4 ms·

The coming AI enshittification is going to be epic. For those of us who have been on the web for more than five minutes, we can see this a mile away. If you th

by titzer 4mo ago

The coming AI enshittification is going to be epic. For those of us who have been on the web for more than five minutes, we can see this a mile away. If you think search ads are annoying, pre-roll YouTube ads are annoying, streaming ads are annoying, or basically ads-on-any-screen-anywhere-at-any-time are annoying, just wait until every stupid thing is powered by AI and is subtly trying to manipulate you to buy/watch/believe some crap all the time.

bryanlarsen 4mo ago
Jeopardizing a $200/month subscription in return for $1/month in ad revenue seems insane. Using ads on a $20/month subscription to entice you into a $200/month one, OTOH...
- titzer 4mo ago
  They will almost certainly get more than $1/month in ad revenue for someone interacting with the AI for hours a day.
asdff 4mo ago
It is already ruining forums including this one. People posting AI slop articles. Probably a good deal of commenters using AI slop to write their comments. Can't run away from it. Eventually you will have to step away entirely because you will just be interfacing mainly with AI content. I'm about fed up with forums at this point and I doubt I will be around them in the coming months at this rate of ever increasing slop peddling. I suspect more and more human contributors will feel the same and start slowly walking away, snowballing the slopification effect. There is going to be a point soon where HN is just ai models posting ai articles to be filled with ai comments and for what reason exactly? I guess to try and train new ai slop company products into the datasets of various ai models to capture the budget spend of some ai middle manager model.
- mannanj 4mo ago
  Wasn't this the end goal in the a totalitarian state in the novels by Orwell and sort of described in the movie Ready Player One? The gist of it as I understand it is in a society where things are fake and incredibly extractive (where a select few, bourgeoisie or rich prioritize their interests over others like we see accelerating today) they limit the forums available for people to question them and peddle their interests on the select few that remain. If you sufficiently isolate the people, it's hard for them to tell whats real and eventually they come to accept the fake narratives as truth. In an odd way, this sort of fits in with the theories about winners writing history, and all those weird, sort of conspiracy-laden accounts of human history having these odd unexplainable gaps or stories around it. I don't know about you, I think we are simply seeing those forces of the past working at preserving their interests and using the latest technology to do it.
VorpalWay 4mo ago
I'm not sure how that would legally work in EU: several countries have strict rules about ads having to be clearly distinguished from non-ads material. I know that UK has pretty strict rules about product placement in broadcasts too for example. Yes they can do ads, but if they try to be subtle they will likely (eventually) be hit with fines. Though, do the current rules apply to AI? Likely unclear. But if this becomes a problem I would expect new consumer protection regulation to be introduced aimed at this specific issue.

by titzer 4mo ago

bryanlarsen 4mo ago

Jeopardizing a $200/month subscription in return for $1/month in ad revenue seems insane. Using ads on a $20/month subscription to entice you into a $200/month one, OTOH...

titzer 4mo ago
They will almost certainly get more than $1/month in ad revenue for someone interacting with the AI for hours a day.

asdff 4mo ago

It is already ruining forums including this one. People posting AI slop articles. Probably a good deal of commenters using AI slop to write their comments. Can't run away from it. Eventually you will have to step away entirely because you will just be interfacing mainly with AI content. I'm about fed up with forums at this point and I doubt I will be around them in the coming months at this rate of ever increasing slop peddling. I suspect more and more human contributors will feel the same and start slowly walking away, snowballing the slopification effect. There is going to be a point soon where HN is just ai models posting ai articles to be filled with ai comments and for what reason exactly? I guess to try and train new ai slop company products into the datasets of various ai models to capture the budget spend of some ai middle manager model.

mannanj 4mo ago
Wasn't this the end goal in the a totalitarian state in the novels by Orwell and sort of described in the movie Ready Player One? The gist of it as I understand it is in a society where things are fake and incredibly extractive (where a select few, bourgeoisie or rich prioritize their interests over others like we see accelerating today) they limit the forums available for people to question them and peddle their interests on the select few that remain. If you sufficiently isolate the people, it's hard for them to tell whats real and eventually they come to accept the fake narratives as truth. In an odd way, this sort of fits in with the theories about winners writing history, and all those weird, sort of conspiracy-laden accounts of human history having these odd unexplainable gaps or stories around it. I don't know about you, I think we are simply seeing those forces of the past working at preserving their interests and using the latest technology to do it.

VorpalWay 4mo ago

I'm not sure how that would legally work in EU: several countries have strict rules about ads having to be clearly distinguished from non-ads material. I know that UK has pretty strict rules about product placement in broadcasts too for example. Yes they can do ads, but if they try to be subtle they will likely (eventually) be hit with fines. Though, do the current rules apply to AI? Likely unclear. But if this becomes a problem I would expect new consumer protection regulation to be introduced aimed at this specific issue.