I always think HN could be improved by having a paragraph summary of each link in addition to the title. (Of course how and who would create such a summary then becomes a problem).
Anyway the summary of this link to save anyone clicking through (copied from the youtube summary):
The internet is ever changing, but over the past couple of years things have started to change. The proportion of bots in increasing. A theory dubbed “The Dead Internet Theory” that states that most of the internet is in fact AI bots. These bots have been unleashed to control the populous and rake in profits. But is it true? And if so, how much of it is true?
The only small correction would be AI is not required. What was required to overwhelm everything is Cost of Broadcast dropping to 0. Spammers and scammers can mass bombard billions 24*7 cause there is no big cost per message sent. The cost is borne by the receiver to wade through the ever growing sewage placed in front of them. As a result less than 0.5% of content produced is consumed as mentioned in the report. Its probably similar to HN but HN is not going to measure it or inform you about it.
You need a web of trust, not a web of advertisement and anonymous spam.
Just as in real life, there needs to be the possibility to reliably identify yourself easily to others and establish trusted channels of communication. Not just in a P2P manner, but in the sense of a town meeting.
Your attention is worth real money, it is billable working hours. Anonymous actors with ill intent stealing it is a crime without prosecution. That should change.
You could say HN has a decent web of trust, but it doesn't solve the info overload problem.
Think of how many links are not being clicked or read by anyone.
HN can show us the number everyday. If they say for every 100 links submitted only 1 is getting read. And month by month that 100 is growing to 1000 and 10000 why should/will ppl submit links? HN looks alive. But right now who knows what the number is so the submissions and traffic keep flowing and growing.
Scaling it up, when we talk about a dead networks, info exploding for no great reason, is something we need to track and think about more.
People are anonymous, they post anonymously and comment as such. Accordingly, incentive to contribute substantially is minimal at best. Look at your own comment: you didn't really read what I wrote and made some cheap whataboutism-statement.
Useless information rotting away in the void until final deletion is no problem. Incentive to spam others without blowback is.
I think it was r/geopolitics (or maybe r/credibledefense? both?) where the author themselves have to make a submission statement as a comment summarizing the article and what it's about.
The dead internet theory is a creepypasta-originated belief about the internet being basically empty and almost all content being produced by bots.
This has nothing to do with the objective reality that in order to maintain the web a lot of bots are used and contribute to the majority of the traffic
It can be true for specific websites. And while it won't fool dedicated users, it can be good enough to convince casual users and poorly informed investors.
Not long. Once locally hosted LLMs become just a little more ergonomic the main advantages that the internet offered society will be gone. The internet is a great microcosm for a global society, it'll be worth studying just how bad it gets...
That's exactly what a GPT bot would produce to hide the fact that none of you are real and I am just posting within my custom AI crafted bubble of "internet"!
It's actually not all that wrong. ChatGPT is a bit like the Snowden leaks - making the public aware of capabilities that have existed (and which have gone through generations of development) outside of the public eye for a long time.
I remember going out for drinks during ACM Supercomputing 2011 with a gaggle of talkative folks working for a gov't contractor on (social media) profile management and content generation (i.e. astroturf) for the military and intelligence sector, both for tradecraft and influence purposes. The sector was rolling in dough then, because throwing humans at the problem (even if it scaled) makes maintaining operational security and message discipline hard.
I'm not sure that a majority of ALL "user-generated content" on the internet that is seen by actual humans is synthetic, but I am pretty sure that it is true for topics of strategic or commercial interest to all kinds of parties. (The tech is pretty democratized now.)
> It's actually not all that wrong. ChatGPT is a bit like the Snowden leaks - making the public aware of capabilities that have existed (and which have gone through generations of development) outside of the public eye for a long time.
Can you elaborate? Were neural language model bots used to stuff the internet with junk before the publishing of Attention Is All You Need?
Another theory, a positive one, is that AI could really help to absorbe the trash on Internet like a vacuum cleaner.
But it is also important to highlight that because Internet is omniprescent most people would consume "dumb" content in the same way that happened with TV and other media in the past. It is elitist to think that Internet is only for looking at smart stuff and not basic entertainment.
But more seriously, it is important to consider just how much importance any internet discussion should be given. I would say a strong down weight in general is most useful. Consider whether it really helps matters or severely hurts progress to react to the noise. Thinking of troll farms pushing content and adding flamey content to threads. It’d be better if people had some built in skepticism.
Edit-Also, there absolutely will always be someone who disagrees with you/any comment on the internet. And they’re the most likely to respond to that comment. So while there’s a huge amount of actual information on the internet there is far, far more much noise. Actual knowledge and wisdom are going to have to be independently verifiable. Like reading a book, multiple sources, choose sources with demonstrated quality etc.
> consider just how much importance any internet discussion should be given
The problem with this - and it applies to BS in regular media as well - is that it doesn't matter so much what I find important, as what my fellow voters, and real policy makers, find important.
Flat earthers are harmless on their own. If flat earthers start making transport policy, things are going to stop working.
Thing is, flat earthers are a minority. And if the systems of government succeed in representing the relatively quiet majority instead of the loud minorities then transport policy won’t stop working for at least that reason. (Still could for other reasons…”cutting off your nose to spite your face” as an example.) It’s an example of a “bad idea”: an idea which displaces better understanding and further attempts at understanding. Precisely because of that, bad ideas are ends and are like the false fronts on buildings in the old west. They seem larger and more profound from only the front side, but take a little walk behind the main argument and the shallowness reveals itself and its fundamental futility.
Things like me-too happened primarily due to internet discourse. It may or may not have had an impact on society but it was partly due to social media.
The cadence and format of this video actually makes it look AI-generated. The content is padded and repeats itself quite a lot, the video is pretty much all stock footage, and the audio lacks any kind of variation in style like you'd expect even if someone were reading off a script. It sounds exactly like what you'd hear if you fed a script into a modern TTS.
Unfortunately that’s how many YouTubers make videos. I was watching a video about Chinese manufacturing the other day by Bloomberg, and 15 minutes worth of content was thinly stretched to 45 in a similar manner.
Came across many YT videos where you can almost smell the lifted content and structure from Wikipedia (or another video), often by people who aren't experts on the topic they're covering. History channels that are unable to tell the difference between England and Great Britain being a personal peeve.
Google is quite good at detecting duplicate text content, apparently duplicate video content isn't so much a thing.
I'm torn. I found the theme of this video as thought-provoking as I found its closing remarks eye-wateringly trite. The premise of the "Dead Internet" may or may not be true, but if we are to assume that it is, I think that ending on the "positive note" that something is being done about it by tech giants developing "safeguards" based on AI-detecting-AI is naïve and superficial. Also, saying that "education on media literacy and critical thinking skills may go a long way too" is as hackneyed as stating that improved firefighting resources may go a long way to deal with the Canada wildfires.
If we accept the premise of the Dead Internet as true, this is a systemic issue which needs to be dealt with on a systems-level (i.e. economic, social and political), and not by the very architects of this flawed system adding their own little patches —which will just result in an AI arms-race— nor by improving the "media literacy" of the World population so they know how to deal with this broken system —a new arms-race.
Avoiding the consequences of the Dead Internet should not rely on saving the current social-media-attention-economy-internet from AI-bot infestation and expecting people to be "educated" against it. It should rely on either fully rethinking, overhauling and/or shutting down this social-media-attention-economy-internet, or alternatively on helping society to abandon-ship and let this bot-infested internet go the way of Myspace and Digg in terms of social relevance. The one thing that AI content cannot do is get in the way of society's ability to touch grass.
It is really about people not knowing epistemology?
In order to be anything other than a big distraction, information on the internet needs to be true. Which means, it needs to be from real humans, about real life, the real world, providing real useful knowledge.
Epistemology intends to explain how that works. In particular, you need the information to take a trustworthy channel from its source to recipients. Anonymity is one principal contradiction there.
Well if The Dead Internet isn't true there is potential with the latest progress generative AI it might become true. There is an argument to be made that it has the potential to kill social media as we know it, depending on what the majority of people see a point in engaging with non-human generated content. Seeing how chess players treat cheaters, there is hope!
I suspect that the Dead Internet Theory guarantees the death of non-curated social media. Basically, any online community that doesn't do human verification of its users will simply be overrun by bots. In other words, social media platforms pretty much have to be well-moderated by members of that community. That implies smaller, more close-knit communities, probably more akin to the webforums era of the Internet, and not like the giant platforms of today.
I've seen a couple of videos on this topic and it's always been a hit/miss situation for me but this is an interesting topic that I like to think about in a not so serious way - because there is something to it in the end even if it is a meme/conspiracy theory/whatever.
I used to be torn on this conspiracy theory, but I just accept it at this point. It's pretty clear that a huge number of comments on sites like Reddit are if not bots, paid for spam/manipulation. The amount humans, let alone people commenting in good faith is so low as to not make it worth engaging.
There's too much for bad actors and companies to gain, there's no way they're leaving this kind of opportunity on the table, especially as bots get much, much better at appearing human.
It is kind of funny when occasionally a bot messes up and posts the same comment more than once in a thread across more than one account.
I think this is why people increasingly prefer closed off, invite only communities as well. You can vet people coming into a discord community a lot easier and avoid a lot of the nonsense that happens on more open, public, spaces like Reddit, or Twitter.
A lot of so-called "conspiracy theories," including this one, are quite rational once you replace the conspirators with the profit motive under capitalism.
Yeah it doesn't require that everything is actual bots but people behaving like bots. To amend to that I've found that the bigger forums are full of actual people that are just regurgitating the most common talking points on issues and trying to discuss them deeper or developing them is pointless, because the people doing it are just there to root for their "team" not convincing anyone of their point of view. Discussions might disprove their arguments so it is avoided at all cost, with that all discussions become vapid bullshit which does nothing in the world.
I don't think that the internet is currently dead ("dead" = "bot activity mistaken for human activity greatly surpassing genuinely human activity"), but that this is a real future concern.
One thing to take into account is that current bots suck major balls. Specially when it comes to utterance purpose, and for longer utterances; they fail the Turing test really hard, provided that the one asking "is this a bot or a human?" is able to interpret utterances based on nearby utterances and non-textual information around it. In other words if the internet was dead already we would've noticed it.
And someone might argue "ackshyually, there are more advanced bots that model language on pragmatic levels, you just don't know about them because it's all hidden!". Well, then you get a conspiracy "theory" with its typical appeal to ignorance, not something worth thinking about.
I remember reading the original thread on agora road. Alongside it I read a thread about a guy who did a government contract to build something like this, and for the life of me I can't seem to find it anymore. I'm sure it's there but searchability on that site is not good and the recommendation on it weighs recent stuff to heavily. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?
While i think bots and AI is indeed widespread, i think this percentage is accurate only in very specific places. The internet isn't dead, sometimes we (tech people) don't take in consideration how much of the world actually uses the web for things/in ways we wouldn't even consider (bad and good), and how much of it contributes nothing and easily passes as just background noise for us and could, easily, passes as a bot writing.
49 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadAnyway the summary of this link to save anyone clicking through (copied from the youtube summary):
The internet is ever changing, but over the past couple of years things have started to change. The proportion of bots in increasing. A theory dubbed “The Dead Internet Theory” that states that most of the internet is in fact AI bots. These bots have been unleashed to control the populous and rake in profits. But is it true? And if so, how much of it is true?
The only small correction would be AI is not required. What was required to overwhelm everything is Cost of Broadcast dropping to 0. Spammers and scammers can mass bombard billions 24*7 cause there is no big cost per message sent. The cost is borne by the receiver to wade through the ever growing sewage placed in front of them. As a result less than 0.5% of content produced is consumed as mentioned in the report. Its probably similar to HN but HN is not going to measure it or inform you about it.
Just as in real life, there needs to be the possibility to reliably identify yourself easily to others and establish trusted channels of communication. Not just in a P2P manner, but in the sense of a town meeting.
Your attention is worth real money, it is billable working hours. Anonymous actors with ill intent stealing it is a crime without prosecution. That should change.
Think of how many links are not being clicked or read by anyone.
HN can show us the number everyday. If they say for every 100 links submitted only 1 is getting read. And month by month that 100 is growing to 1000 and 10000 why should/will ppl submit links? HN looks alive. But right now who knows what the number is so the submissions and traffic keep flowing and growing.
Scaling it up, when we talk about a dead networks, info exploding for no great reason, is something we need to track and think about more.
People are anonymous, they post anonymously and comment as such. Accordingly, incentive to contribute substantially is minimal at best. Look at your own comment: you didn't really read what I wrote and made some cheap whataboutism-statement.
Useless information rotting away in the void until final deletion is no problem. Incentive to spam others without blowback is.
But yeah, editing those summaries is both huge workload and easily very contentious.
This has nothing to do with the objective reality that in order to maintain the web a lot of bots are used and contribute to the majority of the traffic
It’s already happening.
Sure, but how long until it becomes objectively true?
I remember going out for drinks during ACM Supercomputing 2011 with a gaggle of talkative folks working for a gov't contractor on (social media) profile management and content generation (i.e. astroturf) for the military and intelligence sector, both for tradecraft and influence purposes. The sector was rolling in dough then, because throwing humans at the problem (even if it scaled) makes maintaining operational security and message discipline hard.
I'm not sure that a majority of ALL "user-generated content" on the internet that is seen by actual humans is synthetic, but I am pretty sure that it is true for topics of strategic or commercial interest to all kinds of parties. (The tech is pretty democratized now.)
Can you elaborate? Were neural language model bots used to stuff the internet with junk before the publishing of Attention Is All You Need?
But it is also important to highlight that because Internet is omniprescent most people would consume "dumb" content in the same way that happened with TV and other media in the past. It is elitist to think that Internet is only for looking at smart stuff and not basic entertainment.
But more seriously, it is important to consider just how much importance any internet discussion should be given. I would say a strong down weight in general is most useful. Consider whether it really helps matters or severely hurts progress to react to the noise. Thinking of troll farms pushing content and adding flamey content to threads. It’d be better if people had some built in skepticism.
Edit-Also, there absolutely will always be someone who disagrees with you/any comment on the internet. And they’re the most likely to respond to that comment. So while there’s a huge amount of actual information on the internet there is far, far more much noise. Actual knowledge and wisdom are going to have to be independently verifiable. Like reading a book, multiple sources, choose sources with demonstrated quality etc.
The problem with this - and it applies to BS in regular media as well - is that it doesn't matter so much what I find important, as what my fellow voters, and real policy makers, find important.
Flat earthers are harmless on their own. If flat earthers start making transport policy, things are going to stop working.
Google is quite good at detecting duplicate text content, apparently duplicate video content isn't so much a thing.
If we accept the premise of the Dead Internet as true, this is a systemic issue which needs to be dealt with on a systems-level (i.e. economic, social and political), and not by the very architects of this flawed system adding their own little patches —which will just result in an AI arms-race— nor by improving the "media literacy" of the World population so they know how to deal with this broken system —a new arms-race.
Avoiding the consequences of the Dead Internet should not rely on saving the current social-media-attention-economy-internet from AI-bot infestation and expecting people to be "educated" against it. It should rely on either fully rethinking, overhauling and/or shutting down this social-media-attention-economy-internet, or alternatively on helping society to abandon-ship and let this bot-infested internet go the way of Myspace and Digg in terms of social relevance. The one thing that AI content cannot do is get in the way of society's ability to touch grass.
In order to be anything other than a big distraction, information on the internet needs to be true. Which means, it needs to be from real humans, about real life, the real world, providing real useful knowledge.
Epistemology intends to explain how that works. In particular, you need the information to take a trustworthy channel from its source to recipients. Anonymity is one principal contradiction there.
There's too much for bad actors and companies to gain, there's no way they're leaving this kind of opportunity on the table, especially as bots get much, much better at appearing human.
It is kind of funny when occasionally a bot messes up and posts the same comment more than once in a thread across more than one account.
I think this is why people increasingly prefer closed off, invite only communities as well. You can vet people coming into a discord community a lot easier and avoid a lot of the nonsense that happens on more open, public, spaces like Reddit, or Twitter.
OMG, real life is beckoning!! I'm going to have to get dressed and go outside again!
One thing to take into account is that current bots suck major balls. Specially when it comes to utterance purpose, and for longer utterances; they fail the Turing test really hard, provided that the one asking "is this a bot or a human?" is able to interpret utterances based on nearby utterances and non-textual information around it. In other words if the internet was dead already we would've noticed it.
And someone might argue "ackshyually, there are more advanced bots that model language on pragmatic levels, you just don't know about them because it's all hidden!". Well, then you get a conspiracy "theory" with its typical appeal to ignorance, not something worth thinking about.