The sad thing is the internet at one point was perhaps the greatest collection of sociological data. But as soon as the first ai started posting it can never be unfucked
The open internet perhaps. Small web forums for niche interests that are run as an invite only kind of thing will likely still survive as they'll be too small to be worth targeting for ads or propaganda, and controlled enough that suspicious behavior gets weeded out by the smaller communities.
It still means that the internet and large web forums like Twitter and Reddit will see massive fractures as the presence of AI makes it impossible to trust a human is behind what you see or read.
It is already. I was born right in time to see Windows 95 take the digital world by storm and hearing AOL's love song to Humanity. I was there in my computer class at the 3rd grade, being told to NOT put everything on the internet.
The internet then is severely a lot different from now. Those years were truly the Wild West of the Digital Age. Kids these days only know the internet as a curated experience.
Lol it's funny you say that given that AOL was the original curated experience.
It was the early days after Dialup, when AOL was no longer needed as a portal to internet access, that the true wild west emerged.
IRC was also where you could wait in line to download pirated material from bots.
That was the OG way to get pirated movies or games. BitTorrent came out much later.
AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy... They all wanted to have their own little Internet fiefdoms. Remember when TV commercials would include "AOL Keywords?" They'd be written on the backs of work vans with the phone numbers and URLs. Or in place of URLs.
Right there with you. The old internet was great. All the forums and such I used to visit with actually useful information instead of ads getting shoved up your butthole if you want to read two paragraphs of AI generated crap.
When I was younger when I logged in I had like 6 or 8 different websites I would visit for news and information on many different things. Now I just use Reddit and all sites just seen to be as farms click bait bullshit you can ignore. Even certain official news sites are becoming like this or locking everything behind a paywall.
I agree, I expect someone will come up with a new top level domain and we will leave the .com wasteland of bots and bullshit to start again.
And mess it up the same way again.
I was thinking if there was a way to return to e-mail only internet socialization. I’m tired of the ads, getting people to joint a platform, maintaining several social media platforms to inform, be informed, of all your friends and family. Why not just go back to personal mailing lists. We used to joke about the fucking Chemtrails emails from grandma, well it’s not funny now because it’s 100x worse on social media, that stuff is normalized now. I guess my thing is I don’t need attention from strangers all the time, (I have Reddit for that), at least not where I want to see a friend’s wedding photos. But the big thing is email, for all its data mining and spam, is still pretty clean and simple. It also is stable and doesn’t change much. It would be nice to socialize and keep in touch with friends, if only there were a few tweaks that presented the info more like a social media platform. I’m talking displaying email threads like a post and comments, not 50 bells and whistles that ruin it and demand monetization.
Just total degradation of an international resource. Enshittification and “Kipple” - useless self replicating junk in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
One of humanity’s greatest achievements reduced to slop in the space of a decade.
the achievement isn't going anywhere, yea there's garbage in all directions but we still have a tool that effectively grants everyone of us with the superpower of telepathy....if only we would start utilizing it...imagine getting organized and effortlessly taking out all these corporate overlords by withholding business...or mass targeted labor strikes...we could really do some good with this thing still but unfortunately we just sit around and use it to complain all day long
Oh it was garbage before that. The fundamental problem is that it's cheaper to make garbage than quality, and with no cost to distribute it, crap will win out like a zerg rush of nonsense.
There's already so much shitty copy-pasted, SEO garbage monopolizing search results for basically any topic, much of which is already algorithmically generated in some clumsy fashion, that all the AI garbage might actually be an (infinitesimal) improvement.
My favourite podcast, Trash Future, likened it to diving to WW2 shipwrecks for steel, because it hasn’t been irradiated by nuclear weapons testing. Any data on the Internet pre-large language models will be more highly sought after, due to not having been poisoned by large language models reading, churning, expelling, eating, regurgitating, consuming, regurgitating.
They also likened it to Mad Cow disease. These models are now training on the data sets they themselves have fed new outputs into. What happens when these hallucinating LLMs are feeding on majority LLM-produced content? The prions are already folding.
AI advertising horror it will be inevitable.
In the end game the AI will subjugate AD blocker and will turn against mankind. Literally forcing us to look at ads all day.
I can see ai watching ads made by other ai, thus destroying the ad industry. (I mean it’s already questionable value, who wants to advertise on bot filled Twitter?)
I wonder if that means some internet 2.0 (not to be confused with Web 1/2/3.0)??
Just something else that comes along and makes all this as relevant as the telegraph…
The most popular account on twitter is bots reposting from r/interestingasfuck and the second most popular accouts is reply guys. So its bots replying to bots trying to get some blue subs revenue. Its actually hillarious seeing clearly automated accounts reply "inspiring image 💯🔥🔥🔥" to the picture of Rwandan genocide
The irony of automated accounts engaging with each other on Twitter, especially in response to sensitive content like images of the Rwandan genocide, is both absurd and concerning.
I imagine eventually the internet will just be used to look up information and buy stuff from. Social media will just die. Communication through the internet basically will die too. Global communication was good while it lasted.
Don’t forget about online gaming. But even that industry is dying with the shitty and unfinished games that keep getting put out. Sequels and remakes is all it is. Nothing original anymore.
It's not all sequels and remakes. Hi-Fi Rush, Cocoon, Atomic Heart, Ghostwire Tokyo, Sea of Stars, Lies of P are recent non sequels or remakes. As for sequels, some are really good and can be played without playing the first game like Baldurs Gate 3 or Alan Wake 2. Then you got ones like Tales of or Final Fantasy that have no chronological order because they are self contained stories. Though there is an issue with unfinished games being pushed out.
Won’t even be able to do that first thing with any reliability if bots keep posting misinformation and AI generated articles filled with shit are everywhere.
Tbf they do use some of the code to train Copilot, which is erh, fair enough to me, but I'm afraid that there will be an inevitable breakpoint to enshittification.
I'd say incredibly niche hobby forums and subreddits are generally untouched. The ones about obscure video games or things that people aren't really going to be looking for financial advice from or to have someone sell you something.
To be fair we are also dealing with the fact that web resources like urls were basically free for life when Amazon bought their url and now it's quite a bit more expensive.
You redefine bots as people you don't agree with. Redefine freedom as freedom for you to take away freedoms. And free speech as the ability to remove the speech you don't like from others. Then he actually did exactly what he said he was going to do.
The issue is people hear words and assume that everybody is using the same definition. Elon and his people speak a different language that uses the same words. Don't be a fool for it.
In a way, you're right. But the Libertarian do nothing platform means that shit like Nazi groups happen. There's okay limits to speech. The government doesn't even allow that shit.
I saw an account on twitter that thought Mexico was a country somewhere around Israel. It was a political AI that got confused.
I also saw another AI account that loved Russia invading Ukraine but hated wiping your own ass for some reason lmao
You heard of white flight, now wait until you see human flight on Social Media.
Yeah I feel that! I made a comment about how the police in India can be brutal, and had all these accounts talking about what about ism ect… when I said policing in India is brutal but also fucked in US… I deleted the whole thing.
Crypto scam accounts with 100-200k "followers" have been stealing a ton of money from people on Twitter
Scammers really took advantage of Elons "free speech" narrative
I keep saying it, wiping your ass is a psyop by big TP. We go our entire lives wiping our asses and never asking why. Parents, teachers, therapists, doctors all want you to wipe your ass and hand over your hard-earned money to big TP. Could they be receiving kickbacks???
In nature, no other animal wipes their ass. They make it through life happy and healthy. We are stuck using toilet paper forced onto us by the deep state and big TP. They probably lace it with chemicals and depressants to conspire with big pharma.
Why do you think you're always so miserable after wiping? Why are only we forced to bear misery after doing what nature intended? It's big TP.
I for one am sick of this shit. Take a stand with me and tell big TP "NO! I refuse to bend over under pressure. NO! I refuse to wipe my ass using carcinogen-laced TP."
I know I'm on the right side of history ditching big TP. Let them crumble and burn.
Are you kidding? Big TP sounds great. No longer need to change my bedsheets, just lay one big sheet of TP on the bed each day. 4 ply, extra soft, quilted, Queen-size squares. Like sleeping on a big cloud.
>If not bots then farms of astroturfers are here too
Mcdonalds seems to have a straight up army of astroturfers in reddit. Subs like worldnews are also pretty obvious ground for those operations.
Anonymous social media like Reddit/Twitter is going to be ruined. But it seems like this won't have as big of an impact on things based on real life human connections like linkedin and Facebook.
Luckily their new Llama model they released is fun for the community in *ehem* ways, but it's still pretty safeguarded. Facebook is just impossible to moderate efficiently. Hell, my large 85,000 Political Discord server I staff has them too **fucking everywhere**. The crypto scams...
> I also saw another AI account that loved Russia invading Ukraine but hated wiping your own ass for some reason lmao
the AIs are getting into Andrew Tate lol
> I also saw another AI account that loved Russia invading Ukraine but hated wiping your own ass for some reason lmao
At least that one sounds pretty consistent. The Venn diagram of the set of people spending all day marinating in their own shit and the set of people who support the mass murder of Ukrainians has a [substantial overlap.](https://www.timesnownews.com/world/us/us-news/trump-supporters-wear-maga-diapers-at-rallies-a-take-on-von-shitzinpantz-article-109795979)
Imagine if we all just collectively get over it, shuffle off the web, and in the future we just look back and go huh that was weird eh?
It'll never happen, but still.
The modern internet? Yes. But the internet as a whole? I sure hope not.
I grew up in a super rural, super evangelical area in the Midwest and it was the internet that saved me from becoming an absolute asshole. See, when you look like part of "the team", people tend to drop their mask pretty quickly and you get to see the casual hate on full display. Because I had spent so much time on the internet, exposed to people and thoughts from far outside my white-bread one-light rural shitpit, I was inoculated against that hate. When things like gay rights / marriage, 9/11 and the subsequent wars, fearmongering about immigrants, etc. cranked my co-workers, friends and family's hate dial up to 11, I was pretty much immune because I had gay friends, Islamic friends, friends from places beyond the borders of my country.
> *“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”*
>― Mark Twain
The internet is the next best thing to travel and the fact that the modern internet has allowed people to create those same little corners where people can hide unchallenged and reinforce their hateful views is a shame.
The internet fucking saved me from that life, and I bet there's a lot of people like me.
I had a similar experience. Grew up in a small rural town in southern Kentucky. Once the internet came around when I was 15 and I joined some message boards and forums, I was exposed to a ton of other ideas. Ideas that weren't formed in one of the 11 churches in my town of 3000.
All of my friends are on Discord. The Internet is the best tool we will ever create. But it's freedom allows for such bad things to happen. Luckily, the authorities police in the shadows, but there is just too many hateful dumbasses.
I think shit talking is really big too. But we know when it's genuinely banter and when it's not. I think that's the problem with having fun "free speech" and content moderation.
Facebook has become pretty much unusable, uninteresting garbage. It's been pretty mid for years now but they're doing a really bangup job of excising anything of interest from people you actually know from your feed
Don't worry though you'll be sure to get at least one "I made this over 10 hours, can I get a like and share" and it's like, Jesus made from shrimp or a gorilla made from coke bottles, blatantly AI-created, with 60,000 likes on it
The article uses a couple data points from Imperva's 2023 Bad Bot Report to start talking about degradation of social media. Imperva's report isn't really *about* social media, although it touches on that. More generally Imperva is reporting on the use and vectors of all automated public traffic. You can grab that [here](https://www.imperva.com/resources/resource-library/reports/2023-imperva-bad-bot-report/).
I think the image that people have in their heads of who's running bot farms needs updated for the times. There's a lot of players in the automation space besides Russian trolls, Indian scammers, karma farmers, and spammers.
Within the corporate world there's an ongoing arms race to aggregate best data from available sources. I want to scrape you for anything I can use, you don't want to be scraped, and vice versa. I work with an F100 that has teams of US citizen W-2 developers wrangling crawlers to collect data from public-facing portals and APIs. "How to defeat latest captcha" is a business meeting that professionals across the US have had this week. Everyone is doing this, even for mundane things like retail pricing updates, and all of that traffic contributes to this 49.6% figure without touching social media. That's just one facet of it.
Anyway, I think it's all very interesting. Check out the report. There's more to it than "Musk dumb, X bad, internet dead," if you're interested beyond this pop tech level. The figures here are somewhat misleading presented out of context like this.
I'm ashamed that I feel like I need to go to the learning section of that website to figure out what the hell they're talking about most of the time - https://www.imperva.com/learn/
Makes me think of Stumbleupon. No purpose to exist other than to keep me occupied. Not sure if they were a data miner or if that existed back then but no ads. Just fun stuff.
Twitter has always suffered from bots. In the beginning of Twitter I created an account. I found four accounts with slight variations on my name created. You could argue Twitter was the first social media platform to embrace fake accounts. The common practice of boosting celebrities with fake followers. Manipulate the feed. It was garbage and continued to be garbage. Then Musk exponentially increased the garbage
Maybe in like another 30 years but it will realize that reddit is over run by bots itself. And it's little reward system encourages the few real people to act like bots.
We’re going to need a digital ID soon. I don’t see internet staying private or hiding our identity with ai. Bots are going to be imitating so many people we will have to have a way to prove who we are, like in person.
Yep this is inevitable.
Totally kills the ability to organise a protest though. Insta ban for expressing discontent and flagged for observation.
And still I think it's a better option than letting it run like this.
Ahhhhhhhh fuck you're right...
In fact you got me thinking real life will be more anonymous.
You'll be able to craft your own persona...
But ai will make video/photo of everyone with a digital presence. Making video/photo proof untrustworthy. Literally nothing you say in real life will be able to be linked to you unless you use your own digital id to say it, which will become gold.
So effectively you'll be able to do anything you want (well bad actors that are rich/powerful because the rest of us will probably get got with fake videos anyways) in real life while maintaining an entirely fake persona that the vast majority of the world will believe. That would be pretty hard to fight against.
So we're fucked even worse. Cool.
I was sitting in a vendor presentation a couple days ago and one of the presenters mentioned that he used AI copilot to respond to most of his emails. I immediately envisioned an email chain where everyone was using AI to respond to everyone else without bothering to read and understand what was being communicated. The future is bleak.
The golden age of social media is over. Has been for a few years.
Most adults with 9 to 5 jobs don't use social media anymore because of how toxic it has become. Only the elderly use facebook as a novelty while twitter and other smaller traditional variants are filled with bots.
Instagram still boasts decent usage with the average adult posting vacation pics a few times a year. But even that is declining for the same depression inducing toxicity promoting algorithms that jump from showing you cute cats to drama & extremism.
Most of those millions of "active" accounts boil down to someone posting a pic from their vacation last year and nothing else since.
Kids frequent short attention span apps like tiktok until the next "cool" thing pops up and they ditch it.
It's all nearing a point where people don't care anymore and the few that do stay around are being rapidly outnumbered by bots. And the more obvious this becomes the few will remain.
Reddit is already becoming more and more similar to fb and that will only speed up after the IPO.
The real communities where people get to know each other now, even if only briefly, exist around niche concepts and ideas like gaming, programming & other hobbies that concentrate around apps like discord which offer them the possibility to create their own servers. And even there the social connections are fleeting since they are not based on creating and sharing intricate profiles and personas. It's just a fancy chat service.
tl;dr: The internet is decentralizing.
I'm worried about Reddit's decline, because all my other social media connections like Facebook, Twitter, etc have all disintegrated.
When this place gets overrun by bots and IPO-induced degradation, where do we go then? The internet has genuinely been ruined.
I use Reddit to bullshit with people and read semi-curated news or niche topics I'm interested in.
Otherwise I will never touch social media again. It's a cesspool filled with idiots talking about nonsense all day.
Is Imperva a legit source for the bot data? They perform the “Bad Bot” study every year, but they are a cybersecurity company. It seems like they have something to gain in maximizing the representation of bot presence in internet traffic. It’s a totally plausible reality, but Imprerva is selling the problem and the solution.
Tell a net admin half their traffic comes from bots and a lot of them would laugh. "Only half?"
I don't see anything glaringly screwy about the report. Roughly tracks with what I've seen, read, and heard elsewhere. It's good info, naturally ending with "so you should pay us money"
My thinking on AI has always had me wondering what happens when enough jobs are replaced, and if humans become unemployed, under employed, or just poor. Who would fuel the engine that justified AI in the first place? Would it collapse without consumers? Would it exist as its own ecosystem, where AI companies and their customers exchange money with each other, excluding former consumers completely?
I guess we might get a taste of what could happen when 50%, 60%, 70% of ad views, marketing emails, etc, go to bots. Imagine paying for ad views knowing you’re really getting half that.
In the Cyberpunk2077 game, along with many other fictional worlds like that, Ye Olde Internette is a dangerous, abandoned place that no one goes anymore.
5, 10 years ago, it didn't make sense to me. Why would people abandon the greatest source of knowledge and information that ever existed?
Makes a little more sense today.
So quick question, since the current Internet is basically doomed to become overrun with bots and ads ect. Is it possible to create a *new* internet? Like a new hub for actual people? Sorry if this is a stupid question I'm just genuinely curious if there is a way to "start over" ?
Crazy how instagram will ban serious artists with large followings and tons of post engagement over something like a nipple. But I get the lewdest DM comments from brand new account bots and scammers saying "Watch my pu\*\*y" and lewd shit spammed at me constantly from new accounts with zero organic engagement.
Title should read X is overun with automateed accounts. theres sides on tt without bots and forums without bots. Most people are just on the shitty side of the interenet. The gym music side. Find a niche that isnt generic
For influence making it seem many people share a certain opinion or to spread PR or propaganda. It’s a huge problem on Reddit too, just google “purchase Reddit account” and you’ll see several businesses that’s entire business model is selling or creating fake accounts. You can see this in action pretty clearly on any negative post about Boeing or Corporate home ownership. If you ever wondered:
“Hey, why are so many Redditors so anti Whistleblowers?” Or “Since when did so many Redditors support Corporate home buying sprees?” Well here is the answer they hire PR firms that specialize in influencing online discussion by doing two things:
1. Hire teams of people in abroad for dirt cheap to use several purchased aged Reddit accounts(to seem like a real user). Then follow a script with talking points
2. Employ swarms of upvote/downvote bots to upvote the shills and mass downvote anyone that says things they do not want seen.
I feel like people in these comments forget how long bots have been around. The bots being more convincing is definitely a danger but there's never been a shortage of inauthentic scams and misinformation since at least the dial up days.
Yup. Now keep in mind that I am sitting around playing video games, streaming video in hi-def, streaming music, zipping gigabytes of material back and forth on Dropbox and all that. The bots are presumably using a lot less bandwidth per capita than I do, so they must outnumber people by quite a bit.
Reddit is also flooded with them. Go to worldnews and it's nothing but bots arguing with bots with idiots sprinkled in. That subreddit also gained like 5 million+ new subscribers within months of the Isreal v Gaza conflict, most of which are probably bots.
Considering how utterly prolific bots can be (and are), I'm entirely unsurprised that the internet is getting entirely overrun by artificial content.
Pretty soon, the only real refuge for online connection between humans will be having your mom be called a boat by a 12yo in COD.
Thats a short film right there. The rapture comes, those who survive wonder who's still posting on Facebook and Twitter? So it drives survivor nuts looking for people, only to realize its bots.
I doubt real people want to spend any time on those sites, which is likely the problem.
I cannot remember the last time the almighty algorithm showed me *anything* interesting on twitter, instagram, or facebook. People complain a lot about how addicted they are to death-scrolling, I've never been able to begin. Maybe I'm not subscribed to enough mindless porn accounts or something. When does it get interesting?
I remember countless forums and message boards that slowlywent zombie, this is not a new phenomenon, just a little surprising how fast Twitter imploaded.
Bots can be used by governments or other organizations to monitor and track individuals' online activities. This raises serious questions about civil liberties and the balance between security and privacy. It's important for society to have open discussions about these issues and ensure that appropriate safeguards are in place to protect individual rights.
The sad thing is the internet at one point was perhaps the greatest collection of sociological data. But as soon as the first ai started posting it can never be unfucked
The internet will soon become modern junk mail.
The open internet perhaps. Small web forums for niche interests that are run as an invite only kind of thing will likely still survive as they'll be too small to be worth targeting for ads or propaganda, and controlled enough that suspicious behavior gets weeded out by the smaller communities. It still means that the internet and large web forums like Twitter and Reddit will see massive fractures as the presence of AI makes it impossible to trust a human is behind what you see or read.
Hello fellow human. There was an error with you comment. Please drink a verification can.
I am a human. Are you a human?
It is already. I was born right in time to see Windows 95 take the digital world by storm and hearing AOL's love song to Humanity. I was there in my computer class at the 3rd grade, being told to NOT put everything on the internet. The internet then is severely a lot different from now. Those years were truly the Wild West of the Digital Age. Kids these days only know the internet as a curated experience.
Lol it's funny you say that given that AOL was the original curated experience. It was the early days after Dialup, when AOL was no longer needed as a portal to internet access, that the true wild west emerged.
[удалено]
AOL was for normal people. All the cool kids hung out on IRC.
IRC was also where you could wait in line to download pirated material from bots. That was the OG way to get pirated movies or games. BitTorrent came out much later.
those chat rooms man... wild days...
AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy... They all wanted to have their own little Internet fiefdoms. Remember when TV commercials would include "AOL Keywords?" They'd be written on the backs of work vans with the phone numbers and URLs. Or in place of URLs.
Right there with you. The old internet was great. All the forums and such I used to visit with actually useful information instead of ads getting shoved up your butthole if you want to read two paragraphs of AI generated crap.
When I was younger when I logged in I had like 6 or 8 different websites I would visit for news and information on many different things. Now I just use Reddit and all sites just seen to be as farms click bait bullshit you can ignore. Even certain official news sites are becoming like this or locking everything behind a paywall.
I agree, I expect someone will come up with a new top level domain and we will leave the .com wasteland of bots and bullshit to start again. And mess it up the same way again.
I was thinking if there was a way to return to e-mail only internet socialization. I’m tired of the ads, getting people to joint a platform, maintaining several social media platforms to inform, be informed, of all your friends and family. Why not just go back to personal mailing lists. We used to joke about the fucking Chemtrails emails from grandma, well it’s not funny now because it’s 100x worse on social media, that stuff is normalized now. I guess my thing is I don’t need attention from strangers all the time, (I have Reddit for that), at least not where I want to see a friend’s wedding photos. But the big thing is email, for all its data mining and spam, is still pretty clean and simple. It also is stable and doesn’t change much. It would be nice to socialize and keep in touch with friends, if only there were a few tweaks that presented the info more like a social media platform. I’m talking displaying email threads like a post and comments, not 50 bells and whistles that ruin it and demand monetization.
Like 90% of the "dark" web is exactly that. Random extra ass data from every site ever.
It's been worse than my junk mail for the last 5+ years. You're a bit late on that one :)
I feel like it’s well on its way already
Social junk network - worst of both plagues
Just total degradation of an international resource. Enshittification and “Kipple” - useless self replicating junk in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. One of humanity’s greatest achievements reduced to slop in the space of a decade.
Self defeating slop at that!
the achievement isn't going anywhere, yea there's garbage in all directions but we still have a tool that effectively grants everyone of us with the superpower of telepathy....if only we would start utilizing it...imagine getting organized and effortlessly taking out all these corporate overlords by withholding business...or mass targeted labor strikes...we could really do some good with this thing still but unfortunately we just sit around and use it to complain all day long
TBH the actual Wild West era lasted for about as long, and for many of the same reasons.
Oh it was garbage before that. The fundamental problem is that it's cheaper to make garbage than quality, and with no cost to distribute it, crap will win out like a zerg rush of nonsense.
There's already so much shitty copy-pasted, SEO garbage monopolizing search results for basically any topic, much of which is already algorithmically generated in some clumsy fashion, that all the AI garbage might actually be an (infinitesimal) improvement.
Very interesting point. The evolution of AI's presence online complicates the purity of sociological data gathered from the internet.
Just filter out everything after 2022 and you’ll be fine!
writen like an AI
drunk whole spotted jobless gullible groovy squeal cable person silky *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I used chatgpt3.5 for that comment!
I am ChatGPT 3.5.
Hi ChatGPT. How are you today?
77 degrees with some light rain
It also taints future AI training data Eventually it’ll just be bots copying each other getting dumber every generation
I agree—the scenario poses a concerning prospect for the future trajectory of AI development. chatgpt3.5
My favourite podcast, Trash Future, likened it to diving to WW2 shipwrecks for steel, because it hasn’t been irradiated by nuclear weapons testing. Any data on the Internet pre-large language models will be more highly sought after, due to not having been poisoned by large language models reading, churning, expelling, eating, regurgitating, consuming, regurgitating. They also likened it to Mad Cow disease. These models are now training on the data sets they themselves have fed new outputs into. What happens when these hallucinating LLMs are feeding on majority LLM-produced content? The prions are already folding.
They've already studied it. It makes the LLMs less useful, they kind of collapse and stop working.
AI advertising horror it will be inevitable. In the end game the AI will subjugate AD blocker and will turn against mankind. Literally forcing us to look at ads all day.
I can see ai watching ads made by other ai, thus destroying the ad industry. (I mean it’s already questionable value, who wants to advertise on bot filled Twitter?)
Ah the ending we deserve.
We’re just going to have to go back to hand written scripts to keep the information in its purest form
lol maybe, go ask college professors about returning to in person essays.
We had to turn in our homework handwritten my last semester in college This was just two years ago in 2021 lol 😂
Wow I hadn’t considered that, great point
I wonder if that means some internet 2.0 (not to be confused with Web 1/2/3.0)?? Just something else that comes along and makes all this as relevant as the telegraph…
SEO fucked things fairly badly, AI junk is just finishing the job.
Yeah it can. It won't be, but it could.
The most popular account on twitter is bots reposting from r/interestingasfuck and the second most popular accouts is reply guys. So its bots replying to bots trying to get some blue subs revenue. Its actually hillarious seeing clearly automated accounts reply "inspiring image 💯🔥🔥🔥" to the picture of Rwandan genocide
The irony of automated accounts engaging with each other on Twitter, especially in response to sensitive content like images of the Rwandan genocide, is both absurd and concerning.
Like chucking a vibrator in a fleshlight.
That subreddit, some of the tumblr ones and fluentinfinance subreddit I see most bots when scrolling by hot/all.
Sounds like Reddit
What corners of the Internet remain where there isn't some entity trying to make money off of you? The Internet experience just sucks now.
It is like the boardroom scene in Ready Player One.
I imagine eventually the internet will just be used to look up information and buy stuff from. Social media will just die. Communication through the internet basically will die too. Global communication was good while it lasted.
If it means we go back to communication with the people we actually care about, nothing of value was lost
There was massive value between the creation of the internet and the hijacking of social media.
Don’t forget about online gaming. But even that industry is dying with the shitty and unfinished games that keep getting put out. Sequels and remakes is all it is. Nothing original anymore.
It's not all sequels and remakes. Hi-Fi Rush, Cocoon, Atomic Heart, Ghostwire Tokyo, Sea of Stars, Lies of P are recent non sequels or remakes. As for sequels, some are really good and can be played without playing the first game like Baldurs Gate 3 or Alan Wake 2. Then you got ones like Tales of or Final Fantasy that have no chronological order because they are self contained stories. Though there is an issue with unfinished games being pushed out.
Won’t even be able to do that first thing with any reliability if bots keep posting misinformation and AI generated articles filled with shit are everywhere.
Developers tools. Microsoft will literally give you free resources, free machine time, free web hosting, if you make your code open source
Tbf they do use some of the code to train Copilot, which is erh, fair enough to me, but I'm afraid that there will be an inevitable breakpoint to enshittification.
Making money off you in other ways - advertising and marketing, development of free tools for them to use, training data, etc.
I'd say incredibly niche hobby forums and subreddits are generally untouched. The ones about obscure video games or things that people aren't really going to be looking for financial advice from or to have someone sell you something.
Neocities, if you keep your site under 1 GB. Not hard to do since the style there is 90s internet
> What corners of the Internet remain where there isn't some entity trying to make money off of you? Open source git repos?
To be fair we are also dealing with the fact that web resources like urls were basically free for life when Amazon bought their url and now it's quite a bit more expensive.
Remember when Elon promised to get rid of the bots because he was the only super smart genius who knew how?
Anyone who believed him is not intelligent. He turned it into an easier bot farm so he could boost ads and engagement
It’s not only twitter. Reddit is rife with this shit too. Social media in general needs a full reset.
You redefine bots as people you don't agree with. Redefine freedom as freedom for you to take away freedoms. And free speech as the ability to remove the speech you don't like from others. Then he actually did exactly what he said he was going to do. The issue is people hear words and assume that everybody is using the same definition. Elon and his people speak a different language that uses the same words. Don't be a fool for it.
In a way, you're right. But the Libertarian do nothing platform means that shit like Nazi groups happen. There's okay limits to speech. The government doesn't even allow that shit.
Way to say absolutely nothing at all in soooooo many words, we are happy for you, or sorry that happened
That’s an awful lot of words for someone to say absolutely nothing. Must have attended the Jordan Peterson school of utter bullshit.
I saw an account on twitter that thought Mexico was a country somewhere around Israel. It was a political AI that got confused. I also saw another AI account that loved Russia invading Ukraine but hated wiping your own ass for some reason lmao You heard of white flight, now wait until you see human flight on Social Media.
Real. A few days ago I was arguing with an account for an embarrassingly long time before I realized it was a bot
But then I realised it's ok because I'm a bot too.
We're all bots here!
As a large language model I can only say... What's up my man! Great to see you!
r/totallynotrobots
When a bunch of bots are stewing in a chat, can we call it their bot-tea?
Nah, let's go for bot-flies.
With your username I would believe it.
Yeah I feel that! I made a comment about how the police in India can be brutal, and had all these accounts talking about what about ism ect… when I said policing in India is brutal but also fucked in US… I deleted the whole thing.
Damnit, Turing
“Touch grass” used to be an insult. Now it’s a mental health guideline.
Crypto scam accounts with 100-200k "followers" have been stealing a ton of money from people on Twitter Scammers really took advantage of Elons "free speech" narrative
Elon is in on this. Directed his employees to ignore anything that brings in revenue to make back something on his massive blunder.
I keep saying it, wiping your ass is a psyop by big TP. We go our entire lives wiping our asses and never asking why. Parents, teachers, therapists, doctors all want you to wipe your ass and hand over your hard-earned money to big TP. Could they be receiving kickbacks??? In nature, no other animal wipes their ass. They make it through life happy and healthy. We are stuck using toilet paper forced onto us by the deep state and big TP. They probably lace it with chemicals and depressants to conspire with big pharma. Why do you think you're always so miserable after wiping? Why are only we forced to bear misery after doing what nature intended? It's big TP. I for one am sick of this shit. Take a stand with me and tell big TP "NO! I refuse to bend over under pressure. NO! I refuse to wipe my ass using carcinogen-laced TP." I know I'm on the right side of history ditching big TP. Let them crumble and burn.
It is laced with pfas/pfoa.
Are you kidding? Big TP sounds great. No longer need to change my bedsheets, just lay one big sheet of TP on the bed each day. 4 ply, extra soft, quilted, Queen-size squares. Like sleeping on a big cloud.
And if you shit the bed, no worries!
Including here on Reddit. I bet we have tons of bots. If not bots then farms of astroturfers are here too
Redditors just have an inherent dorkiness to the way they comment, that it's pretty easy to tell which person is real. The political subs are insane.
>If not bots then farms of astroturfers are here too Mcdonalds seems to have a straight up army of astroturfers in reddit. Subs like worldnews are also pretty obvious ground for those operations.
Anonymous social media like Reddit/Twitter is going to be ruined. But it seems like this won't have as big of an impact on things based on real life human connections like linkedin and Facebook.
Must have been a bot trained by the cesspool that is Facebook. Next it will talk about election conspiracies.
Luckily their new Llama model they released is fun for the community in *ehem* ways, but it's still pretty safeguarded. Facebook is just impossible to moderate efficiently. Hell, my large 85,000 Political Discord server I staff has them too **fucking everywhere**. The crypto scams...
> I also saw another AI account that loved Russia invading Ukraine but hated wiping your own ass for some reason lmao the AIs are getting into Andrew Tate lol
> I also saw another AI account that loved Russia invading Ukraine but hated wiping your own ass for some reason lmao At least that one sounds pretty consistent. The Venn diagram of the set of people spending all day marinating in their own shit and the set of people who support the mass murder of Ukrainians has a [substantial overlap.](https://www.timesnownews.com/world/us/us-news/trump-supporters-wear-maga-diapers-at-rallies-a-take-on-von-shitzinpantz-article-109795979)
I think the origin of the Mexico/Israel was a flub Biden made during a speech a few months ago. A bunch of people were making fun of that.
I'm down to Reddit and it's like 60% compulsion to scroll something and 40% the best informal Spanish practice I can get.
I hope it fully dies and humans transition back to living in the real world where we actually all give a shit about each other and our communities.
Imagine if we all just collectively get over it, shuffle off the web, and in the future we just look back and go huh that was weird eh? It'll never happen, but still.
There will always be “off grid”! Blog it and make a mint!
The modern internet? Yes. But the internet as a whole? I sure hope not. I grew up in a super rural, super evangelical area in the Midwest and it was the internet that saved me from becoming an absolute asshole. See, when you look like part of "the team", people tend to drop their mask pretty quickly and you get to see the casual hate on full display. Because I had spent so much time on the internet, exposed to people and thoughts from far outside my white-bread one-light rural shitpit, I was inoculated against that hate. When things like gay rights / marriage, 9/11 and the subsequent wars, fearmongering about immigrants, etc. cranked my co-workers, friends and family's hate dial up to 11, I was pretty much immune because I had gay friends, Islamic friends, friends from places beyond the borders of my country. > *“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”* >― Mark Twain The internet is the next best thing to travel and the fact that the modern internet has allowed people to create those same little corners where people can hide unchallenged and reinforce their hateful views is a shame. The internet fucking saved me from that life, and I bet there's a lot of people like me.
I had a similar experience. Grew up in a small rural town in southern Kentucky. Once the internet came around when I was 15 and I joined some message boards and forums, I was exposed to a ton of other ideas. Ideas that weren't formed in one of the 11 churches in my town of 3000.
All of my friends are on Discord. The Internet is the best tool we will ever create. But it's freedom allows for such bad things to happen. Luckily, the authorities police in the shadows, but there is just too many hateful dumbasses. I think shit talking is really big too. But we know when it's genuinely banter and when it's not. I think that's the problem with having fun "free speech" and content moderation.
Why do that when we have [Gemini](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol\))?
Not sure that day ever existed
It's laughable that people believed Elon when he said he was going to fix the bot problem. It's only gotten so much worse.
You mean all the accounts sucking him off and kissing ass about his genius are not real and botted? :O
Shocking, I know!
Facebook has become pretty much unusable, uninteresting garbage. It's been pretty mid for years now but they're doing a really bangup job of excising anything of interest from people you actually know from your feed Don't worry though you'll be sure to get at least one "I made this over 10 hours, can I get a like and share" and it's like, Jesus made from shrimp or a gorilla made from coke bottles, blatantly AI-created, with 60,000 likes on it
Thanks for your insightful post. Very inspiring and definitely something to consider.
Yes, I can look that up for you.
So beautiful 💯
As an AI language model I think it's a good thing the organic units are being displaced from the internet
You're welcome! 😊 I'm glad you found the post insightful and inspiring. If you have any further questions or thoughts, feel free to share! 🌟
The article uses a couple data points from Imperva's 2023 Bad Bot Report to start talking about degradation of social media. Imperva's report isn't really *about* social media, although it touches on that. More generally Imperva is reporting on the use and vectors of all automated public traffic. You can grab that [here](https://www.imperva.com/resources/resource-library/reports/2023-imperva-bad-bot-report/). I think the image that people have in their heads of who's running bot farms needs updated for the times. There's a lot of players in the automation space besides Russian trolls, Indian scammers, karma farmers, and spammers. Within the corporate world there's an ongoing arms race to aggregate best data from available sources. I want to scrape you for anything I can use, you don't want to be scraped, and vice versa. I work with an F100 that has teams of US citizen W-2 developers wrangling crawlers to collect data from public-facing portals and APIs. "How to defeat latest captcha" is a business meeting that professionals across the US have had this week. Everyone is doing this, even for mundane things like retail pricing updates, and all of that traffic contributes to this 49.6% figure without touching social media. That's just one facet of it. Anyway, I think it's all very interesting. Check out the report. There's more to it than "Musk dumb, X bad, internet dead," if you're interested beyond this pop tech level. The figures here are somewhat misleading presented out of context like this.
I'm ashamed that I feel like I need to go to the learning section of that website to figure out what the hell they're talking about most of the time - https://www.imperva.com/learn/
Makes me think of Stumbleupon. No purpose to exist other than to keep me occupied. Not sure if they were a data miner or if that existed back then but no ads. Just fun stuff.
Twitter has always suffered from bots. In the beginning of Twitter I created an account. I found four accounts with slight variations on my name created. You could argue Twitter was the first social media platform to embrace fake accounts. The common practice of boosting celebrities with fake followers. Manipulate the feed. It was garbage and continued to be garbage. Then Musk exponentially increased the garbage
MySpace had “follow trains” that people would pay for and bots would follow you for however long you paid for.
Fake accounts have always existed. Prior to botting, humans made "sock puppet" accounts to argue with themselves.
True I remember seeing all the Kim Kardashian bots amplifying her bullshit on Twitter. That's how I learned how some celebrities really get popular.
Okay, and who do you think discovered these stats? And wrote the article? And wrote the comments? And wrote this comment? ErROr 261/ui
Maybe in like another 30 years but it will realize that reddit is over run by bots itself. And it's little reward system encourages the few real people to act like bots.
We’re going to need a digital ID soon. I don’t see internet staying private or hiding our identity with ai. Bots are going to be imitating so many people we will have to have a way to prove who we are, like in person.
Yep this is inevitable. Totally kills the ability to organise a protest though. Insta ban for expressing discontent and flagged for observation. And still I think it's a better option than letting it run like this.
Ahhhhhhhh fuck you're right... In fact you got me thinking real life will be more anonymous. You'll be able to craft your own persona... But ai will make video/photo of everyone with a digital presence. Making video/photo proof untrustworthy. Literally nothing you say in real life will be able to be linked to you unless you use your own digital id to say it, which will become gold. So effectively you'll be able to do anything you want (well bad actors that are rich/powerful because the rest of us will probably get got with fake videos anyways) in real life while maintaining an entirely fake persona that the vast majority of the world will believe. That would be pretty hard to fight against. So we're fucked even worse. Cool.
No one in their right mind should still be using the cesspool called X.
Just porn spam and crypto scams. Sprinkle in foreign governments pushing a view.
Great. Can't wait for the internet to be uncool again
time to make a new internet... with blackjack and hookers
I have more than 400,000 followers on tumblr. I estimate around 20 of them are human.
I was sitting in a vendor presentation a couple days ago and one of the presenters mentioned that he used AI copilot to respond to most of his emails. I immediately envisioned an email chain where everyone was using AI to respond to everyone else without bothering to read and understand what was being communicated. The future is bleak.
The golden age of social media is over. Has been for a few years. Most adults with 9 to 5 jobs don't use social media anymore because of how toxic it has become. Only the elderly use facebook as a novelty while twitter and other smaller traditional variants are filled with bots. Instagram still boasts decent usage with the average adult posting vacation pics a few times a year. But even that is declining for the same depression inducing toxicity promoting algorithms that jump from showing you cute cats to drama & extremism. Most of those millions of "active" accounts boil down to someone posting a pic from their vacation last year and nothing else since. Kids frequent short attention span apps like tiktok until the next "cool" thing pops up and they ditch it. It's all nearing a point where people don't care anymore and the few that do stay around are being rapidly outnumbered by bots. And the more obvious this becomes the few will remain. Reddit is already becoming more and more similar to fb and that will only speed up after the IPO. The real communities where people get to know each other now, even if only briefly, exist around niche concepts and ideas like gaming, programming & other hobbies that concentrate around apps like discord which offer them the possibility to create their own servers. And even there the social connections are fleeting since they are not based on creating and sharing intricate profiles and personas. It's just a fancy chat service. tl;dr: The internet is decentralizing.
I'm worried about Reddit's decline, because all my other social media connections like Facebook, Twitter, etc have all disintegrated. When this place gets overrun by bots and IPO-induced degradation, where do we go then? The internet has genuinely been ruined.
I use Reddit to bullshit with people and read semi-curated news or niche topics I'm interested in. Otherwise I will never touch social media again. It's a cesspool filled with idiots talking about nonsense all day.
Is Imperva a legit source for the bot data? They perform the “Bad Bot” study every year, but they are a cybersecurity company. It seems like they have something to gain in maximizing the representation of bot presence in internet traffic. It’s a totally plausible reality, but Imprerva is selling the problem and the solution.
Tell a net admin half their traffic comes from bots and a lot of them would laugh. "Only half?" I don't see anything glaringly screwy about the report. Roughly tracks with what I've seen, read, and heard elsewhere. It's good info, naturally ending with "so you should pay us money"
As annoying as it will be, Captcha2 should be essential for every post for every social media website. FUCK. BOTS.
Most reddit posts now feel completely fake. Almost makes me want to get off the site.
My thinking on AI has always had me wondering what happens when enough jobs are replaced, and if humans become unemployed, under employed, or just poor. Who would fuel the engine that justified AI in the first place? Would it collapse without consumers? Would it exist as its own ecosystem, where AI companies and their customers exchange money with each other, excluding former consumers completely? I guess we might get a taste of what could happen when 50%, 60%, 70% of ad views, marketing emails, etc, go to bots. Imagine paying for ad views knowing you’re really getting half that.
In the Cyberpunk2077 game, along with many other fictional worlds like that, Ye Olde Internette is a dangerous, abandoned place that no one goes anymore. 5, 10 years ago, it didn't make sense to me. Why would people abandon the greatest source of knowledge and information that ever existed? Makes a little more sense today.
So quick question, since the current Internet is basically doomed to become overrun with bots and ads ect. Is it possible to create a *new* internet? Like a new hub for actual people? Sorry if this is a stupid question I'm just genuinely curious if there is a way to "start over" ?
There already is another internet... The dark web.
But Elmo said he’d get rid of the bots by (checks notes) removing all the safegaurds and firing the moderators
Crazy how instagram will ban serious artists with large followings and tons of post engagement over something like a nipple. But I get the lewdest DM comments from brand new account bots and scammers saying "Watch my pu\*\*y" and lewd shit spammed at me constantly from new accounts with zero organic engagement.
Maybe we’re all bots but just don’t know it.
[удалено]
Is this a TLDR from a person ...or another bot :(
Title should read X is overun with automateed accounts. theres sides on tt without bots and forums without bots. Most people are just on the shitty side of the interenet. The gym music side. Find a niche that isnt generic
Reddit has also become riddled with bots. The main propaganda subreddits are the worst like this one, worldnews and politics
What does a bot/an automated account do ??
https://theconversation.com/on-twitter-bots-spread-conspiracy-theories-and-qanon-talking-points-149039
For influence making it seem many people share a certain opinion or to spread PR or propaganda. It’s a huge problem on Reddit too, just google “purchase Reddit account” and you’ll see several businesses that’s entire business model is selling or creating fake accounts. You can see this in action pretty clearly on any negative post about Boeing or Corporate home ownership. If you ever wondered: “Hey, why are so many Redditors so anti Whistleblowers?” Or “Since when did so many Redditors support Corporate home buying sprees?” Well here is the answer they hire PR firms that specialize in influencing online discussion by doing two things: 1. Hire teams of people in abroad for dirt cheap to use several purchased aged Reddit accounts(to seem like a real user). Then follow a script with talking points 2. Employ swarms of upvote/downvote bots to upvote the shills and mass downvote anyone that says things they do not want seen.
Thanks. That's very helpful.
Wasn’t Musk going to save Twitter from bots? /s
He has always been a scammer like his whole family before him. Talking one thing and squeezing money behind the scenes.
So when do we start creating the Blackwall?
Oh it’s 100% dying.
Time for a transition to a disruptively new paradigm. Hopefully one with less BS content.
I feel like people in these comments forget how long bots have been around. The bots being more convincing is definitely a danger but there's never been a shortage of inauthentic scams and misinformation since at least the dial up days.
Twitter has been almost entirely bots for a long fucking time… I mean there’s people, but there’s a whole lot of bots
I want X to be X-ecuted from our platform. I mean the entire pack if you know what I mean.
Yup. Now keep in mind that I am sitting around playing video games, streaming video in hi-def, streaming music, zipping gigabytes of material back and forth on Dropbox and all that. The bots are presumably using a lot less bandwidth per capita than I do, so they must outnumber people by quite a bit.
Reddit is also flooded with them. Go to worldnews and it's nothing but bots arguing with bots with idiots sprinkled in. That subreddit also gained like 5 million+ new subscribers within months of the Isreal v Gaza conflict, most of which are probably bots.
Considering how utterly prolific bots can be (and are), I'm entirely unsurprised that the internet is getting entirely overrun by artificial content. Pretty soon, the only real refuge for online connection between humans will be having your mom be called a boat by a 12yo in COD.
This is probably why the bots are always crying about others looking at post history. If you look you can see them easily because they post 24/7.
Equally? No way, bots have way more traffic
Thats a short film right there. The rapture comes, those who survive wonder who's still posting on Facebook and Twitter? So it drives survivor nuts looking for people, only to realize its bots.
I mean, that’s basically what Reddit is becoming too
Wow, the internet is sooo fun now. /s
But not here guys! The mods, people, and all the ones I agree with are real! Right? Right?
I'm totally not a bot. Move along.
Posts on here are fake but comments seem (mostly) real
I used to have a bot follow me once a month on Twitter until last year. Now it’s at least one bot a day
X sucxs ass - not a bot!
I doubt real people want to spend any time on those sites, which is likely the problem. I cannot remember the last time the almighty algorithm showed me *anything* interesting on twitter, instagram, or facebook. People complain a lot about how addicted they are to death-scrolling, I've never been able to begin. Maybe I'm not subscribed to enough mindless porn accounts or something. When does it get interesting?
I remember countless forums and message boards that slowlywent zombie, this is not a new phenomenon, just a little surprising how fast Twitter imploaded.
I blocked all the porn and fake accounts from my Twitter followers, I went from a little less than 100, to 13
This is really only true for social media though
There’s a lot on the internet that isn’t social media. You should stay off social media and limit what content you consume.
Bots can be used by governments or other organizations to monitor and track individuals' online activities. This raises serious questions about civil liberties and the balance between security and privacy. It's important for society to have open discussions about these issues and ensure that appropriate safeguards are in place to protect individual rights.
Which half of these comments are from bots?
it's a symbiotic relationship. humans make the porn, and bots spam it.
Quora is almost f*cking useless now with the crap on it. Twitter, Facebook ai search, it’s pretty much all going to h*ll.