Recently I keep coming across news and clips talking about the ‘Dead Internet Theory’. They go on and on about how the internet is mostly fake AI bots these days.
I’ll argue that the internet is still the same amount of people doing contributions. What ‘broke it’ was the walled gardens of companies trying to milk their user base for profit. They don’t want people going to other sites or following links. Those links are what made the web the web.
Search sucks now and everyone has known that for a long tie. You can’t use a search engine without a summarized AI paragraph at the top. There isn’t going down through links to find the right answer to a question. There is only the assumption that the summary is the right answer. Half the time the response a hallucination that poisons without supporting evidence.
AI is great and it sucks. LLMs are not human intelligence even though advocates are trying to sell everyone on the idea that it could be. Hell I can remember college exams where I was regurgitating a mass amount of information from the textbook without absorbing it’s meaning, before forgetting it again since I had to do the same thing again with another large amount of info. No I don’t fucking remember a painting style famous in the 1700s or the macroeconomics that created Black Thursday (besides shitty traders being shitty). I remember my stats class that I barely passed since I had to study so damn hard. I had so many wrong answers on the first few tests and the shame kept me in the damn library studying like mad.
My rant being is that regurgitating information isn’t reasoning. LLMs, as far as anyone can tell, don’t think about what the right answer is. Shoot ask it complicated coding questions while trying to debug your python. Their code response will look pretty, but you’ll be damned if it runs without failing.
The internet isn’t dead and isn’t failing. What’s failing are the walled gardens attempting to squeeze their user base for revenue through ads and subscriptions. It doesn’t matter if it’s an AI site, a search engine, or some social network. The web is still a bunch of links if people follow them. Outside of the web the internet is always expanding if people would explore in those directions too.
Keep using the tools you like and move outside of them to see what’s out there. The only real intellectual poison is staying in your echo chamber.
/end trans
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