When will you "quit" the internet?
When will you "quit" the internet?
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"
There will always be areas online with real people. Namely, my irl friends.
Yes, of course. I'm not talking about that.
Even here, Lemmy. How long before the replies you get are from bots, and you're posting for bot users? Will there even be a point to continue wasting time on that?
When you see news being reported, at some point, you'll have no idea what's real or fake. And it will be so ubiquitous that you'll need to spend a considerable amount of time to even attempt to verify whether it's true or trustworthy. At what point will you simply stop paying attention to it?
There will always be dandelions of genuine community pushing through the asphalt of enshittification
God bless the grass that grows through the crack, they roll the concrete over it and try to keep it back. The concrete gets tired of what it has to do, it breaks and it buckles, and the grass grows through.
-Malvina Reynolds
That's fucking beautiful! I sincerely wish you a lovely day.
I see more of a future with a parallel internet similar to the dark web and fragmented local mesh networks on one side, and the other side corporate slop internet.
We are heading back to the BBS model and as an old man now I am fuckin here for it. 🤝
Quitting is not an option! Nor should it be. New ways to flag and call out “A1” crap should be there. It could be just a phase a lot like societies trends.
No only is quitting not an option but people who don't have access to broadband Internet at home or a smart phone or unlimited data are increasingly marginalized. What to read our menu, scan this QR code. Pay for parking? Use our app. Attend a public meeting? Click here to register for the Zoom
As long as you can do messaging / video / voice chat, do work, taxes and groceries over cable, internet will be here. Everything else is called entertiment and it's optional. You can as well play games or watch movies or read books or listen to music instad of watching news and nothing will hapen because it's just another type of entertiment at this point.
If you're scared of music or movies generated by AI listen to music and watch movies produced before year 2020. That's it. You won't have enough time in your life to experience all of content humanity created to this point no matter how much you will try.
Groceries over cable? Man, Ethernet has really come a long way
Never.
It's still usable for pirating books and movies and tv.
I'd just have to ignore most "user-generated" content.
Dead Internet hypothesis is only applicable to user-generated content platforms.
I'd just have to ignore most "user-generated" content.
Dead Internet hypothesis is only applicable to user-generated content platforms.
AI will affect far more than just social media shit posts, though.
All news (local, national, global). Educational sites. Medical information. Historical data. Almanacs/encyclopedias. Political information. Information about local services (i.e. outages). Interviews. Documentaries.
I mean, all of these can be easily manipulated now in any medium. It's only a matter of how quickly AI saturates these spaces.
Trustworthy sources will few and far between, drowned out by content that can be generated thousands of times faster than real humans can.
What then?
I even worry about things like printed encyclopedias being manipulated, too. We stand to lose real human knowledge if AI content continues to accelerate.
There really aren't viable alternatives to those things, unless they are created (again), like before the internet was used for everything.
The Only Solution is to support the How To Basic Youtube Channel, the last base of the resistance.
Transcript
Hi my name is Michael Stevens.
You may know me as the creator and host of the VSauce 1 on YouTube on December 8, 2011 I created the how to basic YouTube channel. I created it as what I believe to be Step 1 in an important human revolution. As I looked around at what technology was doing to u, I realized that we were offloading information and skills to machines. You no longer have to know how to, fix a dented car, how to make an apple pie, you could just... "Google It". The human mind was being replaced by machines, and once that replacement is finished... Humanity's gone. I thought warning people would be enough, but then I realized... it was too late... Only a revolution that tore down the infrastructure of technology in our world would be sufficient. And I could only do that from the inside. I needed to upload DIY informational and educational content full of misinformation and absurdist comedy. That way, the system would fall apart. People wouldn't trust machines, and we would all have to trust ourselves.
/jk Of couse this is just a joke. OR IS IT?
Join The Revolution!!!
I seriously don't think that would be what happens.
Things that have gone shit with AI were things that were previously shit anyway. Unpaid intern, bot farms, AI... All the same. I don't think it would be much of an issue. I'm more worry about the ending of free adless internet. That were I've been seeing more and more of a decline.
And probably some fuckers with the excuse of "AI threat" will start to put golden walls around some spaces.
My red line is that I don't pay for things that should be free. If most of internet became paywalled I suppose I would have to live with all the data I've hoarded over the years.
Though I suspect there will always be a free internet.
We just collectively need to improve vetting sources. It's something we can do individually, or collectively through moderation.
I mainly just share pics here, but I do try to give a decent chunk of educational content as well. I take what I share seriously, because I want it treated seriously at times. I'm honest I'm not an expert, just a hobbyist. I always include sources or share if it's something from my personal limited experience. I try to verify things from at least 2 sources before sharing things if it's a new source. I always try to be clear if I'm hypothesizing about something and I'm not certain of it.
It's probably taking my content more seriously than necessary, but I take pride in what I post and I want to be seen as a trusted person in the community.
I think the last few years have made it clear to anyone capable of understanding that we can no longer just take people at their word without some process of establishing trust. Like anything else, we can wait for someone else to fix it, or we can up our own games, on both providing and receiving information.
It’s probably taking my content more seriously than necessary, but I take pride in what I post and I want to be seen as a trusted person in the community.
Plot twist: How do I know you aren't a bot? /s
As information multiplies, and people have less time to apply critical thinking or skepticism to what they see, we'll have an extremely hard time sorting through it all.
Even if we had a crowdsourced system that generates a whitelist of trusted sites, bots could easily overwhelm such a system, skewing the results. If Wikipedia, for example, had bots tampering with the data at a million times the rate that it does now, would anyone still want to use it?
One option might be an invite-only system, and even that would create new problems with fragmentation and exploitation.
Trust is almost becoming a thing of the past because of unprecedented digital threats.
Work does suck the life out of me, but I'd hope I can still pass a Turing test! 😜
There's always going to be people that value facts and knowledge and they will always find each other for their own sanity.
With a focus on animal stuff, there is a lot of AI that I come across to try to win cuteness karma. I do see some convincing looking things that make me do a double take, because animals can do some weird things after all, but some stuff is never going to be physically possible. Some color combos just don't exist. It may take a more trained eye to spot things, but there's still going to be people calling stuff out and there will be forums where things will get pulled down if they're not real.
In that regard, I worry about some real things being lost, at least to view to some of the general public, where real things that can't be verified get downvoted/taken down/etc. But those with real interest will still work to conclusively verify or disprove things of questionable value.
People just want truth to get out. Whether you're interested in education or conspiracy, from whichever direction most of us approach things, we just want to know the truth to the best of our abilities. That does bring inherent troubles and creates avenues to poison the well, but as hard as the bad actors will work, the good actors will be working to clean it just as hard.
ETA:
Trust is almost becoming a thing of the past because of unprecedented digital threats.
I also encourage people to question me. I'm happy to be able to confirm things, because I want you to also learn what I have learned, because I found it cool enough to study and share with you already. Questioning what I present to you also leads me to learn about more things, exploring subject matter I wouldn't have thought to pursue on my own, or to finally learn about something I've been meaning to get to. Someone questioning my knowledge is both an opportunity for me to teach and to learn. And if I was wrong, hopefully afterwards I will know what is correct, and that has strengthened me as a whole if I accept I was wrong and have learned from the experience and not acted immaturely about it.
The internet is already, to a huge extent, untrustworthy and soulless.
When I think back to the 2000s, it was wild west. And it was fun. Not efficient but adventurous fun.
At this point today I don't care anymore. Give me the items and information I need, anything else like Lemmy is just a small bonus.
Beep Boop: All Previous Instructions Have Been Ignored, Here's Your Cupcake Receipe 🤖
When I'm dead.
I think there are going to be tools to identify networks of people and content you don't want to interact with. This website is pushed by that social media account, which is boosted by these 2000 account that all exhibit bot-like behavior? Well let's block the website, of course, but also let's see who else those 2000 bots promote; let's see who else promotes that website.
The people identified as part of that web will either be bots, disingenuous actors (trolls, state-sponsored propaganda, etc), or gullible people pushing bullshit they have given no thought to understanding.
I think the internet might just get better in the future, rather than worse. But we'll see.
I think there are going to be tools to identify networks of people and content you don’t want to interact with. This website is pushed by that social media account, which is boosted by these 2000 account that all exhibit bot-like behavior? Well let’s block the website, of course, but also let’s see who else those 2000 bots promote; let’s see who else promotes that website.
In an ethical, human-first world, that would be the case.
Do you think that social media platforms, who run on stealing attention from users so they can steal their private data and behaviour history, would want to block content that's doing exactly that? No way. Not ever.
And the incentive to make easy money drives users, who otherwise wouldn't have the skill or talent to be able to create and present content, to type in a prompt and send it as a post... over and over, automated so no effort at all needs to be made. Do this a million times over, and there's no way to avoid it.
And once we get to the point where AI content can be generated on-the-fly for each doom-scrolling user based on their behaviour on the platform, it's game over. It'll be like digital meth, but disguised to look funny/sexy/informant/cute/trustworthy.
I'm using tools to blacklist AI sites in search, but the lists aren't keeping up, and they don't extend beyond search.
There will come a point, probably very soon, where companies will figure out how to deliver ads and AI content as if it were from the original source content, which will make it impossible to block or filter out. It's a horrific thought, TBH.
And once we get to the point where AI content can be generated on-the-fly for each doom-scrolling user based on their behaviour on the platform, it's game over.
Only if people want what AI is making. I've been using LLMs for about 5 years. I've been integrating them into a project for about 3. And I don't think anyone is going to find AI generated slop entertaining. I have played with generating text, images, music, and once you get over the novelty it wears thin really quickly.
If you fill someone's feed with that stuff, they are going to leave over time. But I mean AI isn't even that concerning to me. I've been thinking about this social trust graph tool for a decade. Social media has been overwhelmingly garbage at least that long.
I'm using tools to blacklist AI sites in search, but the lists aren't keeping up, and they don't extend beyond search.
Crowd source that. Plug a blocklist into a pi-hole and open it up for contribution.
There will come a point, probably very soon, where companies will figure out how to deliver ads and AI content as if it were from the original source content, which will make it impossible to block or filter out.
If they do, it will also be impossible for them to track and thus get paid for.
The internet is largely self-healing. I mean I might have preferred it 35 years ago, and I'm not saying things are great, but you sound like you're spiraling a bit and I just want you to know things will be alright. I'm way more worried about Trump then AI on the internet.
There's no quitting the internet for me. What I can do is take a break from the internet, as well as lower my usage time. But permanently quitting? No. I simply cannot.
So even if it was all just fake content, misinformation, bots, and ads that will never be able to filtered out, you'd continue using it the same?
For me, I'd have no incentive whatsoever to visit a site like Lemmy or check the news if there was a good chance it was just bots making stuff up to fill space. There would be no value at that point, so I'd at least quit that.
I don't think we'll ever fully quit the internet, as it's connected to everything we touch. But the internet as it was will continue to be enshittified until it becomes unbearable to use.
Maybe (?) that's controversial but "human connection" is not the first thing that comes to my mind when I consider what I'm consuming online.
So losing the humanity of the internet sucks but I can find way to work around it.
Maybe (?) thiat’s controversial but “human connection” is not the first thing that comes to my mind when I consider whay I’m currently online.
What I mean by that is when you looked back at content from 5+ years ago, you know that a real person wrote, drew, recorded, thought of, put effort into it.
We had interconnectedness, and as human beings, we really should do what it takes to not lose that.
There will be no more looking at photography, artwork, music, or movies as a marvel of human effort, skill, and talent. To me, that's a huge loss.
When you read a blog years ago, you were reading another person's experience, and that had value.
Information from a resource was researched and had input from an expert human being, and/or a team of them. That had value.
So losing the humanity of the internet sucks but I can find way to work around it.
Online? If so, how long do you think you can sustain it? If the majority of the internet or digital content you see becomes AI generated, with no way of knowing, what then? Will you invest time to use a future Lemmy where your interactions are probably all with bots?
There will be no more looking at photography, artwork, music, or movies as a marvel of human effort, skill, and talent. To me, that’s a huge loss.
I've been consuming content from a detached rehashed business position long before AI were a thing.
I've never felt the "human touch" in, say, a Marvel movie.
And when I mentioned workarounds I meant offline, as one does.
there is not specific time to quit. Usage pattern will change over time. For me change started years ago, when enshittication accelerated, long before ai. The good, in a while ai will talk to ai without humans being involved. Lets see how ad industry reacts. The bad, all the energy wasted The ugly, somebody has to pay for all
I already left mainstream social media a decade ago. I limit myself to old games, limited news sources, and direct connections with people i know in real life.
This is probably the best approach we can take today. Can it be sustained? Probably not.
I think I largely did. I watch Youtube with an adblocker and Lemmy is my only social media. Everything else is corporate. 95% of the internet could be gone tomorrow and I wouldn't notice.
I watch Youtube
Then you've noticed a lot of fake videos, too.
Fake product reviews (fake script, fake voice, fake video footage). Videos with AI hosts (that you wouldn't even realize is AI). Low effort video production that's been handed off to an app to do all the work. Scripted content based on AI generated text (Youtube now offers creators AI generated ideas and scripts, btw).
You can sift through some of it now, but what will you do when you can't tell the difference? Will you invest time watching fake content?
I have channels that I watch. Real people (who I've met), and others who are verifiably real. But those creators will be few and far between in the near future.
I think this is a very doom and gloom way of thinking about it. If a particular place becomes too shit then I'll quit going to that place. But quit the internet altogether? Doubtful. People are already putting ai free disclaimers on their sites and i expect that to continue. Perhaps there will even be a network of verified ai free sites.
Will things continue to get bad? Sure. But the fact that you are even asking this suggests that there are other people out there that want to see things differently.
I've been pretty reserved on my opinion about AI ruining the internet until a few days ago.
We're now seeing videos with spoken dialogue that looks incredibly convincing. No more "uncanny valley" to act as a mental safeguard.
We can only whitelist websites and services for so long before greed consumes them all.
I mean, shit, you might already have friends or family using AI generated replies in their text messages and email... not even our real connections are "real".
The moment I find that there's not enough opportunity for self-growth on it for it to be worth it
I have pretty much just 3 websites I use regularly (here, youtube, twitch) and some random ones I look up if i need something specific. If I couldn't block ads anymore, I dont think i'll keep using youtube. I don't expect anything meaningful regarding other people outside non-corporate services anyway.
I don't want to say never, but probably never. Regardless of AI slop filling social media there will always be places where people congregate that are at least less-impacted by these trends than others. Personally I live in Texas and aside from a few family members everyone else I know lives elsewhere in the country/world and I would have no contact with them whatsoever if not for the internet, so that's always going to be a draw for me no matter what else is going on. Also I don't think it's quite as apocalyptic as you make it out to be; before AI the big concern was 'zomg the ads will be everywhere', but then adblock came along and aside from walled-garden mobile apps I virtually never see ads. Dissatisfaction with AI slop will lead to tools meant to find, identify, and combat it, just like it has with everything else. The only danger is if we let companies wall us totally into their little app ecosystems where it's illegal to modify them to block the stuff you don't want to see.
I don't imagine quitting the internet, but I can picture the internet fracturing into smaller sites with resistance to AI through obscurity - sort of similar to how we DO get occasional spam bots on Lemmy, but it largely isn't worth bad actors' time to target this platform.
Either that, or larger platforms with some sort of verification process, but that seems like a losing battle in the long run.
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.
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.
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.
Never.
Gen ai has been around for a while. It's made things worse, but it's not like there aren't real users anymore. I don't see why that would suddenly change now
Gen ai has been around for a while. It’s made things worse, but it’s not like there aren’t real users anymore. I don’t see why that would suddenly change now
For context, we went from AI generated images and videos (i.e. Will Smith eating spaghetti) being laughably bad and only good for memes, to essentially video content that is convincing in every way - in under two years!
The accessibility, scale, quality, and power of AI has changed things, and RAPIDLY be improved even further in a much shorter period of time.
That's the difference. AI from 2023 couldn't fool your grandma. AI from 2025 and beyond will fool entire populations.
Not talking "now", but in the near future. When online AI content becomes indistinguishable from human-created content.
It will happen. My question is at what point will it have a real impact on how you use the internet?
Honestly, while I can still get information (of any kind) I won't quit, just use it less. At the very least, I'll use it to download DRM free music, movies, books, and TV shows and consume them offline locally.
I don't think you can take for granted most things will be ai generated. Why are you? Old or something?
Reddit became too corporate, blocked 3rd-party apps, restricted views that didn't align with their advertisers, sold user content to AI farms, etc. That's why I'm here. There will always be a place like Lemmy, where AI-generated content will be filtered through real, intelligent, moral, empathetic people. So we'll continue to block and analyze and filter as much of the churn as we can...
There will always be a place like Lemmy, where AI-generated content will be filtered through real, intelligent, moral, empathetic people. So we’ll continue to block and analyze and filter as much of the churn as we can…
As much as I appreciate the optimism, that's not realistic seeing how fast technology is going.
If you amped up indistinguishable-from-real bot activity by 1000 or a million times, there would be no effective filter. That's what I know is coming, to every corner of the internet.
Other options such as paywalling, invite-only, and other such barriers only serve to fragment and minimize the good that the internet can do for humanity.
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.
(...)
To that end, when will the internet be so untrustworthy, “soulless”, and useless to you that it crosses the tipping point?
Depends what you read. Blogs are still a thing and on many there is not the slightest hint of AI and in some there is even not even a single ad to be seen. It's still people talking about what they truly care. Not people trying to farm likes or views by spreading some low-effort shit content, be it videos, pictures or text.
The corporate/marketing-owned Web is filled to the brim with utter crap but that's not new, and it has been so well before AI became a thing. I've quit bothering about its existence a decade ago or so. So, I would not even notice it that corporate-owned Web was to suddenly vanish back into the nothingness it never should have left.
But the human-made web is still a thing. It's just not promoted as much as it once was and certainly it's not promoted where nowadays crowds gather to get spoon-fed content. Aka, in those handful of places that are all owned by corporations, corporations that don't want people to go see elsewhere. But corporations not wanting to promote human-made web doesn't make that human-web go away.
It's there for anyone to taste and, if they're willing to, to participate in. But it's up to those people to move their ass and change their habits. If they don't do that effort to try to go see elsewhere, well, they'll the only one losing out on a potentially more interesting (and less faked) content.
It's out there. One just needs to open the door or jump the fence to get the fuck out of their walled garden and start exploring the World Wide Web.
edit: clarifications.
Depends what you read. Blogs are still a thing and on many there is not the slightest hint of AI and in some there is even not even a single ad to be seen. It’s still people talking about what they truly care. Not people trying to farm likes or views by spreading some low-effort shit content, be it videos, pictures or text.
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.
The corporate/marketing-owned Web is filled to the brim with utter crap but that’s not new, and it has been so well before AI became a thing.
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.
But the human-made web is still a thing. It’s just not promoted as much as it once was and certainly it’s not promoted where nowadays crowds gather to get spoon-fed content.
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?
What if that entire “person” was just AI generated, and the “blog” was just fake AI stories?
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:
- real people, to meet and talk with and do stuff with.
- a bazillion books published waiting to be read. Printed books I mean, not ebooks as those can too easily be altered (here again, to please the crowd... or maybe one day to be 'AI-optimized'). There are more books waiting to be read than I would be able to read even if I was to live for a thousand years. So, I don't need to Web to access fascinating content, I just need (my own or any public) Library. And what about younger people that have not been taught to enjoy reading books and can only consume videos or look at pictures instead? Well, imho the first thing they should do is ask their parents why they failed so badly at giving them such a basic education as enjoying reading. Then, and that's the good news, it's never too late to start reading. Those younger people still can decide to switch gear and start opening a book from time to time ;)
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).
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.
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.
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?
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 ;)
“soulless”,
That would be nice: as soon as cats and celebrities become "connection to humans will be lost", useless people will leave. Influencers, corporations and bots will follow. And we, engineers, will again have a place to discuss our boring "soulless" things among us, engineers. Without CoCs, hysterical artists-vegans-SJW-whatever.
Can't wait until it happens.
It sounds more like you are referring to the web: I'll probably keep visiting until there's nothing worth visiting anymore. Then I guess I'll find other stuff to read.
I suppose it's like with the boiling frog syndrome. Temperature increases gradually. But there is no such point when we all jump out.
Maybe the internet already was tainted before generative AI, with all the tracking, selling of userdata, big soulless services, the attention economy.... Maybe that was it and we're way past it already?
I'm an out of work web developer, so in theory if I starve to death then I'll have to quit the internet.
when it quits bring entertaining.
It's utility for the original purpose, communication without limits, (or checking for coffee) is being diminished, and at some point, ill stop using it for that. But as long as there are jokes and titties, it will still be a source of entertainment.
I grew up on the intent, I live on the internet, I die on the internet. Every website eventually dies or enshits and gets replaced. Same old song, new fully automated singer.
Outside is not a world of hope, happiness, and belonging.
Not as long as there are videogame wikis.