think Google is forever married to advertising. If they could charge everyone $50+/month for Assistant, I think they'd do it.