8 ms·

Meanwhile Facebook is flooded with AI-generated slop with hundreds of thousands of other bots interacting with it to boost it to whoever is insane enough to sti

Meanwhile Facebook is flooded with AI-generated slop with hundreds of thousands of other bots interacting with it to boost it to whoever is insane enough to still use that putrid hellhole of a mass-data-harvesting platform. Dead internet theory is very much happening in real time, and I dread what's about to come since the world has collectively decided to lose their minds with this AI crap. And people on this site are unironically excited about this garbage that is indistinguishable from spam getting more and more popular. What a fucking joke

rocgf 2y ago
I agree with the overall sentiment, but it's is not necessarily the case that "the world has collectively decided to lose their minds with this AI crap". You only need a relatively small number of bad actors for this to be the case.
- consf 2y ago
  I think the situation highlights the need for better regulation
  - throwaway7ahgb 2y ago
    No thank you. Use existing laws that cover wide nets and actually enforce them.
TheAceOfHearts 2y ago
I think there's room for a middle-ground. I agree that there's a lot of slop being generated and shared around. Part of it is due to the initial excitement over these AI tools. Part of it is that most AI tools still kinda suck at the moment. In the long term I expect tools to get way better, which I'm hopefully could help enable smaller teams of people than ever before to execute on their creative vision. Personally I have tons of creative ideas which I think would be interesting and engaging but for which I lack the resources to bring into this world, so I'm hoping that in the long term AI tools can help bridge this gap. I'm really hopeful for a world where people from all over the world can share their creative stories, rather than being mostly limited to a few rich people in Hollywood. Unfortunately I do expect this to end up being the minority of content, especially as we continue being flooded by increasing amounts of trash. But maybe that's just opening up the opportunity for someone to develop new content curation tools. If anything, even before the rise of AI stuff there were mountains of content, and we saw with the rise of TikTok that a good recommendation algorithm still leaves room for new platforms.
have_faith 2y ago
The feed certainly is, but I suspect most activity left on Facebook is happening in group pages. Groups are the only thing I still log in for as some of them, particularly the local ones, have no other way of taking part. They are also commonly membership by request and actively moderated. If I had the time (and energy) I might put some effort into advocating to moving to something else, but it will be an uphill battle.
- consf 2y ago
  The challenges of moving to alternative solutions
  - have_faith 2y ago
    The irony of a bot account sliding into a convo about internet slop is not lost.
    - sgu999 2y ago
      How do you know?
      - justneedaname 2y ago
        The comment history does read much like you'd expect from a bot, lots of short, generic statements that vaguely tie to the subject of the post
        consf 2y ago
        There was no need to scroll through my history and analyze it. Your analysis is mistaken. I'm not a bot. Sometimes my comments are brief because I'm trying to be concise. I don't just express my agreement with a simple 'I agree', but respond in a more detailed manner yet also shortly.
        justneedaname 2y ago
consf 2y ago
[dead]
- human_ai 2y ago
  [flagged]
LoveMortuus 2y ago
In regards to the dead internet hypothesis, the content that you're enjoying today, will still be there tomorrow. What I mean is if you, for example, like Mr.Beast, AI is not going to replace him and the content that he produces. Now, he might use AI to boost the productivity of his company, but the end result is still "making the best video ever" as he's often said.
- LauraMedia 2y ago
  The big problem with this is that content is harder and harder to find. Try to find a non-AI generated reply to a viral post on Twitter, you're looking at having to scroll down 5-6 1080p screens to finally get to some actual stuff people wrote. The content you're enjoying today still exists, but it's a needle in a haystack of AI spam
  - Shinchy 2y ago
    This is the exact thing I keep telling people. It's all well and good saying human made content will still be around, but it will be covered in a tidal wave of cheaply generated AI hogwash.
    - throwawayfour 2y ago
      Reminds me of shopping on <enter your favorite large ecommerce site>
  - shinycode 2y ago
    We need a law or something that impose platforms to label any text that is only AI and text reworked by AI. And the possibility to filter both (we did this with industrial products). Then let humanity decide what it wants to feed itself with. I prefer to give up completely internet if it would only be filled with generated content. I gladly let it to people who enjoy that. Maybe a platform that label this and allows strict filtering (if possible) would be a success.
    - 2y ago
kashyapc 2y ago
I get your frustration of a scorched internet. But I don't think it's all that gloomy. Whether we like it or not, LLMs and some kind of a "down-to-earth AI" is here to stay, once the dust settles. Right now, it feels like everything is burning because we're in the thick of an evolving situation; and the Silicon Valley tech-bros are in a hurry to ride the wave and make a quick buck with their ChatGPT wrapper. (I can't speak of social networks, I don't have any accounts for 10+ years, except for HN.) * * * On "collective losing of minds", you might appreciate this quote from 1841 (!) by Charles MacKay. I quoted it in the past[1] here, but is worth re-posting: "In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first [...] "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one." — from MacKay's book, 'Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds' [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25767454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25767454
- sgu999 2y ago
  What a nice quote. What were "millions of people" simultaneously obsessed with around 1841?
  - kashyapc 2y ago
    I didn't read the book, I'm afraid. I don't know if he actually mentions it anywhere.
  - sebastiennight 2y ago
    I believe MacKay's book (quoted here) is most famous for its account of the Dutch tulip mania[0], which is one of the most notable financial bubbles in history (somebody reportedly paid 12 acres of land - 5 hectares - for a single bulb). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
elorant 2y ago
Every content that exists on the web could now be rewritten and repurposed by LLMs. This could lead into an explosion of web sites that could easily double in size every few years. Good luck indexing all that crap and deciding what is duplicate and what not.
sbeaks 2y ago
Are we going to end up with rererecapture where to post you need something on your phone/laptop measuring typing speed and scanning your face with an IR cam? Or a checkmark showing typed out by hand? Wouldn't get rid of ai content but may slow down bots posting it.
- sebastiennight 2y ago
  I got so tired of having to prove I'm a human, I wrote a bunch of prompts for multimodal LLMs to solve CAPTCHAs for me.
kristopolous 2y ago
They're trajectory is so close to AOL's it's almost implausible. Their cash cow flagship product is widely panned by tech insiders as abusive, manipulative, and toxic but they also place significant financial resources in high quality open source projects out of what can only be described as benevolence and some commitment to the common good.
- aranke 2y ago
  Which open-source projects is AOL known for? A quick Google search isn’t returning much.
  - jonathanwallace 2y ago
    https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=aol%20tcl https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=aol%20tcl https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/AOLserver https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/AOLserver
  - kristopolous 2y ago
    Dropping cash for Netscape/Mozilla is the big one.
csomar 2y ago
That's actually the preferred outcome. The open internet noise ratio will be so high that it turns into pure randomness. The traditional old venues (reputed blogs, small communities forums, pay for valued information, pay for your search, etc..) will resurface again. The Popular Web has been in a slow decline, time to kill it.
- wildrhythms 2y ago
  My concern is that these platforms will soon sell Human Created (tm) content back to us.
- thierrydamiba 2y ago
  Is it really a decline? If people are looking for and consuming the slop, where is the issue? There is still plenty high quality stuff too if that is what you’re looking for. If you want to roll with the pigs in the shit, who am I to tell you no?
- dspillett 2y ago
  > The traditional old venues […] will resurface again. … to be subsequently drowned out by AI “copies” of themselves, which in turn are used to train more AIs, until we don't have a Dead Internet¹ but a Habsburg Internet. -- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
eightysixfour 2y ago
I am one of those people unironically excited - the social parts of the internet have been dead and filled with bots for a long time. Now people just see it more. Maybe they’ll go outside.
- zwnow 2y ago
  Bots were easy to detect, now they're almost indistinguishable from human interaction. The death of the internet would be an incredible loss for humanity. You will not be able to trust anything you find online. Nothing is safe from this.
  - eightysixfour 2y ago
    I am using the broad definition of bots to include large numbers of accounts controlled by small groups of people to influence online discourse. Between those bots (for nefarious, mundane, or marketing reasons) and previous attempts at automated bots, “broad” internet discourse was already ruined. Now people recognize it. This will have the effect of pushing communities back to smaller sizes, I think this is a good thing. People shouldn’t have trusted all the things they read online from untrusted sources in the first place.
Kiro 2y ago
And I don't understand why people lump all AI together as if a coding assistant is the same thing as AI generated spam and other garbage. I'm pretty sure no-one here is excited about that. I'm excited about the former since AI has massively improved my productivity as a programmer to a point where I can't imagine going back. Everything is not black or white and people can be excited about one part of something and hate another at the same time.
- chr15m 2y ago
  fear is why
- sensanaty 2y ago
  Seeing some of the code my colleagues are shitting out with the help of coding "assistants", I would definitely categorize their contributions as spam, and has had nothing but an awful effect on my own time and energy, having to sift through the unfiltered crap. The problem being, of course, that the idiotic C-suite in their infinite wisdom decided to push "use AI assistants" as a KPI, so people are even encouraged to spam PRs with terrible code. If this is what productivity looks like then I'm proud to be unproductive.
  - Kiro 2y ago
    I'm sorry that you work at a dysfunctional company.
testfrequency 2y ago
Hear, hear!

rocgf 2y ago

I agree with the overall sentiment, but it's is not necessarily the case that "the world has collectively decided to lose their minds with this AI crap". You only need a relatively small number of bad actors for this to be the case.

consf 2y ago
I think the situation highlights the need for better regulation
- throwaway7ahgb 2y ago
  No thank you. Use existing laws that cover wide nets and actually enforce them.

TheAceOfHearts 2y ago

I think there's room for a middle-ground. I agree that there's a lot of slop being generated and shared around. Part of it is due to the initial excitement over these AI tools. Part of it is that most AI tools still kinda suck at the moment. In the long term I expect tools to get way better, which I'm hopefully could help enable smaller teams of people than ever before to execute on their creative vision. Personally I have tons of creative ideas which I think would be interesting and engaging but for which I lack the resources to bring into this world, so I'm hoping that in the long term AI tools can help bridge this gap. I'm really hopeful for a world where people from all over the world can share their creative stories, rather than being mostly limited to a few rich people in Hollywood. Unfortunately I do expect this to end up being the minority of content, especially as we continue being flooded by increasing amounts of trash. But maybe that's just opening up the opportunity for someone to develop new content curation tools. If anything, even before the rise of AI stuff there were mountains of content, and we saw with the rise of TikTok that a good recommendation algorithm still leaves room for new platforms.

have_faith 2y ago

The feed certainly is, but I suspect most activity left on Facebook is happening in group pages. Groups are the only thing I still log in for as some of them, particularly the local ones, have no other way of taking part. They are also commonly membership by request and actively moderated. If I had the time (and energy) I might put some effort into advocating to moving to something else, but it will be an uphill battle.

consf 2y ago
The challenges of moving to alternative solutions
- have_faith 2y ago
  The irony of a bot account sliding into a convo about internet slop is not lost.
  - sgu999 2y ago
    How do you know?
    - justneedaname 2y ago
      The comment history does read much like you'd expect from a bot, lots of short, generic statements that vaguely tie to the subject of the post
      - consf 2y ago
        There was no need to scroll through my history and analyze it. Your analysis is mistaken. I'm not a bot. Sometimes my comments are brief because I'm trying to be concise. I don't just express my agreement with a simple 'I agree', but respond in a more detailed manner yet also shortly.
        justneedaname 2y ago

consf 2y ago

[dead]

human_ai 2y ago
[flagged]

LoveMortuus 2y ago

In regards to the dead internet hypothesis, the content that you're enjoying today, will still be there tomorrow. What I mean is if you, for example, like Mr.Beast, AI is not going to replace him and the content that he produces. Now, he might use AI to boost the productivity of his company, but the end result is still "making the best video ever" as he's often said.

LauraMedia 2y ago
The big problem with this is that content is harder and harder to find. Try to find a non-AI generated reply to a viral post on Twitter, you're looking at having to scroll down 5-6 1080p screens to finally get to some actual stuff people wrote. The content you're enjoying today still exists, but it's a needle in a haystack of AI spam
- Shinchy 2y ago
  This is the exact thing I keep telling people. It's all well and good saying human made content will still be around, but it will be covered in a tidal wave of cheaply generated AI hogwash.
  - throwawayfour 2y ago
    Reminds me of shopping on <enter your favorite large ecommerce site>
- shinycode 2y ago
  We need a law or something that impose platforms to label any text that is only AI and text reworked by AI. And the possibility to filter both (we did this with industrial products). Then let humanity decide what it wants to feed itself with. I prefer to give up completely internet if it would only be filled with generated content. I gladly let it to people who enjoy that. Maybe a platform that label this and allows strict filtering (if possible) would be a success.
  - 2y ago

kashyapc 2y ago

I get your frustration of a scorched internet. But I don't think it's all that gloomy. Whether we like it or not, LLMs and some kind of a "down-to-earth AI" is here to stay, once the dust settles. Right now, it feels like everything is burning because we're in the thick of an evolving situation; and the Silicon Valley tech-bros are in a hurry to ride the wave and make a quick buck with their ChatGPT wrapper. (I can't speak of social networks, I don't have any accounts for 10+ years, except for HN.) * * * On "collective losing of minds", you might appreciate this quote from 1841 (!) by Charles MacKay. I quoted it in the past[1] here, but is worth re-posting: "In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first [...] "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one." — from MacKay's book, 'Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds' [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25767454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25767454

sgu999 2y ago
What a nice quote. What were "millions of people" simultaneously obsessed with around 1841?
- kashyapc 2y ago
  I didn't read the book, I'm afraid. I don't know if he actually mentions it anywhere.
- sebastiennight 2y ago
  I believe MacKay's book (quoted here) is most famous for its account of the Dutch tulip mania[0], which is one of the most notable financial bubbles in history (somebody reportedly paid 12 acres of land - 5 hectares - for a single bulb). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

elorant 2y ago

Every content that exists on the web could now be rewritten and repurposed by LLMs. This could lead into an explosion of web sites that could easily double in size every few years. Good luck indexing all that crap and deciding what is duplicate and what not.

sbeaks 2y ago

Are we going to end up with rererecapture where to post you need something on your phone/laptop measuring typing speed and scanning your face with an IR cam? Or a checkmark showing typed out by hand? Wouldn't get rid of ai content but may slow down bots posting it.

sebastiennight 2y ago
I got so tired of having to prove I'm a human, I wrote a bunch of prompts for multimodal LLMs to solve CAPTCHAs for me.

kristopolous 2y ago

They're trajectory is so close to AOL's it's almost implausible. Their cash cow flagship product is widely panned by tech insiders as abusive, manipulative, and toxic but they also place significant financial resources in high quality open source projects out of what can only be described as benevolence and some commitment to the common good.

aranke 2y ago
Which open-source projects is AOL known for? A quick Google search isn’t returning much.
- jonathanwallace 2y ago
  https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=aol%20tcl https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=aol%20tcl https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/AOLserver https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/AOLserver
- kristopolous 2y ago
  Dropping cash for Netscape/Mozilla is the big one.

csomar 2y ago

That's actually the preferred outcome. The open internet noise ratio will be so high that it turns into pure randomness. The traditional old venues (reputed blogs, small communities forums, pay for valued information, pay for your search, etc..) will resurface again. The Popular Web has been in a slow decline, time to kill it.

wildrhythms 2y ago
My concern is that these platforms will soon sell Human Created (tm) content back to us.
thierrydamiba 2y ago
Is it really a decline? If people are looking for and consuming the slop, where is the issue? There is still plenty high quality stuff too if that is what you’re looking for. If you want to roll with the pigs in the shit, who am I to tell you no?
dspillett 2y ago
> The traditional old venues […] will resurface again. … to be subsequently drowned out by AI “copies” of themselves, which in turn are used to train more AIs, until we don't have a Dead Internet¹ but a Habsburg Internet. -- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

eightysixfour 2y ago

I am one of those people unironically excited - the social parts of the internet have been dead and filled with bots for a long time. Now people just see it more. Maybe they’ll go outside.

zwnow 2y ago
Bots were easy to detect, now they're almost indistinguishable from human interaction. The death of the internet would be an incredible loss for humanity. You will not be able to trust anything you find online. Nothing is safe from this.
- eightysixfour 2y ago
  I am using the broad definition of bots to include large numbers of accounts controlled by small groups of people to influence online discourse. Between those bots (for nefarious, mundane, or marketing reasons) and previous attempts at automated bots, “broad” internet discourse was already ruined. Now people recognize it. This will have the effect of pushing communities back to smaller sizes, I think this is a good thing. People shouldn’t have trusted all the things they read online from untrusted sources in the first place.

Kiro 2y ago

And I don't understand why people lump all AI together as if a coding assistant is the same thing as AI generated spam and other garbage. I'm pretty sure no-one here is excited about that. I'm excited about the former since AI has massively improved my productivity as a programmer to a point where I can't imagine going back. Everything is not black or white and people can be excited about one part of something and hate another at the same time.

chr15m 2y ago
fear is why
sensanaty 2y ago
Seeing some of the code my colleagues are shitting out with the help of coding "assistants", I would definitely categorize their contributions as spam, and has had nothing but an awful effect on my own time and energy, having to sift through the unfiltered crap. The problem being, of course, that the idiotic C-suite in their infinite wisdom decided to push "use AI assistants" as a KPI, so people are even encouraged to spam PRs with terrible code. If this is what productivity looks like then I'm proud to be unproductive.
- Kiro 2y ago
  I'm sorry that you work at a dysfunctional company.

testfrequency 2y ago

Hear, hear!