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”

  • Resol van Lemmy@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • Showroom7561@lemmy.caOP
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      2 months ago

      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.

        • Showroom7561@lemmy.caOP
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          2 months ago

          I think it would be impossible to fight back when there will come a time when you won’t even know what is real and what is not.

          It would be impossible to filter through all the content that you’ll be exposed to in the future.

          We can obviously try, but the vast majority of the population simply won’t have the skills to defend against this new reality.

  • nimble@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • Showroom7561@lemmy.caOP
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      2 months ago

      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”.

  • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I don’t think you can take for granted most things will be ai generated. Why are you? Old or something?

  • toiletobserver@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.

  • FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au
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    2 months ago

    I don’t care what’s AI generated and what isn’t tbh. Cool pictures are still cool pictures no matter who made them. Funny videos are still funny videos. A someone who’s smart enough to not believe everything they read on the internet, fake articles etc don’t bother me.

  • Mister Neon@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I’m an out of work web developer, so in theory if I starve to death then I’ll have to quit the internet.

  • FartsWithAnAccent@fedia.io
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    2 months ago

    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.

  • quediuspayu@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.

  • leave_it_blank@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.

  • The Picard Maneuver@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.

  • anon6789@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • Showroom7561@lemmy.caOP
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      2 months ago

      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.

      • anon6789@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        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.

  • Delta_V@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • Showroom7561@lemmy.caOP
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      2 months ago

      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.

    • cattywampas@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      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.

  • dan69@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • akilou@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      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