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”
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.
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.