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”

  • Delta_V@lemmy.worldEnglish
    41·
    2 days ago

    There’s a lot to unpack here.

    Lets start with the attempt to define “usefulness” as the degree to which connection to humans happens. Human connection on the internet has always been illusory. Yet we still find utility in it.

    “Trusted sources” have always been 100% biased in favor of whoever owns them. We all have equal free speech rights, but some of us are more free than others because the ability to purchase a bigger megaphone scales with access to capital.

    Organized, capitalized propaganda farms existed before LLMs and have been engaged in the same kind of destructive information warfare. LLMs seem to be more persuasive than the wage-slave humans employed by troll farms and other mass media outlets, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing if it manufactures a more rational public opinion.

    LLMs lower the capital requirement to begin competing in the propaganda war. The biggest players who could afford to buy enormous media empires and fund human-generated influence operations are going to have to compete against the rest of us.

    This planet has been a soulless hellscape longer than any of us have been alive, and LLMs are more likely to improve the situation than make it worse.

    • cattywampas@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      This planet has been a soulless hellscape longer than any of us have been alive

      This right here is an important realization. It’s how reading a lot of history and anthropology helps me feel better about the world and how we’re doing a lot better than the people who came before us.

      It pains us because we focus on and hope for what could be, but it’s important to also realize how things were for most of our existence.

    • Showroom7561@lemmy.caOP
      1·
      1 day ago

      I appreciate the thoughtfulness of your answer.

      To expand on a few points:

      Lets start with the attempt to define “usefulness” as the degree to which connection to humans happens. Human connection on the internet has always been illusory. Yet we still find utility in it.

      While “usefulness” and human connection can be linked, you can also separate them.

      For instance, if the majority of websites become content farms, with information that (likely) isn’t accurate because an LLM hallucinated it. Can you find it useful compared to when an expert wrote the content?

      This could even apply to how-to content, where now you might have someone with actual experience showing you how to fix something or work something. But with AI content farms, you might get a mishmash of information, that may not be right, and you’d never be able to ask for clarity from a real person.

      What about a travel site that fakes photos, generates convincing videos of your destination, and features stories from other travellers (AI bots) without you knowing the difference? This might have been hard to pull off five years ago, but you can generate 1000 such websites in a few days. When does the usefulness of using such a site become diminished?

      As for human connection. I disagree that it has always been illusory. When you chatted with strangers online 10 years ago, you knew for a fact that they were a real person. Sure, they could have been deceptive or have an “online personality”, but they were real.

      A step up from that would be people using a fake identity, but there was still a person on the other end.

      But in the near future, every stranger you connect with online might end up being a bot. You’d never know. At what point would you consider not spending time or energy interacting on a platform?

      This planet has been a soulless hellscape longer than any of us have been alive, and LLMs are more likely to improve the situation than make it worse.

      I’ve been around long enough to say that’s not true in the slightest. Being online and consuming content online was very, very different 10+ years ago as it will be in the next 10 years.

      The internet of old was mostly a force for good. The internet of tomorrow will be weaponized, monetized, and made to be unrecognizable from what we’ve had.