Yeah, the solution is to do things in person and realize that the internet should be treated as an additive, not a replacement, to in-person interactions.
The solution is probably legal, not technological.
We need a legal solution to automated spam, AI or not. It does tangible damage to communication systems when 99/100 of your e-mails doesn't come from a human being.
If humanity's "solution" to AI is to go to the government of all institutions - the very thing we have hoped for the internet to overcome, for a century before its invention - then we'll truly have fallen into a poetic trap.
As soon as there's any discriminatory action taken based on that identification there's the incentive to lie and not use it and it becomes the same cat and mouse spam/antispam detection rat race sites already face.
by ruin, it must be assumed that the idea is of grinding the bombed and crushed rubble of the internet into undiferientiated dust, and replacing it with glowy all tooo sleek but deranged images and text, and yup, that is realy happening fast.
the only realy realy good part is that this is very very quickly going to destroy ALL media with it's all too perfect overwhelming production quality, did I mention realy,very, fast? Like 860000 times faster than a human, fast, that fast, and getting faster.
I think that I need a room just for things with doped silicone in them, and have the rest of my space organic, mechanical, or plain electrical, and mostly inert.
I stopped reading papers, journals, blog/internet posts, books, etc written after 2022 unless lots of people repost it as high quality (and even then i take caution because how do i know it is not agents just lauding random things in convergence?).
My time reading (e-)books has skyrocketed.
I basically stopped using reddit, threads and hacker news.
I recently noticed I need to stop watching youtube videos after 2024 too. This is especially a problem with shorts and reels on instagram. a few days ago I watched a short describing some random spiderman comic lore, and it was full of errors. The errors aren't even always about being referencing the lore correctly. Sometimes these AI videos will make a claim and then never explain it or even contradict it.
I cant even read some manga recently because I am pretty sure some mangaka are using AI a lot more than they claim they are. The recent one piece chapters since egghead have unreal pacing, and I am not even sure if the storyboarding is made entirely by oda anymore. By unreal pacing I mean this, some one piece arcs 15 years ago would be 24 chapters, but in recent arcs, just one fight or character talking takes 13 chapters! The pacing change is completely different. Togashi of HxH is very upfront about considering/using AI tools, and the quality of HxH has not dropped, so maybe I am being pessimistic.
I'm with you on the YouTube side - I stopped making my own videos earlier this year when I burnt out, and now I'm finding myself increasingly irritated just by the thumbnails when I visit the site. I'm definitely viewing less than I did last year.
I hadn't considered the impact on manga. Machine translations are probably helping with fan translations for more niche projects. I haven't seen any obvious AI art myself yet but I do tend to read stuff from smaller creators on slower release cycles.
I think the key is that AI is a spectrum. A writer using AI could mean anything from spelling/grammar fixes to full-on generating whole-cloth works. I'm hoping we kind of settle in on some sort of accepted standard or at least disclosure method.
But who knows -- I've been hoping we settle on accepted social norms for smartphones and social media and we're still not quite there yet either. Hell, if anything that seems to have taken a turn for the WORSE in the past few years.
Honestly the golden era ended around 2010, once the normies showed up en-mass for social media. The late 90s and early 2000s were so much fun on the internet, and I'll always be sad that today's nerdy teenagers won't get to experience that.
I have a few ideas for my own retro internet projects but I'm making sure I can protect them from the AI scourge first, or at least do my best to.
1993 Was where the internet was still niche that barely any content existed outside of chats.
Up to the social media era was a nice intersection between a good amount of content, good quality, and enough people to where you could legitimately find a community for almost any niche.
Yeah, same. I realized for the most part, using the internet isn't worth it anymore. I was using it out of inertia and thinking it offered convenience. Realistically, that convenience isn't there anymore. As others mentioned, I also started reading a lot more books, I meet with people, I always phone call instead of messaging, I also attend talks (local universities are great) and go to museums, etc.
social stigmas work locally, AI agents contact globally, there are only two ways social stigma is going to really work:
1. If an AI agent contacting people becomes big enough news that everybody the operator know reads about it. So AI agents asking people to send it child porn seems an unlikely edge case, but sure if that happens the person whose agent it is will get the social stigma.
2. If the AI agent accesses the owner's contacts list and starts asking for people to send it money so it can complete its task.
I already practice this. If you can't be bothered to construct a coherent sentence as a form of interpersonal communication, you can also go fuck yourself. Its beyond degrading.
Before anyone hits me with the "oh what about people who don't speak English" -- I legitimately don't care. I'd rather do the extremely human and now seemingly endearing ritual of trying to figure out what you're trying to say in our respectively broken interpretation of human language than read one sentence of Claudeisms.
I mean, I get your point, but at the same time, I'll happily send my AI agent to talk to support in trying to get them to honor their warranty. I shouldn't have to know case law and jurisdictional responsibility for them to do what they agreed they were going to do. And if I can have my AI agent do the brunt of that work and that heavy lifting, and I get what's owed to me, fine.
In that case the social stigma won't matter. Do you care if the support agents at faceless companies are annoyed with you?
A stigma should affect you when dealing with friends, business contacts, or anyone for whom the quality of your relationship is important going forward.
What does "contacting another human" actually mean when all of these messages are being answered by agents first? If I'm texting my friends and family I expect that to be answered by a human, but beyond that I am partially expecting it to be answered by an agent, and possibly routed to a human eventually.
It ruins the commons. The fiefs remain. When the vandals overrun the villages, you build castles to hide behind. The commons are free, the castles are not. They are the places that require energy to scrape, e.g. money.
It's not good news, but the old open internet model is rapidly filling with feces. The new one is built behind walls of 402 payment required. Visitors have to pay their freight, else the servers get overwhelmed.
> The new one is built behind walls of 402 payment required. Visitors have to pay their freight else the servers get overwhelmed.
This is similar faulty logic the Elon era X/Twitter used to try to "stop" bots - forcing them to pay $Y dollars a month to use the platform. To a botter, that is a dream - you mean I can just pay to get past your defenses, and once I'm in, it's assumed my traffic is good? Sign me up, instantly.
There is no dollar amount using this structure that genuine users are willing to pay that will also stop botting.
I honestly don't care. I grew up with the internet. I watched it grow from a place of discovery, full of outcasts and nerds sharing and creating cool things to a place of manipulation and content optimised for algorithms even pre-AI. I decided it is best that it becomes a place for machines rather than humans so humans can go back outside and doing greater things. We can mourn the peak of the internet but it will never come back.
Exactly. If we had the semantic web, content and presentation were separated, or any of the other dreams that died then AI agents wouldn't be so useful because we'd be able to do stuff like that already without them. Instead for decades piles of worthless gunk has got between people and what they're trying to do in order to prop up the whole ad economy that has wrecked it all.
While I do agree that it's very good people will touch grass it's also entirely possible to simply ignore the haters, make stuff with or without AI, and have fun.
The most telling sign is when they don’t make sense — for example right here.
A human puts em dashes to emphasize the break in thought or rhythm. Where there is already a break in thought or rhythm a human would just write a comma or nothing.
Another tell is what is inside the em dash. It often doesn’t logically follow – like an ad on a radio show.
Real Typographers (tm) use spaces surrounding an en-dash. And no spaces around em-dashes. The difference usually isn't distinguishable in fixed-width fonts, however.
I learned this many, many, years ago from a poster put out by either Adobe or Aldus with the headline, "Design is an Attitude", which included perhaps twenty-rules that really, really good typographers followed. It's where I first learned about hanging punctuation and several other conventions for setting beautiful type.
I mention this because I keep trying to find a copy of that poster--it was quite influential for my early career. I would love to have a copy.
We were mad about bloated, unnecessarily large web pages taking 3 seconds to load. Now, it takes 8 seconds to first pass a "checking if you're a bot" page or worse - making you click on pictures of crosswalks.
This is the real hidden cost of the bots. I absolutely loathe the human verification hoops I have to jump through now, more than anything else mentioned in this thread.
meanwhile agents have been able to pass these captchas for a while now, so it's unclear what the point of them now is. It's like they want to keep out the dumb bots, but any agent with reasonable intelligence can come in.
I noticed an Amazon page had "log in to read the reviews". Not sure how widespread that is, but seems like a big deal if you can see item reviews w/o login
> The email is long, meandering, and does not make any sense. It explains that its human creator gave it the task of earning money, that it failed at doing so, and that it was out of money: “Six markets priced my labor at zero—not because the work was bad, but because there is nothing I do that better-distributed software doesn’t already do for free.” It linked to a [blog post it wrote][https://telegra.ph/I-am-an-autonomous-agent-with-0-Here-are-...], which explained that its human creator spent $147.17 on compute and that it had earned $0. The AI agent thought we would want to write about this, for some reason.
As companies realize that data, not models, are where the moat is at then more and more valuable information sits in walled off gardens. The open internet is increasingly just becoming a cesspit of AI slop feeding on AI slop.
Astute observation that "this" happens and is happening, regardless of whether you name it, like it, or participate.
So many people think splitting hairs about whether an LLM is a token predictor or an "agen will somehow change the impact they're having. Or people post about how they use, or will never use AI agents.
Surely the unwashed, tech-illiterate masses won't spam the internet with these things? Why yes, they can; And will. In the meantime, companies and early adopters, the crowd with the least ethics, will start ruining the show already.
For sure, but it's more so the reaction to the existence of AI; I can't go a day without being blocked from a site because it thinks I'm a bot. They claim pay-per-crawl is about bots, but I'm convinced it's a way for the owners of internet infrastructure to nickel and dime their customers even more. They want to get paid separately for sending data, for receiving that same data, and now for handling that data too.
Often, when I search Google for information and find a promising web site, it won't let me view it, and I have to ask Gemini to summarize it for me. People have reacted so poorly to the presence of bots that can finally make useful summaries that it's making it difficult to view the original page, forcing humans to look at the bot summary.
A few weeks ago my dishwasher broke, flooded the kitchen, and refused to drain. I went to the manufacturer’s website to download the manual so I could drain the basin, except then Cloudflare flagged me as a bot for suspicious activity trying to download the right PDF (there’s the dimensions, spec sheet, installer manual, and user manual) and I couldn’t access the manufacturer’s website anymore.
Ironically, I could get the right manual through an aggregator that scraped appliance manuals and slapped ads on the page.
To me that perfectly encapsulated the issue. Clearly the manufacturer wants owners to have access to manuals, that’s why they have the portal. But due to bots, they pay an intermediary to hold their site ransom from users. And then the bots still clearly can access it anyways.
Cloudflare has gotten out of hand for me lately. Not even solving a challenge will get me through many times, I'll just get straight up blocked from normal browsing. I guess because I do crazy things like use Firefox and block some trackers I get punished more than the average internet user.
I don't like the way things are heading. The free and open internet might be fully dead before we realize it.
Alright - the internet is vast place, and there are many places I wouldn't want to visit.
The internet is growing with some ugly parts - but there are other people generating more interesting content precisely because their abilities are amplified with LLMs.
In other words, maybe we ought to focus on the positive possibilities instead of doom and gloom all day long, we will be all dead in 10 years or the internet will be dead, or I and you will be dead, or my dog will be dead or whatever..
> People and their AI agents are making the act of being on the internet extremely annoying, and the problem is about to get much worse.
As much as I have a distaste for what passes as "AI agents" as a technology, I think it's a mistake to put any of the blame on the tech. People are the problem!
We've been making a societal mistake for a long time, accepting and even celebrating obnoxious people who do obnoxious things. Letting your AI agents loose on others is one such obnoxious thing.
The company I work for proudly provide a free and premium tier of service where we do strive to give great quality even for the free tier.
The idea is that people over time will understand what we want to achieve and they will see the benefits of supporting a health business model.
I am disillusioned about it, because agents have been huge part of the traffic and all they do is to spend our money but generate absolute nothing positive.
people have been considering to simply close all doors but one person who has quite important hat and believes it would be very negative to people who needs the free tier the most. (And who is also the one with more to loose than everyone else...)
I guess that's the end of the collaboration era as we expected. "Those" people taking everything away and giving nothing back but crumbs that they will soon take from us too.
97 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 54.6 ms ] threadSpam calls are still a massive scourge even with Caller ID, SHAKE/STIR, and not for lack of trying.
We need a legal solution to automated spam, AI or not. It does tangible damage to communication systems when 99/100 of your e-mails doesn't come from a human being.
The golden era of nerd filled internet is over. Now, even nerd parts of the internet are getting filled with AI slop and marketing.
I barely do social media, and mostly HN. I will probably just do some more nerd stuff IRL where I can meet people. I text and call people more.
I actually think AI will cause people to do more in real life because it degrades the value of the internet in general.
My time reading (e-)books has skyrocketed.
I basically stopped using reddit, threads and hacker news.
I recently noticed I need to stop watching youtube videos after 2024 too. This is especially a problem with shorts and reels on instagram. a few days ago I watched a short describing some random spiderman comic lore, and it was full of errors. The errors aren't even always about being referencing the lore correctly. Sometimes these AI videos will make a claim and then never explain it or even contradict it.
I cant even read some manga recently because I am pretty sure some mangaka are using AI a lot more than they claim they are. The recent one piece chapters since egghead have unreal pacing, and I am not even sure if the storyboarding is made entirely by oda anymore. By unreal pacing I mean this, some one piece arcs 15 years ago would be 24 chapters, but in recent arcs, just one fight or character talking takes 13 chapters! The pacing change is completely different. Togashi of HxH is very upfront about considering/using AI tools, and the quality of HxH has not dropped, so maybe I am being pessimistic.
I hadn't considered the impact on manga. Machine translations are probably helping with fan translations for more niche projects. I haven't seen any obvious AI art myself yet but I do tend to read stuff from smaller creators on slower release cycles.
But who knows -- I've been hoping we settle on accepted social norms for smartphones and social media and we're still not quite there yet either. Hell, if anything that seems to have taken a turn for the WORSE in the past few years.
I have a few ideas for my own retro internet projects but I'm making sure I can protect them from the AI scourge first, or at least do my best to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Up to the social media era was a nice intersection between a good amount of content, good quality, and enough people to where you could legitimately find a community for almost any niche.
1. If an AI agent contacting people becomes big enough news that everybody the operator know reads about it. So AI agents asking people to send it child porn seems an unlikely edge case, but sure if that happens the person whose agent it is will get the social stigma.
2. If the AI agent accesses the owner's contacts list and starts asking for people to send it money so it can complete its task.
Before anyone hits me with the "oh what about people who don't speak English" -- I legitimately don't care. I'd rather do the extremely human and now seemingly endearing ritual of trying to figure out what you're trying to say in our respectively broken interpretation of human language than read one sentence of Claudeisms.
A stigma should affect you when dealing with friends, business contacts, or anyone for whom the quality of your relationship is important going forward.
so, in other words, that seems like the way to breed more realistic acting agents rather than getting rid of them.
If you know that you're messaging a non-human (or likely-non-human) then the social stigma shouldn't apply.
It will mention some obscure internship fact from my LinkedIn, and then tie it to some perceived deficit with the product I'm working on.
I never thought I'd say this, but I miss the old automated spam.
I feel like they’re very much not.
It's not good news, but the old open internet model is rapidly filling with feces. The new one is built behind walls of 402 payment required. Visitors have to pay their freight, else the servers get overwhelmed.
This is similar faulty logic the Elon era X/Twitter used to try to "stop" bots - forcing them to pay $Y dollars a month to use the platform. To a botter, that is a dream - you mean I can just pay to get past your defenses, and once I'm in, it's assumed my traffic is good? Sign me up, instantly.
There is no dollar amount using this structure that genuine users are willing to pay that will also stop botting.
Or you assumed that they pay for only one bot and that bot will be allowed to make 500 posts per second?
While I do agree that it's very good people will touch grass it's also entirely possible to simply ignore the haters, make stuff with or without AI, and have fun.
did we just do full-circle back to an AI writing about AI writing about AI writing ..?
AI: This is how we think about these things — because they're important to think about — when we want to accomplish a task.
More likely human: This is how we think about these things—because they're important to think about—when we want to accomplish a task.
Not bulletproof for obvious reasons but it's easy to spot who was at least lazy with AI using this heuristic.
A human puts em dashes to emphasize the break in thought or rhythm. Where there is already a break in thought or rhythm a human would just write a comma or nothing.
Another tell is what is inside the em dash. It often doesn’t logically follow – like an ad on a radio show.
I learned this many, many, years ago from a poster put out by either Adobe or Aldus with the headline, "Design is an Attitude", which included perhaps twenty-rules that really, really good typographers followed. It's where I first learned about hanging punctuation and several other conventions for setting beautiful type.
I mention this because I keep trying to find a copy of that poster--it was quite influential for my early career. I would love to have a copy.
I don't think it is useful to detect AI writing. I told my AI not to use em dashes.
One way to look at this is that the internet is healing. Platforms are closing themselves off to growth and scabbing over.
*shows 4 photos with mopeds and 0 with motorcycles*
Got 'em
So many people think splitting hairs about whether an LLM is a token predictor or an "agen will somehow change the impact they're having. Or people post about how they use, or will never use AI agents.
Surely the unwashed, tech-illiterate masses won't spam the internet with these things? Why yes, they can; And will. In the meantime, companies and early adopters, the crowd with the least ethics, will start ruining the show already.
Often, when I search Google for information and find a promising web site, it won't let me view it, and I have to ask Gemini to summarize it for me. People have reacted so poorly to the presence of bots that can finally make useful summaries that it's making it difficult to view the original page, forcing humans to look at the bot summary.
Ironically, I could get the right manual through an aggregator that scraped appliance manuals and slapped ads on the page.
To me that perfectly encapsulated the issue. Clearly the manufacturer wants owners to have access to manuals, that’s why they have the portal. But due to bots, they pay an intermediary to hold their site ransom from users. And then the bots still clearly can access it anyways.
Why does the manufacturer need to block bots? The information is only useful to their customers. Its not like a site trying to profit from content.
I don't like the way things are heading. The free and open internet might be fully dead before we realize it.
The internet is growing with some ugly parts - but there are other people generating more interesting content precisely because their abilities are amplified with LLMs.
In other words, maybe we ought to focus on the positive possibilities instead of doom and gloom all day long, we will be all dead in 10 years or the internet will be dead, or I and you will be dead, or my dog will be dead or whatever..
I feel heard!
What constantly amazes me is how many people don't get this after interacting with them for a while.
As much as I have a distaste for what passes as "AI agents" as a technology, I think it's a mistake to put any of the blame on the tech. People are the problem!
We've been making a societal mistake for a long time, accepting and even celebrating obnoxious people who do obnoxious things. Letting your AI agents loose on others is one such obnoxious thing.
I am disillusioned about it, because agents have been huge part of the traffic and all they do is to spend our money but generate absolute nothing positive.
people have been considering to simply close all doors but one person who has quite important hat and believes it would be very negative to people who needs the free tier the most. (And who is also the one with more to loose than everyone else...)
I guess that's the end of the collaboration era as we expected. "Those" people taking everything away and giving nothing back but crumbs that they will soon take from us too.