AI generated content, which now includes incredibly convincing videos of people, will grow exponentially over the next weeks, months, and years.
At some point, the majority of the content you see will be fake, and any usefulness or connection to humans will be lost.
Even information that you might have previously been able to confirm from a trusted source can (and will) be manipulated in some way, making verification impossible.
This lack of verification, along with the speed at which fake content can now be generated, will make it impossible to defend against.
Even the world of art and communication has been tainted, serving no connection to real people through this digital hellscape.
To that end, when will the internet be so untrustworthy, “soulless”, and useless to you that it crosses the tipping point?
EDIT: Ok, holy fuck. There’s actually a term for what I’m describing: “The Dead Internet Theory”
To illustrate my point: Say, five years from now, you come across a “blog”. It’s got photos of a friendly person, she shares images and video of her and her family, and talks about homesteading.
What if that entire “person” was just AI generated, and the “blog” was just fake AI stories? How would you even know? Would you want to spend time even reading blogs, knowing that it may not even be written by an actual person?
We will be at that point very soon. You will never know who’s real and who’s fake (online), because their entire life can be faked.
While true, and I agree, at least it was people being evil/greedy. And the speed at which they could be evil/greedy was capped.
With AI, you could generate a lifetime of greedy/evil corporate/marketing-owned web in a matter of hours, and just flood every corner of the internet with it.
It’s a very different threat.
Per my point above, you’ll never know what’s human-made in the very near future. At some point, bots with human identities will flood websites, then what?
I don’t live in the future so that I could not tell.
What I can tell is that AI of today smells very much like AI (which is to say, by grossly over-simplifying, that AI ‘creates’ content that is a severely neutered content and that shows) and, seeing how people are asking for more of that shit content, it doesn’t look like they will need to invest that much more to make AI better to make it an economical success. So I doubt it will ever reach a point where we can’t tell teh difference. But if it was to get to that there would still be:
So, if that ugly AI-Web was to take over what I call the human-made Web, I would simply quit using the Web.
Exactly like we quit owning (and watching) a TV in the early 00s my spouse and I, when we realized we had had enough of being asked to pay money in order to watch unskipable fucking ads and what we considered always shittier content (read: ‘politically correct’ content a bit like that AI-crap of today, as we both prefer to be challenged by what we watch and what we read, not so much being nursed or feeling validated by it).
They could flood the Web they own with that shit and, imho, that’s 100% what they will do and so will do Hollywood and Netflix (it will be much cheaper/quicker to produce and there will be less risk of getting lynched for offending this or that part of the population). That they will do, I’m willing to bet. But they still won’t be able to flood my part of the Web (I pay for it, I own it, I decide what’s (not) published on it), as well as on many other small parts of the Web owned by other people like me. To get rid of us they first would need to make it illegal (or too costly) for mere individuals like us to own a domain and publish content. If that was to happen (and it could very well) it would take them a lot of work to achieve, and that would give us, the mere people willing to keep our freedom of expression (and willing to remain not-owned in any way) the opportunity to search for some other place… including moving back to analog media and IRL/in-person meetings.
I mean, humanity has shared stories for thousands of years. The Internet? It’s approx 40 years old. So, yeah, we should be able to find some alternatives ways to express ourselves without relying on such a shitty web if things were to become that bad.
See what I just said.
Sure, there will most certainly be a web like the one you’re describing and realizing how lazy most people are it will most certainly be a huge hit. But no matter how successful it is it will still be 100% of no interest to me and to people like me. So me and those other people we would focus our time (and money) on a man-made Web without worrying how machines monkey humans. And if one day they make it so that it’s not possible to access any man-made content online, well, we will fall back on IRL-meeting, with real people. Like going to church, or to a book club, go to concerts or make some music in a band, go listen to poetry, go places to play board-games, whatever.
We don’t need our lives to be online at all time. As a matter of fact, we used to not spend it online at all up until very recently ;)
Thank you for your thoughtful reply.
I grew up when the internet was still dial-up, so I think I could adapt to going back to the “old way” of doing things.
But unless society moves in that same direction, it would seem that things would become more and more difficult. We can’t rely on old books and already-created content to move us forward.
I’ve been finding more value in IRL contact with other people these days. But I don’t think everyone has that luxury, I’m afraid.
100% with you on this. And this is a real issue.
Note that people are still writing books, making music and so on. Some even still go to school in order to be educated—they’re just not as trendy anymore ;)
It’s becoming unusual but it’s not a luxury. As a matter of fact it’s often cheaper than to use online services to go meet someone at a local place: one needs no subscriptions and no is not (not that much) tracked to be monetized either. The real issue, imho, is that people have been very quickly ‘un-educated’ about living IRL/together to the point it’s now starting to become not only unusual but also… odd to be willing to meet (and talk) IRL, not through an app (it’s really noticeable among the young).
Thinking about it, it’s almost feels like if humanity was trying to commit suicide: we only exist as a species because we devised ‘societies’ aka the art of living/working/being together.