Man I was just thinking about it lastnite.
Back in the day we were (at some level) respectful to each other in places like IRC and forums, even tho nobody knew each other. And when some idiot started to f- around you had IRCOps and moderators, so it was somewhat easier and straight forward to maintain. That is something that I really miss, the old IRC days.
Today people show their faces, you sometimes know who they are, but they are at times completely disrespectful and you have no moderation at all.
Smaller-scale, pre-social-media forums and such in many ways took things more seriously, not less. The poster-to-moderator ratio was WAY lower than somewhere like Facebook or Twitter, and things got handled faster. Internet content was generally not taken too seriously, but internet communities were still serious, and they had better tools for enforcement than they do if they live inside of Twitter.
In a world where someone could spin up a bunch of generative AI bots and target them at a forum to screw with people (whether commercial spam or trolling or just subtle disinformation) that seems a lot harder to maintain.
But, honestly and genuinely asking here: isn't that exacly what happens when all you think is about scale, money and growth, at all costs? (I mean, on the big social networks side)
Reddit communities with active moderators are often great places to have respectful conversations. Twitter, on the other extreme, has virtually zero moderation tools for any group. You get to live with whatever rules Twitter sets for the entire platform (and die by the group that's able to hack them)
I don't know if the current tools are up to the task.
There's many other ways to set reputation thought:
- I've seen private online communities where you need one or two members to "vouch" for you
- StackOverflow has it's own reputation model based on how helpful you've been in the past
- Bitcoin et-all use proof-of-work as a reputation model.
I'm sure there are many more just waiting to be discovered
StackOverflow and such are probably fine since they are generally "testable" answers.
Otherwise, we've already seen marketers figure out how to deal with reputation - "influencer marketing" is far higher-reputation, in terms of whether or not people want to interact with the marketing/marketers, than email spam was a decade ago. So imagine a forum about Toyotas. Have a bunch of mostly-chatbot-powered members hang out for a while, talking about how they like Toyotas, each with distinct voices and personalities and hobbies and (AI-generated) photos of their cars in different parts of the country... then over the next year, they slowly all start realizing that man, that new Honda is making them rethink their Toyota fandom!
You could do this today without generative AI - and people do, especially for things with huge marketing budgets like political campaigns! - but it's gonna be a LOT cheaper very soon. So it'll happen a lot more.
Vouching would certainly slow things down, but if someone is managing a fleet of 50 GPT bots, once they convince 2 real people to let the first ones in, they can start bringing their others in on their own.
It reminds me of the 2000s a lot, yeah. For example, does anyone else remember all of the George W Bush sentence mixing? That famous "Fuzzy Math" song that spread around as a SWF. Good times. This is similar in some regards, but significantly more unhinged.
Even in terms of work, I’m suddenly put off by purely digital things. I want to interface with the real world, hardware, build systems that humans need. I’m very interested in AI, but it’s not a problem I’m solving and I suppose I don’t really want to compete with it or interface with it more than on an opt-in basis.
But yes, I agree. I really hope that this wave pushes people to get back outside and meet more people in the community. It's really hard to say what will happen though!
We just need that in order to lower the current rates of depression/anxiety, imo, or else the situation will only get worse.
I like Balenciaga ones: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9CIfP547-JFhCFeLeRlA2MX1...
I think that’s a very naive view point. Internet is core part of today’s society, like it or not. It’s almost like saying that since we invented home printer, which make it easy to forge money, people will just take money less seriously.
OP is talking about a large cultural shift, the type that skeptics said was impossible back at the advent of the web. The orthodox opinion was that the web was a fad and we'd all be reading newspapers and using coin-operated phones forever.
The scale of change that he’s describing — where the internet ceases to become a source-of-truth — would be a complete paradigm shift. Whether it's a "core part of today's society" is entirely irrelevant… newspapers were once core too.
I don't think it would be progress to abandon cities because someone figured out how to destroy them.
> Internet is core part of today’s society
Processing is _the_ core part of all society. The internet has enabled compartmentalized access to specific types of information. Eventually humanity will realize that the information in their technology is fundamentally the _same_ as the information they deal with day to day. Instead of being subjected to the emotional magnet of these technologies they will be incorporated _into_ our daily processes to enhance them.
Trusted networks where you had to identify yourself, and public networks where you could be anonymous.
When I first read it, it really impacted me and I knew this is the likely future of our internet.
(not generated in realtime I believe, due to being created in the ancient days of a year ago)
1. Never believe anything you see, hear or read on the internet.
2. Never give out personal information of any kind.
3. Every girl that wanted to meet you on the internet was an FBI agent.
It seems like almost every problem we've had with the internet comes from breaking one of those three rules.
I wish/hope we could/can go back.
i can't remember who said it but there was a tagline for a while that went "The Internet, where the men are men, the women are men, and the teen girls are FBI agents".
I've been starting to think this way as well. It feels like we're seeing something similar to the way that mass spam calls drastically changed the way people use the phones to the point where people don't recognize a phone number, they just don't pick up anymore. As the ratio of garbage goes up, people will just slowly stop using the medium.
My semi-crazy prediction is that AI like GPT are going to be the death of large social media sites. I don't think the internet will die, but I think we're going to return to a more local, trust-less internet like we had in the 90s and early 00s, but for a completely different reason.
This might be wishful thinking, but I'm coming to believe that AI like ChatGPT are capable of bringing out the absolutely worst qualities of massive social media sites and in that way might end up saving us from ourselves.
I don't recognize this description of the Internet from any time after 1985 onward.
I think "trust-less" is more what I'm getting at though. In the 90s and early 00s the whole, "don't reveal anything personal, assume anyone you don't have a history with as if they might have malicious intent" was still very prevalent. That only changed when the early versions of social media really started to catch on. My mental mile marker for that happening has always been when Facebook no longer required an edu email to sign up (2005), but I'm sure you could argue it happened earlier.
There are plenty of reasons we should go back to that mindset and AI bots making it incredibly hard to verify that you are talking to an actual human maybe the thing that pushes us back toward that mindset.
I've had many conversations with many people my age (mid 30s) about how we went from "don't post anything about yourself" to "post your entire life online" around when Facebook got big, so I don't think it's something that only I experienced. There's another commenter on this post saying something similar and I remember being taught about "internet safety" in middle school, so maybe it's a generational thing.
Earlier (pre-eternal september) usenet was definitely different though and I think much more like you say - sadly that was before I was old enough to get on-line, so I never saw it.
The past century has really been an anomaly when it came to trusting news, with photos and videos seeming to be reliable proof. Before that, societies had to be structured very differently to account for the lack of proof. You'd hear people from out of town talking about what they saw in a neighboring city.
You'd need to judge how trustworthy the person was.
People would expect a chain of narration, to understand how _that_ person came to learn a bit of information (or if they claimed to witness it first hand).
As AI generated content becomes more popular, I predict we as a society are going to go back to relying more and more on the reputation of the speakers in question.
Who might you consider reputable? People you've met personally, people who your community respects, and of course, influencers who you follow who's persuasive words match your pre-existing world views. Perhaps something else will emerge
Regrettably this doesn't seem to be the case pre-AI - just look at the scare stories about 15 minute cities being "stealth lockdown zones" where people will be allocated to an area and forbidden to leave. Media literacy is dire and always has been: in the 19th century it was normal for actors playing baddies (Brutus, for instance) to get mobbed on the street, so stage doors were invented. In the 1960s, the BBC did a parody of Panorama and convinced people spaghetti grew on trees. Ghostwatch in the 90s remains a cult programme taken as evidence of the existence of ghosts by some.
The difficulty epistemically speaking is that in order to know something, _anything_ about the world, there must be trustworthy sources and people able to discern who they are. In the darkest timeline, fake news foreshadows the flood of misinformation by AI and renders all knowledge so difficult to trust that we enter a new dark age.
The last dark age was our illiteracy and superstitution, the next will be our own creations bewildering us so utterly that we have no idea what to believe anymore.
It’s gonna be a wild ride with many dangerous possible outcomes.
Neal Stephenson goes into this topic with some depth in his 2019 novel "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell". Through his narrative he argues against the notion that any amount of false information on the internet will lead to people not trusting the internet.
Photography at large has been grappling with this same issue since at least the 90s when photography transitioned away from film and digital manipulation of images was suddenly possible. Today, photographs are still used all the time in journalism, in insurance claims, for identity verification, and in other matters were it is important to establish truth. We still largely trust photographs (but to a lesser degree), even if a skilled teenager can completely fabricate an image or video on a Saturday.
What would prevent that some of those people use AI, even if it's invitation-only forum/whatever? I just don't think the "old internet" can come back anymore. If anything, maybe in-person activities may get increasingly popular.
There will always be people saying how crazy that photo of bigfoot is and how that video of aliens is proof but most people will eventually start to realize just about anything you see online might be doctored.
LOL. Uhuh.
Go read up on the raft of cognitive biases that humans are subject to.
People won't take the internet less seriously, they'll just keep doing what they do now: only believe the stuff that confirms what they already think. The only difference is the tsunami of fake information will make it impossible for even well-meaning people to be able to tell the difference between truth and lies.
Back in 2016 folks coined the idea that we were transitioning to a post-truth era:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-truth
We're now transitioning to a post-fact era.
Buckle up. It's gonna be interesting...
No-one’s coupled an LLM with a worm yet AFAIK but I see no reason to think it will take very long.
I think a good analogy is how technological advances made forging physical currency trivially easy. Governments that deployed anti-forgery measures eventually weathered the storm. Governments that didn't ended up with catastrophically weak currencies. Information and data are the ultimate currency on the Internet.
At the very least, responsible businesses can agree by common convention to abide by this code of conduct. There could be something like a "good AI seal of approval" issued to businesses that voluntarily adhere to the standard, like those web certificates that were ubiquitous in the early Aughts. Not only should the communications be public-key signed so the browser can identify them, but the the synthetic authors/speakers etc. should be named in a consistent way that unequivocally identifies them as AI.
For example, appending a numeral to the name. Instead of calling itself Joe Rogan, the AI would be "Joe 7 Rogan." Or instead of an article written by Jennifer 8. Lee, it would be written by, hmm, okay there might be a little problem in her[0] case. One thing I've been mulling around is the idea of repurposing the Apple][ symbol. So Joe][ and Jennifer][, where ][ is pronounced "two." The convenience being that it's comprised of glyphs that are on every keyboard, and they also look mechanical and nothing like normal names.
How do you even set safeguards for this?
The would be great. Finally a return to the old ways.
"I have read about it on the internet" was a meme for a reason...
While slightly silly, I think in future people might start to take internet way less serious when you can literally make things up. Which I think is a good trend. People getting depressed or so consumed by the internet culture that they loose all interest in the real world have been a trend I've disliked. We might be just going back to the time of early, anonymous internet forums time where most people used to it just didn't take it too seriously, and a lot of communities were closed /invite only.
[1] https://youtu.be/IkaAZE_UGMo
https://youtu.be/q6ra0KDgVbg
[2] https://youtu.be/X6RCLJ4pDaw