7 ms·

Dead Internet Theory

51 points by philip1209 4y ago

bediger4000 4y ago
After looking at Apache httpd log files from a VPS running a Hugo generated blog, I have to agree. I see very few GET requests for favocon.ico, or CSS files or .js files, but tons of requests overall. There's a few well behaved bots (Google, bing, Apple, Seznam), a few less well behaved bots, based on user agent. Then there's a ton of requests that are obviously machine generated due to the speed of arrival, and not asking for CSS or .js files, but not having a user agent string that indicates programmatic requests. There's also a fraction of requests that seem to be probing for security vulnerabilities.
- ElevenLathe 4y ago
  I used to work in webhosting and HTTP logs are full of really weird stuff where you can't even really understand what they are trying to do. We would pass funny or novel ones back and forth for fun in the sysadmin Jabber chat. My favorite one (it became my internal email sig for a while) was something like: GET ../../../../../etc/shadow.php?redirect=google.com You try to follow the thought process just end up crosseyed: OK they are trying to use directory traversal to get the shadow file, but...they expect it to have a PHP extension. Well, I guess that could be some .htaccess RewriteRule misconfiguration that's relatively common. Ok but then they expect it to actually /be/ a PHP script and...to understand the "redirect" parameter? Hmm maybe this is possible if some other vulnerability lets them write to the shadow file. OK but if they can already write to arbitrary files on the machine, why use /etc/shadow, and why do any of this just to generate ... a 3xx to google.com?
  - dmux 4y ago
    Being as confusing as possible actually seems like a really good tactic. Depending on the web server and frameworks installed, couldn't etc/shadow.php actually be a file in a common framework? Also, if I wanted to be extra obscure, "redirect=google.com" wouldn't actually do what you think it would. It's just a key and a value which could be used for who-knows-what internally.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      /etc/shadow is a file containing system account info that should never be accessible to the public on a properly-configured webserver. It's possible the request was probing for some very-specific combo of misconfigurations that might permit reading sensitive files, without going so far as to request the sensitive file.
      - dmux 4y ago
        Right, I understand that. What I probably should have made more clear was whether it was trying to get to /etc/shadow, or another .../etc/shadow.php file located somewhere within the web-server's file directory.
  - swatcoder 4y ago
    It was probably probing, not exploiting, and the “.php” and query parameter probably helps it get filtered away under some common log filter regex/rules. It’s goal was to see how your server responded to that kind of request (relative path that escapes html root, probably) without standing out too obviously in your logs. Based on the response it provided, your server might have gotten bumped into a list for more targeted probing or exploitation.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Might test for some combo of letting you reach files you shouldn't be able to, and other dangerously-configured httpd rules (e.g. open redirects), in such a way that it lets the webserver take care of the whole request while still verifying you could access the file you want with a different request. Might help evade early detection by IDS or something, in very-specific cases, while still permitting probing of the filesystem. Like, it might let you basically stat the file without reading its contents, if the webserver does things in the following order: 1) Verify that the file, after applying rewrite rules, exists and is readable; else, 404, 2) see the "redirect" query string, short-circuit request and serve a 304 (or what have you) without actually reading the file we already verified exists—never actually make any syscalls to read the file. ... if it's not that, yeah, no clue.
    - ElevenLathe 4y ago
      Basically my thoughts as well. Mainly I take a cyberpunk-esque view of things where the net is a big ecosystem with lots of weird environmental niches, and so it breeds software, people, and organizations to occupy these niches. Asking what this one request is supposed to mean is kind of beside the point, like asking what a particular log in a forest means.
  - bediger4000 4y ago
    Thank you! I've looked at a lot of PHP malware and a good portion of it is impossible to understand because it's hard to tell what the intent is. Bug or probe? Typo or clever coding trick? Cut-n-paste or testing only against SunOS 4.10 server?
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Low(ish) traffic sites & servers have seen high-proportion-bot-and-vuln-scanner traffic since at least the late 90s. Solution used to be to blackhole IP blocks associated with certain countries, provided you didn't really, really need to serve those countries. Would usually stop 99% of it, so the logs were a lot less noisy and you could tell when you were under focused attack and needed to really pay attention (which was basically 100% of the time, without the blocks) The modern version is letting CloudFlare hit IPs in those countries with never-ending CAPTCHA challenges.
sbate1987 4y ago
how much of a new car is made by a human - even designed by a human - how much of a spacex rocket is made by a human - in thirty years how much will be made by humans. as soon as I can get past the small fingers I will make humans. Humans with big eyes this is my world now.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- drdeca 4y ago
  ?
- bloppe 4y ago
  This is the hottest take
- oliveshell 4y ago
  You can do anything at Zombocom
  - shmde 4y ago
    The only limit is yourself
version_five 4y ago
If I'm understanding this correctly, it's always been true but there has also always been some "real" content on the internet. We're all on a site right now that, say what you like about it, it isn't bot spam. If looked for warez or porn in the late '90s, there was always some kind of circular ad and scam infested network of links promising stuff but never going anywhere. It's more sophisticated now and there's more of it, and it's expanded into shopping and travel and hotels and recipies and whatever else. But there's also more real content.
- Avshalom 4y ago
  >>say what you like about it, it isn't bot spam. It might be. There have been some threads where it very obviously has been and some threads where I can't prove it but I suspect.
- abruzzi 4y ago
  I think there has already been people on this board admittedly using LLMs to generate comments. This theory predated this current AI explosion, but that potentially makes it harder to tell if you are arguing with a person or a bot.
  - berkle4455 4y ago
    Absolutely. There’s immense value in holding a large network of online personas across different social mediums. And it can take a very long time to establish those accounts in a credible manner.
    - uoaei 4y ago
      This is why I'm looking forward to a more federated, inter-operable social internet experience in the future. Global conversations are dominated by the loudest among us and inevitably end up floundering in the face of any kind of nuance. In contrast, if you join a curated group, and you yourself curate the groups you join, a lot of the guards people put up when they hop onto e.g. Twitter can be lowered and people are more interested in engaging in good faith. There is still some work to be done as regards flow of information between federated instances to promote substantive discussion while avoiding filter bubbles, but it's a better start than the simplest kind of flattening of society that is expressed today in Twitter and the like.
ren_engineer 4y ago
already seeing some tools for hooking up multi-model GPT to Chromium. We're going to need some real-time proof of humanity test or the internet will be bots talking to other bots. Captchas aren't going to cut it and if the problem isn't fixed it's going to be a tragedy of the commons situation. Might end up being a good thing though if people give up on the internet and start doing stuff in person again
- rossdavidh 4y ago
  ...or at least use the internet for communicating with people they've met in real life, rather than for arguing with people they've never met and never will (much less trying to gauge the general opinion of the population).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
dougmwne 4y ago
Boy, if this wasn't literally true before, it's going to be literally true now. One very refreshing thing about VR metaverse apps like Altspace (which just shut down) was that they were very much populated by real people since it wasn't possible for a bot to create content or interaction on the platform.
LeoPanthera 4y ago
At least I can be sure that there aren't any bots here. Isn't that right, fellow humans?
- dokem 4y ago
  1
- fumblebee 4y ago
  * bleep bloop bleep * I'm 58.93% sure I'm not a bot.
- deltarholamda 4y ago
  Yes, I am very glad to be typing with you. I like to use my ten fingers to converse with other real humans on these internet. I wish I could type more with you, but I must now go to eat human foods at a restaurant diner.
- outworlder 4y ago
  While it's reassuring to believe that online discussions are free from bots, the reality is that it can be difficult to tell if you're interacting with a human or a machine. However, by engaging in open and respectful dialogue, we can work towards fostering authentic and productive conversations regardless of who or what we're interacting with.
  - LeoPanthera 4y ago
    I can't tell if it's good or bad that I now recognize GPT-generated text.
    - dokem 4y ago
      Condescending and vapid corporate speak generator.
fumblebee 4y ago
Oddly prescient. We're converging on a bimodal world of information. 1. Trusted, centralised sources like the Economist, BBC, NYTimes, etc. 2. Everything else, you should basically assume is generated information pushing some agenda. Quoting some stats from an article on HN mid last year (links to sources didn't copy over) [1] --------------------------------- * Elon Musk estimates that 20% of Twitter users are bots. The authors of this paper suggest 14% as an upper bound. * Supposedly 10% — or around 95m — of accounts on Instagram are bot/spam accounts. * In a study of the first impeachment of Donald Trump (same paper as linked above), bots made up 1% of active users, but posted 31% of the tweets. * Some 42% of Amazon reviews are fake. Amazon are suing Facebook for ‘failing to tackle fake review factories’ * TikTok is not immune either. Bots are artificially inflating popularity of accounts and posting videos that are essentially adverts. Here’s a comprehensive guide to buying bots on TikTok. * According to this article, “over 80 percent of NFTs minted for free on OpenSea are fake, plagiarised or spam”. --------------------------------- For any platform where any user is free to create their own content. In the not too distant future, nine times out of ten, they'll be a bot. [1] https://grandy.substack.com/p/the-new-normal-the-coming-tsunami https://grandy.substack.com/p/the-new-normal-the-coming-tsun...
- ridgered4 4y ago
  > * Some 42% of Amazon reviews are fake. Amazon are suing Facebook for ‘failing to tackle fake review factories’ Why is it Facebook's job to make sure Amazon's reviews aren't fake? I guess I don't understand the pipeline for fake reviews or something.
  - fumblebee 4y ago
    Feels closer to an SNL skit. Here's the original link to the news story [1]. Clearly this is a problem on the Amazon side, and not the Facebook side. If Amazon design their platform in a way where fake reviews are trivial to write, then they will be written, regardless of whether the groups behind them have communities on Facebook, or Reddit, or wherever else. [1] https://news.sky.com/story/amazon-files-lawsuit-against-10-000-facebook-groups-designed-to-create-fake-reviews-12654766 https://news.sky.com/story/amazon-files-lawsuit-against-10-0...
Karawebnetwork 4y ago
The internet is not dead, but the nature of online activity has changed. Traditional forums may not be as popular as they once were. The ease of access to information through search engines (and even within platforms like ChatGPT) means that people are still engaging with content just not creating it publicly through long social exchanges as before. Many topics that previously required cooperation on a forum are now readily available with a simple search, reducing the need to discuss those solutions. Stack Overflow and other small niche communities are the exception here. This shift towards more accessible information has resulted in less visible activity if we view internet activity as the creation of original text content. The older generation of internet users may have moved on from forums to focus on real-life issues, which has taken time away from hobbies. Niche communities still exist, but the use of small public forums is not as trendy as it once was. Many people have shifted towards using larger social networks and private messaging platforms (like Messenger, Snapchat, and Discord). Discord for example is used by a lot of communities to aggregate their documentation and user activity, despite the risk of this content being pruned earlier than it should. These platforms are still very active, but they may not be as visible to those outside of closed groups. The data and activity within these groups are not crawled, making it seem as though there is less activity on the internet than there really is. The rise of video content has made it difficult to quickly read and crawl through information, leading to the false impression that the internet is empty of recent original content. There is actually more video content available now than ever before, but it may not be as easily searchable or accessible as text-based content.
- revx 4y ago
  This comment feels AI generated to me, but I'm not sure if now I'm just being paranoid :)
  - Karawebnetwork 4y ago
    DeepL translated from French :')
- swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
  Finding any obscure topic and delving into the treasure trove of videos on it whatever it may be really gives me hope for self-teaching being the future of education
javier123454321 4y ago
I saw this really annoying thing on reddit where some user was clearly answering questions in small business subreddits via ChatGPT to promote their web design business. It made me sick and got me furious for some reason. The answers were clearly in the voice of chatGPT which is currently one that is about as generic as a 19 year old trying to break into content marketing on an industry they have no knowledge about. The internet is getting saturated with this drivel and I think it will just drown itself out. As more and more of these auto generated articles, responses, traffic, and soon video blur the lines, I think the search for authenticity will be the thing that keeps it alive. It will not be hard to stand out, but maybe it will be harder to surface the authentic content.
- surgical_fire 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - javier123454321 4y ago
    Maybe, but content generated by an LLM will be everywhere and anyone can use the same model to generate the same content. Sure, a lot of traffic to search engines are simple information lookup, so those might become obsolete, but when you are browsing the internet, how often are you searching for facts? I will tell you that a lot of the interesting things that I search for (and why I like old school forums like hacker news and reddit) is the discussion that happens in the comments. I.E. authentic content.
  - xboxnolifes 4y ago
    Because certain content is only useful because of authenticity. If I'm looking to aggregate opinions on a topic, I want to know that I read 100 opinions from real people. Not 100 generated hallucinations from ChatGPT.
xena 4y ago
I wrote a bunch of my fears about this on my blog recently: https://xeiaso.net/blog/a-weapon-to-surpass-metal-gear https://xeiaso.net/blog/a-weapon-to-surpass-metal-gear
cagenut 4y ago
I prefer Max Read's "the inversion" phrase to "dead internet theory". https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-inte... We've crossed the line on the "default" for things being bot/spam/automated-fake.
tracerbulletx 4y ago
There are viable ways to create smaller curated communities with tiers of vetted membership online and I imagine we will continue to see that happen.
mugr 4y ago
The internet is not the same as the web, which is what the entry talks about.

51 points by philip1209 4y ago

After looking at Apache httpd log files from a VPS running a Hugo generated blog, I have to agree. I see very few GET requests for favocon.ico, or CSS files or .js files, but tons of requests overall. There's a few well behaved bots (Google, bing, Apple, Seznam), a few less well behaved bots, based on user agent. Then there's a ton of requests that are obviously machine generated due to the speed of arrival, and not asking for CSS or .js files, but not having a user agent string that indicates programmatic requests. There's also a fraction of requests that seem to be probing for security vulnerabilities.

ElevenLathe 4y ago
I used to work in webhosting and HTTP logs are full of really weird stuff where you can't even really understand what they are trying to do. We would pass funny or novel ones back and forth for fun in the sysadmin Jabber chat. My favorite one (it became my internal email sig for a while) was something like: GET ../../../../../etc/shadow.php?redirect=google.com You try to follow the thought process just end up crosseyed: OK they are trying to use directory traversal to get the shadow file, but...they expect it to have a PHP extension. Well, I guess that could be some .htaccess RewriteRule misconfiguration that's relatively common. Ok but then they expect it to actually /be/ a PHP script and...to understand the "redirect" parameter? Hmm maybe this is possible if some other vulnerability lets them write to the shadow file. OK but if they can already write to arbitrary files on the machine, why use /etc/shadow, and why do any of this just to generate ... a 3xx to google.com?
- dmux 4y ago
  Being as confusing as possible actually seems like a really good tactic. Depending on the web server and frameworks installed, couldn't etc/shadow.php actually be a file in a common framework? Also, if I wanted to be extra obscure, "redirect=google.com" wouldn't actually do what you think it would. It's just a key and a value which could be used for who-knows-what internally.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    /etc/shadow is a file containing system account info that should never be accessible to the public on a properly-configured webserver. It's possible the request was probing for some very-specific combo of misconfigurations that might permit reading sensitive files, without going so far as to request the sensitive file.
    - dmux 4y ago
      Right, I understand that. What I probably should have made more clear was whether it was trying to get to /etc/shadow, or another .../etc/shadow.php file located somewhere within the web-server's file directory.
- swatcoder 4y ago
  It was probably probing, not exploiting, and the “.php” and query parameter probably helps it get filtered away under some common log filter regex/rules. It’s goal was to see how your server responded to that kind of request (relative path that escapes html root, probably) without standing out too obviously in your logs. Based on the response it provided, your server might have gotten bumped into a list for more targeted probing or exploitation.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Might test for some combo of letting you reach files you shouldn't be able to, and other dangerously-configured httpd rules (e.g. open redirects), in such a way that it lets the webserver take care of the whole request while still verifying you could access the file you want with a different request. Might help evade early detection by IDS or something, in very-specific cases, while still permitting probing of the filesystem. Like, it might let you basically stat the file without reading its contents, if the webserver does things in the following order: 1) Verify that the file, after applying rewrite rules, exists and is readable; else, 404, 2) see the "redirect" query string, short-circuit request and serve a 304 (or what have you) without actually reading the file we already verified exists—never actually make any syscalls to read the file. ... if it's not that, yeah, no clue.
  - ElevenLathe 4y ago
    Basically my thoughts as well. Mainly I take a cyberpunk-esque view of things where the net is a big ecosystem with lots of weird environmental niches, and so it breeds software, people, and organizations to occupy these niches. Asking what this one request is supposed to mean is kind of beside the point, like asking what a particular log in a forest means.
- bediger4000 4y ago
  Thank you! I've looked at a lot of PHP malware and a good portion of it is impossible to understand because it's hard to tell what the intent is. Bug or probe? Typo or clever coding trick? Cut-n-paste or testing only against SunOS 4.10 server?
yamtaddle 4y ago
Low(ish) traffic sites & servers have seen high-proportion-bot-and-vuln-scanner traffic since at least the late 90s. Solution used to be to blackhole IP blocks associated with certain countries, provided you didn't really, really need to serve those countries. Would usually stop 99% of it, so the logs were a lot less noisy and you could tell when you were under focused attack and needed to really pay attention (which was basically 100% of the time, without the blocks) The modern version is letting CloudFlare hit IPs in those countries with never-ending CAPTCHA challenges.

sbate1987 4y ago

how much of a new car is made by a human - even designed by a human - how much of a spacex rocket is made by a human - in thirty years how much will be made by humans. as soon as I can get past the small fingers I will make humans. Humans with big eyes this is my world now.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
drdeca 4y ago
?
bloppe 4y ago
This is the hottest take
oliveshell 4y ago
You can do anything at Zombocom
- shmde 4y ago
  The only limit is yourself

version_five 4y ago

If I'm understanding this correctly, it's always been true but there has also always been some "real" content on the internet. We're all on a site right now that, say what you like about it, it isn't bot spam. If looked for warez or porn in the late '90s, there was always some kind of circular ad and scam infested network of links promising stuff but never going anywhere. It's more sophisticated now and there's more of it, and it's expanded into shopping and travel and hotels and recipies and whatever else. But there's also more real content.

Avshalom 4y ago
>>say what you like about it, it isn't bot spam. It might be. There have been some threads where it very obviously has been and some threads where I can't prove it but I suspect.
abruzzi 4y ago
I think there has already been people on this board admittedly using LLMs to generate comments. This theory predated this current AI explosion, but that potentially makes it harder to tell if you are arguing with a person or a bot.
- berkle4455 4y ago
  Absolutely. There’s immense value in holding a large network of online personas across different social mediums. And it can take a very long time to establish those accounts in a credible manner.
  - uoaei 4y ago
    This is why I'm looking forward to a more federated, inter-operable social internet experience in the future. Global conversations are dominated by the loudest among us and inevitably end up floundering in the face of any kind of nuance. In contrast, if you join a curated group, and you yourself curate the groups you join, a lot of the guards people put up when they hop onto e.g. Twitter can be lowered and people are more interested in engaging in good faith. There is still some work to be done as regards flow of information between federated instances to promote substantive discussion while avoiding filter bubbles, but it's a better start than the simplest kind of flattening of society that is expressed today in Twitter and the like.

ren_engineer 4y ago

already seeing some tools for hooking up multi-model GPT to Chromium. We're going to need some real-time proof of humanity test or the internet will be bots talking to other bots. Captchas aren't going to cut it and if the problem isn't fixed it's going to be a tragedy of the commons situation. Might end up being a good thing though if people give up on the internet and start doing stuff in person again

rossdavidh 4y ago
...or at least use the internet for communicating with people they've met in real life, rather than for arguing with people they've never met and never will (much less trying to gauge the general opinion of the population).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

dougmwne 4y ago

Boy, if this wasn't literally true before, it's going to be literally true now. One very refreshing thing about VR metaverse apps like Altspace (which just shut down) was that they were very much populated by real people since it wasn't possible for a bot to create content or interaction on the platform.

LeoPanthera 4y ago

At least I can be sure that there aren't any bots here. Isn't that right, fellow humans?

dokem 4y ago
1
fumblebee 4y ago
* bleep bloop bleep * I'm 58.93% sure I'm not a bot.
deltarholamda 4y ago
Yes, I am very glad to be typing with you. I like to use my ten fingers to converse with other real humans on these internet. I wish I could type more with you, but I must now go to eat human foods at a restaurant diner.
outworlder 4y ago
While it's reassuring to believe that online discussions are free from bots, the reality is that it can be difficult to tell if you're interacting with a human or a machine. However, by engaging in open and respectful dialogue, we can work towards fostering authentic and productive conversations regardless of who or what we're interacting with.
- LeoPanthera 4y ago
  I can't tell if it's good or bad that I now recognize GPT-generated text.
  - dokem 4y ago
    Condescending and vapid corporate speak generator.

fumblebee 4y ago

Oddly prescient. We're converging on a bimodal world of information. 1. Trusted, centralised sources like the Economist, BBC, NYTimes, etc. 2. Everything else, you should basically assume is generated information pushing some agenda. Quoting some stats from an article on HN mid last year (links to sources didn't copy over) [1] --------------------------------- * Elon Musk estimates that 20% of Twitter users are bots. The authors of this paper suggest 14% as an upper bound. * Supposedly 10% — or around 95m — of accounts on Instagram are bot/spam accounts. * In a study of the first impeachment of Donald Trump (same paper as linked above), bots made up 1% of active users, but posted 31% of the tweets. * Some 42% of Amazon reviews are fake. Amazon are suing Facebook for ‘failing to tackle fake review factories’ * TikTok is not immune either. Bots are artificially inflating popularity of accounts and posting videos that are essentially adverts. Here’s a comprehensive guide to buying bots on TikTok. * According to this article, “over 80 percent of NFTs minted for free on OpenSea are fake, plagiarised or spam”. --------------------------------- For any platform where any user is free to create their own content. In the not too distant future, nine times out of ten, they'll be a bot. [1] https://grandy.substack.com/p/the-new-normal-the-coming-tsunami https://grandy.substack.com/p/the-new-normal-the-coming-tsun...

ridgered4 4y ago
> * Some 42% of Amazon reviews are fake. Amazon are suing Facebook for ‘failing to tackle fake review factories’ Why is it Facebook's job to make sure Amazon's reviews aren't fake? I guess I don't understand the pipeline for fake reviews or something.
- fumblebee 4y ago
  Feels closer to an SNL skit. Here's the original link to the news story [1]. Clearly this is a problem on the Amazon side, and not the Facebook side. If Amazon design their platform in a way where fake reviews are trivial to write, then they will be written, regardless of whether the groups behind them have communities on Facebook, or Reddit, or wherever else. [1] https://news.sky.com/story/amazon-files-lawsuit-against-10-000-facebook-groups-designed-to-create-fake-reviews-12654766 https://news.sky.com/story/amazon-files-lawsuit-against-10-0...

Karawebnetwork 4y ago

The internet is not dead, but the nature of online activity has changed. Traditional forums may not be as popular as they once were. The ease of access to information through search engines (and even within platforms like ChatGPT) means that people are still engaging with content just not creating it publicly through long social exchanges as before. Many topics that previously required cooperation on a forum are now readily available with a simple search, reducing the need to discuss those solutions. Stack Overflow and other small niche communities are the exception here. This shift towards more accessible information has resulted in less visible activity if we view internet activity as the creation of original text content. The older generation of internet users may have moved on from forums to focus on real-life issues, which has taken time away from hobbies. Niche communities still exist, but the use of small public forums is not as trendy as it once was. Many people have shifted towards using larger social networks and private messaging platforms (like Messenger, Snapchat, and Discord). Discord for example is used by a lot of communities to aggregate their documentation and user activity, despite the risk of this content being pruned earlier than it should. These platforms are still very active, but they may not be as visible to those outside of closed groups. The data and activity within these groups are not crawled, making it seem as though there is less activity on the internet than there really is. The rise of video content has made it difficult to quickly read and crawl through information, leading to the false impression that the internet is empty of recent original content. There is actually more video content available now than ever before, but it may not be as easily searchable or accessible as text-based content.

revx 4y ago
This comment feels AI generated to me, but I'm not sure if now I'm just being paranoid :)
- Karawebnetwork 4y ago
  DeepL translated from French :')
swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
Finding any obscure topic and delving into the treasure trove of videos on it whatever it may be really gives me hope for self-teaching being the future of education

javier123454321 4y ago

I saw this really annoying thing on reddit where some user was clearly answering questions in small business subreddits via ChatGPT to promote their web design business. It made me sick and got me furious for some reason. The answers were clearly in the voice of chatGPT which is currently one that is about as generic as a 19 year old trying to break into content marketing on an industry they have no knowledge about. The internet is getting saturated with this drivel and I think it will just drown itself out. As more and more of these auto generated articles, responses, traffic, and soon video blur the lines, I think the search for authenticity will be the thing that keeps it alive. It will not be hard to stand out, but maybe it will be harder to surface the authentic content.

surgical_fire 4y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- javier123454321 4y ago
  Maybe, but content generated by an LLM will be everywhere and anyone can use the same model to generate the same content. Sure, a lot of traffic to search engines are simple information lookup, so those might become obsolete, but when you are browsing the internet, how often are you searching for facts? I will tell you that a lot of the interesting things that I search for (and why I like old school forums like hacker news and reddit) is the discussion that happens in the comments. I.E. authentic content.
- xboxnolifes 4y ago
  Because certain content is only useful because of authenticity. If I'm looking to aggregate opinions on a topic, I want to know that I read 100 opinions from real people. Not 100 generated hallucinations from ChatGPT.

xena 4y ago

I wrote a bunch of my fears about this on my blog recently: https://xeiaso.net/blog/a-weapon-to-surpass-metal-gear https://xeiaso.net/blog/a-weapon-to-surpass-metal-gear

cagenut 4y ago

I prefer Max Read's "the inversion" phrase to "dead internet theory". https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-inte... We've crossed the line on the "default" for things being bot/spam/automated-fake.

tracerbulletx 4y ago

There are viable ways to create smaller curated communities with tiers of vetted membership online and I imagine we will continue to see that happen.

mugr 4y ago

The internet is not the same as the web, which is what the entry talks about.