Comment by aucisson_masque 2 days ago
Did we (the humans) somehow managed to pollute the internet so much with AI that's it's now barely usable ?
In my opinion the internet can be considered as the equivalent of a natural environment like the earth. it's a space where people share, meet, talk, etc.
I find it astonishing that after polluting our natural environment we know polluted the internet.
I've seen plenty of comments here that read like they've been generated by an LLM, if this is a gated community we need a better gate.
It's hard to tell, though. People have been saying my borderline autistic comments sound like GPT for years now.
Also our collective unwillingness to pay for subscriptions for publications
True, that is maybe too strong a phrase, but I think it's close to accurate. I think the culture & medium provide kind of a self-selecting gate: it's just plain text and links to articles, with the discussion expected by culture to be fairly serious. I think that turns off enough people that it kind of forms its own gate shutting out the people that make "eternal Septembers" happen. But yeah, ultimately, you're right.
I think that HN eternal september'd at the beginning of the pandemic and the Reddit Apollo stuff was the nail in the coffin.
The people who make Eternal Septembers happen show up here all the time. They show up here from Reddit and 4chan and elsewhere expecting this forum to be a free-for-all because the word "hacker" is in the title, and are inevitably shocked and disappointed to learn how aggressively moderated and tone-policed this place is.
They're the ones who post racist diatribes under green alt account and anti-vaxx conspiracy theories and complain about wokeness and talk out of their ass about subjects they have no actual expertise in. The ones who think flagging is just a super downvote.
I mean, the premise that simply having a minimalist layout would filter for a better class of people has always been a bit silly. Eternal September is an inevitable result of having new people join a community. Every new person, every new comment, increases entropy. It doesn't matter how technically proficient they are, they will change the culture simply by virtue of their existence and participation at scale.
The public Internet has been relentlessly strip-mined for profit by ever since Canter & Siegel posted their immigration services ad to every single Usenet newsgroup.
> Did we (the humans) somehow managed to pollute the internet
Corporations did that, not humans.
"few people recognize that we already share our world with artificial creatures that participate as intelligent agents in our society: corporations" - https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.4116
Yes. Here are practical instructions on how to turn it into an even more of a cesspit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=endHz0jo9Ck I think it's now a law of nature that any new tech leads to SEO amplification. AI has become the Degelman M34 Manure Spreader of the internet https://degelman.com/products/manure-spreaders
> Did we (the humans) somehow managed to pollute the internet so much with AI that's it's now barely usable
If we haven't already, we will be very soon. I'm sure there are people working on this problem, but I think we're starting to hit a very imminent feedback loop moment. Most of human's recorded information is digitized and most of that is generating non-human content at an incredible pace. We've injected a whole lot of noise into our usable data.
I don't know if the answer is more human content (I'm doing my part!) or novel generative content but this interim period is going to cause some medium-term challenges.
I like to think the LLM more-tokens-equals-better era is fading and we're getting into better use of existing data, but there's a very real inflection point we're facing.