9 ms·

The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

237 points by arnon 11mo ago

huijzer 11mo ago
Yes nice article. Interesting point. One small one I do not agree with is "Are you burning VC cash on unsustainable unit economics?". I think it's safe to conclude by now that unsustainable businesses can be kept alive for years as long as the investors want it.
- arnon 11mo ago
  I guess that's true for some but not for all. I wouldn't say that's the most common scenario
- pessimizer 11mo ago
  Nothing safer than financial scams in the West these days. Never short Herbalife.
  - rufus_foreman 11mo ago
    Looks like you could have made a lot of money shorting Herbalife over the last 5 years.
piker 11mo ago
The observations in this article about the insane signal-to-noise ratio are valid.
bgwalter 11mo ago
It is becoming unbearable. YouTube now has "AI" slop ads for Freenow (Lyft brand in the EU) with fake cars that move without the wheels turning and "AI" "actors" that look like plastic. This of course means that Freenow is now on the personal blacklist. People should not engage with companies who advertise with "AI" slop.
- symfoniq 11mo ago
  Agreed. I’m increasingly using the presence of AI slop as a primary signal about whether to avoid a company and its products.
  - Applejinx 11mo ago
    Which suggests the next human dirty trick will be to put out AI slop 'supporting' a company and its products just to make 'em deny it was them making it :)
  - SideburnsOfDoom 11mo ago
    Youtube is intentionally blunting this signal by making many videos look slightly slop-y, I mean "enhancing low-res content with AI upscaling" https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/08/youtube-shorts-ai-upscaling/683946/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/08/youtu... https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/youtube-dismisses-creators-concerns-secretly-used-ai-edit-videos-rcna227096 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/youtube-dismisses-cre...
- SideburnsOfDoom 11mo ago
  When it comes to ads on Youtube, Freenow is at the classy end of them. i.e. it's not that they're good, but that many others are much worse.
- mv4 11mo ago
  I was just looking at Instagram's promoted shopping ads, and 9 out of 10 are AI slop, pretending to be actual physical products. It is quite shocking.
- HarHarVeryFunny 11mo ago
  Not just ads - there is TONS of AI-generated YouTube shorts now, and the quality is so good that it's tough to always tell whether it's real as long as it's plausible (which not all of it is). It's annoying because the whole point of a lot of this stuff is that it's real, and one can be informed, entertained or have an emotional response to it. When you distrust everything because it's maybe fake, then the fun of the internet as a window into human nature and the rest of the world just disappears.
everdrive 11mo ago
Doesn't matter. We must keep building more and more technology no matter the cost. Have an idea for a business? Build it. Does your business make the lives of people worse? Doesn't matter, keep pushing. Could some new technology ruin the lives and relationships that people have? Doesn't matter, just build it. We always need more, need to do more. Every experiment is valid, every impulse must be followed. More complexity, more control, more distraction, more outrage, more engagement. Just keep building forever no matter the cost.
- ricogallo 11mo ago
  It sounds like the "The City" in "Blame!"
- throwmeaway307 11mo ago
  move fast and break things! nevermind if the things are people or their lives!!
  - arnon 11mo ago
    build things """"people"""" want
    - TheOtherHobbes 11mo ago
      People want dopamine hints, gamification, addictive distractions, and a culture of competitive perma-hustle. If they didn't, we wouldn't be having these problems. The problem isn't AI, it's how marketing has eaten everything. So everyone is always pitching, looking for a competitive advantage, "telling their story", and "building their brand." You can't "build trust" if your primary motivation is to sell stuff to your contacts. The SNR was already terrible long before AI arrived. All AI has done is automated an already terrible process, which has - ironically - broken it so badly that it no longer works.
      - ModernMech 11mo ago
        Tired: "Build things people want" Wired: "Build things society needs"
alexpotato 11mo ago
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens fame [0], has a great quote (paraphrasing): Interviewer: How will humans deal with the avalanche of fake information that AI could bring? YNH: The way humans have always dealt with fake information: by building institutions we trust to provide accurate information. This is not a new phenomenon btw. In democracies, this is often either the government (e.g. the Bureau of Labor Statistics) or newspapers (e.g. the New York Times) or even individuals (e.g. Walter Cronkite). In other forms of government, it becomes trust networks built on familial ties e.g. "Uncle/Aunt is the source for any good info on what's happening in the company" etc 0 - https://amzn.to/4nFuG7C https://amzn.to/4nFuG7C
- pron 11mo ago
  The problem is that too many people just don't know how to weigh different probabilities of correctness against each other. The NYT is wrong 5% of the time - I'll believe this random person I just saw on TikTok because I've never heard of them ever being wrong; I've heard many stories about doctors being wrong - I'll listen to RFK; scientific models could be wrong, so I'll bet on climate change being not real etc.
  - ajaisjsbbz 11mo ago
    Trust is much more nuanced than N% wrong. You have to consider circumstantial factors as well. ie who runs The NY Times, who gives them money, what was the reason they were wrong, even if they’re not wrong what information are they leaving out. The list goes on. No single metric can capture this effectively. Moreover, the more political a topic the more likely the author is trying to influence your thoughts (but not me I promise!). I forgot who, but a historian was asked why they wouldn’t cover civil war history, and responded with something to the affect of “there’s no way to do serious work there because it’s too political right now”. It’s also why things like calling your opponents dumb, etc is so harmful. Nobody can fully evaluate the truthfulness of your claims (due to time, intellect, etc) but if you signal “I don’t like you” they’re rightfully going to ignore you because you’re signaling you’re unlikely to be trustworthy. Trust is hard earned and easily lost.
Chinjut 11mo ago
AI-esque blog post about how infinite AI content is awful, from "a co-founder at Paid, which is the first and only monetization and billing system for AI Agents".
- arnon 11mo ago
  So I can't have opinions? Also, this is entirely hand-written ;)
  - dkdcio 11mo ago
    this is a funny phenomenon that I keep seeing. I think people are going through the reactionary “YoU mUsT hAvE wRiTtEn ThIs oN a CuRsEd TyPwRiTeR instead of handwriting your letter!1!!” hopefully soon we move onto judging content by its quality, not whether AI was used. banning digital advertisement would also help align incentives against mass-producing slop (which has been happening long before ChatGPT released)
    - saulpw 11mo ago
      I don't have the time or energy to judge content by its quality. There are too many opportunities for subtle errors, whether made maliciously or casually. We have to use some non-content filter or the avalanche of [mis]information will bury us. We used to be able to filter out things with misspellings and rambling walls of text, and presumably most of the rest was at least written by a human you could harangue if it came to that. Now we're trying to filter out content based on em-dashes and emoji bullet lists. Unfortunately that won't be effective for very long, but we have to use what we've got, because the alternative is to filter out everything.
  - ambicapter 11mo ago
    The authentic nature of opinions means that sometimes they suck. Maybe GP is commenting that your opinion sucks?
  - gwd 11mo ago
    I think this basically proves your point. There were things about it that made me think it may have been at least "AI-assisted", until I saw your "guaranteed bot-free" thing at the bottom. Anyone doing entirely hand-written things from now on are going to be facing a headwind of skepticism.
tetris11 11mo ago
I needed to get some builder quotes for my home. It did not enter my mind to go online to search for any. I just reached out to my family for any trustworthy builders they've had, and struck up conversations with some of my fancier neighbors for any recommendations. (I came to the conclusion that all builders are cowboys, and I might as well just try doing some of this myself via youtube videos) Using the internet to buy products is not a problem for me, I know roughly the quality of what I expect to get and can return anything not up to standard. Using the internet to buy services though? Not a chance. How can you refund a service
- miloignis 11mo ago
  When we needed some work done, we asked family and friends too, and ended up with a cowboy. When the work needed to be re-done, we looked up local reviews for contractors, and ended up with someone who was more expensive but also much more competent, and the work was done to a higher standard.
  - bluGill 11mo ago
    > ended up with someone who was more expensive but also much more competent, and the work was done to a higher standard. How do you know that? Or is it just that your bias is coybows are bad and so you assume someone who dresses and acts better is better? Now step back, I'm not asking you personally, but the general person. It is possible that you have the knowledge and skills to do the job and so you know how to inspect it to ensure it was done right. However the average person doesn't have those skills and so won't know the well dressed person who does a bad job that looks good from the poorly dressed person who does a good job but doesn't look as good.
    - miloignis 11mo ago
      Perhaps I wasn't clear - I don't know enough to say if the job was good or bad just by inspecting it, I know the first job was bad because it didn't solve the problem, and then a more expensive contractor explained why, and did solve the problem. Our issue was water intrusion along a side wall that was flowing under our hardwoods, warping them and causing them to smell. The first contractor replaced the floor and added in an outside drain. The drain didn't work, and the water kept intruding and the floor started to warp again. When we got multiple highly rated contractors out, all of them explained that the drain wasn't installed correctly, that a passive drain couldn't prevent the problem at that location, and that the solution was to either add an actively pumped drain or replace the lower part of the wall with something waterproof. We ended up replacing that part of the wall, and that has fixed the issue along that wall. (We now have water intrusion somewhere else, sigh). If anything, I was originally biased for the cowboy, as they came recommended, he and his workers were nice, and the other options seemed too expensive & drastic. Now I've learned my lesson, at least about these types of trickier housing issues. Also, no one mentioned evaluating someone by how they're dressed - the issue was family/friend recommendations vs online reviews, and I while I do take recommendations from friends and family into account, I've actually had better luck trusting online (local) reviews.
bee_rider 11mo ago
What I get from the article is that, proving that a company will stick around for a while after you’ve subscribed is hard now, because anybody can AI generate the general vibe of the marketing department of a big established player. This seems like it’ll be devastating for companies whose business model requires signing new users up for ongoing subscriptions. Maybe it could lead to a resurgence of the business model where you buy a program and don’t have to get married to the company that supports it, though? I’d love it if the business model of “buy our buggy product now, we’ll maybe patch it later” died.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- arnon 11mo ago
  that's exactly my point - yes you need to prove beyond a doubt that YOU are the right one to buy from, because it's so easy for 3 Stanford dropouts in a trenchcoat to make a seemingly successful business in just a few days of vibecoding.
  - gnarlouse 11mo ago
    > 3 stanford dropouts in a trenchcoat I'm using this
    - arnon 11mo ago
      please do, i've been forcing it on people for a year now
- gnarlouse 11mo ago
  We already got your money, what do we need to work for again?
  - bee_rider 11mo ago
    Yeah. The modern software market actually seems like a total inversion of normal human bartering and trade relationships, actually… In Ye Olden Days, you go to the blacksmith, and buy some horseshoes. You expect the things to work, they are simple enough that you can do a cursory check and at least see if they are plausibly shaped, and then you put them on your horse and they either work or they don’t. Later you sell him some carrots, buy a pot: you have an ongoing relationship checkpointed by ongoing completed tasks. There were shitty blacksmiths and scummy farmers, but at some point you get a model of how shitty the blacksmith is and adjust your expectations appropriately (and maybe try to find somebody better when you need nails). Ongoing contracts were the domain of specialists and somewhat fraught with risk. Big trust (and associated mechanics, reputation and prestige). Now we’re negotiating an ongoing contracts for our everyday tools, it is totally bizarre.
realitydrift 11mo ago
[flagged]
- adammarples 11mo ago
  I think this "drift principle" you're pushing is just called bias or overfitting. We've overfit to engagement in social media and missed the bigger picture, we've overfit to plausible language in LLMs and missed a lot.
renegat0x0 11mo ago
I use RSS to follow these I want to hear. I do not follow recommendation, since RSS reader is my window to the world. I follow even AI slop via reddit RSS. I control however what comes in.
- erpigna 11mo ago
  I'm looking for a practical and possibly Open Source way to filter noise from RSS feeds, have you got any recommendation?
  - robin_reala 11mo ago
    Delete noisy feeds. I’m not joking: RSS only becomes a truly great experience when actively curated.
  - renegat0x0 11mo ago
    I have seen a lot recommends for karakeep. I disagree with people suggesting removing noisy RSS feeds, as some are noisy, yet sometime useful. I think RSS client needs advanced filtering and search. I use my own project for RSS https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive, but it should be considered 'alpha' as I move fast and break things. It provides me functionality that I miss in most of the clients, and it is a web client, so I can access it through mobile and PC, no need for sync. I am not a front-end dev so it does not look that much appealing.
Applejinx 11mo ago
I'm already seeing this. I very much fall into the category of 'delete all email offers' as I'm a small youtuber, big enough to be targeted by AI sponsor deals, so I'm just buried with it. The last five times I've looked at something in case it was a legitimate user email it was AI promotion of someone just like in the article. Their only way to escalate, apart from pure volume, is to take pains to intentionally emulate the signals of someone who's a legitimate user needing help or having a complaint. Logically, if you want to pursue the adversarial nature of this farther, the AIs will have to be trained to study up and mimic the dialogue trees of legitimate users needing support, only to introduce their promotion after I've done several exchanges of seemingly legitimate support work, in the guise of a friend and happy customer. All pretend, to get to the pitch. AI's already capable of this if directed adeptly enough. You could write a script for it by asking AI for a script to do exactly this social exploit. By then I'll be locked in a room that's also a Faraday cage, poking products through a slot in the door—and mocking my captors with the em-dashes I used back when I was one of the people THEY learned em-dashes from. One thing about it, it's a very modern sort of dystopia!
- AaronAPU 11mo ago
  YouTubers and other social media influencers are a sort of royalty now, getting to decide by fiat which companies live or die. But you can’t really even make the case to them anymore because like you said they can’t/won’t even read your email. What mostly happens is they constantly provide free publicity to existing big players whose products they will cover for free and/or will do sponsored videos with. The only real chance you have to be covered as a small player is to hope your users aggregate to the scale where they make a request often enough that it gets noticed and you get the magical blessing from above. Not sure what my point is other than it kinda sucks. But it is what it is.
  - Applejinx 11mo ago
    Or know people personally. There's two people I promote because they actively helped me do my own work, pitched in open source code and did development to support my project. There's another guy who lives in my town, so he gets some mention just because of that (his work's good, but that's my angle for mentioning it). And a microphone company got a shout out not because they give me microphones, but because the guy running the company noticed and liked my ethos and did a repair for free for me. That counts as a form of sponsoring so I talked him up, am already a fan of his work. Make friends and work with people where possible. I get that some of this only works for us open source types, but the microphone guy isn't, he just did good work. I initially heard of his company through a pro sound engineer website, and ran with it when the advice turned out to be good.
ModernMech 11mo ago
Trust collapse is real, I don't trust anything anymore. Take this article for instance, I don't trust it because of the random bolding. Does that mean it's AI generated? I don't know but I've seen lots of AI generated content and it has random bolding, so when I see it, I immediately don't trust it. And I don't have the time to verify anything, so whether or not this article was written by the author or AI, it's gone on the "not credible" heap for me, just because of the bolding. It's not a strong signal but it's a signal, and due to the volume of slop, I must filter on whatever signals I have to maintain any chance of finding genuine human work product. Maybe I miss something genuine and important by filtering this way, but it's the best I can do.
- rho4 11mo ago
  Well said. Sad how that reflex starts kicking in for HN comments as well (ps I'm not getting any signals from your comment).
ChrisMarshallNY 11mo ago
> Will you still be here in 12 months when I’ve integrated your tool into my workflow? This is the biggie; especially with B2B. It's really 3 months, these days. Many companies have the lifespan of a mayfly. AI isn't the new reason for this. It's been getting worse and worse, in the last few years, as people have been selling companies; not products, but AI will accelerate the race to the bottom. One of the things that AI has afforded, is that the lowest-tier, bottom-feeding scammer, can now look every bit as polished and professional as a Fortune 50 company (often, even more). So that means that not only is the SNR dropping, the "noise" is now a lot riskier and uglier.
- tablet 11mo ago
  > One of the things that AI has afforded, is that the lowest-tier, bottom-feeding scammer, can now look every bit as polished and professional as a Fortune 50 company (often, even more). Made my day. So true.
stevetron 11mo ago
You can't build trust in your OS (operating system) when your OS spies on the entire customer base, and you spin it off as telemetry. Or you remotely target the OS to implement a radical change, and force it to be installed as an 'update'. I stopped accepting telephone calls before 2010. They still ring the phone.
slightwinder 11mo ago
What if this is the plan all along? People losing trust in media, so the rich and powerful can continue doing shit without getting exposed any more, because now they always can say it's just AI, and didn't really do this or that?
heddycrow 11mo ago
I wish we were talking about what's next versus what's increasingly here. How can infinite AI content be strictly awful if it forces us to fix issues with our trust and reward systems? Short term, sure. But infinite (also) implies long term. I wish I had a really smart game theorist friend who could help me project forward into time if for nothing other than just fun. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to reduce the value of "ouch, it hurts right now" stories and responses. But damned if we don't have an interesting and engaging problem on our hands right now. There's got to be some people out there who love digging in to complicated problems. What's next after trust collapses? All of us just give up? What if that collapse is sooner than we thought; can we think about the fun problem now?
- arnon 11mo ago
  I suggest we go back to before and be human about things - and build trust in-person.
  - trylist 11mo ago
    This is childish thinking. Whatever we do, we cannot go back to "before". Which "before"? How do we go back? You can't regress back to a being a kid just because the problems you face as an adult are too much to handle. However this is resolved, it will not be anything like "before". Accept that fact up front.
  - heddycrow 11mo ago
    Dunbar's number leaps to mind. I wonder what our systems look like at large when we have cause to strengthen our 150 meaningful connections. Would this truly be a move back? I've met people outside my social class and disposition who seem to rely quite heavily on networking this way.
    - AndrewKemendo 11mo ago
      This is exactly the reason Human biological limits prevent the realization of stable equilibrium at the scale of coordination necessary for larger emergent superstructures Humans need to figure out how to become a eusocial superorganism because we’re past the point where individual groups don’t produce externalities that are existential to other groups/individuals I don’t think that’s possible, so I’m just building the machine version
Sharlin 11mo ago
In other words, many new people now get to know the "using an internet dating service as a woman" experience.
- heddycrow 11mo ago
  If that's what people wanted, they could have created a woman account or a western white male account on a rest-of-the-world dating site. If it's not? Oh well, suffer. It's still better than the "average western male on a dating site" experience. Note: I really like the metaphor. My apologies if I abused it or stretched it to far or in the wrong direction.
jjoe 11mo ago
Do you think usury is to blame for this aggressive and excessive push to make more money? Synonym for excessive here could be unethical
JCM9 11mo ago
We see business go through this cycle a lot. Some new “better cheaper” thing comes along. Everyone implements it to keep up with the Jones’s. Suddenly there’s no differentiation because everyone has it and everyone thinks it sucks. Suddenly going back to some reworked version of the old thing is the new black. One such example was call centers. In the 2000s implementing a call center in India was all the rage on cost cutting. The customer experience was terrible and suddenly having a US-based call center (the thing companies just abandoned) was now a feature. I think we’ll see similar things with AI. Everyone will get flooded with AI slop. Folks will get annoyed and suddenly interacting with a real human or a real human writing original content will be a “feature” that folks flock to.
- bluGill 11mo ago
  Problem is how do you find real humans in the first place if you don't know them. Easy enough to walk/drive around my city and talk to them. However there are a lot of topics that the experts live elsewhere and so that won't work.
cantor_S_drug 11mo ago
We need PageRank like algorithm for "Trust / Human Content" to be applied directly to the source of such content. E.g. following all three channels are AI made. But all these content can be liked to an advanced AI version of audio based videos of Wikiarticles. If a video is providing just a summary based on established historical facts, even though it is AI based, how is it different than refering a thesaurus or dictionary? Aren't such videos making "knowledge" accessible. FINAL Financial hours of U.S.A. just before the 1929 crash https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxiSOlvKUlA&t=1008s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxiSOlvKUlA&t=1008s The Volcker Shock: When the Fed Broke the Economy to Save the Dollar (1980) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTvgL2XtHsw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTvgL2XtHsw How Inflation Makes the Rich Richer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDnlYQsbQ_c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDnlYQsbQ_c
_the_inflator 11mo ago
It didn't help documentation at all. I had to work with auth0 for example and their documentation is such a bloat, that I am already prototyping with better-auth. No structure, outdated stuff marked as "preview" from 2023/2024, wikipedia like in depth articles about everything but not for simple questions like: how to implement a backend for frontend. You find fragments and pieces of information here and there - but no guidance at all. Settings hidden behind tabs etc. A nightmare. No sane developer would have done such a mess, because of time constraints and bloat. You see and experience first hand, that the few gems are from the trenches, with spelling mistakes etc. Bloat for SEO, the mess for devs.
returnInfinity 11mo ago
Yes sick of AI generated "illustrations".
guzik 11mo ago
So I went on X after a long break from social media, and my feed is full of tips like this one: Growing on X is so simple I’m shocked it works. 100x comments a day 10x posts a day 15x DM’s a day 1x thread a day 1x email a day This is how you grow your presence on X. Even if having a presence matters, how can you actually say something meaningful if you post 10 times a day - there's no way (unless you just repeat yourself). Hopefully my algorithm's just gone weird but sadly the people I used to follow stopped posting.
Lerc 11mo ago
I don't think this shows that you can't trust things. I think it means trust should be earned. We might be transitioning to a world where trust has value and is earned and stored in your reputation. Clickbait is a symptom of people valuing attention over trust. Clickbait spends a percentage of their reputation by trading it for attention. In a world of many providers, most people have not heard of any particular individual provider. This means they have no reputation to lose, so their choice to act in a reputation losing manner is easy. Beyond a certain scale when everyone can play that game we end up with the problem that this article describes. The content is easy but vacuous. There are far more people vying for the same number of eyballs now. The solution is, I believe, earned trust. Curators select items from sources they trust. The ones that do a good job become trusted curators. In a sense HackerNews is a trusted curator. Reddit is one that is losing, or has lost, trust. AI could probably take on some of the role of that curation. In the future perhaps more so. An AI can scan the sources of an article to see if the sources make the claims that the article says it makes. I doubt it can do so with sufficient accuracy to be useful right now, but I don't think that is too far off. Perhaps the various fediverse reddit clones had the wrong idea. Maybe they should in a distributed fashion where each point is a subreddit analogue operated each with their own ways of curation, then an upper level curation can make a site of the groups they trust. This makes a multi level trust mechanism. At each level there are no rules governing behaviour. If you violate the values of a higher layer, they lose trust in you. AI could run its own curation nodes. It might be good at it or it might be terrible, it doesn't really matter. If it is consistently good, it earns trust. I don't mind there being lots of stuff, if I can still find the good stuff.
avhception 11mo ago
This isn't limited to sales. The trust collapse is also coming for the public debate, interpersonal relationships and probably more stuff than I can imagine right now. I predict a renaissance of meeting people in person.
- tartoran 11mo ago
  > I predict a renaissance of meeting people in person. I hope that will come to fruition.
  - avhception 11mo ago
    Let's call it the glass-half-full scenario :)
TedDallas 11mo ago
Three words to solve this problem: direct mail marketing. Just kidding, that just goes into my RL trash can.
tug2024 11mo ago
[dead]
wazoox 11mo ago
As Hannah Arendt said : "The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth, and truth be defamed as lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world - and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end - is being destroyed."
visarga 11mo ago
I think the claim is wrong, depends on many things. In most cases AI content is better than web content, especially if you use Deep Research to ground it in multiple sources. It is a problem when content is generated to capture traffic (SEO, content feeds), but in those venues we were already neck deep in slop before 2022. If anything AI slop might improve the quality of old SEO and feed bait. When I need to be sure about something, I check it manually in trusted sources. If I am not sure, I check all the sources I can. More recently I run deep research on 3 agents (Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini) and then compare between the reports.
turnsout 11mo ago
We're finally getting the "pure" capitalism that economists dream about. An infinite number of sellers with perfectly commoditized products, driving margins asymptotically to zero. If you want to get ahead, you'll need to find the 1% edge and exploit it for 15 minutes until a competitor erases your lead.
projektfu 11mo ago
My screening inbox is full of the same exact form of engagement, almost identical to the one mentioned in the article. "I'm curious..." and then some interval later a follow up and then a "I don't seem to be reaching you" e-mail and by that point I have noticed and blocked them. It is fine for me, I have a system to handle it, but my receptionists often forward me these things from their inbox which bypasses my controls. It's not just that it is 0 effort, it also sucks, and it is increasingly not relevant because their agents are just scooping up stuff to reach out about and they aren't even selling something that you would need to buy. I just wish that we could go back to the old way. There should be a cost to attempt to get a sales lead.
hexator 11mo ago
The cost to create content is not zero. People across the board are underestimating the cost to run AI.
- aarondf 11mo ago
  I think you're conflating the cost to consumers to use AI and the cost to run AI. Sure, it's a house of cards, but the cost to consumers still rounds to zero.
  - hexator 11mo ago
    Sure, but that can't last.
hexator 11mo ago
From reading some of the reactions to this post, this quote comes to mind by Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” There are a lot of people here who have spent a lot of time, money, and effort building AI products. And they may be good and worthwhile! I'm literally one of them. But you still see some people totally underestimate this public-facing trust collapse and the growing anti-AI sentiment in general.
yndoendo 11mo ago
Anyone else see AI as nothing more than a logging system for citing real world experience and expertise? In order for any AI/ML content to have value it must cite where the accumulation of information came from. By not doing so it nothing more than a custom Wikipedia-esque with a motto _Trust Me Bro_. Citations and lack there of should be a simple key factor in evaluating trust. What are your sources for this idea / answer?
BeFlatXIII 11mo ago
Ironic coming from a blog about B2B sales. Who was answering cold calls and reading LinkedIn profiles before AI?
eddythompson80 11mo ago
I'm honestly all for it. As AI keeps poisoning all aspects of online content and online interactions, people who care about that sort of thing will have to move back to in person interaction more. The person you're physically interacting with might be using AI in their workflow, that's fine. I use AI too. I just don't want to "build a relationship" with AI. I don't care for AI "content". Art, blogs, articles, advertisements, even detestable things like sales and marketing are all forms of human relationships to me. It's fine if you wanna autogenerate it. I'm even "in the market" for autogenerates stuff as I use AI bots too, but you can't try to sell me a 100% automated-burger when I have the Fabricator 3000 too. If I'm hungry and just want a burger, I'll get my Fabricator 3000 to generate one for me. If I'm in the mood for a human touch on food and a dining experience, I'll cook, go to a (reputable) restaurant or a friend's place who likes to cook. Maybe there is a market for you to run your Fabricator 3000 to generate a burger for me. maybe. I don't know why I'd buy it though when I can just get your prompt and feed it into my own Fabricator 3000...
hbn 11mo ago
AI slop has tarnished the one remaining pure thing I do on the internet which is watch videos of cute animals. I've spotted a good amount in my Instagram feed lately which I only happened to notice it was fake at the last second. I'm sure some of them I've watched were indeed AI. It feels betraying to get tricked like that.
scotty79 11mo ago
> Which means all of it is now suspect. That's actually wonderful result. Humans and their messages are not to be trusted. It's a bit late that we had to make AI to show us that.
obscurette 11mo ago
The problem isn't that I don't trust AI. The problem is that I don't trust anything or anyone any more.

237 points by arnon 11mo ago

Yes nice article. Interesting point. One small one I do not agree with is "Are you burning VC cash on unsustainable unit economics?". I think it's safe to conclude by now that unsustainable businesses can be kept alive for years as long as the investors want it.

arnon 11mo ago
I guess that's true for some but not for all. I wouldn't say that's the most common scenario
pessimizer 11mo ago
Nothing safer than financial scams in the West these days. Never short Herbalife.
- rufus_foreman 11mo ago
  Looks like you could have made a lot of money shorting Herbalife over the last 5 years.

piker 11mo ago

The observations in this article about the insane signal-to-noise ratio are valid.

bgwalter 11mo ago

It is becoming unbearable. YouTube now has "AI" slop ads for Freenow (Lyft brand in the EU) with fake cars that move without the wheels turning and "AI" "actors" that look like plastic. This of course means that Freenow is now on the personal blacklist. People should not engage with companies who advertise with "AI" slop.

symfoniq 11mo ago
Agreed. I’m increasingly using the presence of AI slop as a primary signal about whether to avoid a company and its products.
- Applejinx 11mo ago
  Which suggests the next human dirty trick will be to put out AI slop 'supporting' a company and its products just to make 'em deny it was them making it :)
- SideburnsOfDoom 11mo ago
  Youtube is intentionally blunting this signal by making many videos look slightly slop-y, I mean "enhancing low-res content with AI upscaling" https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/08/youtube-shorts-ai-upscaling/683946/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/08/youtu... https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/youtube-dismisses-creators-concerns-secretly-used-ai-edit-videos-rcna227096 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/youtube-dismisses-cre...
SideburnsOfDoom 11mo ago
When it comes to ads on Youtube, Freenow is at the classy end of them. i.e. it's not that they're good, but that many others are much worse.
mv4 11mo ago
I was just looking at Instagram's promoted shopping ads, and 9 out of 10 are AI slop, pretending to be actual physical products. It is quite shocking.
HarHarVeryFunny 11mo ago
Not just ads - there is TONS of AI-generated YouTube shorts now, and the quality is so good that it's tough to always tell whether it's real as long as it's plausible (which not all of it is). It's annoying because the whole point of a lot of this stuff is that it's real, and one can be informed, entertained or have an emotional response to it. When you distrust everything because it's maybe fake, then the fun of the internet as a window into human nature and the rest of the world just disappears.

everdrive 11mo ago

Doesn't matter. We must keep building more and more technology no matter the cost. Have an idea for a business? Build it. Does your business make the lives of people worse? Doesn't matter, keep pushing. Could some new technology ruin the lives and relationships that people have? Doesn't matter, just build it. We always need more, need to do more. Every experiment is valid, every impulse must be followed. More complexity, more control, more distraction, more outrage, more engagement. Just keep building forever no matter the cost.

ricogallo 11mo ago
It sounds like the "The City" in "Blame!"
throwmeaway307 11mo ago
move fast and break things! nevermind if the things are people or their lives!!
- arnon 11mo ago
  build things """"people"""" want
  - TheOtherHobbes 11mo ago
    People want dopamine hints, gamification, addictive distractions, and a culture of competitive perma-hustle. If they didn't, we wouldn't be having these problems. The problem isn't AI, it's how marketing has eaten everything. So everyone is always pitching, looking for a competitive advantage, "telling their story", and "building their brand." You can't "build trust" if your primary motivation is to sell stuff to your contacts. The SNR was already terrible long before AI arrived. All AI has done is automated an already terrible process, which has - ironically - broken it so badly that it no longer works.
    - ModernMech 11mo ago
      Tired: "Build things people want" Wired: "Build things society needs"

alexpotato 11mo ago

Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens fame [0], has a great quote (paraphrasing): Interviewer: How will humans deal with the avalanche of fake information that AI could bring? YNH: The way humans have always dealt with fake information: by building institutions we trust to provide accurate information. This is not a new phenomenon btw. In democracies, this is often either the government (e.g. the Bureau of Labor Statistics) or newspapers (e.g. the New York Times) or even individuals (e.g. Walter Cronkite). In other forms of government, it becomes trust networks built on familial ties e.g. "Uncle/Aunt is the source for any good info on what's happening in the company" etc 0 - https://amzn.to/4nFuG7C https://amzn.to/4nFuG7C

pron 11mo ago
The problem is that too many people just don't know how to weigh different probabilities of correctness against each other. The NYT is wrong 5% of the time - I'll believe this random person I just saw on TikTok because I've never heard of them ever being wrong; I've heard many stories about doctors being wrong - I'll listen to RFK; scientific models could be wrong, so I'll bet on climate change being not real etc.
- ajaisjsbbz 11mo ago
  Trust is much more nuanced than N% wrong. You have to consider circumstantial factors as well. ie who runs The NY Times, who gives them money, what was the reason they were wrong, even if they’re not wrong what information are they leaving out. The list goes on. No single metric can capture this effectively. Moreover, the more political a topic the more likely the author is trying to influence your thoughts (but not me I promise!). I forgot who, but a historian was asked why they wouldn’t cover civil war history, and responded with something to the affect of “there’s no way to do serious work there because it’s too political right now”. It’s also why things like calling your opponents dumb, etc is so harmful. Nobody can fully evaluate the truthfulness of your claims (due to time, intellect, etc) but if you signal “I don’t like you” they’re rightfully going to ignore you because you’re signaling you’re unlikely to be trustworthy. Trust is hard earned and easily lost.

Chinjut 11mo ago

AI-esque blog post about how infinite AI content is awful, from "a co-founder at Paid, which is the first and only monetization and billing system for AI Agents".

arnon 11mo ago
So I can't have opinions? Also, this is entirely hand-written ;)
- dkdcio 11mo ago
  this is a funny phenomenon that I keep seeing. I think people are going through the reactionary “YoU mUsT hAvE wRiTtEn ThIs oN a CuRsEd TyPwRiTeR instead of handwriting your letter!1!!” hopefully soon we move onto judging content by its quality, not whether AI was used. banning digital advertisement would also help align incentives against mass-producing slop (which has been happening long before ChatGPT released)
  - saulpw 11mo ago
    I don't have the time or energy to judge content by its quality. There are too many opportunities for subtle errors, whether made maliciously or casually. We have to use some non-content filter or the avalanche of [mis]information will bury us. We used to be able to filter out things with misspellings and rambling walls of text, and presumably most of the rest was at least written by a human you could harangue if it came to that. Now we're trying to filter out content based on em-dashes and emoji bullet lists. Unfortunately that won't be effective for very long, but we have to use what we've got, because the alternative is to filter out everything.
- ambicapter 11mo ago
  The authentic nature of opinions means that sometimes they suck. Maybe GP is commenting that your opinion sucks?
- gwd 11mo ago
  I think this basically proves your point. There were things about it that made me think it may have been at least "AI-assisted", until I saw your "guaranteed bot-free" thing at the bottom. Anyone doing entirely hand-written things from now on are going to be facing a headwind of skepticism.

tetris11 11mo ago

I needed to get some builder quotes for my home. It did not enter my mind to go online to search for any. I just reached out to my family for any trustworthy builders they've had, and struck up conversations with some of my fancier neighbors for any recommendations. (I came to the conclusion that all builders are cowboys, and I might as well just try doing some of this myself via youtube videos) Using the internet to buy products is not a problem for me, I know roughly the quality of what I expect to get and can return anything not up to standard. Using the internet to buy services though? Not a chance. How can you refund a service

miloignis 11mo ago
When we needed some work done, we asked family and friends too, and ended up with a cowboy. When the work needed to be re-done, we looked up local reviews for contractors, and ended up with someone who was more expensive but also much more competent, and the work was done to a higher standard.
- bluGill 11mo ago
  > ended up with someone who was more expensive but also much more competent, and the work was done to a higher standard. How do you know that? Or is it just that your bias is coybows are bad and so you assume someone who dresses and acts better is better? Now step back, I'm not asking you personally, but the general person. It is possible that you have the knowledge and skills to do the job and so you know how to inspect it to ensure it was done right. However the average person doesn't have those skills and so won't know the well dressed person who does a bad job that looks good from the poorly dressed person who does a good job but doesn't look as good.
  - miloignis 11mo ago
    Perhaps I wasn't clear - I don't know enough to say if the job was good or bad just by inspecting it, I know the first job was bad because it didn't solve the problem, and then a more expensive contractor explained why, and did solve the problem. Our issue was water intrusion along a side wall that was flowing under our hardwoods, warping them and causing them to smell. The first contractor replaced the floor and added in an outside drain. The drain didn't work, and the water kept intruding and the floor started to warp again. When we got multiple highly rated contractors out, all of them explained that the drain wasn't installed correctly, that a passive drain couldn't prevent the problem at that location, and that the solution was to either add an actively pumped drain or replace the lower part of the wall with something waterproof. We ended up replacing that part of the wall, and that has fixed the issue along that wall. (We now have water intrusion somewhere else, sigh). If anything, I was originally biased for the cowboy, as they came recommended, he and his workers were nice, and the other options seemed too expensive & drastic. Now I've learned my lesson, at least about these types of trickier housing issues. Also, no one mentioned evaluating someone by how they're dressed - the issue was family/friend recommendations vs online reviews, and I while I do take recommendations from friends and family into account, I've actually had better luck trusting online (local) reviews.

bee_rider 11mo ago

What I get from the article is that, proving that a company will stick around for a while after you’ve subscribed is hard now, because anybody can AI generate the general vibe of the marketing department of a big established player. This seems like it’ll be devastating for companies whose business model requires signing new users up for ongoing subscriptions. Maybe it could lead to a resurgence of the business model where you buy a program and don’t have to get married to the company that supports it, though? I’d love it if the business model of “buy our buggy product now, we’ll maybe patch it later” died.

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
arnon 11mo ago
that's exactly my point - yes you need to prove beyond a doubt that YOU are the right one to buy from, because it's so easy for 3 Stanford dropouts in a trenchcoat to make a seemingly successful business in just a few days of vibecoding.
- gnarlouse 11mo ago
  > 3 stanford dropouts in a trenchcoat I'm using this
  - arnon 11mo ago
    please do, i've been forcing it on people for a year now
gnarlouse 11mo ago
We already got your money, what do we need to work for again?
- bee_rider 11mo ago
  Yeah. The modern software market actually seems like a total inversion of normal human bartering and trade relationships, actually… In Ye Olden Days, you go to the blacksmith, and buy some horseshoes. You expect the things to work, they are simple enough that you can do a cursory check and at least see if they are plausibly shaped, and then you put them on your horse and they either work or they don’t. Later you sell him some carrots, buy a pot: you have an ongoing relationship checkpointed by ongoing completed tasks. There were shitty blacksmiths and scummy farmers, but at some point you get a model of how shitty the blacksmith is and adjust your expectations appropriately (and maybe try to find somebody better when you need nails). Ongoing contracts were the domain of specialists and somewhat fraught with risk. Big trust (and associated mechanics, reputation and prestige). Now we’re negotiating an ongoing contracts for our everyday tools, it is totally bizarre.

realitydrift 11mo ago

[flagged]

adammarples 11mo ago
I think this "drift principle" you're pushing is just called bias or overfitting. We've overfit to engagement in social media and missed the bigger picture, we've overfit to plausible language in LLMs and missed a lot.

renegat0x0 11mo ago

I use RSS to follow these I want to hear. I do not follow recommendation, since RSS reader is my window to the world. I follow even AI slop via reddit RSS. I control however what comes in.

erpigna 11mo ago
I'm looking for a practical and possibly Open Source way to filter noise from RSS feeds, have you got any recommendation?
- robin_reala 11mo ago
  Delete noisy feeds. I’m not joking: RSS only becomes a truly great experience when actively curated.
- renegat0x0 11mo ago
  I have seen a lot recommends for karakeep. I disagree with people suggesting removing noisy RSS feeds, as some are noisy, yet sometime useful. I think RSS client needs advanced filtering and search. I use my own project for RSS https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive, but it should be considered 'alpha' as I move fast and break things. It provides me functionality that I miss in most of the clients, and it is a web client, so I can access it through mobile and PC, no need for sync. I am not a front-end dev so it does not look that much appealing.

Applejinx 11mo ago

I'm already seeing this. I very much fall into the category of 'delete all email offers' as I'm a small youtuber, big enough to be targeted by AI sponsor deals, so I'm just buried with it. The last five times I've looked at something in case it was a legitimate user email it was AI promotion of someone just like in the article. Their only way to escalate, apart from pure volume, is to take pains to intentionally emulate the signals of someone who's a legitimate user needing help or having a complaint. Logically, if you want to pursue the adversarial nature of this farther, the AIs will have to be trained to study up and mimic the dialogue trees of legitimate users needing support, only to introduce their promotion after I've done several exchanges of seemingly legitimate support work, in the guise of a friend and happy customer. All pretend, to get to the pitch. AI's already capable of this if directed adeptly enough. You could write a script for it by asking AI for a script to do exactly this social exploit. By then I'll be locked in a room that's also a Faraday cage, poking products through a slot in the door—and mocking my captors with the em-dashes I used back when I was one of the people THEY learned em-dashes from. One thing about it, it's a very modern sort of dystopia!

AaronAPU 11mo ago
YouTubers and other social media influencers are a sort of royalty now, getting to decide by fiat which companies live or die. But you can’t really even make the case to them anymore because like you said they can’t/won’t even read your email. What mostly happens is they constantly provide free publicity to existing big players whose products they will cover for free and/or will do sponsored videos with. The only real chance you have to be covered as a small player is to hope your users aggregate to the scale where they make a request often enough that it gets noticed and you get the magical blessing from above. Not sure what my point is other than it kinda sucks. But it is what it is.
- Applejinx 11mo ago
  Or know people personally. There's two people I promote because they actively helped me do my own work, pitched in open source code and did development to support my project. There's another guy who lives in my town, so he gets some mention just because of that (his work's good, but that's my angle for mentioning it). And a microphone company got a shout out not because they give me microphones, but because the guy running the company noticed and liked my ethos and did a repair for free for me. That counts as a form of sponsoring so I talked him up, am already a fan of his work. Make friends and work with people where possible. I get that some of this only works for us open source types, but the microphone guy isn't, he just did good work. I initially heard of his company through a pro sound engineer website, and ran with it when the advice turned out to be good.

ModernMech 11mo ago

Trust collapse is real, I don't trust anything anymore. Take this article for instance, I don't trust it because of the random bolding. Does that mean it's AI generated? I don't know but I've seen lots of AI generated content and it has random bolding, so when I see it, I immediately don't trust it. And I don't have the time to verify anything, so whether or not this article was written by the author or AI, it's gone on the "not credible" heap for me, just because of the bolding. It's not a strong signal but it's a signal, and due to the volume of slop, I must filter on whatever signals I have to maintain any chance of finding genuine human work product. Maybe I miss something genuine and important by filtering this way, but it's the best I can do.

rho4 11mo ago
Well said. Sad how that reflex starts kicking in for HN comments as well (ps I'm not getting any signals from your comment).

ChrisMarshallNY 11mo ago

> Will you still be here in 12 months when I’ve integrated your tool into my workflow? This is the biggie; especially with B2B. It's really 3 months, these days. Many companies have the lifespan of a mayfly. AI isn't the new reason for this. It's been getting worse and worse, in the last few years, as people have been selling companies; not products, but AI will accelerate the race to the bottom. One of the things that AI has afforded, is that the lowest-tier, bottom-feeding scammer, can now look every bit as polished and professional as a Fortune 50 company (often, even more). So that means that not only is the SNR dropping, the "noise" is now a lot riskier and uglier.

tablet 11mo ago
> One of the things that AI has afforded, is that the lowest-tier, bottom-feeding scammer, can now look every bit as polished and professional as a Fortune 50 company (often, even more). Made my day. So true.

stevetron 11mo ago

You can't build trust in your OS (operating system) when your OS spies on the entire customer base, and you spin it off as telemetry. Or you remotely target the OS to implement a radical change, and force it to be installed as an 'update'. I stopped accepting telephone calls before 2010. They still ring the phone.

slightwinder 11mo ago

What if this is the plan all along? People losing trust in media, so the rich and powerful can continue doing shit without getting exposed any more, because now they always can say it's just AI, and didn't really do this or that?

heddycrow 11mo ago

I wish we were talking about what's next versus what's increasingly here. How can infinite AI content be strictly awful if it forces us to fix issues with our trust and reward systems? Short term, sure. But infinite (also) implies long term. I wish I had a really smart game theorist friend who could help me project forward into time if for nothing other than just fun. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to reduce the value of "ouch, it hurts right now" stories and responses. But damned if we don't have an interesting and engaging problem on our hands right now. There's got to be some people out there who love digging in to complicated problems. What's next after trust collapses? All of us just give up? What if that collapse is sooner than we thought; can we think about the fun problem now?

arnon 11mo ago
I suggest we go back to before and be human about things - and build trust in-person.
- trylist 11mo ago
  This is childish thinking. Whatever we do, we cannot go back to "before". Which "before"? How do we go back? You can't regress back to a being a kid just because the problems you face as an adult are too much to handle. However this is resolved, it will not be anything like "before". Accept that fact up front.
- heddycrow 11mo ago
  Dunbar's number leaps to mind. I wonder what our systems look like at large when we have cause to strengthen our 150 meaningful connections. Would this truly be a move back? I've met people outside my social class and disposition who seem to rely quite heavily on networking this way.
  - AndrewKemendo 11mo ago
    This is exactly the reason Human biological limits prevent the realization of stable equilibrium at the scale of coordination necessary for larger emergent superstructures Humans need to figure out how to become a eusocial superorganism because we’re past the point where individual groups don’t produce externalities that are existential to other groups/individuals I don’t think that’s possible, so I’m just building the machine version

Sharlin 11mo ago

In other words, many new people now get to know the "using an internet dating service as a woman" experience.

heddycrow 11mo ago
If that's what people wanted, they could have created a woman account or a western white male account on a rest-of-the-world dating site. If it's not? Oh well, suffer. It's still better than the "average western male on a dating site" experience. Note: I really like the metaphor. My apologies if I abused it or stretched it to far or in the wrong direction.

jjoe 11mo ago

Do you think usury is to blame for this aggressive and excessive push to make more money? Synonym for excessive here could be unethical

JCM9 11mo ago

We see business go through this cycle a lot. Some new “better cheaper” thing comes along. Everyone implements it to keep up with the Jones’s. Suddenly there’s no differentiation because everyone has it and everyone thinks it sucks. Suddenly going back to some reworked version of the old thing is the new black. One such example was call centers. In the 2000s implementing a call center in India was all the rage on cost cutting. The customer experience was terrible and suddenly having a US-based call center (the thing companies just abandoned) was now a feature. I think we’ll see similar things with AI. Everyone will get flooded with AI slop. Folks will get annoyed and suddenly interacting with a real human or a real human writing original content will be a “feature” that folks flock to.

bluGill 11mo ago
Problem is how do you find real humans in the first place if you don't know them. Easy enough to walk/drive around my city and talk to them. However there are a lot of topics that the experts live elsewhere and so that won't work.

cantor_S_drug 11mo ago

We need PageRank like algorithm for "Trust / Human Content" to be applied directly to the source of such content. E.g. following all three channels are AI made. But all these content can be liked to an advanced AI version of audio based videos of Wikiarticles. If a video is providing just a summary based on established historical facts, even though it is AI based, how is it different than refering a thesaurus or dictionary? Aren't such videos making "knowledge" accessible. FINAL Financial hours of U.S.A. just before the 1929 crash https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxiSOlvKUlA&t=1008s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxiSOlvKUlA&t=1008s The Volcker Shock: When the Fed Broke the Economy to Save the Dollar (1980) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTvgL2XtHsw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTvgL2XtHsw How Inflation Makes the Rich Richer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDnlYQsbQ_c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDnlYQsbQ_c

_the_inflator 11mo ago

It didn't help documentation at all. I had to work with auth0 for example and their documentation is such a bloat, that I am already prototyping with better-auth. No structure, outdated stuff marked as "preview" from 2023/2024, wikipedia like in depth articles about everything but not for simple questions like: how to implement a backend for frontend. You find fragments and pieces of information here and there - but no guidance at all. Settings hidden behind tabs etc. A nightmare. No sane developer would have done such a mess, because of time constraints and bloat. You see and experience first hand, that the few gems are from the trenches, with spelling mistakes etc. Bloat for SEO, the mess for devs.

returnInfinity 11mo ago

Yes sick of AI generated "illustrations".

guzik 11mo ago

So I went on X after a long break from social media, and my feed is full of tips like this one: Growing on X is so simple I’m shocked it works. 100x comments a day 10x posts a day 15x DM’s a day 1x thread a day 1x email a day This is how you grow your presence on X. Even if having a presence matters, how can you actually say something meaningful if you post 10 times a day - there's no way (unless you just repeat yourself). Hopefully my algorithm's just gone weird but sadly the people I used to follow stopped posting.

Lerc 11mo ago

I don't think this shows that you can't trust things. I think it means trust should be earned. We might be transitioning to a world where trust has value and is earned and stored in your reputation. Clickbait is a symptom of people valuing attention over trust. Clickbait spends a percentage of their reputation by trading it for attention. In a world of many providers, most people have not heard of any particular individual provider. This means they have no reputation to lose, so their choice to act in a reputation losing manner is easy. Beyond a certain scale when everyone can play that game we end up with the problem that this article describes. The content is easy but vacuous. There are far more people vying for the same number of eyballs now. The solution is, I believe, earned trust. Curators select items from sources they trust. The ones that do a good job become trusted curators. In a sense HackerNews is a trusted curator. Reddit is one that is losing, or has lost, trust. AI could probably take on some of the role of that curation. In the future perhaps more so. An AI can scan the sources of an article to see if the sources make the claims that the article says it makes. I doubt it can do so with sufficient accuracy to be useful right now, but I don't think that is too far off. Perhaps the various fediverse reddit clones had the wrong idea. Maybe they should in a distributed fashion where each point is a subreddit analogue operated each with their own ways of curation, then an upper level curation can make a site of the groups they trust. This makes a multi level trust mechanism. At each level there are no rules governing behaviour. If you violate the values of a higher layer, they lose trust in you. AI could run its own curation nodes. It might be good at it or it might be terrible, it doesn't really matter. If it is consistently good, it earns trust. I don't mind there being lots of stuff, if I can still find the good stuff.

avhception 11mo ago

This isn't limited to sales. The trust collapse is also coming for the public debate, interpersonal relationships and probably more stuff than I can imagine right now. I predict a renaissance of meeting people in person.

tartoran 11mo ago
> I predict a renaissance of meeting people in person. I hope that will come to fruition.
- avhception 11mo ago
  Let's call it the glass-half-full scenario :)

TedDallas 11mo ago

Three words to solve this problem: direct mail marketing. Just kidding, that just goes into my RL trash can.

tug2024 11mo ago

[dead]

wazoox 11mo ago

As Hannah Arendt said : "The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth, and truth be defamed as lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world - and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end - is being destroyed."

visarga 11mo ago

I think the claim is wrong, depends on many things. In most cases AI content is better than web content, especially if you use Deep Research to ground it in multiple sources. It is a problem when content is generated to capture traffic (SEO, content feeds), but in those venues we were already neck deep in slop before 2022. If anything AI slop might improve the quality of old SEO and feed bait. When I need to be sure about something, I check it manually in trusted sources. If I am not sure, I check all the sources I can. More recently I run deep research on 3 agents (Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini) and then compare between the reports.

turnsout 11mo ago

We're finally getting the "pure" capitalism that economists dream about. An infinite number of sellers with perfectly commoditized products, driving margins asymptotically to zero. If you want to get ahead, you'll need to find the 1% edge and exploit it for 15 minutes until a competitor erases your lead.

projektfu 11mo ago

My screening inbox is full of the same exact form of engagement, almost identical to the one mentioned in the article. "I'm curious..." and then some interval later a follow up and then a "I don't seem to be reaching you" e-mail and by that point I have noticed and blocked them. It is fine for me, I have a system to handle it, but my receptionists often forward me these things from their inbox which bypasses my controls. It's not just that it is 0 effort, it also sucks, and it is increasingly not relevant because their agents are just scooping up stuff to reach out about and they aren't even selling something that you would need to buy. I just wish that we could go back to the old way. There should be a cost to attempt to get a sales lead.

hexator 11mo ago

The cost to create content is not zero. People across the board are underestimating the cost to run AI.

aarondf 11mo ago
I think you're conflating the cost to consumers to use AI and the cost to run AI. Sure, it's a house of cards, but the cost to consumers still rounds to zero.
- hexator 11mo ago
  Sure, but that can't last.

hexator 11mo ago

From reading some of the reactions to this post, this quote comes to mind by Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” There are a lot of people here who have spent a lot of time, money, and effort building AI products. And they may be good and worthwhile! I'm literally one of them. But you still see some people totally underestimate this public-facing trust collapse and the growing anti-AI sentiment in general.

yndoendo 11mo ago

Anyone else see AI as nothing more than a logging system for citing real world experience and expertise? In order for any AI/ML content to have value it must cite where the accumulation of information came from. By not doing so it nothing more than a custom Wikipedia-esque with a motto _Trust Me Bro_. Citations and lack there of should be a simple key factor in evaluating trust. What are your sources for this idea / answer?

BeFlatXIII 11mo ago

Ironic coming from a blog about B2B sales. Who was answering cold calls and reading LinkedIn profiles before AI?

eddythompson80 11mo ago

I'm honestly all for it. As AI keeps poisoning all aspects of online content and online interactions, people who care about that sort of thing will have to move back to in person interaction more. The person you're physically interacting with might be using AI in their workflow, that's fine. I use AI too. I just don't want to "build a relationship" with AI. I don't care for AI "content". Art, blogs, articles, advertisements, even detestable things like sales and marketing are all forms of human relationships to me. It's fine if you wanna autogenerate it. I'm even "in the market" for autogenerates stuff as I use AI bots too, but you can't try to sell me a 100% automated-burger when I have the Fabricator 3000 too. If I'm hungry and just want a burger, I'll get my Fabricator 3000 to generate one for me. If I'm in the mood for a human touch on food and a dining experience, I'll cook, go to a (reputable) restaurant or a friend's place who likes to cook. Maybe there is a market for you to run your Fabricator 3000 to generate a burger for me. maybe. I don't know why I'd buy it though when I can just get your prompt and feed it into my own Fabricator 3000...

hbn 11mo ago

AI slop has tarnished the one remaining pure thing I do on the internet which is watch videos of cute animals. I've spotted a good amount in my Instagram feed lately which I only happened to notice it was fake at the last second. I'm sure some of them I've watched were indeed AI. It feels betraying to get tricked like that.

scotty79 11mo ago

> Which means all of it is now suspect. That's actually wonderful result. Humans and their messages are not to be trusted. It's a bit late that we had to make AI to show us that.

obscurette 11mo ago

The problem isn't that I don't trust AI. The problem is that I don't trust anything or anyone any more.