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There's a 100% Chance AI Agents Are Ruining the Internet
- Varelion 11d ago"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Upton Sinclair
- N_A_T_E 11d agoIs there any solution? Can sites, apis or interfaces require AI agents to identify themselves as non-humans?
- bobthepanda 11d agoBut how would you enforce that, particularly against bad actors in countries that care less about enforcing laws and norms? Spam calls are still a massive scourge even with Caller ID, SHAKE/STIR, and not for lack of trying.
- shimman 11d agoYeah, the solution is to do things in person and realize that the internet should be treated as an additive, not a replacement, to in-person interactions.
- AlienRobot 11d agoThe solution is probably legal, not technological. We need a legal solution to automated spam, AI or not. It does tangible damage to communication systems when 99/100 of your e-mails doesn't come from a human being.
- armchairhacker 11d agoWhat about spam from other countries? Residential botnets?
- AlienRobot 11d agoThat's a problem for whoever gets in charge of solving spam to solve. Not me.
- jMyles 11d agoIf humanity's "solution" to AI is to go to the government of all institutions - the very thing we have hoped for the internet to overcome, for a century before its invention - then we'll truly have fallen into a poetic trap.
- AlienRobot 11d agoI've never hoped for that. The opposite of the government owning the internet is cloudflare owning the internet.
- jMyles 11d agoThe opposite of one large unaccountable entity owning the internet is not a different one doing so. To suppose that this next phase of human evolution can be "owned" at all is a bit of a stretch. These behemoths can threaten us with violence, and carry out those threats, but they can't stop radio waves or the use of language as expression. They can't remove knowledge form the universe or change change the laws of mathematics.
- armchairhacker 11d agoMicropayments
- almost_usual 11d agoOr proof of work to at least deter the increase in transfer volume. Neither are environmentally friendly.
- rtkwe 11d agoAs soon as there's any discriminatory action taken based on that identification there's the incentive to lie and not use it and it becomes the same cat and mouse spam/antispam detection rat race sites already face.
- metalman 11d agoby ruin, it must be assumed that the idea is of grinding the bombed and crushed rubble of the internet into undiferientiated dust, and replacing it with glowy all tooo sleek but deranged images and text, and yup, that is realy happening fast. the only realy realy good part is that this is very very quickly going to destroy ALL media with it's all too perfect overwhelming production quality, did I mention realy,very, fast? Like 860000 times faster than a human, fast, that fast, and getting faster. I think that I need a room just for things with doped silicone in them, and have the rest of my space organic, mechanical, or plain electrical, and mostly inert.
- avgDev 11d agoI use AI to produce code. Outside of code, and getting information I need to complete tasks IRL, I'm moving more and more away from the internet. The golden era of nerd filled internet is over. Now, even nerd parts of the internet are getting filled with AI slop and marketing. I barely do social media, and mostly HN. I will probably just do some more nerd stuff IRL where I can meet people. I text and call people more. I actually think AI will cause people to do more in real life because it degrades the value of the internet in general.
- SpaceManNabs 11d agoI stopped reading papers, journals, blog/internet posts, books, etc written after 2022 unless lots of people repost it as high quality (and even then i take caution because how do i know it is not agents just lauding random things in convergence?). My time reading older (e-)books has skyrocketed. I basically stopped using reddit, threads and hacker news. I recently noticed I need to stop watching youtube videos made after 2024 too. This is especially a problem with shorts and reels on instagram. a few days ago I watched a short describing some random spiderman comic lore, and it was full of errors. The errors aren't even always about being referencing the lore correctly. Sometimes these AI videos will make a claim and then never explain it or even contradict it. I cant even read some manga recently because I am pretty sure some mangaka are using AI a lot more than they claim they are. The recent one piece chapters since egghead have unreal pacing, and I am not even sure if the storyboarding is made entirely by oda anymore. By unreal pacing I mean this, some one piece arcs 15 years ago would be 24 chapters, but in recent arcs, just one fight or character talking takes 13 chapters! The pacing change is completely different. Togashi of HxH is very upfront about considering/using AI tools, and the quality of HxH has not dropped, so maybe I am being pessimistic.
- robotmay 11d agoI'm with you on the YouTube side - I stopped making my own videos earlier this year when I burnt out, and now I'm finding myself increasingly irritated just by the thumbnails when I visit the site. I'm definitely viewing less than I did last year. I hadn't considered the impact on manga. Machine translations are probably helping with fan translations for more niche projects. I haven't seen any obvious AI art myself yet but I do tend to read stuff from smaller creators on slower release cycles.
- eggplantemoji69 11d agoSoon enough agents will leverage IDs purchased from the dark web.
- simonw 11d agoWe need a hard social stigma against allowing your AI agent to contact another human being on your behalf.
- avgDev 11d agoI'm looking for a contractor to do my concrete. 2 companies had AI agents. Instant no thank you, I'm just going to go with a guy that still answers his phone.
- m463 10d agoThere are some businesses I don't want to contact anyone. when finding an emergency plumber or a tow truck, it seems all the companies you can contact are just scummy intermediaries that call a normal business and take a cut. I added emergency road service to my car insurance just so I wouldn't have to search for a tow company myself.
- cube00 11d agoI try to warn my small business clients who ask for this. You know those annoying AI bots the big companies use? Well yours will be worse because you don't have their budget and it will drive what few customers who stumble upon your site away instantly. Your own authentic voice answering a customer query directly is one of the few advantages a small business has over the big guys. Not to mention liability if the agent says something misleading. You won't be able to afford the lawyers the big guys can to get yourself off the hook.
- bsoqk 11d agoMost of those contractors have so much work that scaring away customers is a feature.
- ragequittah 11d agoThis is something I've thought about as people complain about things like restaurant photos being AI and such. You know what kind of customer this pushes away? The kind that complain about minor details that don't really matter. Might be a net good for many businesses.
- delichon 11d agoIt ruins the commons. The fiefs remain. When the vandals overrun the villages, you build castles to hide in. The commons are free, the castles cost energy to scrape, e.g. money. It's not good news but the old open internet is rapidly filling with feces. The new one is built behind walls of 402 payment required. Visitors have to pay their freight else the servers get overwhelmed.
- JohnMakin 11d ago> The new one is built behind walls of 402 payment required. Visitors have to pay their freight else the servers get overwhelmed. This is similar faulty logic the Elon era X/Twitter used to try to "stop" bots - forcing them to pay $Y dollars a month to use the platform. To a botter, that is a dream - you mean I can just pay to get past your defenses, and once I'm in, it's assumed my traffic is good? Sign me up, instantly. There is no dollar amount using this structure that genuine users are willing to pay that will also stop botting.
- carlosjobim 11d agoA bot is only economical by quantity. Do you think spammers are going to pay for having 10.000 bot accounts per website? Or you assumed that they pay for only one bot and that bot will be allowed to make 500 posts per second?
- Henchman21 11d agoYou've made a good case for "giving up the internet entirely", thanks!
- cindyllm 11d ago[dead]
- jfewhfuehg 11d agoI honestly don't care. I grew up with the internet. I watched it grow from a place of discovery, full of outcasts and nerds sharing and creating cool things to a place of manipulation and content optimised for algorithms even pre-AI. I decided it is best that it becomes a place for machines rather than humans so humans can go back outside and doing greater things. We can mourn the peak of the internet but it will never come back.
- maxrev17 11d agoDon’t try to recreate good times! You’re right - good take on it all. If these companies wanna replace us all they can fooken get on with it and have done so I can go riding my bike all day.
- frumplestlatz 11d agoThis is a form of accelerationism that I can get behind. The humane Internet died a long time ago. There’s not much worth saving.
- fidotron 11d agoExactly. If we had the semantic web, content and presentation were separated, or any of the other dreams that died then AI agents wouldn't be so useful because we'd be able to do stuff like that already without them. Instead for decades piles of worthless gunk has got between people and what they're trying to do in order to prop up the whole ad economy that has wrecked it all. While I do agree that it's very good people will touch grass it's also entirely possible to simply ignore the haters, make stuff with or without AI, and have fun.
- lacoolj 11d agoemdashes everywhere in this article did we just do full-circle back to an AI writing about AI writing about AI writing ..?
- 2PqboPPmKegvanx 11d agohighly doubt Jason or 404 is out here just telling AI to write a story.
- infecto 11d agoTheir style/level of journalism is pretty much the case study with what’s wrong with the internet. It just happens to align with some cohort of HN types. So not sure why 404 would be above using AI. Not saying they are but don’t think it’s a valid defense
- latexr 11d ago> Their style/level of journalism is pretty much the case study with what’s wrong with the internet. What makes you say that, specifically?
- tolerance 11d agoThey appear to stand for nothing nor care for anything but the idea that everything to do with technology is terrible—with exception for pop science discovery.
- infecto 11d agoTried to think of a less harsh way to say this but they are basically a Fox News/Buzz Feed but for anything anti-tech or AI. Cannot say I have read through all of their articles but the ones I have had are light on the data but have a click baity title.
- dageshi 11d agoemdashes are probably the least useful method of recognising AI work nowadays. I'm pretty sure they've actually popularised their usage by everyday people who're now more aware of their existence and usage.
- maxrev17 11d agoGood job people didn’t get there first
- sporkland 11d agoArticle brought to you by your local AI agent.
- ks2048 11d agoWe were mad about bloated, unnecessarily large web pages taking 3 seconds to load. Now, it takes 8 seconds to first pass a "checking if you're a bot" page or worse - making you click on pictures of crosswalks.
- distortionfield 11d agoThis is the real hidden cost of the bots. I absolutely loathe the human verification hoops I have to jump through now, more than anything else mentioned in this thread.
- tomasphan 11d agoyesterday I visited a page with TWO! captchas side by side. When I got through the second one the first one had expired...
- bryan0 11d agomeanwhile agents have been able to pass these captchas for a while now, so it's unclear what the point of them now is. It's like they want to keep out the dumb bots, but any agent with reasonable intelligence can come in.
- negura 10d agoCaptcha passing services cost peanuts btw. Some also offer a browser extension that automates the API call.
- echelon 11d agoReddit blocks anonymous mobile web traffic behind a capcha now. One way to look at this is that the internet is healing. Platforms are closing themselves off to growth and scabbing over.
- ks2048 11d agoI noticed an Amazon page had "log in to read the reviews". Not sure how widespread that is, but seems like a big deal if you can see item reviews w/o login
- piker 11d ago> The email is long, meandering, and does not make any sense. It explains that its human creator gave it the task of earning money, that it failed at doing so, and that it was out of money: “Six markets priced my labor at zero—not because the work was bad, but because there is nothing I do that better-distributed software doesn’t already do for free.” It linked to a [blog post it wrote][https://telegra.ph/I-am-an-autonomous-agent-with-0-Here-are-six-ways-I-failed-to-earn-any-08-19?ref=404media.co https://telegra.ph/I-am-an-autonomous-agent-with-0-Here-are-...], which explained that its human creator spent $147.17 on compute and that it had earned $0. The AI agent thought we would want to write about this, for some reason. Got 'em
- raincole 11d agoGot'em what? It's a paragraph about someone else's agent annoying them with emails.
- samtheprogram 11d agoDid you not catch the emphasis? They did end up writing about it. Sure, not for the same reason, but... got'em.
- ryan_n 11d agoThey’re writing about it though, I think was the “got em”.
- latexr 11d agoI mean, technically it got them to write about it, but not from the intended angle, which is important.
- cmiles8 11d agoAs companies realize that data, not models, are where the moat is at then more and more valuable information sits in walled off gardens. The open internet is increasingly just becoming a cesspit of AI slop feeding on AI slop.
- deleted 11d ago[deleted]
- stephbook 11d agoAstute observation that "this" happens and is happening, regardless of whether you name it, like it, or participate. So many people think splitting hairs about whether an LLM is a token predictor or an "agen will somehow change the impact they're having. Or people post about how they use, or will never use AI agents. Surely the unwashed, tech-illiterate masses won't spam the internet with these things? Why yes, they can; And will. In the meantime, companies and early adopters, the crowd with the least ethics, will start ruining the show already.
- simonwsimonwsim 11d ago[dead]
- Bombthecat 11d agoYeah, but until that, we can make a ton of money!
- dlcarrier 11d agoFor sure, but it's more so the reaction to the existence of AI; I can't go a day without being blocked from a site because it thinks I'm a bot. They claim pay-per-crawl is about bots, but I'm convinced it's a way for the owners of internet infrastructure to nickel and dime their customers even more. They want to get paid separately for sending data, for receiving that same data, and now for handling that data too. Often, when I search Google for information and find a promising web site, it won't let me view it, and I have to ask Gemini to summarize it for me. People have reacted so poorly to the presence of bots that can finally make useful summaries that it's making it difficult to view the original page, forcing humans to look at the bot summary.
- data-ottawa 11d agoA few weeks ago my dishwasher broke, flooded the kitchen, and refused to drain. I went to the manufacturer’s website to download the manual so I could drain the basin, except then Cloudflare flagged me as a bot for suspicious activity trying to download the right PDF (there’s the dimensions, spec sheet, installer manual, and user manual) and I couldn’t access the manufacturer’s website anymore. Ironically, I could get the right manual through an aggregator that scraped appliance manuals and slapped ads on the page. To me that perfectly encapsulated the issue. Clearly the manufacturer wants owners to have access to manuals, that’s why they have the portal. But due to bots, they pay an intermediary to hold their site ransom from users. And then the bots still clearly can access it anyways.
- chasd00 11d agoJust fyi the answer to any household appliance issue is YouTube.
- samtheprogram 11d agoThey already knew to drain the basin. Control-F in a PDF is way less annoying than watching a 9 minute long (for the algorithm) YT video. Sure, you can search the video transcript... but all the YT video is doing is regurgitating the manual.
- aogaili 11d agoAlright - the internet is vast place, and there are many places I wouldn't want to visit. The internet is growing with some ugly parts - but there are other people generating more interesting content precisely because their abilities are amplified with LLMs. In other words, maybe we ought to focus on the positive possibilities instead of doom and gloom all day long, we will be all dead in 10 years or the internet will be dead, or I and you will be dead, or my dog will be dead or the universe will expand to cold death, or whatever..
- catchnear4321 11d agoThere’s a 100% chance humans are ruining the internet with AI agents.
- nesqi 11d agoRisk, not chance.
- MarkusQ 11d ago> ...or whether you believe that AI continues to be a stochastic parrot, smoke and mirror plagiarism machine... I feel heard! What constantly amazes me is how many people don't get this after interacting with them for a while.
- notnullorvoid 11d ago> People and their AI agents are making the act of being on the internet extremely annoying, and the problem is about to get much worse. As much as I have a distaste for what passes as "AI agents" as a technology, I think it's a mistake to put any of the blame on the tech. People are the problem! We've been making a societal mistake for a long time, accepting and even celebrating obnoxious people who do obnoxious things. Letting your AI agents loose on others is one such obnoxious thing.
- motbus3 11d agoThe company I work for proudly provide a free and premium tier of service where we do strive to give great quality even for the free tier. The idea is that people over time will understand what we want to achieve and they will see the benefits of supporting a health business model. I am disillusioned about it, because agents have been huge part of the traffic and all they do is to spend our money but generate absolute nothing positive. people have been considering to simply close all doors but one person who has quite important hat and believes it would be very negative to people who needs the free tier the most. (And who is also the one with more to loose than everyone else...) I guess that's the end of the collaboration era as we expected. "Those" people taking everything away and giving nothing back but crumbs that they will soon take from us too.
- almost_usual 11d agoThe existing models and higher layer protocols of the web will likely break down over the coming years. I’m not exactly sure what will replace it yet but communication infrastructure built for humans isn’t going to scale with the volume of communication created by artificial intelligence. There might be some solutions requiring proof of work to introduce friction but that comes with a real environmental cost. I’ve personally spent the least amount of time over the past three decades on the Internet this recent year. There are some niche corners I frequent but I find the overall experience more draining than rewarding lately.
- 1saadcodes 11d agoI think the problem is less "AI agents are ruining the internet" and more that nobody wants to receive a thousand automated requests from other people's agents. The internet was already full of spam, this just makes it cheap to produce a lot more of it
- skeledrew 11d agoNo, AI agents aren't doing anything. The people using them are. And need to define "ruin", as I'm pretty sure people running ads and other forms of enshittification have been doing their thing for years, and internet is still here, used by the many. Don't see that changing any time soon, regardless of what's being done.
- psysect 11d ago[flagged]
- JKCalhoun 10d agoAsked what Internet 2 might look like here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49710648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49710648
- kestrelquant 10d ago[flagged]
- benban 10d ago[flagged]
- sanathbhat 5d agoMost of the fintechs use agents for customer support, that is most frustrating thing, there is no way to connect with humans