Microblog Memes

Everything converges to generic sameness

When I hit this sentence in the OP, I realized AI is going to remain very popular with the average joe for a long time.

People who are tech literate, actively curious about the natural world, and do crazy shit like care about humanity (so most people reading this, most likely) will still reject it for the junk it is. But it seems the vast majority of people around me are not like Lemmy users. I mean, they are called normies for a reason, and I don't mean that in a derogatory way.

Generic sameness seems to be what the rat race pushes people towards. Maybe being burned out and having the economy constantly innovating new ways to bleed you dry makes the pre-packaged commoditized comforts from the advertisements too easy to accept. I look around and I see people anger-driving their pickup trucks and luxury SUVs to their jobs that they hate so that they can afford the cars they drive to get there. Plus they need to be able to afford beer and snacks for the game after they fill up those gas tanks!

These people don't care if the stories and tiktoks scrolling past their glazed-over eyes are AI generated. It only matters if those things can shake that stubborn drop of dopamine loose that just won't fall from the faucet. Just get through the day so we can do it again tomorrow.

Could you guys stop dumping your trash in the forest please? It obstructs my garbage trucks which I send to the forest to dump garbage in.

How is it a crisis? I'm expecting/hoping LLMs will just get increasingly worse as they are fed on their own slop, until they collapse into unusability and the world finally returns to sanity.

I'm still baffled about the expected outcome of replacing all content creation with AI for new events or ideas, like news articles.

If there are no humans to write the story first, where are the bots going to get the new information to plagiarize?

So at this point we're gonna have to go back to reading books...

The internet I loved died like 15 years ago anyway. It got replaced by ads and misinformation bots and hatred.

I love love love model collapse. It's the absolute perfect conclusion to our Internet and this AI bubble.

The make AI. They realize that we're not ready for it. But short term profits overlook any and all ethical concerns. So they business bro and release anyway, unleashing a flood of slop and garbage content. All of which is impossible to tell if it is human made or not. But the only way to make their business continue is to train new models, which needs more human created content, of which they already destroyed and made imperceivable from their slop.

It's honestly just pure poetic justice. The ones who are hiring the next generation of AI models are AI companies.

In part, this is what Microsoft Recall is about: scraping end users' data at will to sort and feed to its LLMs, without the user ever seeing what is being scraped or having any real, lasting ability to shut Recall off and keep it shut down.

While I am aware that MS insists none of that is true, it is fact that 1) the snapshotted and OCR'd Recall data is now stored in an encrypted database that takes higher than average user skill to get into; 2) even users who turned off Recall saw it turned on again at the next Windows Update; and 3) even after MS said they were backing off Recall, MS continued to partner with hardware makers to create computers bundled with Windows 11 on top of the extra GPU necessary for processing all these Recall snapshots without making that sluggish Windows bloat even more sluggishly bloated than it already was.

So why all that money and effort, even as they claimed to be backing away from it, just to help a hypothetically forgetful user here and there? Data harvesting was always part of the payoff, why they were and are very willing to piss off a huge part of their own consumer base around the world by ending Windows 10 unnecessarily, and why even now they keep ramming Recall shit down the pipe when literally NO ONE wants it.

They get your data. At will. And as much of it as they like, without you ever having the opportunity to oversee what they're getting, much less curate it. And after feeding it to their LLMs, they get to aggregate and broker it to their "partners" as well. Never forget what MS did in Palestine and the partners they can and will gladly work with, all based on massive collections of quietly gathered user data that either should not legally exist, or is not known outside of MS and its partners to exist at all.

On top of this, the scrapers that feed the AIs are creating more and more traffic, and therefor load on sites that did not have them before.

Explains why my personal blog, wiki, and git repo keep getting hammered by hordes of AI company scrapers. If AI was intelligent, they'd download a single snapshot every month or so and share. But no, eight different scrapers using thousands of different IP addresses (to evade my fail2ban measures) each have to follow every single blame and diff link when a simple git clone operation would get them the hundreds of megabytes of content in one go.

They are getting better, though. More hits are to RecentChanges on my wiki, so there seem to be some optimizations going on. But I refuse to increase my operating costs beyond a few USD/month to serve AI bots when I know barely anyone human visits.

I can not prove it but i think that already since a long time that most articles are copy + pasted and some kind of summary. Which might have happend automatically. Like someonr might write a real article on anything and then hundreds of sites copied it, without adding anything

The problem is that the resource they consume to feed the AI, (human generated content) has become a limited resource, completely mined.

they could pay people to write, IE, news agencies pay writers to write and AI site are one of their clients.

you should get DMs from anthropic offering 50$ for your weeks posts and comments...

Instead they want to pretend they have still room to grow for free. but they can't

(That is just basic economic theory, I want those companies to fuck off already)

The open internet will become divided into verified websites, and the rest will be left for bots to fight on forever.

It will be used as an excuse by our governments to force a ID verification system tied to your real life person, refuse it and fight it in every possible way.

There's no way an AI generated article costs less than a cent.

So humans writing articles cost more than the billions they're pumping in to AI? I very much doubt it.

The Hapsburg chin of the digital age

Its almost like its predictable outcome of prediction algorithms being used to generate content

Well, technically, the AI companies aren't making any profits so the actual cost is higher, and also the revenues from the AI articles are declining because people aren't interracting with them.

I feel so bad for Gen Z. Their future looks so bleak.